‘But he doesn’t like different!’ He is exasperated now. ‘I think, Rob, as we have been keeping the gospel alive in your absence, you must let us judge the best way to proceed.’
‘You talk as if I had been travelling for my own pleasure. It has all been on the king’s business, and a sad business it is. Folk in Germany believe we are living through the Last Days.’
‘They’ve been saying that for ten years or more. If you talk to Henry about the Last Days he thinks you’re threatening him. And that never does any good.’
It is difficult to be at ease, he thinks, with men who believe that, since the misunderstanding in Eden, we have had neither reason nor will of our own. ‘The king says if, as Luther holds, our only salvation comes through faith in Christ, who has elected some of us, not others, to life eternal, and if our works are so besmirched as to be entirely useless in God’s eyes, and cannot help us to salvation – then why should any man do charity to his neighbour?’
‘Works follow election,’ Barnes says. ‘They do not precede it. It is simple enough. The man who is saved will show it, by his Christian life.’
‘Do you think I am saved?’ he says. ‘I am covered in lamp black and my hands smell of coin, and when I see myself in a glass I see grime – I suppose that is the beginning of wisdom? About my fallen state, I have no choice but agree. I must meddle with matters that corrupt – it is my office. In the golden age the earth yielded all we required, but now we must dig for it, quarry it, blast it, we must drive the world, we must gear and grind it, roll and hammer and pulp it. There must be dinners cooked, Rob. There must be slates chalked, and ink set to page, and money made and bargains struck, and we must give the poor the means to work and eat. I bear in mind that there are cities abroad where the magistrates have done much good, with setting up hospitals, relieving the indigent, helping young tradesmen with loans to get a wife and a workshop. I know Luther turns his face from what ameliorates our sad condition. But citizens do not miss monks and their charity, if the city looks after them. And I believe, I do believe, that a man who serves the commonweal and does his duty gets a blessing for it, and I do not believe –’
He breaks off, before the magnitude of what he does not believe. ‘I sin,’ he says, ‘I repent, I lapse, I sin again, I repent and I look to Christ to perfect my imperfection. I cling to faith but I will not give up works. My master Wolsey taught me, try everything. Discard no possibility. Keep all channels open.’
‘You cite your cardinal? In these times?’
‘Admit it.’ He laughs. ‘You were terrified of him, Rob.’
Barnes leaves him. He looks downcast and is muttering about Dun Scotus. A worldly man, a clever man, but he is afraid to be in England now: as if she were Ultima Thule, where earth, air and water mix to form a jellied broth, and a night lasts six months, and the people dye themselves blue. There was a day, before Wolsey, when the princes of Europe no more regarded England than they regarded this soup-land, where they had never set foot. England bred sheep and sheep sustained it, but the women were said to be loose and the men bloody-minded; if they were not killing abroad, they were killing at home. The cardinal, out of his great ingenuity, had found some way to turn this reputation to use. He made his country count: he, with his guile and his well-placed bribes, his sorcerer’s wit and his conjurer’s wiles, his skills to make armies and bullion from thin air, to conjure weaponry from mist. I hold the balance, gentlemen, he would say: in any little war of yours, I may intervene, or not. The King of England has deep coffers, he would lie, and a race of warriors at his back: your Englishman is so martial in his character that he sleeps in harness, and every clerk has a broadsword at his side, and every scrivener will stick you with a penknife, and even the ploughman’s horse paws the ground.
And so for a year or two it became a question: what does England think? What will England do? France must solicit her: the Emperor must apply. War itself, the cardinal preferred to avoid. Henry on French soil, curvetting on his steed, his visor lowered, his armour a blaze of gold: that is as far as it went, if you add in a few sordid engagements that consisted in churning up the mud and blowing trumpets. If war is a craft, the cardinal would say, peace is a consummate and blessed art. His peace talks cost as much as most campaigns. His diplomacy was the talk of Constantinople. His treaties were the glory of the west.
But once Henry began divorcing his wife, spitting in the Emperor’s eye, all this advantage was lost. The Pope’s bull of excommunication hangs over Henry like a blade on a human hair. To be excommunicate is to be a leper. If the bull is implemented, the king and his ministers will be the target of murderers, who carry the Pope’s commission. His subjects will have a sacred duty to depose him. Invading troops will come with a blessing, and the sins incidental to any invasion – rapes, robberies – will be allowed for and wiped out in advance.
Lord Cromwell gets up every day – Austin Friars, his rooms at court, his house at Stepney, the Rolls House at Chancery Lane – and he tries to think of a way to stop this happening. This week, France and the Emperor are at war. Next week who knows? Circumstances alter fast, and before news can cross the Narrow Sea they have altered again. Even now – with the king twice widowed and newly-married – our people in Rome have a wedge in the door, keeping it open a crack: still maintaining a dialogue, and passing cash with a wink. The curia must keep hope alive, that England might return to the fold. The great thing is to make sure the bull remains in suspension. Meanwhile, we must assume the worst case: Charles or François, one or both, will walk in and wipe their boots in Whitehall.
There are now three kinds of people in the world. There are those who give Lord Cromwell his proper title. There are flatterers, who called him ‘my lord’ when he wasn’t. And there are begrudgers, who won’t call him ‘my lord’ now he is.
Gregory trails him: ‘Do you think if my mother had lived, she would have liked being called Lady Cromwell?’
‘I do suppose any woman would.’ He halts, papers in his hands: looks Gregory over. ‘How would it be if we were to stretch out a hand to the Duke of Norfolk, and help him in his trouble?’
The duke has said to him, for God’s sake, my lord, work something with the king, to put me back in his grace. Is it my fault Richmond is dead?
‘Call-Me,’ he says, ‘send our people to Norfolk’s people, and make them know that if they were to invite Gregory to hunt this summer, I would look favourably on such an invitation.’
‘What, me?’ Gregory says.
Richard says, ‘Not as if you were doing anything else.’
Gregory digests it. ‘They say it is good hunting country at Kenninghall. I suppose I can do it. But before I go, I would like to know when I am to get a stepmother.’
He frowns: stepmother?
‘You promised,’ Gregory says. ‘You swore to us, you would step out of here and wed the first woman you met, to clear yourself of any charge you mean to match with Lady Mary. So did you? Have you? Who was she?’