‘Richmond cannot be put in place without great quarrel and grudge. Whichever lady the king has been married to – if he was ever married to anybody – the whole world agrees it was not to Richmond’s mother. As for any new heir he may get – the life of a young child, you cannot count on it from hour to hour. Tell Mary: if ever she is to compromise her conscience, now is the time, when she can do herself some good.’ He leans back in his chair. ‘Yes, of course she will despise herself afterwards. But that is the price. Tell her time will ease the sting of it.’
‘It seems to me,’ the ambassador says, ‘you are saying, you can live, but only as Cromwell permits. You can reign even – but only through Cromwell’s grace.’
‘If you wish to explain it like that.’ He has lost patience. ‘Explain it how you like. I will send her a document to sign. A deed of submission. She need not read it. In fact, she must not, as she may need to repudiate it later. But she must have a clerk copy it, because it cannot go to the king in my hand.’
‘No, that would wreck everything,’ Chapuys smiles. ‘She is not simple, you know.’
‘Tell her that from now on I will make sure she is protected. She will live at her ease, as a king’s daughter, and no one will trouble her to make the same prayers as I do, or to give up her saints, or her ceremonies. But then tell her – if she does not give way now, she is lost. I will regard her as the most obdurate and ungrateful woman who ever lived. I will not block the king’s will. And even if by some miracle she survives, she is dead to me. I take my leave of her for ever. I shall never come into her presence. I will never see her or speak to her again.’
A pause. ‘I see.’ The ambassador looks sardonic. ‘You had better write that yourself. I will carry your letter faithfully.’
‘Shall we go down?’
Chapuys winces as he stands, and rubs his back. ‘You first, my lord. I am so slow.’
He scoops the papers from the marble. ‘I’ll carry these.’ He is ahead of the ambassador. At the first landing he calls up, ‘I am not looking into them, I promise!’
Christophe is squatting, vigilant, in the posture he had imagined. Standing by him, another shape in the dimness. ‘Good evening, sir,’ the shape says softly. It is Mr Wriothesley, a sheaf of peonies in his hand.
In the parlour with the lapis tiles, the flame of a single wax candle shimmering in the blue, he makes his first draft; it is hard for him, to become the king’s daughter. At dawn he takes the draft back to the city, and in the morning light sits before it again: humble, trembling, obedient. Perhaps he should do this in a room alone; but he does not want to think about it too much.
He picks up a quill. Examines its tip. ‘This will require self-abasement.’
Richard Cromwell says, ‘Shall I go out and find somebody who’s better at it than you are?’
‘Richard Riche knows the art of creeping,’ Gregory offers. ‘And Wriothesley can crawl when required.’
He begins: ‘Most humbly prostrate before your Majesty …’
‘Try, prostrate at the feet of your Majesty,’ Gregory says.
‘Redundant,’ Richard says.
‘Yes, but it makes her sound … flatter.’
He amends the phrase. ‘Don’t let our efforts be mentioned outside this room. The king must think she composed it herself. I write to … why do I write?’
… To open my heart to your grace … as I have and will put my soul under your direction … so I wholly commit my body … desiring no state, no condition, nor no manner or degree of living but such as your grace shall appoint …
‘It sounds straight out of a law book,’ Richard says. ‘Not this, not that, not the other.’
‘True. She is not a Gray’s Inn man.’ He is exasperated. He knows no way to draft, but to cover every circumstance; no way to write that leaves a gap, a hairsbreadth, a crack, that would allow meaning to slide or leak away. Forgive my offences … I do recognise, accept, take, repute and acknowledge …
‘The king must expect her to take a lawyer’s advice,’ Gregory says. ‘He will expect it to show.’
… repute and acknowledge the king’s highness to be supreme head, under Christ, of the church of England …
I do freely, frankly … recognise and acknowledge that the marriage formerly had between his majesty and my mother … was by God’s law and man’s law incestuous and unlawful …
‘Incestuous and unlawful,’ Gregory repeats. ‘It covers everything. Nothing is left to want.’
‘Except,’ Richard says, ‘that she has not actually taken the oath.’
He dries the ink. ‘As long as no one makes Henry face that fact.’
Let this be her own form of oath, crushing and comprehensive. When she writes of Katherine, she says, the late princess dowager, as any subject might; but she also writes my mother, my dead mother: whose hand now falls incapacitate, and flinches into its shroud. Catalina, today you are put down; the living beat the dead, England conquers Spain. I have written letters for Mary before, he thinks, more pitiful than this and more yielding: I am but a woman, and your child. They met with small success. They did not touch the king’s heart. What touches his heart is giving him everything he wants: and in such a form that, until he had it, he did not know what he lacked. I put my soul under your direction. I commit my body to your mercy.
‘I want Rafe to take this to Hunsdon,’ he says. ‘Get it signed tonight.’
We are now in the third week of June. A gusty wet spring when Anne died; a month passes, and we are in high summer. On a hot morning you close your eyes and on your lids is stamped a blazing pattern of cloth of gold. You raise your arm to cover your face and the glare shifts to purple, as if bishops were hatching through flames. With the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, he rides up to Hunsdon to honour the young lady who – penitent, chastened, abased – is once again fit to be called the king’s daughter.
Hertfordshire is a moneyed and populous country, well wooded and well furnished with the residences of gentlemen and courtiers. The house itself, brick-built on high ground, is fit for the accommodation of a king’s family. The manor itself is ancient, but this present house is perhaps eighty years old; they show as antiquities their charters with painted shields bearing the emblems of long-dead lords: the bend sable of a Despencer heiress, the Mowbrays’ lion argent, and the royal arms of Edmund Beaufort, with their broken border of silver and blue. Two years back the king laid out near three thousand on new tiles and timbers, and sent up people from Galyon Hone’s workshop to glaze the principal chambers with striped roses, lovers’ knots, shivering white falcons and fleur-de-lys. At the same time – providentially, as it turns out – the whole house was made more tight and secure, with new hinges, clasps, hooks, bolts and locks.
On the journey the trains of the three lords keep separate, for fear of quarrels between servants. Norfolk says, cackling, ‘It is well-known what Cromwell does when he strays north of London, he will stop at some low hostelry to drag out a pot-washer and have his pleasure of her.’ Except that the duke uses a coarser expression, accompanying it with a driving elbow and a pumping fist.
Charles Brandon roars. It’s Brandon’s sort of joke.
He notices the Lesser Thomas is riding with Norfolk. Whatever the half-brothers were whispering about when he left them together, they are whispering still. ‘You see that?’ he says to Suffolk.
‘I do,’ Suffolk says. ‘Your man, Tom Truth. Walking/talking. Dipping/snipping. Wishing/fishing.’
Poor boy, he thinks. Even Suffolk knows how evil he rhymes. He recalls the young Howard’s stricken face, when he broke it to him that the ladies shared their verses. As if he never thought that could happen. As if he thought they read the poem then ate the paper.