But that was long ago and in another country. Now Rafe Sadler is here with a message: he must return suddenly to Greenwich, to this raw morning, the rain just holding off. Where is Karl Heinz today? Dead probably. Since the night he saw the goddess growing on the wall, he has intended to commission one himself, though other purposes – making money and drafting legislation – have taken up his time.
‘Rafe?’
Rafe stands in the doorway and does not speak. He looks up at the young man’s face. His hand lets go his quill and ink splashes the paper. He stands up at once, wrapping his furred robe about him as if it will buffer him from what is to come. He says, ‘Gregory?’ and Rafe shakes his head.
Gregory is intact. He did not run a course.
The tournament is interrupted.
It is the king, Rafe says. It is Henry, he is dead.
Ah, he says.
He dries the ink with dust from the box of bone. Blood everywhere, no doubt, he says.
He keeps at hand a gift he was given once, a Turkish dagger made of iron, the sheath engraved with a pattern of sunflowers. Until now he had always thought of it as an ornament, a curio. He tucks it away amongst his garments.
He will recall, later, how difficult it was to get through the doorway, to turn his steps to the tilting ground. He feels weak, the backwash of the weakness that had made him drop the pen when he thought that Gregory was hurt. He says to himself, it is not Gregory; but his body is dazed, slow to catch up with the news, as if he himself had received a killing blow. Whether, now, to go forward to try to seize command, or to seize this moment, perhaps the last moment, to quit the scene: to make good an escape, before the ports are blocked, and to go where? Perhaps to Germany? Is there any principality, state, in which he would be safe from the reach of Emperor or Pope, or the new ruler of England, whoever that may be?
He has never backed off; or once, perhaps, from Walter when he was seven years old: but Walter came on. Since then: forward, forward, en avant! So his hesitation is not long, but afterwards he will have no recollection of how he arrived in a lofty and gilded tent, embroidered with the arms and devices of England, and standing over the corpse of King Henry VIII. Rafe says, the contests had not begun, he was running at the ring, the point of his lance scooped the eye of the circle. Then the horse stumbled under him, man and rider down, horse rolling with a scream and Henry beneath it. Now Gentle Norris is on his knees by the bier, praying, tears cascading down his cheeks. There is a blur of light on plate armour, helms hiding faces, iron jaws, frog mouths, the slits of visors. Someone says, the beast went down as if its leg were broke, no one was near the king, no one to blame. He seems to hear the appalling noise of it, the horse’s roar of terror as it pitches, the screams from the spectators, the grating clatter of steel and hooves on steel as one huge animal entangles with another, warhorse and king collapsing together, metal driven into flesh, hoof into bone.
‘Fetch a mirror,’ he says, ‘to hold to his lips. Fetch a feather to see if it stirs.’
The king has been manhandled out of his armour, but is still laced in his tournament jacket of wadded black, as if in mourning for himself. There is no evident blood, so he asks, where was he hurt? Someone says, he knocked his head; but that is all the sense he can glean from the wailing and babbling that fills the tent. Feathers, mirrors, they intimate it has been done; tongues clam-our like bell tongues, their eyes are like pebbles in their heads, one shocked and vacant face turns to another, oaths are uttered and prayers, and they move slowly, slowly; no one wants to carry the corpse inside, it is too much to take on oneself, it will be seen, it will be reported. It is a mistake to think that when the king dies his councillors shout, ‘Long live the king.’ Often the fact of the death is hidden for days. As this must be hidden…Henry is waxen, and he sees the shocking tenderness of human flesh evicted from steel. He is lying on his back, all his magnificent height stretched on a piece of ocean-blue cloth. His limbs are straight. He looks uninjured. He touches his face. It is still warm. Fate has not spoiled him or mangled. He is intact, a present for the gods. They are taking him back as he was sent.
