The Mirror and the Light

‘Redundant,’ Richard says.

‘Yes, but it makes her sound … flatter.’

He amends the phrase. ‘Don’t let our efforts be mentioned outside this room. The king must think she composed it herself. I write to … why do I write?’

… To open my heart to your grace … as I have and will put my soul under your direction … so I wholly commit my body … desiring no state, no condition, nor no manner or degree of living but such as your grace shall appoint …

‘It sounds straight out of a law book,’ Richard says. ‘Not this, not that, not the other.’

‘True. She is not a Gray’s Inn man.’ He is exasperated. He knows no way to draft, but to cover every circumstance; no way to write that leaves a gap, a hairsbreadth, a crack, that would allow meaning to slide or leak away. Forgive my offences … I do recognise, accept, take, repute and acknowledge …

‘The king must expect her to take a lawyer’s advice,’ Gregory says. ‘He will expect it to show.’

… repute and acknowledge the king’s highness to be supreme head, under Christ, of the church of England …

I do freely, frankly … recognise and acknowledge that the marriage formerly had between his majesty and my mother … was by God’s law and man’s law incestuous and unlawful …

‘Incestuous and unlawful,’ Gregory repeats. ‘It covers everything. Nothing is left to want.’

‘Except,’ Richard says, ‘that she has not actually taken the oath.’

He dries the ink. ‘As long as no one makes Henry face that fact.’

Let this be her own form of oath, crushing and comprehensive. When she writes of Katherine, she says, the late princess dowager, as any subject might; but she also writes my mother, my dead mother: whose hand now falls incapacitate, and flinches into its shroud. Catalina, today you are put down; the living beat the dead, England conquers Spain. I have written letters for Mary before, he thinks, more pitiful than this and more yielding: I am but a woman, and your child. They met with small success. They did not touch the king’s heart. What touches his heart is giving him everything he wants: and in such a form that, until he had it, he did not know what he lacked. I put my soul under your direction. I commit my body to your mercy.

‘I want Rafe to take this to Hunsdon,’ he says. ‘Get it signed tonight.’

We are now in the third week of June. A gusty wet spring when Anne died; a month passes, and we are in high summer. On a hot morning you close your eyes and on your lids is stamped a blazing pattern of cloth of gold. You raise your arm to cover your face and the glare shifts to purple, as if bishops were hatching through flames. With the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, he rides up to Hunsdon to honour the young lady who – penitent, chastened, abased – is once again fit to be called the king’s daughter.

Hertfordshire is a moneyed and populous country, well wooded and well furnished with the residences of gentlemen and courtiers. The house itself, brick-built on high ground, is fit for the accommodation of a king’s family. The manor itself is ancient, but this present house is perhaps eighty years old; they show as antiquities their charters with painted shields bearing the emblems of long-dead lords: the bend sable of a Despencer heiress, the Mowbrays’ lion argent, and the royal arms of Edmund Beaufort, with their broken border of silver and blue. Two years back the king laid out near three thousand on new tiles and timbers, and sent up people from Galyon Hone’s workshop to glaze the principal chambers with striped roses, lovers’ knots, shivering white falcons and fleur-de-lys. At the same time – providentially, as it turns out – the whole house was made more tight and secure, with new hinges, clasps, hooks, bolts and locks.

On the journey the trains of the three lords keep separate, for fear of quarrels between servants. Norfolk says, cackling, ‘It is well-known what Cromwell does when he strays north of London, he will stop at some low hostelry to drag out a pot-washer and have his pleasure of her.’ Except that the duke uses a coarser expression, accompanying it with a driving elbow and a pumping fist.

Charles Brandon roars. It’s Brandon’s sort of joke.