is a prudent lawyer who can sift a sentence like a cook sifting a sack of rice for grit. An eloquent speaker, he is tenacious of a point, and devoted to his career; now that he's Chancellor he aims to make an income to go with the office. As for what he believes, it's up for negotiation; he believes in Parliament, in the king's power exercised in Parliament, and in matters of faith … let's say his convictions are flexible. As for Lee, he wonders if he believes in God at all – though it doesn't stop him having a bishopric in his sights. He says, ‘Rowland, will you take Gregory into your household? I think Cambridge has done all that it can for him. And I admit that Gregory has done nothing for Cambridge.’
‘I'll take him up the country with me,’ Rowland says, ‘when I go to have a row with the northern bishops. He is a good boy, Gregory. Not the most forward, but I can understand that. We'll make him useful yet.’
‘You don't intend him for the church?’ Cranmer asks.
‘I said,’ growls Rowland, ‘we'll make him useful.’
At Westminster his clerks are in and out, with news and gossip and paperwork, and he keeps Christophe with him, supposedly to look after his clothes, but really to make him laugh. He misses the music they have nightly at Austin Friars, and the women's voices, heard from other rooms.
He is at the Tower most days of the week, persuading the foremen to keep their men working through frost and rain; checking the paymaster's accounts, and making a new inventory of the king's jewels and plate. He calls on the Wardens of the Mint, and suggests a spot check on the weight of the king's coinage. ‘What I should like to do,’ he says, ‘is make our English coins so sound that the merchants over the sea won't even bother weighing them.’
‘Do you have authority for this?’
‘Why, what are you hiding?’
He has written a memorandum for the king, setting out the sources of his yearly revenues, and detailing through which government offices they pass. It is remarkably concise. The king reads it and reads it again. He turns the paper over to see if anything convoluted and inexplicable is written on the back. But there is nothing more than meets his eye.
‘It's not news,’ he says, half-apologetic. ‘The late cardinal carried it in his head. I shall keep calling at the Mint. If Your Majesty pleases.’
At the Tower he calls on a prisoner, John Frith. At his request, which does not count for nothing, the prisoner is cleanly kept above ground, with warm bedding, sufficient food, a supply of wine, paper, ink; though he has advised him to put away his writings if he hears the key in his lock. He stands by while the turnkey admits him, his eyes on the ground, not liking what he is going to see; but John Frith rises from his table, a gentle, slender young boy, a scholar in Greek, and says, Master Cromwell, I knew you would come.
When he takes Frith's hands he finds them all bones, cold and dry and with tell-tale traces of ink. He thinks, he cannot be so delicate, if he has lived so long. He was one of the scholars shut in the cellar at Wolsey's college, where the Bible men were held because there was no other secure place. When the summer plague struck underground, Frith lay in the dark with the corpses, till someone remembered to let him out.
‘Master Frith,’ he says, ‘if I had been in London when you were taken –’
‘But while you were in Calais, Thomas More was at work.’
‘What made you come back into England? No, don't tell me. If you were going about Tyndale's work, I had better not know it. They say you have taken a wife, is that correct? In Antwerp? The one thing the king cannot abide – no, many things he cannot abide – but he hates married priests. And he hates Luther, and you have translated Luther into English.’
‘You put the case so well, for my prosecution.’
‘You must help me to help you. If I could get you an audience with the king … you would have to be prepared, he is a most astute theologian … do you think you could soften your answers, to accommodate him?’
The fire is built up but the room is still cold. You cannot get away from the mists and exhalations of the Thames. Frith says, his voice barely audible, ‘Thomas More still has some credit with the king. And he has written him a letter, saying,’ he manages to smile, ‘that I am Wycliffe, Luther and Zwingli rolled together and tied up in string – one reformer stuffed inside another, as for a feast you might parcel a pheasant inside a chicken inside a goose. More means to dine on me, so do not injure your credit by asking for mercy. As for softening my answers … I believe, and I will say before any tribunal –’
‘Do not, John.’
‘I will say before any tribunal what I will say before my last judge – the Eucharist is but bread, of penance we have no need, Purgatory is an invention ungrounded in scripture –’
‘If some men come to you and say, come with us, Frith, you go with them. They will be my men.’
‘You think you can take me out of the Tower?’
Tyndale's Bible says, with God shall nothing be unpossible. ‘If not out of the Tower, then when you are taken to be questioned, that will be your chance. Be ready to take it.’
‘But to what purpose?’ Frith speaks kindly, as if speaking to a young pupil. ‘You think you can keep me at your house and wait for the king to change his mind? I should have to break out of there, and walk to Paul's Cross, and say before the Londoners what I have already said.’
‘Your witness cannot wait?’
‘Not on Henry. I might wait till I was old.’
‘They will burn you.’
‘And you think I cannot bear the pain. You are right, I cannot. But they will give me no choice. As More says, it hardly makes a man a hero, to agree to stand and burn once he is chained to a stake. I have written books and I cannot unwrite them. I cannot unbelieve what I believe. I cannot unlive my life.’
He leaves him. Four o'clock: the river traffic sparse, a fine and penetrative vapour creeping between air and water.
Next day, a day of crisp blue cold, the king comes down in the royal barge to see the progress of the work, with the new French envoy; they are confidential, the king walking with a hand on de Dinteville's shoulder, or rather on his padding; the Frenchman is wearing so many layers that he seems broader than the doorways, but he is still shivering. ‘Our friend here must get some sport to warm his blood,’ the king says, ‘and he is a bungler with the bow – when we went into the butts last, he shook so much I thought he would shoot himself in the foot. He complains we are not serious falconers, so I have said he should go out with you, Cromwell.’
Is this a promise of time off? The king strolls away and leaves them. ‘Not if it's cold like this,’ the envoy says. ‘I'm not standing in a field with the wind whistling, it will be the death of me. When shall we see the sun again?’
‘Oh, about June. But the falcons will be moulting by then. I aim to have mine flying again in August, so nil desperandum, monsieur, we shall have some sport.’
‘You wouldn't postpone this coronation, would you?’ It's always so; after a little chaff and chat, out of his mouth pops an ambassador's purpose. ‘Because when my master made the treaty, he didn't expect Henry to be flaunting his supposed wife and her big belly. If he were to keep her quietly, it would be a different matter.’
He
