him, George says, laid him out for burial. ‘I found, under his fine holland shirt, a belt of hair … I am sorry to tell you, I know you are not a lover of these practices, but so it was. I think he never did this till he was at Richmond among the monks.’
‘What became of it? This belt of hair?’
‘The monks of Leicester kept it.’
‘God Almighty! They'll make it pay.’
‘Do you know, they could provide nothing better than a coffin of plain boards?’ Only when he says this does George Cavendish give way; only at this point does he swear and say, by the passion of Christ, I heard them knocking it together. When I think of the Florentine sculptor and his tomb, the black marble, the bronze, the angels at his head and foot … But I saw him dressed in his archbishop's robes, and I opened his fingers to put into his hand his crozier, just as I thought I would see him hold it when he was enthroned at York. It was only two days away. Our bags were packed and we were ready for the road; till Harry Percy walked in.
‘You know, George,’ he says, ‘I begged him, be content with what you have clawed back from ruin, go to York, be glad to be alive … In the course of things, he would have lived another ten years, I know he would.’
‘We sent for the mayor and all the city officials, so that they could see him in his coffin, so there could be no false rumours that he was living and escaped to France. Some made remarks about his low birth, by God I wish you had been there –’
‘I too.’
‘For to your face, Master Cromwell, they had not done it, nor would they dare. When the light failed we kept vigil, with the tapers burning around his coffin, till four in the morning, which you know is the canonical hour. Then we heard Mass. At six we laid him in the crypt. There left him.’
Six in the morning, a Wednesday, the feast of St Andrew the Apostle. I, a simple cardinal. There left him and rode south, to find the king at Hampton Court. Who says to George, ‘I would not for twenty thousand pounds that the cardinal had died.’
‘Look, Cavendish,’ he says, ‘when you are asked what the cardinal said in his last days, tell them nothing.’
George raises his eyebrows. ‘I already have. Told them nothing. The king questioned me. My lord Norfolk.’
‘If you tell Norfolk anything, he will twist it into treason.’
‘Still, as he is Lord Treasurer, he has paid me my back wages. I was three-quarters of the year in arrears.’
‘What were you paid, George?’
‘Ten pounds a year.’
‘You should have come to me.’
These are the facts. These are the figures. If the Lord of the Underworld rose up tomorrow in the privy chamber, and offered a dead man back, fresh from the grave, fresh from the crypt, the miracle of Lazarus for £20,000 – Henry Tudor would be pushed to scrape it together. Norfolk as Lord Treasurer? Fine; it doesn't matter who holds the title, who holds the clanking keys to the empty chests.
‘Do you know,’ he says, ‘if the cardinal could say, as he used to say to me, Thomas, what would you like for a New Year's gift, I would say, I would like sight of the nation's accounts.’
Cavendish hesitates; he begins to speak; he stops; he starts again. ‘The king said certain things to me. At Hampton Court. “Three may keep counsel, if two are away.”’
‘It is a proverb, I think.’
‘He said, “If I thought my cap knew my counsel, I would cast it into the fire.”’
‘I think that also is a proverb.’
‘He means to say that he will not choose any adviser now: not my lord of Norfolk, nor Stephen Gardiner, or anyone, any person to be close to him, to be so close as the cardinal was.’
He nods. That seems a reasonable interpretation.
Cavendish looks ill. It is the strain of the long sleepless nights, of the vigil around the coffin. He is worried about various sums of money the cardinal had on the journey, which he did not have when he died. He is worried about how to get his own effects from Yorkshire to his home; apparently Norfolk has promised him a cart and a transport allowance. He, Cromwell, talks about this while he thinks about the king, and out of sight of George folds his fingers, one by one, tight into the palm of his hand. Mary Boleyn traced, in his palm, a certain shape; he thinks, Henry, I have your heart in my hand.
When Cavendish has gone, he goes to his secret drawer and takes out the package that the cardinal gave him on the day he began his journey north. He unwinds the thread that binds it. It snags, knots, he works at it patiently; before he had expected it, the turquoise ring rolls into his palm, cold as if it came from the tomb. He pictures the cardinal's hands, long-fingered, white and unscarred, steady for so many years on the wheel of the ship of state; but the ring fits as if it had been made for him.
The cardinal's scarlet clothes now lie folded and empty. They cannot be wasted. They will be cut up and become other garments. Who knows where they will get to over the years? Your eye will be taken by a crimson cushion or a patch of red on a banner or ensign. You will see a glimpse of them in a man's inner sleeve or in the flash of a whore's petticoat.
Another man would go to Leicester to see where he died and talk to the abbot. Another man would have trouble imagining it, but he has no trouble. The red of a carpet's ground, the flush of the robin's breast or the chaffinch, the red of a wax seal or the heart of the rose: implanted in his landscape, cered in his inner eye, and caught in the glint of a ruby, in the colour of blood, the cardinal is alive and speaking. Look at my face: I am not afraid of any man alive.
At Hampton Court in the great hall they perform an interlude; its name is ‘The Cardinal's Descent into Hell’. It takes him back to last year, to Gray's Inn. Under the eye of the officials of the king's household, the carpenters have been working furiously and for bonus rates, erecting frames upon which to drape canvas cloths painted with scenes of torture. At the back of the hall, the screens are entirely hung with flames.
The entertainment is this: a vast scarlet figure, supine, is dragged across the floor, howling, by actors dressed as devils. There are four devils, one for each limb of the dead man. The devils wear masks. They have tridents with which they prick the cardinal, making him twitch and writhe and beg. He had hoped the cardinal died without pain but Cavendish had said no. He died conscious, talking of the king. He had started out of sleep and said, whose is that shadow on the wall?
The Duke of Norfolk walks around the hall chortling, ‘Isn't it good, eh? It's good enough to be printed! By the Mass, that's what I shall do! I shall have it printed, so I can take it home with me, and at Christmas we can play it all over again.’
Anne sits laughing, pointing, applauding. He has never seen her like this before: lit up, glowing. Henry sits frozen by her side. Sometimes he laughs, but he thinks if you could get close you would see that his eyes are afraid. The cardinal rolls across the floor, kicking out at the demons, but they harry him, in their woolly suits of black, and cry, ‘Come, Wolsey, we must fetch you to Hell, for our master Beelzebub is expecting you to supper.’
When the scarlet mountain pops up his head and asks, ‘What wines does he serve?’ he almost forgets himself and laughs. ‘I'll have no English wine,’ the dead man declares. ‘None of that cats' piss my lord of
