Wolf Hall

“So now get up!” Walter is roaring down at him, working out where to kick him next. […] “What are you, an eel?” his parent asks. He trots backward, gathers pace and aims another kick.

It knocks the last breath out of him; he thinks it may be his last. His forehead returns to the ground; he lies waiting, for Walter to jump on him. The dog, Bella, is barking, shut away in an outhouse. “I’ll miss my dog,” he thinks. […]

Inch by inch. Inch by inch forward. Never mind if he calls you an eel or a worm or a snake. Head down, don’t provoke him.

He never lives in a single reality, but in a shifting shadow-mesh of diplomatic possibilities. While he is doing his best to keep the king married to Queen Katherine and her Spanish-Imperial family, by begging Henry to forget his scruples, he will also plan for an alternative world, in which the king’s scruples must be heeded, and the marriage to Katherine is void. Once that nullity is recognized—and the last eighteen years of sin and suffering wiped from the page—he will readjust the balance of Europe, allying England with France, forming a power bloc to oppose the young Emperor Charles, Katherine’s nephew. And all outcomes are likely, all outcomes can be managed, even massaged into desirability: prayer and pressure, pressure and prayer, everything that comes to pass will pass by God’s design, a design reenvisaged and redrawn, with helpful emendations, by the cardinal.

Thomas Cromwell is now a little over forty years old. […] Various expressions are available to his face, and one is readable: an expression of stifled amusement. […] It is said he knows the entire New Testament in Latin, and so as a servant of the cardinal is apt—ready with a text if abbots flounder. His speech is low and rapid, his manner assured; he is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop’s palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury.

What he says about Gregory is, at least he isn’t like I was, when I was his age; and when people say, what were you like? he says, oh, I used to stick knives in people. Gregory would never do that; so he doesn’t mind—or minds less than people think—if he doesn’t really get to grips with declensions and conjugations. When people tell him what Gregory has failed to do, he says, “He’s busy growing.” He understands his need to sleep; he never got much sleep himself, with Walter stamping around, and after he ran away he was always on the ship or on the road, and then he found himself in an army.

This is an indecent spectacle: the man who has ruled England, reduced. They have brought out […] the scarlet silk in which he braves the summer heat of London, the crimson brocades that keep his blood warm when snow falls on Westminster and whisks in sleety eddies over the Thames. […] There have been days when, swaggering out, he would say, “Right, Master Cromwell, price me by the yard!”

[…] So day by day, at his request and to amuse him, he would put a value on his master. Now the king has sent an army of clerks to do it. But he would like to take away their pens by force and write across their inventories: Thomas Wolsey is a man beyond price.

“Is it something to do with the English?” Cavendish asks earnestly. He’s still thinking of the uproar back there when they embarked; and even now, people are running along the banks, making obscene signs and whistling. “Tell us, Master Cromwell, you’ve been abroad. Are they particularly an ungrateful nation? […]”

“I don’t think it’s the English. I think it’s just people. They always hope there may be something better.”

“But what do they get by the change?” Cavendish persists. “One dog sated with meat is replaced by a hungrier dog who bites nearer the bone. […]”

He closes his eyes. The river shifts beneath them, dim figures in an allegory of Fortune. Decayed Magnificence sits in the center. Cavendish, leaning at his right like a Virtuous Councillor, mutters words of superfluous and belated advice […]; he, like a Tempter, is seated on the left […].

How simple it would be, if he were allowed to reach down and shake some straight answers out of Norris. But it’s not simple; this is what the world and the cardinal conspire to teach him. Christ, he thinks, by my age I ought to know. You don’t get on by being original. You don’t get on by being bright. You don’t get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook; somehow he thinks that’s what Norris is, and he feels an irrational dislike taking root, and he tries to dismiss it, because he prefers his dislikes rational, but after all, these circumstances are extreme, […] [and] Wolsey’s unraveling, in a great unweaving of scarlet thread that might lead you back into a secret labyrinth, with a dying monster at its heart.

“All along, we were misled, […] because when the king said, Mistress Anne is not to marry into Northumberland, I think, I think, the king had cast his eye on her, all that long time ago.”

[…]

“I wonder,” he says, “how it can be that, though all these people think they know the king’s pleasure, the king finds himself at every turn impeded.” At every turn, thwarted: maddened and baffled. The Lady Anne, whom he has chosen to amuse him, while the old wife is cast off and the new wife brought in, refuses to accommodate him at all. How can she refuse? Nobody knows.

[…] “How has my lord cardinal…” Missed a trick, he wants to say. But that is not a respectful way to speak of a cardinal.

There never was a lady who knew better her husband’s needs.

She knows them; for the first time, she doesn’t want to comply with them.

Is a woman bound to wifely obedience, when the result will be to turn her out of the estate of wife? He, Cromwell, admires Katherine: he likes to see her moving about the royal palaces, as wide as she is high, stitched into gowns so bristling with gemstones that they look as if they are designed less for beauty than to withstand blows from a sword. Her auburn hair is faded and streaked with gray, tucked back under her gable hood like the modest wings of a city sparrow. Under her gowns she wears the habit of a Franciscan nun. Try always, Wolsey says, to find out what people wear under their clothes. At an earlier stage in life this would have surprised him; he had thought that under their clothes people wore their skin.

