Walter’s face grew dark. But he said in a tone mild in the circumstances, ‘Listen, son, this is what I know: right is what you can get away with, and wrong is what they whip you for. As I’m sure life will instruct you, by and by, if your father’s precept and example can’t get it through your skull.’
The thief Edwin had said, while he sucked his knuckles, ‘Be glad of that, boy, a gift from me. You may go begging for a beating hereafter: Satan himself wouldn’t soil his paws.’
On 16 October the rebels enter York. York is the second city in the realm. England is collapsing in on herself, like a house of straw.
When the news comes he is in London, scraping together ten thousand pounds so Norfolk can pay his troops. A message comes from Wriothesley: the king wants him, wants to see him as soon as humanly possible. Another letter follows, another …
When he arrives at Windsor a knot of councillors surges around him, long-faced. The king is at prayer. In his private closet? No, he is addressing God from a grander place, the chapel of St George’s.
Bishop Sampson says, ‘Cromwell, he waits on you.’
‘But you have told him? That York is lost?’ Only in that moment does it strike him that they might have held back the news for him to break.
But it appears Rafe Sadler has done it: Rafe is with him now. Oxford says, ‘I doubt the king will blame you too much, my lord.’
For the fall of York? How could he be to blame? But someone must be …
Lord Audley says, ‘I doubt even Wolsey could have changed the wind these last weeks.’
No? Wolsey would not have fled York, like the present archbishop. He says, ‘No rebel would have dared to rise within a hundred miles of my lord cardinal. Active force would have met him, if he did.’
To St George’s, then. He pushes through the councillors. ‘Come on, Call-Me.’
Wriothesley says, striding beside him, ‘Death has made the cardinal invincible, sir?’
‘So it appears.’ Though Wolsey never speaks to him now. Since he came back from Shaftesbury he is without company or advice. The cardinal bounces in the clouds, where the Faithful Departed giggle at our miscalculations. The dead are magnified in our eyes, while we to them appear as ants. They look down on us from the mists, like mystic beasts on spires, and they sail above us like flags.
The king is in the chantry chapel, high above the Garter stalls. He climbs, and on the tight spiral of the stair the chambers of his heart squeeze small. From here, he knows, the king looks down on his ancestors, at the murdered King Henry – sixth of that name – in his tomb.
He ducks into the low doorway. The king is kneeling, back rigid, seemingly at prayer. Rafe Sadler is kneeling behind him, as far away as the space will allow. Rafe turns up his face, imploring; as he, Lord Cromwell, passes him, he flips his cap over his eyes.
There is a cushion; it’s better than the bare boards. For some time he kneels in silence, directly behind his monarch.
In Florence, he thinks, I played at calcio. It is a game of many players, more a mêlée than a sport. The young men of family would turn out their stouter servants, twenty or thirty to each team. Mad Englishman, he: his excuse being that, as his Tuscan was not perfect, he did not know the rules.
He can hear the king’s breath, his sigh. Henry knows he is there: he gives himself away by a twitch of the muscles at the back of his neck.
Ten minutes into the game you would be bloodied, the ball itself basted in snot and sand and gore, your breath short, your long bones juddering, your feet stamped to a paste and your hair yanked out in handfuls: but you never noticed or cared, once you got hold of the ball. Forward you charged, ball tucked against you, a whoop of triumph sailing over the rooftops; but when you had run ten paces, some bellowing lunatic would hack you behind the knees.
Henry puts his hand to his nape, like someone who has been brushed by a gnat. His sacred head half-turns; he lifts his gaze, wary. ‘Crumb?’ he says. As if it were the start of a prayer: though one with no particular efficacy.
He waits. The king heaves a deeper sigh: a groan.
Mother of Sorrows, the game hurt when it stopped. Though when you were playing, you never felt a thing.
Henry crosses himself, and begins to struggle to his feet. Would a hand to help him be welcome, or bitten?
‘York? How can York fall?’ When the king turns his face it is dismayed: as if somebody has cut a gash in it, opened his brain to the light.
Rafe, in the shadows, stands behind him.
He scoops up his cushion. It is embroidered gold on crimson: ‘HA HA’, it says. Henricus Rex. Anna Regina.
Rafe takes it from him as if it were hot.
If this were Florence, he thinks, I would boot that cushion over Santa Croce. Her memory with it.
The king says, ‘Tonight I shall dine in the great hall.’
‘Majesty,’ he says.
‘I must appear in great …’ the king falters … ‘glory, you understand me? Where is the Mirror of Naples?’
‘Whitehall, sir.’
He thinks Henry will say, take a guard and fetch it. The king takes no heed of distance or weather. He wants to blaze before his subjects in the great pearl and diamond that was the treasure of France.
‘Whitehall?’ Henry says. ‘Never mind.’ It appears he only has to think of the Mirror to feel glorified. He always says, when the French ask for it back, ‘Tell François my claim to that country is stronger than his. One day I shall ask for more than jewels.’
‘We shall need the trumpeters.’ Henry’s voice is small in the great spaces of the chapel. ‘Rafe, are you lurking there? My duty and my love to the queen’s grace. If she pleases to wear the sleeves with my monogram that Ibgrave sent in June, I shall wear the matching doublet.’
Far below them – in the mirror of time you can see them – the Garter knights weep in their stalls, their dead skulls rattling inside feathered helms. But the king straightens his shoulders, tilts up his chin. Later Rafe will say, ‘You have to admire how he took the news, when York fell. You would have thought someone had given him a thousand pounds, instead of a kick in the teeth.’
By suppertime he is so harassed by messengers that he has to send Rafe to whisper in the king’s ear and beseech pardon for his absence. They say the mayor of York has got the treasure out of the city, but can he keep it safe? The Pilgrims will be able to finance their cause from what remains, fleecing the rich citizens. Within York’s walls are crammed forty parish churches, a dozen great houses of religion untouched by the Court of Augmentations. That the place seethes with papists, he has long known; but where would York be, or any of those great wool towns, if he did not work continually to patch up peace with the Emperor, to keep their ports open, and if he did not represent their cause, persistently, to the merchants of the Hanse? If he met Aske he would ask him, how is it in the interest of the north, to threaten those who can best prosper your people?
He says to Rafe, ‘Lucky the King of Scots has gone to France. If he were at home, he might be mustering to come down on us.’
The word from Paris is that James has not yet married a wife. Instead he is doing a lot of shopping.
Rafe says, ‘James has left his council at home to govern. They have an eye to their opportunity, I suppose. I do not know if they would venture to declare war.’
They don’t have to declare it. At calcio, nobody ever declared war. The result was wreckage, all the same: a field strewn with teeth, and (one had heard of it) gouged eyes. No one was actually stabbed but sometimes, inadvertently, players fell onto each other’s knives.