'I will be happy to serve you, sir,' he said at last. And then he did something he had never done before. He bowed.
'Very well,' I said. 'Come, then, let's go to Chancery Lane. See if we can bring a little order into this wicked world. A tiny bit.'
We walked through Temple Gardens. Ahead lay Chancery Lane. Beyond that Smithfield, where the fires would be lit now. Behind us the river, flowing to London Bridge where Cromwell's head stood fixed on its stake. Between Smithfield and the river the roiling city, ever in need of justice and absolution.
HISTORICAL NOTE
By the summer of 1540, the hottest of the sixteenth century, Thomas Cromwell's position as Henry VIII's chief minister was under threat. The king had repudiated Rome and declared himself head of the Church eight years before and had at first welcomed reformist measures. The dissolution of the monasteries, master-minded by Cromwell, had brought him vast wealth and Henry had allowed Cromwell and Archbishop Cranmer much latitude in ending Latin ceremonies and printing the Bible in English for the first time.
By the late 1530s, however, the tide was turning. Henry's innate religious conservatism was reasserting itself and he was afraid that the overturning of the old religious hierarchy might turn into a challenge to the secular class structure, as had happened in parts of Germany. The religious edicts of 1539 began a process of doctrinal backpedalling.
England, moreover, was now isolated in Europe and the pope was urging the main Catholic powers, France and Spain, to unite and reconquer the heretical island for Roman Catholicism. There was genuine fear of invasion and huge sums were spent in training young men in arms, fortifying the south coast, and building up the navy.
Cromwell sought to strengthen both reform at home and England's military position abroad by marrying the king (a widower since his third wife Jane Seymour's death in childbirth in 1537) to a princess from one of the states associated with the German Protestant League. However, his choice, Anne of Cleves, was a disaster. The king disliked her on sight and declared himself unable to have carnal relations with her. Although he had approved the match, Henry VIII always sought someone else to blame for his problems and now he blamed Cromwell. To make matters worse for the chief minister, an incipient Franco-Spanish alliance broke down as the two Catholic powers resumed their traditional hostilities and the threat of invasion receded.
Meanwhile the king, aged nearly fifty, had become infatuated with Catherine Howard, the teenage niece of the Duke of Norfolk. Norfolk headed the religious conservatives at court and had long been Cromwell's most dangerous enemy. When the king sought to divorce the newly married Anne of Cleves and take Catherine for a fifth wife, Cromwell was caught in a trap. He had previously helped the king rid himself of Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, but a Howard queen would inevitably mean a challenge both to his power and to reform. Perhaps, as Shardlake speculates, if Cromwell had helped the king to a divorce he might, just, have saved himself – he had escaped from tight corners before – but he tried to keep the Cleves marriage alive and this was probably the final straw for the king.
Nonetheless, the dramatic suddenness of his arrest at the council table on 10 June 1540 on obviously trumped-up charges of treason surprised contemporaries and has puzzled historians. My story of the Greek Fire fraud as a final nail in Cromwell's coffin is, of course, entirely imaginary, but it fills a gap. Everybody, including Sir Richard Rich, turned their coats; Secretary Grey is a fictitious character, but there must have been many like him.
Thomas Cromwell was executed on 28 July 1540. Henry divorced Anne of Cleves, who was happy enough to escape marriage to her terrifying husband, and married Catherine Howard in secret the day after Cromwell's execution – a marriage that only a year later was to end in yet another gruesome tragedy.
The return to Rome, however, did not happen. For the rest of his reign Henry governed without a chief minister, playing one faction off against another. A year after Cromwell's execution he was complaining that he had been tricked into sacrificing 'the most faithful councillor I ever had'. In time the Duke of Norfolk too fell from grace.
Greek Fire was, it is believed, a compound of petroleum and certain wood resins. This primitive flame-thrower was discovered, as related in the book, in seventh-century Constantinople and was used to great effect by the Byzantines against the Arab navies. The secret of its construction was passed down from one Byzantine emperor to another and in due course was lost, though the memory of this astounding weapon lingered on among scholars.
Of course, even if the method of construction and propulsion had been rediscovered in Renaissance Europe, it is unlikely it could ever have been used since petroleum was an unknown substance there and all potential sources, from the Black Sea to the Middle East and North Africa, were under the control of the expanding Ottoman empire, with which Europe, weakened by political and now religious disunity, was in a state of internecine warfare throughout the sixteenth century. In time Western Europe recovered and rose to a new pre-eminence; together with America it developed weapons compared to which Greek Fire is a mere plaything.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The research for Dark Fire took me to some widely varied sources. While I was in the early stages of writing this book, by great good fortune Channel 4 Television showed a documentary, Machines Time Forgot, Fireship (2003) in which Professor John Haldon of Birmingham University successfully re-created Greek Fire and the apparatus that fired it. I have modelled the apparatus and the formula in Dark Fire on his reconstruction, and I am grateful to him and to the programme.
I am indebted to a number of books on Tudor London, most especially Liza Picard's Elizabeth's London (Weidenfeld amp; Nicolson, 2003) as well as Gamini Salgado's The Elizabethan Underworld (Sovereign, 1977). John Schofield's Medieval London Houses (Yale University Press, 1995) and John Stow's Survey of London (first published 1598; reprinted 1999, Guernsey Press Co.) took me back to the houses and streets of the Tudor City. The A-Z of Elizabethan London (Harry Margary, 1979) enabled me to follow my characters from place to place.
Sir John H. Baker's monumental Introduction to English Legal History (Butterworths, 1971) was invaluable on the legal side; Adrienne Mayor's Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs – Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World (Overlook Press, 2003) was very helpful on the history of Greek Fire, and Allan G. Debus's Man and Nature in the Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 1978) opened up the world of medieval alchemy to me. Rena Gardiner's stunningly illustrated The Story of St Bartholomew the Great (Workshop Press, 1990) was a mine of information on St Bartholomew's Priory, one of the best survivals from the dissolution in England. I have invented the tradition of burying people with some items associated with their early lives.
I am grateful to James Dewar of the Lincoln's Inn treasurer's office for showing me round the Great Hall, to Mrs Bernstein of the Jewish Museum, London, for guiding me to sources on the history of English Jewry and English Jewish names, and to Victor Tunkel of the Selden Society for the Study of Legal History for his help on sources for legal studies of the period. Needless to say, any errors are my own.
While I was in the early stages of researching this book I was involved in a serious road accident. My heartfelt thanks go to a number of people without whose help and encouragement I doubt the book would have been finished anything like on time. First of all to Mike Holmes and Tony Macaulay for their advice to a scientific illiterate on how the fraud on Cromwell could actually have been carried out. Without their aid I would have been completely at sea. Thanks particularly to Mike for guiding me to the conclusion that there was nothing around at the time that would have made a credible substitute for petroleum, and to Tony for the idea of the vodka.