The Mirror and the Light

‘I don’t know, Thomas.’ The old man sounds forlorn. ‘I’d tell you if I could.’

Offered a chair, he looks at it, averse. ‘I won’t sit where Thomas More sat. For what that ingrate did to me, I will never pass the time of day with him. If I smell him these days, I go the other way.’

He says, ‘Sir, you know I did not betray you? Despite what your daughter thinks?’

Wolsey paces, dragging his scarlet. At last he says, ‘Well, Thomas … I dare say … women get things wrong.’

His great fatigue, which had lifted when he was facing Gardiner or Norfolk every day, now returns. The feeling around his heart – that it is crushed, forced out of shape – he now understands as a deformity caused by grief. He feels he is dragging corpses, shovelling them up: Robert Aske, Tom Truth, Harry Norris and Will Brereton, little Francis Weston and Mark Smeaton with his lute. And even those in whose death no one can say he took a hand: Jane the queen, Harry Percy, Thomas Boleyn.

His mind turns over the questions that have been put to him, as if the interrogations were still going on. He thinks about Richard Riche: ‘In June 1535, the prisoner said to me, “Richard, when the reign of King Cromwell dawns, you shall be a duke.”’

And Audley saying, faintly, ‘Riche, we cannot put that in the record. I think my lord was making a joke.’

He recalls Wriothesley, his outburst one afternoon: ‘He thought he was king already. He acted like a king. I remember when French merchants came to Greenwich, the year of the ice. They had goods they pressed on his Majesty, and his Majesty put them off, saying he had spent all his money fighting the Pilgrims. But then, seeing their distress and their journey wasted, he graciously agreed to purchases. But my lord Privy Seal forced them out of the king’s chambers and compounded a bargain with them, making them sell him at a lower price those goods that were intended for the king.’

He recalls that day: the ice-light in the chamber, the enticements laid before Henry: a velvet dog collar, a pair of strawberry sleeves and, for him, Lord Cromwell, the murrey-colour silk. Call-Me said, ‘Be careful sir.’ He remembers the strain on Call-Me’s face. He didn’t think he meant, be careful of me.

Edmund Walsingham comes in every day or so, and stays only long enough to witness his prisoner is still sound in mind and limb: it is as if he fears conversation will contaminate him. Kingston has his duties as councillor, and is at the Tower only on days of portent. So he has no one to talk to, except Christophe and his turnkey and the dead; and with daylight the ghosts melt away. You can hear a sigh, a soufflation, as they disperse themselves. They become a whistling draught, a hinge that wants oil; they subside into natural things, a vagrant mist, a coil of smoke from a dying fire.

He lives in dread that the king will stop Rafe’s visits. But it appears that the king still wishes him to have some news. Lord Hungerford is under sentence of death, Rafe says. ‘The French ambassador is spreading the rumour he has raped his daughter. But no such charge has been brought. There is enough with the sorcery and the sodomy.’

‘Marillac is emboldened,’ he says, ‘after all the rumours he has spread about me. There seem to be no consequences.’

He cannot find it in his heart to be sorry for Hungerford: except he is sorry for any confined creature, who knows his next outing will be his death. He would like Wolsey to come in so they could have a game of chess: though you should never play chess with a prelate, they always have a pawn in their sleeves. He craves the sight of Thomas More, with his grey stubble of beard and his tired eyes, sitting at the table as he used to do: that table which had taken on the aspect of an altar, the candle flame tugged by a draught. In the wet spring of 1535, More had a trick of absenting himself from the scene, so that what sat before you appeared already dead, a carcass, like the silvery corpse that you find in a spider’s web when the spider has died at home.

They speak of More as a martyr now, instead of a man who miscalculated the odds. He had said to Chapuys, More thought he could manipulate Henry, and perhaps he was right; but then he met what he had not reckoned on, he met Anne Boleyn. We councillors think we are men of vision and learning, we gravely delineate our position, set forth our plans and argue our case far into the night. Then some little girl sweeps through and upsets the candle and sets fire to our sleeve; leaves us slapping ourselves like madmen, trying to save our skin. It rankles with me, that some sneak thief like Riche should best me; that a fool like Polo should hole my boat, and a dolt like Lisle should drown me. Perhaps some people will say I have died for the gospel, as More died for the Pope. But most will not think me a martyr for anything, except the great cause of getting on in life.