He is brainsick, perhaps, his wits turned. But his folly will undo his countrymen, leading them to the fight through weather in which only a novice would campaign. And Bigod is not so mad he cannot be responsible for his actions. The king’s pardon was once and once only: after that, martial law.
Hans comes to him. ‘He has decided he wants a wall painting.’
‘Is that more difficult?’
Hans rubs his beard. He wants to talk terms; he wants to go on the royal books, with board and lodging and a workspace at Whitehall for the life of this project and beyond. He asks for a guarantee of thirty pounds a year, and then he will turn down other commissions and call himself painter to the King of England.
‘Thirty?’ He frowns. But after all, Hans has a mistress and two children to keep, apart from his family over the sea.
Hans says, ‘There is a piece of wall in the privy chamber here, I measure it at twenty-two feet.’
‘The privy chamber? That’s where he wants it?’
‘I should hardly put it there without his permission.’
‘I thought he would want it in the presence chamber. To awe the whole world.’
‘No. He just wants to awe you. And his attending gentlemen. And I suppose any poor foreigner he brings in for a tour.’
Of course, the privy chamber is not as private these days as its name implies. The king does not reckon to be alone there. If he wants solitude, or the company of one or two, he finds himself a sanctum in every house: a corner room where he tunes a lute, or a secret book store up a winding stair.
Hans says, ‘I do not mind if few people see it, as long as the right people see it. I plan to place his head’ – he indicates above his own head, ‘about here. No harm to give him an extra inch or so.’
‘In the leg,’ he suggests, ‘not the body. Or you mean elsewhere?’
Han sniggers. ‘I will draw him with gown well-parted, so the world can see the wonder. A generous wad of quilting.’
‘How big will it be? The painting, I mean.’
Hans stretches his arms then wheels about, demonstrating in space. ‘He wonders if he should have his father painted too.’
‘In the same picture?’
‘It can be done.’
And his mother, why not? A line of kings and queens, stretching into the blue distance. And an unborn child hovering, like a shadow of a bird against glass.
‘So he must be available to me,’ Hans says. ‘For drawings. They must be detailed, it will take time. Afterwards I can dispense with his body. He need not be present. I can meet separately with his clothes.’
‘You did not give me that choice when you painted me.’
‘But I failed with you,’ Hans says curtly. ‘You should have been painted by some other master, a dead one, for God He knows, you looked dead. You know Antonello, that fellow from Messina? He would have dragged some expression out of you.’
He has seen this master’s work. When Antonello painted the grandees of Venice, he captured the sceptical raised eyebrow, the flicker of a sour smile. But the Venetians didn’t like his work; he knew too much about them.
‘By the way,’ Hans says, ‘how is your daughter?’
‘Gone home.’ He intends to say no more.
‘She did not like England? Or she did not like you?’
Hans, he thinks, has likely known about Jenneke for years. It would explain certain snatches of conversation, broken off: sideways glances, sly. ‘Hans,’ he says, ‘don’t ask questions unless you know what to do with the answers.’
March, 1537: day by day, at the Tower and at the Rolls House, the Lord Privy Seal unpicks the events of the year past. With witnesses, with interrogatories before him, with clerks and Mr Wriothesley, he is laying bare, day by day and name by name, the machinery of revolt.
‘So you say you were coerced into rebellion? That you took an oath against your will? Please name the rebels who resorted to you, and say when. How were they armed? Did they use force against your person? Did they threaten force against your person? You say your horses were seized, your thatch fired, your wife insulted – you have witnesses? You allege the rebels set fire to your property, which included movable goods to the value of …? You did not have an inventory? Ah, I see, they burned your inventory. And what did you do, to counter their threats? Did you not send messages to your friends for help? You did, and they did not stir? Why not? What had you done to them, to cause them to abandon you?’
Mr Wriothesley wears the sables sent him as a present by our man in Brussels. Christophe builds up the fire. He, Lord Privy Seal, now keeps his own wine store here at the Tower. He has a strongroom, to lock up the interrogatories, so no one can interfere with them overnight, writing between the lines. Helpers come in and out – Augmentations men, his relative John ap Rice, and a useful cleric called Edmund Bonner, a fussy, clucking little man with an eye for the ladies and an ear for gossip. The bishops, still working on their new statement of doctrine, send him weighty folios every night: from the snivelling wrecks at the Tower, he goes home to number the sacraments. The interrogations grind on through the spring. For every answer he has six questions. He is willing to pinch a man with pains, if nothing else will work, though the threat will do more, and he regards it as a defeat if he has to call for chains and heated irons.
Wriothesley has not his patience: but then, he is young, and he has a family he would like to see sometimes. He will touch his elbow: ‘Sir, this is a mild pain, and we have a stubborn rebel before us, and it is late. I believe he can stand more.’
But he thinks, no, none of us can stand anything. Scrape our skin, and beneath it there is an infant, howling.
He says, ‘You could try listening. That’s how you find things out.’
‘But if he says nothing?’
‘Then listen to his silence.’ Listen through his silence. Imagine what you could give him, to make him speak – instead of what you could take away. Perhaps he must die, and he knows that; but some deaths can be faced and some not. What is it worth, to be spared castration, and the apprehension of it? You could offer him the shock of the axe, the carpet of blood, not the panic of half-hanging and the agony of the knife in the bowel. It is all about anticipation, he tells Call-Me. Give him something to live for, or offer him a death that spares him shame. Assure him that, whether or not he helps us, the king will pay his debts and look after his family: such small mercies can make a felon weep and break his will.
In no other country could this happen. In the domains of François or Charles there would be no truces, negotiations, or sessions of question and answer that stretch from Advent to Trinity. Once apprehended the noble suspects would be tortured and killed and the common dead would be butchered and lie under the open sky. He says, where we cannot avoid severity, we can still temper justice with mercy. Where loyal men have been despoiled of property, the crown will compensate them. Where the king has been well-served, there must be rewards. Where his authority has been held in contempt, retribution must be swift and public. In the north Norfolk hangs truce-breakers from the trees. He hangs them in chains if he can get them, but iron is so dear, and rope will do. Their wives come by night to cut them down, but the king says any women who are caught must be straitly punished. He wishes the corpses to hang there through Easter and into the warm weather: as you hang a maggoty crow on a fence, as an example to other birds not to steal your crops. In London, heads are spiked on the bridge, and limbs of traitors are nailed to the gates. But the cold weather stops them rotting and the citizens are sickened by the sight.
By the middle of February young Bigod is captured. His captains are in ward. Tyburn waits for them, in season: no rush. The summer will clean up the winter’s spoilage. Thomas Cromwell will never recover the money he is owed. Nor will Henry learn he should bury the dead.