The Mirror and the Light

Wriothesley is mute.

He, Lord Cromwell, turns to Riche. ‘No man knows better than you that grants like these are not made by snapping the fingers. Wyatt’s grants were set in train months ago, when I recalled him from his embassy. They needed only the king’s signature.’

‘He could have withheld it,’ Wriothesley says, ‘if Wyatt did not please him. Clearly he did.’

Of course Wyatt would be questioned: how not? It seems he has given answers, helpful or at least not disagreeable to the king. But under what constraint, under what pressure? Perhaps Bess is having another phantom child?

‘Wyatt knows your secret dealings,’ Wriothesley says. ‘And, as he has often boasted, the thoughts of your heart.’

‘Not that they are anything to boast about,’ he says. ‘You strain my charity, Wriothesley. Still, when I am set at large, I will try not to hold these things against you.’

Once again that fluttering, behind his ribs, of the organ whose workings have cost Wyatt himself so much pain. Love slayeth my heart. Fortune is depriver of all my comfort … My pleasant days, they fleet away and pass, But daily yet the ill doth change into the worse.

He says – the words emerge suddenly, unguarded – ‘What will you do without me? When a man such as Wyatt goes to work, he works for those who appreciate him. Without me you will read the lines as written, but you will never read between them. Marillac will make fools of you, and Chapuys too, if he returns. Charles and François will scramble your brains like a basin of eggs. Within a year the king will be fighting the Scots, or the French, or likely both, and he will bankrupt us. None of you can manage matters as I can. And the king will quarrel with you all, and you with each other. A year from now, if you sacrifice me, you will have neither honest coin nor honest minister.’

The clerk says, ‘Lord Cromwell is ill. We should perhaps pause?’

He turns his eyes on the boy. ‘Bless you for your courage.’

He is sweating. Norfolk says, ‘Oh, I think he is fit enough. It is not as if he has endured any pains – which are spared him, at the king’s direction, even though he is not nobly born.’

So the day passes, and another. Treason can be construed from any scrap of paper, if the will is there. A syllable will do it. The power is in the hands of the reader, not the writer. The duke continues with his outbursts, and Riche with insinuations that seldom connect one line of questioning with another. Mostly he can answer them; sometimes he has to refer them to the papers they have impounded, or lost. The truth is, as he confesses, he has meddled in so much of the king’s business, that it is impossible even for a man of his capacity to recollect everything said and done. ‘It is hard to live under the law,’ he says. ‘A minister must, unwittingly, transgress at divers points. But if I am a traitor,’ he wipes his face, ‘then all the devils in Hell confound me and the vengeance of God light upon me.’

Left alone at the end of the afternoon, he sits unpicking the fabric of the recent past, and always the thread leads him back to May Day. Thomas Essex at Greenwich, coming and going from the tournament ground, clerks following him with the king’s business; the earl – that is, myself – throwing out a command here and there. Richard Cromwell in the arena, knocking down all comers. Our feasting of our friends and enemies, our style and courtesy, our sprezzatura, our lavish display: May Day undid us, for the envy and rancour it bred could no longer be suppressed. Richard has compounded with some Italians to paint a mural of his triumph in his house at Hinchingbrooke; they mean to decorate the whole room. The time may come when the scene is bitter in his eyes, but he should paint it anyway. He should not give backword to the Italians – it is how they get their living.

Within nine days of his arrest, they have put together enough matter against him to bring a bill of attainder into Parliament. They question him about religion, in order to add further charges. They ask about what he did in Calais, who he protected there. They delve further into their cache of forgeries, out of which they can adduce what they like. Norfolk says to him, ‘When Mr Wriothesley went through Antwerp on the king’s business, you gave him messages for heretics.’

‘I gave him a message for my daughter. My own blood.’

Norfolk says, ‘You think that makes it better?’

He says, once again, ‘Let me see the king.’

Norfolk says, ‘Never.’

He supposes that Henry, for an hour or two together, believes firmly in both his heresy and his treason. But surely he cannot sustain the delusion? For the rest of his hours, he does not care what is true. He cultivates his grudge and grievance. No councillor can ever placate him, assuage this sense of grievance, slake his thirst or satisfy his hunger.