“I wonder,” Wolsey says, “would you have patience with our sovereign lord? When it is midnight and he is up drinking and giggling with Brandon, or singing, and the day’s papers not yet signed, and when you press him he says, I’m for my bed now, we’re hunting tomorrow…If your chance comes to serve, you will have to take him as he is, a pleasure-loving prince. And he will have to take you as you are, which is rather like one of those square-shaped fighting dogs that low men tow about on ropes. Not that you are without a fitful charm, Tom.”

Thomas More says that the imperial troops, for their enjoyment, are roasting live babies on spits. Oh, he would! Says Thomas Cromwell. Listen, soldiers don’t do that. They’re too busy carrying away everything they can turn into ready money.

Under his clothes, it is well known, More wears a jerkin of horsehair. He beats himself with a scourge, of the type used by some religious orders. What lodges in his mind, Thomas Cromwell’s, is that somebody makes these instruments of daily torture. […]

We don’t have to invite pain in, he thinks. It’s waiting for us: sooner rather than later. Ask the virgins of Rome.

He thinks, also, that people ought to be found better jobs.

“Why do people marry?”

[…]

“Most people,” he says, “feel it increases their happiness.”

“Oh, yes, that,” Anne says. “May I choose my husband?”

“Of course,” he says; meaning, up to a point.

“Then I choose Rafe.”

For a minute, for two minutes together, he feels his life might mend. Then he thinks, how could I ask Rafe to wait? He needs to set up his own household. Even five years from now, Anne would be a very young bride.

“I know,” she says. “And time goes by so slowly.”

It’s true; one always seems to be waiting for something.

“Cromwell, I am content you are a burgess in the Parliament.”

He bows his head. “My lord.”

“I spoke to the king for you and he is also content. You will take his instructions in the Commons. And mine.”

“Will they be the same, my lord?”

The duke scowls. […] “Damn it all, Cromwell, why are you such a…person? It isn’t as if you could afford to be.”

He waits, smiling. He knows what the duke means. He is a person, he is a presence. He knows how to edge blackly into a room so that you don’t see him; but perhaps those days are over.

[H]e hears a boy’s voice, speaking behind a half-open door: it is Mark, the lute-player. “…so for my skill he says he will prefer me to Lady Anne. And I shall be glad, because what is the use of being here when any day the king may behead the old fellow? I think he ought, for the cardinal is so proud. […] Yes, for sure the lawyer will come down with him. I say ‘lawyer,’ but who is he? Nobody knows. They say he has killed men with his own hands and never told it in confession. […] So when I am with Lady Anne she is sure to notice me, and give me presents.” A giggle. […] Then Mark: “She is no maid. Not she.” […]

One can do nothing with this. Except bear it in mind.

He stops to have a word with some of the benchers: how was this allowed to go forward? The Cardinal of York is a sick man, he may die, how will you and your students stand then before God? What sort of young men are you breeding here, who are so brave as to assail a great man who has fallen on evil times—whose favor, a few short weeks ago, they would have begged for?

The benchers follow him, apologizing; but their voices are lost in the roars of laughter that billow out from the hall. His young household are lingering, casting glances back. […]

Rafe touches his shoulder. Richard walks on his left, sticking close. “You don’t have to hold me up,” he says mildly. “I’m not like the cardinal.” He stops. He laughs. He says, “I suppose it was…”

“Yes, it was quite entertaining,” Richard says.

There’s no point backing off; do that and Henry will chase you down. Advance, and he may just falter. He says, “No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They’re not affordable things. […] You enter into one and it uses up all the money you’ve got, and then it breaks you and bankrupts you.”

[…]

“You said I was not to lead my troops. You said if I was taken, the country couldn’t put up the ransom. So what do you want? You want a king who doesn’t fight? You want me to huddle indoors like a sick girl?”

“That would be ideal, for fiscal purposes.”

The king takes a deep ragged breath. He’s been shouting. Now—and it’s a narrow thing—he decides to laugh.

He sees her speed, intelligence and rigor. He didn’t think she would help the cardinal, but what do you lose by asking? He thinks, it is the first proposition I have put to her; probably not the last.

[…] There is a world of the possible. A world where Anne can be queen is a world where Cromwell can be Cromwell. He sees it; then he doesn’t. The moment is fleeting. But insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.

“A thousand pounds?” Henry whispers.

It is on the tip of his tongue to say, that will be a start on the ten thousand which, to the best of my knowledge and belief, you have owed the Cardinal of York for a decade now.

He doesn’t say it, of course. At such moments, Henry expects you to fall to your knees—duke, earl, commoner, light and heavy, old and young. He does it; scar tissue pulls; few of us, by our forties, are not carrying injuries.

The king signals, you can get up. He adds, his tone curious, “The Duke of Norfolk shows you many marks of friendship and favor.”

