his bright, tired eyes glance around, as if he might be confuted from all sides. ‘And I believe the Cardinal of York has himself licensed his young divines at Cardinal College to read the sectaries’ pamphlets. Perhaps he includes you in his dispensations. Does he?’
It would be strange for him to include his lawyer; but then it’s strange work for lawyers altogether. ‘We have come around in a circle,’ he says.
More beams at him. ‘Well, after all, it’s spring. We shall soon be dancing around the maypole. Good weather for a sea voyage. You could take the chance to do some wool-trade business, unless it’s just men you’re fleecing these days? And if the cardinal asked you to go to Frankfurt, I suppose you’d go? Now if he wants some little monastery knocked down, when he thinks it has good endowments, when he thinks the monks are old, Lord bless them, and a little wandering in their wits; when he thinks the barns are full and the ponds well stocked with fish, the cattle fat and the abbot old and lean … off you go, Thomas Cromwell. North, south, east or west. You and your little apprentices.’
If another man were saying this, he’d be trying to start a fight. When Thomas More says it, it leads to an invitation to dinner. ‘Come out to Chelsea,’ he says. ‘The talk is excellent, and we shall like you to add to it. Our food is simple, but good.’
Tyndale says a boy washing dishes in the kitchen is as pleasing to the eye of God as a preacher in the pulpit or the apostle on the Galilee shore. Perhaps, he thinks, I won’t mention Tyndale’s opinion.
More pats his arm. ‘Have you no plans to marry again, Thomas? No? Perhaps wise. My father always says, choosing a wife is like putting your hand into a bag full of writhing creatures, with one eel to six snakes. What are the chances you will pull out the eel?’
‘Your father has married, what, three times?’
‘Four.’ He smiles. The smile is real. It crinkles the corner of his eyes. ‘Your beadsman, Thomas,’ he says, as he ambles away.
When More’s first wife died, her successor was in the house before the corpse was cold. More would have been a priest, but human flesh called to him with its inconvenient demands. He did not want to be a bad priest, so he became a husband. He had fallen in love with a girl of sixteen, but her sister, at seventeen, was not yet married; he took the elder, so that her pride should not be hurt. He did not love her; she could not read or write; he hoped that might be amended, but seemingly not. He tried to get her to learn sermons by heart, but she grumbled and was stubborn in her ignorance; he took her home to her father, who suggested beating her, which made her so frightened that she swore she would complain no more. ‘And she never did,’ More will say. ‘Though she didn’t learn any sermons either.’ It seems he thought the negotiations had been satisfactory: honour preserved all round. The stubborn woman gave him children, and when she died at twenty-four, he married a city widow, getting on in years and advanced in stubbornness: another one who couldn’t read. There it is: if you are so lenient with yourself as to insist on living with a woman, then for the sake of your soul you should make it a woman you really don’t like.
Cardinal Campeggio, whom the Pope is sending to England at Wolsey’s request, was a married man before he was a priest. It makes him especially suitable to help Wolsey – who of course has no experience of marital problems – on the next stage of the journey to thwart the king in his heart’s desire. Though the imperial army has withdrawn from Rome, a spring of negotiations has failed to yield any definite result. Stephen Gardiner has been in Rome, with a letter from the cardinal, praising the Lady Anne, trying to disabuse the Pope of any notion he may entertain that the king is being wilful and whimsical in his choice of bride. The cardinal had sat long over the letter listing her virtues, writing it in his own hand. ‘Womanly modesty … chastity … can I say chastity?’
‘You’d better.’
The cardinal looked up. ‘Know something?’ He hesitated, and returned to his letter. ‘Apt to bear children? Well, her family is fertile. Loving and faithful daughter of the church … Perhaps stretching a point … they say she has the scriptures in French set up in her chamber, and lets her women read them, but I would have no positive knowledge of that …’
‘King François allows the Bible in French. She learned her scriptures there, I suppose.’
‘Ah, but women, you see. Women reading the Bible, there’s another point of contention. Does she know what Brother Martin thinks is a woman’s place? We shouldn’t mourn, he says, if our wife or daughter dies in childbirth – she’s only doing what God made her for. Very harsh, Brother Martin, very intractable. And perhaps she is not a Bible-woman. Perhaps it is a slur on her. Perhaps it is just that she is out of patience with churchmen. I wish she did not blame me for her difficulties. Not blame me so very much.’
Lady Anne sends friendly messages to the cardinal, but he thinks she does not mean them. ‘If,’ Wolsey had said, ‘I saw the prospect of an annulment for the king, I would go to the Vatican in person, have my veins opened and allow the documents to be written in my own blood. Do you think, if Anne knew that, it would content her? No, I didn’t think so, but if you see any of the Boleyns, make them the offer. By the way, I suppose you know a person called Humphrey Monmouth? He is the man who had Tyndale in his house for six months, before he ran off to wherever. They say he sends him money still, but that can’t possibly be true, as how would he know where to send? Monmouth … I am merely mentioning his name. Because … now why am I?’ The cardinal had closed his eyes. ‘Because I am merely mentioning it.’
The Bishop of London has already filled his own prisons. He is locking up Lutherans and sectaries in Newgate and the Fleet, with common criminals. There they remain until they recant and do public penance. If they relapse they will be burned; there are no second chances.
When Monmouth’s house is raided, it is clear of all suspect writings. It’s almost as if he was forewarned. There are neither books nor letters that link him to Tyndale and his friends. All the same, he is taken to the Tower. His family is terrified. Monmouth is a gentle and fatherly man, a master draper, well liked in his guild and the city at large. He loves the poor and buys cloth even when trade is bad, so the weavers may keep in work. No doubt the imprisonment is designed to break him; his business is tottering by the time he is released. They have to let him go, for lack of evidence, because you can’t make anything of a heap of ashes in the hearth.
Monmouth himself would be a heap of ashes, if Thomas More had his way. ‘Not come to see us yet, Master Cromwell?’ he says. ‘Still breaking dry bread in cellars? Come now, my tongue is sharper than you deserve. We must be friends, you know.’
It sounds like a threat. More moves away, shaking his head: ‘We must be friends.’
Ashes, dry bread. England was always, the cardinal says, a miserable country, home to an outcast and abandoned people, who are working slowly towards their deliverance, and who are visited by God with special tribulations. If England lies under God’s curse, or some evil spell, it has seemed for a time that the spell has been broken, by the golden king and his golden cardinal. But those golden years are over, and this winter the sea will freeze; the people who see it will remember it all their lives.
Johane has moved into the house at Austin Friars with her husband John Williamson and her daughter little Johane – Jo, the children call her, seeing she is too small for a full name. John Williamson is needed in the Cromwell business. ‘Thomas,’ says Johane, ‘what exactly is your business these days?’
In this way she detains him in talk. ‘Our business,’ he says, ‘is making people rich. There are many ways to do this and John is going to help me out with them.’
‘But John won’t have to deal with my