He opens his mouth and shouts. What do they mean, leaving the king lying here, untouched by Christian hand, as if he were already excommunicate? If this were any other fallen man they would be enticing his senses with rose petals and myrrh. They would be pulling his hair and tweaking his ears, burning a paper under his nose, wrenching open his jaw to trickle in holy water, blowing a horn next to his head. All this should be done and – he looks up and sees Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, running at him like a demon. Uncle Norfolk: uncle to the queen, premier nobleman of England. ‘By God, Cromwell!’ he snarls. And his import is clear. By God, I’ve got you now; by God, your presumptuous guts will be drawn: by God, before the day is over your head will be spiked.
Perhaps. But in the next seconds he, Cromwell, seems to body out and fill all the space around the fallen man. He sees himself, as if he were watching from the canvas above: his girth expands, even his height. So that he occupies more ground. So that he takes up more space, breathes more air, is planted and solid when Norfolk careers into him, twitching, trembling. So he is a fortress on a rock, serene, and Thomas Howard just bounces back from his walls, wincing, flinching, and blethering God knows what about God knows who. ‘MY LORD NORFOLK!’ he roars at him. ‘My lord Norfolk, where is the queen?’
Norfolk is panting hard. ‘On the floor. I told her. I myself. My place to do it. My place, am her uncle. Fallen in a fit. Fell down. Dwarf trying to pull her up. Kicked it away. Oh God Almighty!’
Now who governs, for Anne’s unborn child? When Henry purposed to go to France, he said he would leave Anne as regent, but that was more than a year ago, and besides he never did go, and so we don’t know if he would have done it; Anne had said to him, Cremuel, if I am regent, watch yourself, I will have your obedience or I will have your head. Anne as regent would have made short work of Katherine, of Mary: Katherine is passed beyond her reach, but Mary there for the killing. Uncle Norfolk, lurched down by the corpse for a quick prayer, has stumbled up again: ‘No, no, no,’ he is saying. ‘No woman with a big belly. Such cannot rule. Anne cannot rule. Me, me, me.’
Gregory is pushing through the crowd. He has had the sense to fetch Fitzwilliam, Master Treasurer. ‘The Princess Mary,’ he says to Fitz. ‘How to get her. I must have her. Or the realm is done for.’
Fitzwilliam is one of Henry’s old friends, a man of his own age: too capable by nature, thank God, to panic and gibber. ‘Her keepers are Boleyns,’ Fitz says. ‘I don’t know if they’ll yield her.’
Yes, and what a fool I was, he thinks, not to get among them and suborn them and advance-bribe them for an occasion such as this; I said I would send my ring for Katherine’s deliverance, but for the princess I made no such arrangement. Let Mary remain in the hands of the Boleyns, and she is dead. Let her fall into the hands of the papists, they will set her up as queen, and I am dead. There will be civil war.
Courtiers are now pouring into the tent, all inventing how Henry died, all exclaiming, denying, lamenting; the noise rises, and he grips Fitz’s arm: ‘If this news gets up-country before we do, we will never see Mary alive.’ Her guardians will not hang her up from the staircase, they will not stab her, but they will make sure she meets with an accident, a broken neck on the road. Then if Anne’s unborn child is a girl, Elizabeth is queen, as we have no other.
Fitzwilliam says, ‘Wait now, let me think. Where is Richmond?’ The king’s bastard, sixteen years old. He is a commodity, he is to be reckoned with, he is to be secured. Richmond is Norfolk’s son-in-law. Norfolk must know where he is, Norfolk is best placed to lay hands on him, bargain with him, lock him up or turn him loose: but he, Cromwell, does not fear a bastard boy, and besides, the young man favours him, in all their dealings he has buttered him like a parsnip.
Norfolk is now buzzing from side to side, a maddened wasp, and as if he were a wasp the onlookers shrink from him,
eddying away, then swaying back. The duke buzzes into him; he, Cromwell, bats the duke away. He stares down at Henry. He thinks he has seen, but it might be fantasy, a twitch of an eyelid. It is enough. He stands over Henry, like a figure on a tomb: a broad, mute, ugly guardian. He waits: then he sees that flicker again, he thinks he does. His heart lurches. He puts his hand on the king’s chest, slapping it down, like a merchant closing a deal. Says calmly, ‘The king is breathing.’
There is an unholy roar. It is something between a moan and a cheer and a wail of panic, a shout to God, a riposte to the devil.