The hand on the shoulder, he means: the minute and unexpected vibration of ducal palm against plebeian muscle and bone. “The duke is careful to preserve all distinctions of rank.” Henry seems relieved.

From the day he was sworn into the king’s council, he has had his face arranged. He has spent the early months of the year watching the faces of other people, to see when they register doubt, reservation, rebellion—to catch that fractional moment before they settle into the suave lineaments of the courtier, the facilitator, the yes-man.

When the Loller was led out between the officers the people jeered and shouted. He saw that she was a grandmother, perhaps the oldest person he had ever seen. The officers were nearly carrying her. She had no cap or veil. Her hair seemed to be torn out of her head in patches. People behind him said, no doubt she did that herself, in desperation at her sin. Behind the Loller came two monks, parading like fat gray rats, crosses in their pink paws. The woman in the clean cap […] balled her two hands into fists and punched them in the air, and from the depth of her belly she let loose a scream, a halloo, in a shrill voice like a demon. The press of people took up the cry.

“Look,” she says. She holds up her sleeves. The bright blue with which she has edged them, that kingfisher flash, is cut from the silk in which he wrapped her present of needlework patterns. How do matters stand now at Wolf Hall, he asks, as tactfully as he can: how do you ask after a family, in the wake of incest? She says in her clear little voice, “Sir John is very well. But then Sir John is always very well. […] Why don’t you make some business in Wiltshire and ride down to inspect us? Oh, and if the king gets a new wife, she will need matrons to attend her, and my sister Liz is coming to court. […] I would rather go up-country to the queen, myself. […]”

“If I were your father…no…” he rephrases it, “if I were to advise you, it would be to serve Lady Anne.”

He finds himself praying: this child, his half-formed heart now beating against the stone floor, let him be sanctified by this moment, and let him be like his father’s father, like his Tudor uncles; let him be hard, alert, watchful of opportunity, wringing use from the smallest turn of fortune. If Henry lives twenty years, Henry who is Wolsey’s creation, and then leaves this child to succeed him, I can build my own prince: to the glorification of God and the commonwealth of England. Because I will not be too old. […] And I shall not be like Henry Wyatt and say, now I am retiring from affairs. Because what is there, but affairs?

It is magnificent. At the moment of impact, the king’s eyes are open, his body braced for the atteint; he takes the blow perfectly, its force absorbed by a body securely armored, moving in the right direction, moving at the right speed. His color does not alter. His voice does not shake.

“Healthy?” he says. “Then I thank God for his favor to us. As I thank you, my lords, for this comfortable intelligence.”

He thinks, Henry has been rehearsing. I suppose we all have.

[…]

The urge arises to put a hand on his shoulder, as one does for any inconsolable being. He resists it; simply folds his fingers, protectively, into the fist which holds the king’s heart. “One day we will make a great marriage for her.”

There is a feral stink that rises from the hide of a dog about to fight. It rises now into the room, and he sees Anne turn aside, fastidious, and Stephen puts a hand to his chest, as if to ruffle up his fur, to warn of his size before he bares his teeth. “I shall be back with Your Majesty within a week,” he says. His dulcet sentiment comes out as a snarl from the depth of his guts.

[…]

Henry says, “Stephen is a resolute ambassador, no doubt, but I cannot keep him near me. […] I hate ingratitude. I hate disloyalty. That is why I value a man like you. You were good to your old master in his trouble. […]” He speaks as if he, personally, hadn’t caused the trouble; as if Wolsey’s fall were caused by a thunderbolt.

“The queen will be coming to visit her daughter soon. If you would simply greet her respectfully in the way you should greet your father’s wife—”

“—except she is his concubine—”

“—then your father would take you back to court, you would have everything you lack now, and the warmth and comfort of society. Listen to me, I intend this for your good. The queen does not expect your friendship, only an outward show. Bite your tongue and bob her a curtsy. It will be done in a heartbeat, and it will change everything. Make terms with her before her new child is born. If she has a son, she will have no reason afterward to conciliate you.”

“She is frightened of me,” Mary says, “and she will still be frightened, even if she has a son.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” he says. “A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old. Your undivided church has liked nothing better than persecuting its own members, burning them and hacking them apart when they stood by their own conscience, slashing their bellies open and feeding their guts to dogs. You call history to your aid, but what is history to you? It is a mirror that flatters Thomas More. But I have another mirror, I hold it up and it shows a vain and dangerous man, and when I turn it about it shows a killer, for you will drag down with you God knows how many, who will only have the suffering, and not your martyr’s gratification.”

Henry stirs into life. “Do I retain you for what is easy? Jesus pity my simplicity, I have promoted you to a place in this kingdom that no one, no one of your breeding has ever held in the whole of the history of this realm.” He drops his voice. “Do you think it is for your personal beauty? The charm of your presence? I keep you, Master Cromwell, because you are as cunning as a bag of serpents. But do not be a viper in my bosom. You know my decision. Execute it.”

He knows different now. It’s the living that turn and chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we rewrite their lives. Thomas More had spread the rumor that Little Bilney, chained to the stake, had recanted as the fire was set. It wasn’t enough for him to take Bilney’s life away; he had to take his death too.