Wriothesley says, ‘Bishop Gardiner applies for instructions: how shall he bear himself if, as our ambassador, he should meet the King of Scots?’
He says, ‘He should congratulate James on escaping the dangers of the deep. He has been on his voyage a good while.’
The king says, ‘Tell Gardiner to do James no more honour than he must. I am, as all know, the rightful ruler of Scotland.’
Behind the king’s back he makes a sign to Call-Me: you can leave that out of your letter.
‘And if the French ask about the commotion in our shires,’ the king says, ‘let Gardiner assure them that I have an army at my command that is ready to humble any prince in Europe, and then have puissance remaining, for a second battle and a third.’
He can imagine with what shrugging, grimacing and eye-rolling this news will be received by François. ‘Though the Tudor claims he has a hundred thousand men, all know he has but a fraction of that, and cannot trust his own commanders: or if he can trust some of them, he does not know which.’
And when you think about it, François will say, what did it take, fifty years back, to invade England and overthrow Crookback? A rabble of two thousand mercenaries, led by a man whose name no one knew.
Henry says, ‘You can tell Gardiner, and any other person who enquires, that I will go against the rebels with the whole armed might of England, and so reduce them that their heirs will have to creep over the earth where they lie, and puzzle out their fragments with a magnifying glass.’
But meanwhile, what will he do? He will negotiate.
At Windsor, the king picks through his Italian songbook. The autumn rain beats at the glass. Dead leaves whisk through the air. A la guerra, a la guerra, Ch’amor non vol più pace …
The king says, ‘Where is Thomas Wyatt?’
‘In Kent, sir. Raising his tenants.’
‘How many can he fetch?’
‘A hundred and fifty. Perhaps two hundred.’
A la guerra … Love wants no more peace.
‘How is Sir Henry Wyatt?’
‘Dying, sir.’
‘Will he leave me anything?’
‘His son, sir. Begging as his last request that you will favour him.’
Tom Wyatt: his ardour, his faith, his verse.
The king says, ‘Will Lord Montague bring his people to the muster?’
‘He needs only a day’s warning, sir.’ He thinks, it will be interesting to see if he takes the field himself.
‘Where is his brother Reginald?’
‘Just left Venice.’
‘For?’ The king finishes his thought. ‘Perhaps for Rome. In Rome they will be triumphing over me now.
‘Questa guerra è mortale,’ the king sings. ‘Cromwell, I have forgot the words.
‘Io non trovo arma forte
Che vetar possa morte …’
What weapon is strong enough, to shield me from death? He leafs through the manuscript, which is illuminated with larkspur, vine leaves and leaping hares. ‘I am the tree the wind casts down, because it has no roots …’ And Scaramella goes to war, boot and buckler, lance and shield.
Five wounds. Wife. Children. Master. Dorothea with her needle, straight between his ribs. One withheld? A man might survive them if they were evenly spaced, and he knew the direction from which they would come.
The king says, ‘How many can Edward Seymour turn out?’
‘Two hundred, sir.’
‘And the Courtenays? My lord Exeter?’
‘Five hundred, sir.’
‘Richard Riche?’
‘Forty.’
‘Forty,’ the king says. ‘He is only a lawyer, of course.’
‘I have ordered every coastal district to keep a strait watch for alien ships.’
The king plucks his lute string. ‘Perché un viver duro e grave, Grave e dur morir conviene …’ My life hard, my death bitter, a ship that is wrecked upon a rock.
Prophets – and we are awash with them, though their better forecasts are made after the event – have assured us that this year the waters of Albion will run with blood. When he closes his eyes he can see the flow: not a river tumbling and bursting its banks, not a torrent roaring over stones, but a channel that is oily, crimson, a narrow slick rivulet, boiling beneath its surface: a slow, seeping, unstoppable flood.
In Yorkshire they sing that old complaint from John Ball’s day:
Now pride reigns in every place, and greed not shy to show its face,
And lechery with never shame, and gluttony with never blame.
Envy reigns with reason, and sloth is ever in season.
God help us for now is the time.
III
Vile Blood
London, Autumn–Winter 1536
Aske: he is a petty gentleman, but the king places him at once – second cousin to Harry Percy, and kin to the Cliffords of Skipton Castle. Mr Wriothesley, newly attuned to the king’s mind, marvels at Henry’s knowledge of obscure family ties. In calling the process of the rebels a pilgrimage, Aske lends it the colour of piety. The aim of the Pilgrims, at divers times stated, is to have vile blood drained from the king’s council, and the nobility of England set up again; to have Christ’s laws kept, and restitution for injuries (as they call them) done to the church. Aske enforces an oath on those who come in his path.
He knows Robert Aske – to nod to, anyway. He is a member of Gray’s Inn, sometimes in London on business for the Percy family. Being a lawyer, Aske cannot claim ignorance. He is aware it is a gross presumption to offer oaths in the name of the king. And he must foresee – for he must be acquainted with the chronicles – what the end will be: how rank the puddle in which he swims and will one day sink.
We have all grown up on tales of Jack Straw and John Amend-All – those brave days when the commons marched on London and killed the judges and foreigners. They pissed in rich men’s beds, tore up their poetry books, and used altar cloths to wipe their arses. Their leaders were mean clerks and spoiled priests, Straw and Miller and Carter and Tyler, none of whom went by their right names; as for Amend-All, he is immortal, a self-made man green as spring, who noses up from his common grave whenever mutiny stirs. These rebels wrecked palaces and stormed the Tower of London itself. They smashed whatever they could find to smash – there were not so many mirrors in those days. On Cheapside they set a chopping block, and demanded the heads of fifteen of the king’s councillors, including the Lord Privy Seal. If they could not catch the men they were hunting, they hung up their coats instead and shot them with arrows.
In those days the King of England was a child. There was no good governance. Labourers and craftsmen were oppressed by statute, every trade on a set wage, whatever the price of grain. They endured the poll tax – no wonder that they set the heads of its begetters on spikes. Yet all the while, like Robert Aske, they called themselves loyal subjects, and shouted, ‘God bless our king.’
It is a hundred and fifty years since that broil. It is eighty years or more since Jack Cade called himself Captain of Kent and led his rabble to London Bridge. But to the rustici, you might as well say it happened last Easter, or before the Conquest. They say they want no taxes and will pay none, and they protest against imposts never levied and never imagined. And as the king says to him – when did you hear of a tax so light and pleasant that every man clamoured to pay it?
The common folk of England live on songs and tales and alehouse jokes. Spending their pence on candles to burn before holy images, they live in the dark, and in the dark take fright. Let us say a calf is born dead. By the time the tale crosses a field, it is a calf with two heads. Cross a stream, and it is a calf with two heads, chanting backwards in Latin, and some friar is charging a shilling for a charm against it. So it goes, in half a day, from abortion to Antichrist: and somehow, everybody is poorer except the priests. Pastors warn their flock that if they do not send tribute to Rome, trees will walk and crops will blight. They make them dread the fire of Purgatory, which eats to the bone; they ask, can you bear to see your dead folk burning – your helpless old mother, your dead little children, bound in agony and screaming for your prayers?