Beneath the jacket, within the horsehair padding, a fibrillation, a quiver of life: his hand heavy and flat on the regal breast, he feels he is raising Lazarus. It is as if his palm, magnetised, is drawing life back into his prince. The king’s respiration, though shallow, seems steady. He, Cromwell, has seen the future; he has seen England without Henry; he prays aloud, ‘Long live the king.’
‘Fetch the surgeons,’ he says. ‘Fetch Butts. Fetch any man with skill. If he dies again, they will not be blamed. My word on that. Get me Richard Cromwell my nephew. Fetch a stool for my lord Norfolk, he has had a shock.’ He is tempted to add, throw a bucket of water on Gentle Norris: whose prayers, he has time to notice, are of a marked papist character.
The tent is now so crowded that it seems to have been picked up by its moorings, to be carried on men’s heads. He takes a last look at Henry before his still form disappears under the ministrations of doctors and priests. He hears a long, retching gasp; but one has heard the same from corpses.
‘Breathe,’ Norfolk shouts. ‘Let the king breathe!’ And as if in obedience, the fallen man takes a deep, sucking, scraping breath. And then he swears. And then he tries to sit up.
And it is over.
But not entirely: not until he has studied the Boleyn expressions around. They look numb, bemused. Their faces are pinched in the bitter cold. Their great hour has passed, before they realised it has arrived. How have they all got here so fast? Where have they come from? he asks Fitz. Only then he realises that the light is fading. What felt like ten minutes has been two hours: two hours since Rafe stood in the doorway, and he dropped his pen on the page.
He says to Fitzwilliam, ‘Of course, it never happened. Or if it did, it was an incident of no importance.’
For Chapuys and the other ambassadors, he will stick by his original version: the king fell, hit his head, and was unconscious for ten minutes. No, at no time did we think he was dead. After ten minutes he sat up. And now he is perfectly well.
The way I tell it, he says to Fitzwilliam, you would think that the blow on the head had improved him. That he actually set out to get it. That every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time.
Fitzwilliam is amused. ‘A man’s thoughts at such a time hardly bear scrutiny. I recall thinking, should we not send for the Lord Chancellor? But I don’t know what I thought he was to do.’
‘My thought,’ he confesses, ‘was, somebody get the Archbishop of Canterbury. I think I believed a king couldn’t die without his supervision. Imagine trying to bustle Cranmer across the Thames. He would make you join him in a gospel reading first.’
What does the Black Book say? Nothing to the purpose. No one has made a plan for a king struck down between one moment and the next, one second mounted tall and riding full tilt, next second mashed into the ground. No one dares. No one dares think about it. Where protocol fails, it is war to the knife. He remembers Fitzwilliam beside him; Gregory in the crowd; Rafe by his side, and then Richard his nephew. Was it Richard who helped lever the king upright as he tried to sit, while the doctors cried, ‘No, no, lie him down!’ Henry had clasped his hands to his chest, as if to squeeze his own heart. He had struggled to rise, he had made inarticulate noises, that sounded like words but were not, as if the Holy Ghost had descended upon him and he was speaking in tongues. He had thought, panic darting through him, what if he never makes sense again? What does the Black Book say if a king is rendered simple? Outside he remembers the roaring of Henry’s fallen horse, struggling to rise; but surely that cannot be what he heard, surely they had slaughtered it?
Then Henry himself was roaring. That night, the king rips the bandage from his head. The bruising, the swelling, is God’s verdict on the day. He is determined to show himself to his court, to counter any rumours that he is mauled or dead. Anne approaches him, supported by her father, ‘Monseigneur’. The earl is really supporting her, not pretending to. She looks white and frail; now her pregnancy shows. ‘My lord,’ she says, ‘I pray, the whole of England prays, that you will never joust again.’
Henry beckons her to approach. Beckons her till her face is close to his own. His voice low and vehement: ‘Why not geld me while you are at it? That would suit you, would it not, madam?’
