The Mirror and the Light

The boy trundles out. He says, ‘The light of Christ leads us to some murky places.’

The archbishop is looking at his roast fowl. He says, ‘I cannot touch flesh. Not this evening.’

He says, ‘Have you ever seen a hawk keep killing, when the prey is dead?’

Cranmer flinches. ‘No,’ he says, ‘no. I think the king was … he surprised me … he was judicious, he was, at times, he was almost … fatherly.’

Ripping and stamping, rage in the eye. Sipping blood from the body cavity, then slashing again at the flesh.

‘Fatherly,’ he says. ‘Yes, he was.’

He thinks, after I saw Joan Boughton burned, I went home to my little life and I did not know if it was true or if I had dreamed it. I wondered if I might see her in the street, an elderly body about her business, going with her basket to buy cloves and apples for a pie.

Cranmer says, ‘But what else could we have done? Lambert chose his answers. It lay within his power to make others.’

‘I do not think it did.’

Cranmer considers that. To fill the silence he asks him, ‘How is your lady?’

‘Grete?’ Cranmer speaks as if he had other wives, one or two. ‘Grete is afraid. And tired of hiding. I assured her when I brought her to England that the king would be brought to a different opinion, and that we would be able to live freely like any couple. But as it is …’

His voice dies away. We are living on borrowed time, in small rooms, a bag always packed, an ear always alert; we sleep lightly and some nights hardly at all.

He says to Cranmer, ‘So what now? After this? If the king can burn this man he can burn us. What shall I do?’

‘Maintain your rule as long as you can. For the gospel’s sake I shall do the same.’

‘What use is our rule, if we could not save John Lambert?’

‘We could not save John Frith. Yet look at all we have been able to do, since Frith went into the fire. We could not save Tyndale, but we could save his book.’

True. Dead men are at work. Their cause is not lost. They labour on, screened from us by smoke.

When Cranmer has gone his household supply him with candles and wine and draw his door closed. They subdue their voices and walk as if wearing felt slippers. He takes a fresh sheet of paper and begins to write a letter. To my very loving friend Sir Thomas Wyatt, knight, the king’s ambassador with the Emperor.

He writes, The king’s Majesty, my lord prince’s grace, my ladies his daughters, and the rest of his council be all merry and in good prosperity …

When I was a young man, he thinks, I needed all my strength. Pity was a luxury I might one day afford, like fine white bread or a book; a sound roof over my head, a light of amber or blue glass, a ring for my finger; an ell of pearled brocade, a lute, a beechwood fire; a safe hand to light it.

The xvith day of this present …

Origen says for each man God makes a scroll, which is rolled and hidden in the heart. God inscribes with a quill, a reed, a bone.

… the king’s Majesty, for the reverence of the holy sacrament of the altar …

He thinks of adding, our monarch wore white. Head to toe he shone. Like a mirror. Like a light. He writes, I wish the princes of Europe could have seen it, heard it – with what gravity he strove for the conversion of this poor miserable wretch …

His hand moves across the paper, the ink unites with its weave. The firelight stirs, a candle flame bows and blurs. He remembers riding with Gregory across the downs, under a silver sky: the light without shadow, like the light at the beginning of the world.

If those princes had been with me today, he writes, they would have seen Henry’s learning and marvelled at it. They would have witnessed his judgement, his policy: they would have seen him as – he lifts his pen for an instant from the page – the mirror and light of all other kings and princes in Christendom.

Among his papers he still has a verse from Tom Truth’s pen. It has become loose from its poem, but he has it by heart.

But since my fancy leads her so

And leads my friendship from the light

And walketh me darkling to and fro

While other friends may walk in sight …

Even the worst poets, from time to time, hit on a felicitous phrasing. You can see the flicker, as the human form passes from light to dark and back again. He looks around the room. The subdued glow of the turkey carpet. His books bound in kidskin and calf. The silver plate, reflecting himself to himself: the mirror and light of all councillors that are in Christendom.