The Mirror and the Light

Anger washes through him like a wave, and out again. He says to Marillac, his neighbour, ‘It is an outworn jest, once made against the cardinal.’

‘Ah yes, your old master,’ Marillac says. ‘I was warned never to refer to him, but you use his name freely. Strange that people are still arguing over him. What is it, ten years?’

He points to Sexton. ‘You should have seen that fellow, how he screamed when he was parted from the cardinal and conveyed into the king’s service – I say “conveyed”, because we had to bind him and throw him in a cart.’

Sexton loops nooses around the necks of Snip-Snap and Flip-Flap. They stagger and protrude their tongues. He calls out, ‘Sexton! Beware! Perhaps I have a rope for you in my great sleeve.’

Sexton looks straight at him. ‘Tyburn is no jest, Tom. For him it is a jest,’ he points to the king, ‘and for her, and for me, but not for thee, Tom, not for thee.’

Grime is circling and about to crap. The king’s lips tighten. He makes a gesture: get dog and keeper out, remove friars too. Sexton runs, raising his knees high as if leaping over puddles.

The Britons come in again, to a spatter of applause, carrying the river Thames looped over their arms. Lord Morley sits forward on his stool: ‘Shall we have the war machines of the Emperor Claudius? Vespasian, and the Siege of Exeter?’

‘By my faith,’ Norfolk says, ‘it’s been a long day for us councillors, my lord. And the king will want to have the queen apart, will he not?’

‘There ought to be giants,’ Gregory says. ‘Gogmagog was twelve feet tall. He could rip up oak trees, no effort at all, it was like picking flowers. There was another giant, Retho by name, who made himself a great beard with the beards of men he had slain.’

‘Like Brandon, what?’ Norfolk says. He laughs with pure delight. It is once a decade he makes a joke.

The Thames unrolls, a length of patchy blue. To aid the players, the maids seize the ends and ripple it. Lord Morley says, ‘I am afraid a great part of the story is missed. Britain had kings before Christ was incarnate. You will find it all in Geoffrey of Monmouth, his book.’

He says, ‘My lord, I have read that not all those princes were lucky, and few of them were wise.’ There was the prince who drowned in the river Humber, which they named after him. There was Bladus, who flew over London on home-made wings: they had to scrape him off the pavements. Rivallo was a good king, or well-intentioned at least: but during his time it rained blood, and swarms of flies ate Englishmen alive. And if you go further back, the nation was founded on a murder: Trojan Brutus, father of us all, killed his own father. A hunting accident, they claimed, but perhaps there are no accidents. Those mis-aimed arrows, and the ones that bend in flight: they know their target.

Gregory says, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth, he was such a liar. I wager he wasn’t even born in Monmouth. I wager he was never there in his life.’

The queen stands up, at some invisible signal or perhaps some inner prompting. Her ladies rise and flock about her. The Howard child has to be nudged; she is gaping at a lutenist with a well-turned leg. The evening is winding to its conclusion. The musicians will play the king to his own chamber and then put away their timpani and viols. Henry’s face shows nothing, except traces of fatigue. Mr Wriothesley bends and speaks into his ear: ‘Do you wish you could read his thoughts, sir?’

‘No.’

The privy chamber gentlemen rise and follow the king. The clergy are assembling to go in procession and bless the bed. Every night the king’s sheets are sprinkled with holy water, but tonight he needs Heaven’s special regard: the attention of the angels and saints, fixed on his privy member. Culpeper says, in passing, ‘Now all he has to do is climb aboard and make a Duke of York.’

The king has had a new bed made, very wonderfully carved. He, Lord Cromwell, cannot lie still in his old one, but must walk about. The palace is quiet. Fires are damped. He encounters no one but guards who salute him, and two giddy young lords, wearing red and yellow masquing bonnets, one dancing while the other claps. At the sight of him the dancer skids to a halt. The beat is missed, trapped between his friend’s palms.

‘Go to your cribs,’ he tells them. ‘If you are lucky, in the morning I shall have forgotten your names.’

Abashed, they pass him their bonnets, as if they do not know what else to do with them. ‘They are hats for Tartars, my lord.’

They ought to have strings or ribbons, he remarks. You would think the wind would pluck them off, as they gallop the snowy wastes.

The boys ramble away, arms linked. He calls after them, ‘Pray for me.’ He hears their laughter as they sway downstairs.