Faces open in shock. The Boleyns have the sense to draw Anne backwards, backwards and away, Mistress Shelton and Jane Rochford flapping and tut-tutting, the whole Howard, Boleyn clan closing around her. Jane Seymour, alone of the ladies, does not move. She stands and looks at Henry and the king’s eyes fly straight to her, a space opens around her and for a moment she stands in the vacancy, like a dancer left behind when the line moves on.
Later he is with Henry in his bedchamber, the king collapsed in a velvet chair. Henry says, when I was a boy, I was walking with my father in a gallery at Richmond, one night in summer about eleven of the clock, he had my arm in his and we were deep in talk or he was: and suddenly there was a great crashing and a splintering, the whole building gave a deep groan, and the floor fell away at our feet. I will remember it all my life, standing on the brink, and the world vanished from beneath us. But for a moment I did not know what I heard, whether it was the timbers splintering or our bones. Both of us by God’s grace still stood on solid ground, and yet I had seen myself plummeting, down and down through the floor below till I hit the earth and smelled it, damp like the grave. Well…when I fell today, that was how it was. I heard voices. Very distant. I could not make out the words. I felt myself borne through the air. I did not see God. Or angels.
‘I hope you were not disappointed when you woke. Only to see Thomas Cromwell.’
‘You were never more welcome,’ Henry says. ‘Your own mother on the day you were born was no gladder to see you than I was today.’
The grooms of the chamber are here, going soft-footed about their usual duties, sprinkling the king’s sheets with holy water. ‘Steady,’ Henry says crossly. ‘Do you want me to take a chill? A drowning is not more efficacious than a drop.’ He turns and says, low-voiced, ‘Crumb, you know this never happened?’
He nods. What records are already made, he is in the process of expunging. Afterwards it will be known that on such a date, the king’s horse stumbled. But God’s hand plucked him from the ground and set him back laughing on his throne. Another item of note, for The Book Called Henry: knock him down and he bounces.
But the queen has a point. You’ve seen these jousters from the old king’s time, limping about the court, the wincing and addle-pated survivors of the lists; men who’ve taken a blow on the head once too often, men who walk crooked, bent like a dog-leg brick. And all your skill counts for nothing when your day of reckoning comes. Horse can fail. Boys can fail. Nerve can fail.
That night he says to Richard Cromwell, ‘It was a bad moment for me. How many men can say, as I must, “I am a man whose only friend is the King of England”? I have everything, you would think. And yet take Henry away and I have nothing.’
Richard sees the helpless truth of it. Says, ‘Yes.’ What else can he say?
Later he voices the same thought, in a cautious and modified form, to Fitzwilliam. Fitzwilliam looks at him: thoughtful, not without sympathy. ‘I don’t know, Crumb. You are not without support, you know.’
‘Forgive me,’ he says sceptically, ‘but in what way does this support manifest?’
‘I mean that you would have support, should you need it against the Bole
yns.’
‘Why should I? The queen and I are perfect friends.’
‘That’s not what you tell Chapuys.’
He inclines his head. Interesting, the people who talk to Chapuys; interesting too, what the ambassador chooses to pass on, from one party to another.
‘Did you hear them?’ Fitz says. His tone is disgusted. ‘Outside the tent, when we thought the king was dead? Shouting “Boleyn, Boleyn!” Calling out their own name. Like cuckoos.’
He waits. Of course he heard them; what is the real question here? Fitz is close to the king. He was brought up at court with Henry since they were small boys, though his family is good gentry, not noble. He has been to war. Has had a crossbow bolt in him. Has been abroad on embassies, knows France, knows Calais, the English enclave there and its politics. He is of that select company, the Garter knights. He writes a good letter, to the point, neither abrupt nor circumlocutory, nor larded with flattery, nor cursory in expressions of regard. The cardinal liked him, and he is affable to Thomas Cromwell when they dine daily in the guard chamber. He is always affable: and now more so? ‘What would have happened, Crumb, if the king had not come back to life? I shall never forget Howard pitching in, “Me, me, me!”’
‘It is not a spectacle we will erase from our minds. As for…’ he hesitates, ‘well, if the worst had been, the king’s body dies but the body politic continues. It might be possible to convene a ruling council, made up from the law officers, and from those chief councillors that are now…’
‘…amongst whom, yourself…’