The Mirror and the Light

Europe calls the king a heretic – so now let Europe see and hear him defend our common faith. Pole asserts he is inferior in learning to men like More and Fisher, the blessed dead. He will show the contrary. Rows of benches are set out for the spectators.

‘Pray God the king does not get a fall,’ Rafe Sadler says. ‘Lambert is a student of languages. He can cite the scriptures in tongues ancient and modern.’

He is rueful. ‘I always told the king, English is enough.’

He thinks, for every point Lambert scores, I will smart.

He has done his best to deter Henry from putting on this show. He does not need to answer Lambert, he tells him – he has bishops to take care of it. But Henry is not listening. It is only the day before the debate that he senses the discomfort of his advisers. ‘What, do you fear for me? I am well able for any heretic. And I must carry the torch of faith high, where my friends and enemies can see it.’

He says, and when will your Majesty begin to carry it? ‘About noon,’ Henry says. ‘And by twilight we should be done.’

Early on the morning of the hearing, he receives Lisle’s wife, over from Calais. There is no one, other than Stephen Gardiner, whom he would less like to see before breakfast.

He knows Lady Lisle dislikes him. She dislikes what he is – a jack-in-office – and makes him feel that his manner, his address, gives him away as a pot-boy. All the same, she chatters gaily about the terms on which she will sell him her Gloucestershire property. You would think all was merry in Calais; she does not mention the stream of disaffected informants who roll up to his various houses, some of them still green from the sea-crossing. She does not mention the folk in custody at the Tower, though surely they are cousins of hers; all these people are related. Only she says, ‘I hear you are busy, Lord Cromwell. Never too busy to get land, are you? I said to my husband, depend upon it, Cromwell will make time for me. He wants what I have.’

‘How is my lord Lisle? John Husee says he is melancholy.’

‘It would cheer him to have reward for long service.’

‘The king has offered him two hundred pounds a year.’

‘I would it were four hundred.’

He suppresses a smile. ‘I will ask. I promise nothing.’

‘If the king speeds well with the heretic, he will be in a giving humour come this evening. Well,’ she gets up, ‘I must speed away myself. The sooner I am back in Calais, the better my lord will like it. He says he would rather lose a hundred pounds than spend a week without me.’

‘If he had it to lose,’ he says, before he thinks.

‘That’s up to you,’ she says. ‘Try and work it, won’t you, Master Cromwell?’ She laughs, excuses herself. ‘My lord, I should say.’

‘Yes, you should,’ he says. ‘You should know by now.’

‘I mean no slight. What the king has made you, that thing you are. But do you wonder my lord is miserable? So many nobodies are enriched, while we must scrape.’

Lady Lisle cannot get women to serve her, she is so demanding. But old Lisle is in love with her, he thinks: his hard, bright, selfish bride.

It is gone ten o’clock. At Westminster the bishops are waiting: the members of the king’s council, the gentlemen of the privy chamber, the mayor, the aldermen, officers of the London guilds. Christophe helps him into his coat. ‘Bishop Gardineur will be with you,’ he reminds him. ‘Today he will enjoy himself, for surely this poor Lambert will burn? For who can deny baptism? Before St Christophe was baptised, he was a dog’s-head cannibal. His name was not Christophe, but Abominable. After he was baptised he was human, and could pray. Before, he could only bark.’

He says, ‘I know your name is not really Christophe. You had another. Fabrice, was it not?’

‘Christophe was my Calais name. On Calkwell Street. Before Fabrice I was Benoît, a very good little boy. But it does not matter what I was christened. I have forgot.’

He thinks, it is not baptism that will undo Lambert, it is corpus Christi, it is the body of Christ.

Stephen Gardiner, sweeping in: he checks his pace, they halt, they square up; they do off their hats to each other, respectful men, elaborately polite. But with Stephen, politeness only ever lasts a blink.

‘I don’t know what you have been doing in my absence,’ Stephen says. ‘I don’t know why you would tolerate an anabaptist. Unless of course you are one.’

In fantasy, he takes off his coat again. He rolls up his sleeves, and punches Stephen on the nose. It is dismaying to him, that Stephen has been gone three years, and his urge to knock him down is as strong as ever.

‘Is it likely?’ he says. ‘These people you call anabaptists will take no oaths. They will serve no kings. Not only do they deny the commonwealth their labour, the magistrate their obedience, but they deny the child his book. They love ignorance. They say we live in the last days, so why learn anything? Why tend crops, why store grain: there is no need of a harvest.’