Lambert is an hour dying. At his side, attending my lord Privy Seal, is a small boy, Thomas Cromwell, alias Harry Smith. There is a smear of ash on his bare arm; his body, beneath his jerkin, is cloudy with bruises.
In the starlit hour, Cranmer comes to see him. A pastoral visit. ‘You are not well?’
He will not admit to that. ‘Awake at all hours,’ he says. ‘It is Master Traitor Pole, he makes so much paperwork with his machinations.’
The archbishop looks helpless himself, exhausted. He, Lord Cromwell, calls for wine for him, for food if he will take it: a capon’s wing, plums. Cranmer shuffles in his chair. He blows his nose. He says, ‘You know, what we have begun will not come to fruition in one generation. You are past fifty. And I, not much less.’
‘Gardiner asked if I thought we were living in the last days.’
Cranmer darts a glance at him. ‘But you do not. Surely.’ The archbishop is biting his lip, like a man lifting a splinter with a needle.
‘I can see why good men want to believe that Christ is coming. We want His justice, when justice seems so long delayed.’
‘You think Lambert did not have justice?’
He looks up. It is not a trap.
He says, ‘You can’t pick and choose, if you serve a prince, week to week or cause to cause. Sometimes all you can do is lessen the damage. But here we failed.’
Cranmer says, ‘We must not make Thomas More’s mistake. He thought Henry’s conscience was his to command.’
The door opens. Cranmer starts. ‘Ah, Christophe –’
Christophe puts down a platter. ‘I think my master ought to have a holiday.’
‘Beyond my remit,’ Cranmer says faintly. ‘You know, when I was a boy I did suppose an archbishop could do anything. I supposed he could do miracles.’
‘I never gave it a thought,’ he says. ‘Christophe, bring fruit.’
The boy trundles out. He says, ‘The light of Christ leads us to some murky places.’
The archbishop is looking at his roast fowl. He says, ‘I cannot touch flesh. Not this evening.’
He says, ‘Have you ever seen a hawk keep killing, when the prey is dead?’
Cranmer flinches. ‘No,’ he says, ‘no. I think the king was … he surprised me … he was judicious, he was, at times, he was almost … fatherly.’
Ripping and stamping, rage in the eye. Sipping blood from the body cavity, then slashing again at the flesh.
‘Fatherly,’ he says. ‘Yes, he was.’
He thinks, after I saw Joan Boughton burned, I went home to my little life and I did not know if it was true or if I had dreamed it. I wondered if I might see her in the street, an elderly body about her business, going with her basket to buy cloves and apples for a pie.
Cranmer says, ‘But what else could we have done? Lambert chose his answers. It lay within his power to make others.’
‘I do not think it did.’
Cranmer considers that. To fill the silence he asks him, ‘How is your lady?’
‘Grete?’ Cranmer speaks as if he had other wives, one or two. ‘Grete is afraid. And tired of hiding. I assured her when I brought her to England that the king would be brought to a different opinion, and that we would be able to live freely like any couple. But as it is …’
His voice dies away. We are living on borrowed time, in small rooms, a bag always packed, an ear always alert; we sleep lightly and some nights hardly at all.
He says to Cranmer, ‘So what now? After this? If the king can burn this man he can burn us. What shall I do?’
‘Maintain your rule as long as you can. For the gospel’s sake I shall do the same.’
‘What use is our rule, if we could not save John Lambert?’
‘We could not save John Frith. Yet look at all we have been able to do, since Frith went into the fire. We could not save Tyndale, but we could save his book.’
True. Dead men are at work. Their cause is not lost. They labour on, screened from us by smoke.
When Cranmer has gone his household supply him with candles and wine and draw his door closed. They subdue their voices and walk as if wearing felt slippers. He takes a fresh sheet of paper and begins to write a letter. To my very loving friend Sir Thomas Wyatt, knight, the king’s ambassador with the Emperor.
He writes, The king’s Majesty, my lord prince’s grace, my ladies his daughters, and the rest of his council be all merry and in good prosperity …
When I was a young man, he thinks, I needed all my strength. Pity was a luxury I might one day afford, like fine white bread or a book; a sound roof over my head, a light of amber or blue glass, a ring for my finger; an ell of pearled brocade, a lute, a beechwood fire; a safe hand to light it.
The xvith day of this present …
Origen says for each man God makes a scroll, which is rolled and hidden in the heart. God inscribes with a quill, a reed, a bone.
… the king’s Majesty, for the reverence of the holy sacrament of the altar …
He thinks of adding, our monarch wore white. Head to toe he shone. Like a mirror. Like a light. He writes, I wish the princes of Europe could have seen it, heard it – with what gravity he strove for the conversion of this poor miserable wretch …
His hand moves across the paper, the ink unites with its weave. The firelight stirs, a candle flame bows and blurs. He remembers riding with Gregory across the downs, under a silver sky: the light without shadow, like the light at the beginning of the world.
If those princes had been with me today, he writes, they would have seen Henry’s learning and marvelled at it. They would have witnessed his judgement, his policy: they would have seen him as – he lifts his pen for an instant from the page – the mirror and light of all other kings and princes in Christendom.
Among his papers he still has a verse from Tom Truth’s pen. It has become loose from its poem, but he has it by heart.
But since my fancy leads her so
And leads my friendship from the light
And walketh me darkling to and fro
While other friends may walk in sight …
Even the worst poets, from time to time, hit on a felicitous phrasing. You can see the flicker, as the human form passes from light to dark and back again. He looks around the room. The subdued glow of the turkey carpet. His books bound in kidskin and calf. The silver plate, reflecting himself to himself: the mirror and light of all councillors that are in Christendom.
He puts down his pen. He thinks, this letter will not do, tomorrow I will fill in the gaps; or perhaps not, tomorrow they want me at the Tower. He is too tired, too shaken, too riven by horror and desolation to describe in any detail the judgement of Lambert, let alone his last day. He writes, I doubt not some of your friends who have leisure shall by their letters advertise you of the whole discourse …
Let them. He closes his eyes. What does God see? Cromwell in the fifty-fourth year of his age, in all his weight and gravitas, his bulk wrapped in wool and fur? Or a mere flicker, an illusion, a spark beneath a shoe, a spit in the ocean, a feather in a desert, a wisp, a phantom, a needle in a haystack? If Henry is the mirror, he is the pale actor who sheds no lustre of his own, but spins in a reflected light. If the light moves he is gone.
When I was in Italy, he thinks, I saw Virgins painted on every wall, I saw in every fresco the sponged blood-colour of Christ’s robe. I saw the sinuous tempter that winds from a branch, and Adam’s face as he was tempted. I saw that the serpent was a woman, and about her face were curls of silver-gilt; I saw her writhe about the green bough, saw it sway under her coils. I saw the lamentation of Heaven over Christ crucified, angels flying and crying at the same time. I saw torturers nimble as dancers hurling stones at St Stephen, and I saw the martyr’s bored face as he waited for death. I saw a dead child cast in bronze, standing over its own corpse: and all these pictures, images, I took into myself, as some kind of prophecy or sign. But I have known men and women, better than me and closer to grace, who have meditated on every splinter of the cross, till they forget who and what they are, and observe the Saviour’s blood, running in the soaked fibres of the wood. Till they believe themselves no longer captive to misfortune nor crime, nor in thrall to a useless sacrifice in an alien land. Till they see Christ’s cross is the tree of life, and the truth breaks inside them, and they are saved.