be too humble for Henry.’
This is the season for humility. The word from the talks in Marseilles is that King Francis has fallen at the Pope's feet and kissed his slippers. When the news comes, Henry bellows an obscenity and shreds the dispatch in his hands.
He collects up the pieces, lays it out on a table and reads it. ‘Francis has kept faith with you after all,’ he says. ‘Surprisingly.’ He has persuaded the Pope to suspend his bull of excommunication. England has a breathing space.
‘I wish Pope Clement in his grave,’ Henry says. ‘God knows he is a man of filthy life, and he is always ailing, so he ought to die. Sometimes,’ he says, ‘I pray that Katherine might be translated into glory. Is that wrong?’
‘If you snap your fingers, Majesty, a hundred priests will come running to tell you right from wrong.’
‘It seems I prefer to hear it from you.’ Henry broods, in a sulky twitching silence. ‘If Clement dies, who will be the next rogue in office?’
‘I've put my money on Alessandro Farnese.’
‘Really?’ Henry sits up. ‘One lays bets?’
‘But the odds are short. He has thrown about such bribes to the Roman mob all these years, that they will put the cardinals in terror when the time comes.’
‘Remind me how many children has he.’
‘Four I know of.’
The king is looking into the tapestry on the near wall, where white-shouldered women walk barefoot on a carpet of spring flowers. ‘I may have another child soon.’
‘The queen has spoken to you?’
‘Not yet.’ But he sees, we all do, the flare of colour in Anne's cheeks, the silk sleekness of her person, the tone of command ringing in her voice as she hands out favours and rewards to the people around her. This last week, there are more rewards than black looks, and Stephen Vaughan's wife, who is in the Bedchamber, says she has missed her courses. The king says, ‘She has missed her …’ and then he stops, blushing like a schoolboy. He crosses the room, flings open his arms and embraces him, shining like a star, his great hands with their blazing rings seizing hand-fuls of the black velvet of his jacket. ‘This time for sure. England is ours.’
Archaic, that cry from his heart: as if he were standing on the battlefield between the bloodied banners, the crown in a thorn bush, his enemies dead at his feet.
He disengages himself gently, smiling. He uncrumples the memorandum he had clenched in his fist when the king seized him; because is that not how men embrace, they knead each other with big fists, as if to knock each other down? Henry squeezes his arm and says, ‘Thomas, it is like hugging a sea wall. What are you made of?’ He takes the paper. He gapes. ‘Is this what we must do this morning? This list?’
‘Not more than fifty items. We shall soon work through.’
For the rest of the day he cannot stop smiling. Who cares for Clement and his bulls? He might as well stand on Cheap and let the populace pelt him. He might as well stand under the Christmas garlands – which we dust with flour in years when there is no snow – and sing, ‘Hey nonny no, Fa-la-la, Under the trees so green-o.’
On a cold day towards the end of November the Maid and half a dozen of her principal supporters do penance at Paul's Cross. They stand shackled and barefoot in a whipping wind. The crowd is large and boisterous, the sermon lively, telling what the Maid did on her night walks when her sisters in religion were sleeping, and what lurid tales of devils she told to keep her followers in awe. Her confession is read out, at the end of which she asks the Londoners to pray for her, and begs for the king's mercy.
You wouldn't know her now, for the bonny girl they had at Lambeth. She looks haggard and ten years older. Not that she has been hurt, he would not countenance that for a woman, and in fact they have all talked without duress; the hard thing has been to stop them complicating the story by rumours and fantasies, so that half England is dragged into it. The one priest who had persistently lied, he had simply locked up with an informer; the man was detained for murder, and in no time at all Father Rich had set about saving his soul and interpreting to him the Maid's prophecies and impressing him with the names of important people he knew at court. Pitiful, really. But it has been necessary to put on this show, and next he will take it to Canterbury, so Dame Elizabeth can confess on her home ground. It is necessary to break the hold of these people who talk of the end times and threaten us with plagues and damnation. It is necessary to dispel the terror they create.
Thomas More is there, jostled among the city dignitaries; he is making towards him now, as the preachers step down and the prisoners are being led from the platform. More rubs his cold hands. He blows on them. ‘Her crime is, she was made use of.’
He thinks, why did Alice let you out without your gloves? ‘For all the testimony I have got,’ he says, ‘I still cannot understand how she arrived here, from the edge of the marshes to a public scaffold at Paul's. For sure she made no money out of it.’
‘How will you frame the charges?’ His tone is neutral, interested, lawyer-to-lawyer.
‘The common law does not deal with women who say they can fly, or raise the dead. I shall put an act of attainder into Parliament. Treason charges for the principals. The accessories, life imprisonment, confiscation, fines. The king will be circumspect, I think. Even merciful. I am more interested in unravelling the plans of these people than in exacting penalties. I don't want a trial with scores of defendants and hundreds of witnesses, tying the courts up for years.’
More hesitates.
‘Come on,’ he says, ‘you would have seen them off that way yourself, when you were Chancellor.’
‘You may be right. I am clear anyway.’ A pause. More says, ‘Thomas. In the name of Christ, you know that.’
‘As long as the king knows it. We must keep it firmly in his mind. A letter from you perhaps, enquiring after the princess Elizabeth.’
‘I can do that.’
‘Making it plain you accept her rights and title.’
‘That is not a difficulty. The new marriage is made and must be accepted.’
‘You don't think you could bring yourself to praise it?’
‘Why does the king want other men to praise his wife?’
‘Suppose you were to write an open letter. To say that you have seen the light in the matter of the king's natural jurisdiction over the church.’ He looks across to where the prisoners are being loaded into the waiting carts. ‘They are taking them back to the Tower now.’ He pauses. ‘You mustn't stand about. Come home with me to dinner.’
‘No.’ More shakes his head. ‘I would rather be blown around on the river and go home hungry. If I could trust you only to put food in my mouth – but you will put words into it.’
He watches him melt into the crowd of home-going aldermen. He thinks, More is too proud to retreat from his position. He is afraid to lose his credibility with the scholars in Europe. We must find some way for him to do it, that doesn't depend on abjection. The sky has cleared now, to a flawless lapis blue. The London gardens are bright with berries. There is an obdurate winter ahead. But he feels a force ready to
