The Mirror and the Light

‘It is heavy work, executing. I suppose you were too busy to think of Patch.’ Sexton hauls up his checkered robe and scratches himself. ‘Lord Tom from Putney. You put the jesters out of occupation and make them beg a living. Let Somer watch himself. Who needs make a joke, when the jokes are walking and talking and calling themselves by the title of baron?’

He has to step over the man’s legs. ‘Pull down your clothes, and get away, Sexton. Never let me see you here again.’

When he enters the royal presence, Henry says quite pleasantly to the buzzing swarm, ‘Will you allow me to have conference now with my lord Privy Seal?’

There is a stir – Henry is, for the first time, speaking his new title aloud. After the stir, a shuffle – then a scuttle backwards, bowing. They cannot go fast enough, swept by the king’s stare.

Henry has a thick folio in front of him. His hand lies on it, as if forbidding it to open. ‘Before you were my councillor …’ He stops, and looks into empty air. ‘Pole,’ he says. ‘His book has come, out of Italy. My subject, my liegeman, Reginald Pole. My cousin, my trusted kin. How can he sleep at night? The one thing I cannot endure,’ Henry says, ‘is ingratitude, disloyalty.’

While the king goes on to enumerate the things he cannot endure, his councillor’s eyes rest on the book. It is not, to him, a closed book. He had warning. He is only surprised at the extent of it. There must be three hundred leaves, each leaf veined with treason. He knows the story, but that will not stop the king’s need to rehearse it – the history of the Pole family, their grievance and grudge: the long butchery before the Tudors, when the great families of England hacked each other apart on the battlefield; when they murdered each other with the headsman’s axe in the kingdom’s market squares, and hung body parts on town gates. The process that has put the manuscript on the table, this summer’s day, began before any of us were born: before Henry Tudor landed in Milford Haven and marched through Wales under the emblem of the red dragon on a banner of white and green. That banner kept on marching, till it was laid by the victor on the altar at Paul’s. He came with a ragged army, with a prayer on his lips: he came for the salvation of England, with a broom to sweep the charred bones out, and a rag to mop up the gore.

And what was left of the old regime, after the battle was won, after Richard Plantagenet was dropped naked into his grave? Old King Edward’s sons vanished into the Tower and never came out. His bastards and daughters remained, and a nephew, a child not ten. After showing him to the people, the Tudor locked the child away. He never denied his title, Earl of Warwick: just denied him the right to threaten the new regime.

Henry Tudor was blessed with many children, but then they themselves must breed. A bride for Prince Arthur, the first son, must be secured among the princesses of Europe. The King and Queen of Spain offered one of their daughters, but made a stipulation. They hesitated to part with Catalina to a country so easy to destabilise. His whole reign, Henry Tudor had been plagued by dead men rising and claiming the crown; and though young Warwick was locked up, what would stop some pretender raising troops under his name? So the claimant must die: not in some hole-and-corner scuffle, some stabbing or smothering, but in daylight, on Tower Hill, by the axe.

Treason was alleged: an escape plot. Who believed it? The young man, a prisoner since childhood, was a stranger to ambition; he knew no knightly exercises, he had never taken sword in hand. It was like killing a cripple; but Henry Tudor did it, so as not to lose the Spanish bride. With Warwick dead, his sister Margaret was in the hands of the king; he made her safe with marriage to a loyalist. ‘My grandmother wed her to Richard Pole,’ the king says. ‘It was a modest match, but honourable. It was I who reinstated her in her former fortunes. I revered her family for their ancient blood. I pitied their fall. I made her Countess of Salisbury. What more could I do? I could not give her brother back. I could not raise the dead.’

Catalina, the Spanish princess, knew what lay behind her marriage. In her whole life after, she tried to atone to Margaret Pole. She placed trust in her, making her Lady Governor to Mary, her only child. ‘But,’ Henry says, ‘I have been told there is a curse.’

Don’t repeat it, he thinks. Repetition is the only force it has.

‘The marriage with Katherine was made, and in weeks Arthur was dead. Thereafter, as you know …’