Hilary Mante - Wolf Hall

He scarcely needs an account of the tactics of the summer just past. The cardinal has promised to help finance a French army which will go into Italy and try to expel the Emperor. While this is happening, the Pope, who has lost not just the Vatican but the papal states, and seen Florence throw out his Medici relatives, will be grateful and obliged to King Henry. But as for any longterm rapprochement with the French – he, Cromwell, shares the scepticism of his friends in the city. If you have been in the street in Paris or Rouen, and seen a mother pull her child by the hand, and say, ‘Stop that squalling, or I'll fetch an Englishman,’ you are inclined to believe that any accord between the countries is formal and transient. The English will never be forgiven for the talent for destruction they have always displayed when they get off their own island. English armies laid waste to the land they moved through. As if systematically, they performed every action proscribed by the codes of chivalry, and broke every one of the laws of war. The battles were nothing; it was what they did between the battles that left its mark. They robbed and raped for forty miles around the line of their march. They burned the crops in the fields, and the houses with the people inside them. They took bribes in coin and in kind and when they were encamped in a district they made the people pay for every day on which they were left unmolested. They killed priests and hung them up naked in the marketplaces. As if they were infidels, they ransacked the churches, packed the chalices in their baggage, fuelled their cooking fires with precious books; they scattered relics and stripped altars. They found out the families of the dead and demanded that the living ransom them; if the living could not pay, they torched the corpses before their eyes, without ceremony, without a single prayer, disposing of the dead as one might the carcases of diseased cattle.

This being so, the kings may forgive each other; the people scarcely can. He does not say this to Wolsey, who has enough bad news waiting for him. During his absence, the king had sent his own envoy to Rome for secret negotiations. The cardinal had found it out; and it had come to nothing, of course. ‘But if the king is less than frank with me, it does nothing to aid our cause.’

He has never before met with such double-dealing. The fact is, the king knows his case is weak in law. He knows this, but does not want to know it. In his own mind, he has convinced himself he was never married and so is now free to marry. Let us say, his will is convinced, but not his conscience. He knows canon law, and where he does not know it already he has made himself expert. Henry, as the younger brother, was brought up and trained for the church, and for the highest offices within it. ‘If His Majesty's brother Arthur had lived,’ Wolsey says, ‘then His Majesty would have been the cardinal, and not me. Now there's a thought. Do you know, Thomas, I haven't had a day off since … since I was on the boat, I suppose. Since the day I was seasick, starting at Dover.’

They had once crossed the Narrow Sea together. The cardinal had lain below, calling on God, but he, being used to the voyage, spent the time on deck, making drawings of the sails and rigging, and of notional ships with notional rigging, and trying to persuade the captain – ‘yourself not offended,’ he said – that there was a way of going faster. The captain thought it over and said, ‘When you fit out a merchant ship of your own, you can do it that way. Of course, any Christian vessel will think you're pirates, so don't look for help if you get in difficulties. Sailors,’ he explained, ‘don't like anything new.’

‘Nor does anyone else,’ he'd said. ‘Not as far as I can see.’

There cannot be new things in England. There can be old things freshly presented, or new things that pretend to be old. To be trusted, new men must forge themselves an ancient pedigree, like Walter's, or enter into the service of ancient families. Don't try to go it alone, or they'll think you're pirates.

This summer, with the cardinal back on dry land, he remembers that voyage. He waits for the enemy to come alongside, and for the hand-to-hand fighting to begin.

But for now he goes down to the kitchens, to see how they are getting on with their masterpieces to impress the French envoys. They have got the steeple on their sugar-paste model of St Paul's, but they are having trouble with the cross and ball on top. He says, ‘Make marzipan lions – the cardinal wants them.’

They roll their eyes and say, will it never end?

Since he returned from France their master has been uncharacteristically sour. It is not just the overt failures that make him grumble, but the dirty work behind the scenes. Squibs and slanders were printed against him and as fast as he could buy them up there was a new batch on the street. Every thief in France seemed to converge on his baggage train; at Compiègne, though he mounted a day-and-night guard on his gold plate, a little boy was found to be going up and down the back stairs, passing out the dishes to some great robber who had trained him up.

‘What happened? Did you catch him?’

‘The great robber was put in the pillory. The boy ran away. Then one night, some villain sneaked into my chamber, and carved a device by the window …’ And next morning, a shaft of early sun, creeping through mist and rain, had picked out a gallows, from which dangled a cardinal's hat.

Once again the summer has been wet. He could swear it has never been light. The harvest will be ruined. The king and the cardinal exchange recipes for pills. The king lays down cares of state should he happen to sneeze, and prescribes for himself an easy day of music-making or strolling – if the rain abates – in his gardens. In the afternoon, he and Anne sometimes retire and are private. The gossip is that she allows him to undress her. In the evenings, good wine keeps the chills out, and Anne, who reads the Bible, points out strong scriptural commendations to him.

After supper he grows thoughtful, says he supposes the King of France is laughing at him; he supposes the Emperor is laughing too. After dark the king is sick with love. He is melancholy, sometimes unreachable. He drinks and sleeps heavily, sleeps alone; he wakes, and because he is a strong man and a young man still he is optimistic, clear-headed, ready for the new day. In daylight, his cause is hopeful.

The cardinal doesn't stop work if he's ill. He just goes on at his desk, sneezing, aching, and complaining.

In retrospect, it is easy to see where the cardinal's decline began, but at the time it was not easy. Look back, and you remember being at sea. The horizon dipped giddily, and the shoreline was lost in mist.

October comes, and his sisters and Mercy and Johane take his dead wife's clothes and cut them up carefully into new patterns. Nothing is wasted. Every good bit of cloth is made into something else.

Spring, 1528: Thomas More, ambling along, genial, shabby. ‘Just the man,’ he says. ‘Thomas, Thomas Cromwell. Just the man I want to see.’

He is genial, always genial; his shirt collar is grubby. ‘Are you bound for Frankfurt this year, Master Cromwell? No? I thought the cardinal might send you to the fair, to get among the heretic booksellers. He is spending a deal of money buying up their writings, but the tide of filth never abates.’