He wonders, should he bring Frances under his own roof? He is not short of roofs; she might go to Stepney or Mortlake. If any malcontents should penetrate London, they would attack Austin Friars. God knows what they would expect to find. A great heap of treasure: confiscated chalices winking with gems. Precious relics, such as twigs from the burning bush, and a box of the manna that fell on the Israelites in the desert.
He writes to Richard in his own hand: here we are all well if not contented, Mrs Richard is impatient for your return as am I but the king must be served, temperately, carefully. At idle times, while you are waiting for action to begin, do not let your companions draw you into games of chance. If you refuse they will jeer, look at Cromwell’s nephew, he is not good for the money: but if you take part, they will find some excuse to brand you a cheat. We are agreed Norfolk and his son must join the campaign; but if you come in young Surrey’s path, get out of it, he will work you a mischief if he can. Do not be drawn by any slander to myself. They will say what they must to provoke you, at a time when every man’s weapon is ready in his hand.
He ends each day buried under a weight of dispatches; with every piece of news that comes in, he seems to know less. If Aske were fighting in your own cause, you would call him a robust captain, and godly too, because he directs his ragbag army to pay for what it takes from the country people. But do his soldiers heed him? Or have they run beyond his control? Loyal gentlemen fleeing the north bring their reports. Aske says, hold back: his sergeants say, march. Aske says, don’t ring the bells, his soldiers ring the bells; he says, don’t fire the beacon, and they fire it. His own brothers have deserted his side and galloped for sanctuary. And yet they say his rise was foretold in a prophecy. The north has long been expecting him, a one-eyed messiah. How did he lose his eye? No one knows.
Henry says: ‘Vile blood: what is it, that these rebels cry it down? There have always been mushroom men.’ Grown up overnight, he means. ‘Both my father and my grandfather would agree, a common man can be as good a servant as a duke. Being humble-born, they have no interests of their own – only solicitous to serve their master, from whom they derive all their fortune.’
He says, ‘If my lord of Norfolk were here, he would tell your Majesty that, having no family, such men have no honour. They will do anything, without scruple.’
‘But they have souls to save,’ the king says. ‘So not anything, I do suppose. Did you know Reginald Bray? Bray came from nothing. Worcester grammar school, if I recall. But he was a wise and expert man in my father’s cause. The great lords had to be very pleasant to him, for they feared every word he might drop in the king’s ear.’
Bray must have been dead thirty years, more; how could he have known him? But the calculations of princes run beyond mortal span. He says, ‘I know his resting place, sir.’
Bray is buried here at Windsor, within St George’s, which his munificence helped build. (Though so is John Schorne, a priest who conjured the devil into a boot.) He has seen Bray’s emblem high in the air, his rebus frozen in stone and glass. I should find one at ground level, he thinks, and abase myself on it. Bray took over the king’s finances; he made money for himself by the way. Henry says, ‘The labourer is worthy of his hire. Bray went into battle against the Cornish rebels. He acquitted himself gallantly.’
For a clerk, he thinks. Is the king suggesting that he should put down his pen and pick up a sword? Despite all that has been said?
‘You remember the Cornish,’ Henry says.
He nods. ‘I was a boy then.’
‘My father took us to the Tower. He had faith in that fortress to stand, even if they looted the city.’
It is not just in the north they hate taxes. At the fringes of the kingdom they do not understand England to be one nation, with borders we all must pay to defend. When the Cornish broke out in rebellion they said they would not pay to secure the north against the Scots, for they did not know what a Scot was. They were led by a lawyer, one Thomas Flamank, and a blacksmith they called An Gof: ‘blacksmith’ is what it means, his name tells you what he was. Gathering forces as they rolled up-country, they marched towards London, and before them strode a giant, name of Bolster. Possibly he did not lead them but guarded their rear, for nobody saw him – he was always out in front or just behind.
At the Williamses’ house in Mortlake, where he ran errands in exchange for his dinner, they poured scorn on giants, roaring with laughter as they told the story of one of Bolster’s Cornish mates, a sad and lonely giant who played quoits on Sundays with his only friend, a spry lad called Jack. One day the giant patted Jack on his pate, and his fingers went through the bone as if it were piecrust. The giant’s cries made the welkin ring, while Jack’s brains ran down his chin like gravy.
He told his sister Bet, ‘Giants were descended from Cain, who killed his brother. There were hordes of them on the earth before they drowned in Noah’s flood. They were tall, but not so tall their heads came above the water.’
Bet said nothing.
He said, ‘Trojan Brutus fought those that survived, and put them to the sword. He was the mighty man who invented London.’
Bet said nothing again.
‘Bolster?’ he said. ‘Is that really his name? Because that’s ridiculous.’
Bet said, ‘Are you going to tell him that to his face?’
The more nobody saw Bolster, the more the fear of him grew. He was ten foot tall, or twelve foot, with arms like the sails of a windmill and iron-shod feet that could burst a head like a grape. In Putney, their homes stood in the path of the rebels; and he a boy, some twelve or thirteen years old, stood ready to knock hell out of Bolster’s kneecaps.
In that commotion time, Walter turned a shrewd penny, outfitting his friends in third-hand armour, bashing breastplates into shape. Privately he said he feared not, because he knew about the Cornishmen’s ale. It takes twenty-four hours to make, and they brew it wherever they camp. They down it by the pail, creamy brown and fizzing, and it gets you drunk like nothing else. Then it makes you spew all next day.
At Blackheath the rebels were destroyed by the king’s army. Many knights were made on the battlefield that day. An Gof and the lawyer were hanged and quartered, their bloody parts sent back to be displayed where they were born. But Bolster was never hanged. No gallows would be strong enough. The world is wide and he is in it somewhere. Perhaps he lies fathoms deep, breathing through his gills like a fish, till he is ready to swim up to the light and begin his career afresh. A giant is not used to inaction. Nor is my lord Privy Seal. This frustration, this constraint, as the last of the leaves fall and the early frosts begin, takes him back to his early life, before Bolster was thought of, and before he set his foot on the ladder to rise in the world: before he knew there was a ladder: back to the days when other people were in charge of his fate: before he knew there was fate: when he thought there was only the smithy, the brewery, the wharves, the river, and even London seemed distant to him, or, to speak truth, he had no idea of distance: when he was no more than seven years old, and his uncle John and his father settled his destiny between them, and he said scarcely a word.
His uncle John said: ‘I tell you what, brother. Thomas is no use to you yet, he is only underfoot. So why don’t you let me train him up?’