Stephen Gardiner Character Analysis

That’s the point of a promise, he thinks. It wouldn’t have any value, if you could see what it would cost you when you made it.

His great fatigue, which had lifted when he was facing Gardiner or Norfolk every day, now returns. The feeling around his heart—that it is crushed, forced out of shape—he now understands as a deformity caused by grief. He feels he is dragging corpses, shovelling them up: Robert Aske, Tom Truth, Harry Norris and Will Brereton, little Francis Weston and Mark Smeaton with his lute.

‘My son Surrey says, if you had been left to run your course, you would have left no nobleman alive. He says, now is Cromwell stricken by his own staff. Now it is with him as it has been with many a man who has crossed him, both simple and grand.’

‘I do not dispute it,’ [Cromwell] says.

That’s the point of a promise, he thinks. It wouldn’t have any value, if you could see what it would cost you when you made it.

His great fatigue, which had lifted when he was facing Gardiner or Norfolk every day, now returns. The feeling around his heart—that it is crushed, forced out of shape—he now understands as a deformity caused by grief. He feels he is dragging corpses, shovelling them up: Robert Aske, Tom Truth, Harry Norris and Will Brereton, little Francis Weston and Mark Smeaton with his lute.

‘My son Surrey says, if you had been left to run your course, you would have left no nobleman alive. He says, now is Cromwell stricken by his own staff. Now it is with him as it has been with many a man who has crossed him, both simple and grand.’

‘I do not dispute it,’ [Cromwell] says.