Wreckage

London, May 1536



Once the queen’s head is severed, he walks away. A sharp pang of appetite reminds him that it is time for a second breakfast, or perhaps an early dinner. The morning’s circumstances are new and there are no rules to guide us. The witnesses, who have knelt for the passing of the soul, stand up and put on their hats. Under the hats, their faces are stunned.

But then he turns back, to say a word of thanks to the executioner. The man has performed his office with style; and though the king is paying him well, it is important to reward good service with encouragement, as well as a purse. Having once been a poor man, he knows this from experience.

The small body lies on the scaffold where it has fallen: belly down, hands outstretched, it swims in a pool of crimson, the blood seeping between the planks. The Frenchman – they had sent for the Calais executioner – had picked up the head, swaddled it in linen, then handed it to one of the veiled women who had attended Anne in her last moments. He saw how, as she received the bundle, the woman shuddered from the nape of her neck to her feet. She held it fast though, and a head is heavier than you expect. Having been on a battlefield, he knows this from experience too.

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The women have done well. Anne would have been proud of them. They will not let any man touch her; palms out, they force back those who try to help them. They slide in the gore and stoop over the narrow carcass. He hears their indrawn breath as they lift what is left of her, holding her by her clothes; they are afraid the cloth will rip and their fingers touch her cooling flesh. Each of them sidesteps the cushion on which she knelt, now sodden with her blood. From the corner of his eye he sees a presence flit away, a fugitive lean man in a leather jerkin. It is Francis Bryan, a nimble courtier, gone to tell Henry he is a free man. Trust Francis, he thinks: he is a cousin of the dead queen, but he has remembered he is also a cousin of the queen to come.

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The officers of the Tower have found, in lieu of a coffin, an arrow chest. The narrow body fits it. The woman who holds the head genuflects with her soaking parcel. As there is no other space, she fits it by the corpse’s feet. She stands up, crossing herself. The hands of the bystanders move in imitation, and his own hand moves; but then he checks himself, and draws it into a loose fist.

The women take their last look. Then they step back, their hands held away from them so as not to soil their garments. One of Constable Kingston’s men proffers linen towels – too late to be of use. These people are incredible, he says to the Frenchman. No coffin, when they had days to prepare? They knew she was going to die. They were not in any doubt.

“But perhaps they were, Maître Cremuel.” (No Frenchman can ever pronounce his name.) “Perhaps they were, for I believe the lady herself thought the king would send a messenger to stop it. Even as she mounted the steps she was looking over her shoulder, did you see?”

“He was not thinking of her. His mind is entirely on his new bride.”

“Alors, perhaps better luck this time,” the Frenchman says. “You must hope so. If I have to come back, I shall increase my fee.”

The man turns away and begins cleaning his sword. He does it lovingly, as if the weapon were his friend. “Toledo steel.” He proffers it for admiration. “We still have to go to the Spaniards to get a blade like this.”

He, Cromwell, touches a finger to the metal. You would not guess it to look at him now, but his father was a blacksmith; he has affinity with iron, steel, with everything that is mined from the earth or forged, everything that is made molten, or wrought, or given a cutting edge. The executioner’s blade is incised with Christ’s crown of thorns, and with the words of a prayer.

Now the spectators are moving away, courtiers and aldermen and city officials, knots of men in silk and gold chains, in the livery of the Tudors and in the insignia of the London guilds. Scores of witnesses, none of them sure of what they have seen; they understand that the queen is dead, but it was too quick to comprehend. “She didn’t suffer, Cromwell,” Charles Brandon says.

“My lord Suffolk, you may be satisfied she did.”

Brandon disgusts him. When the other witnesses knelt, the duke stayed rigid on his feet; he so hated the queen that he would not do her that much courtesy. He remembers her faltering progress to the scaffold: her glance, as the Frenchman says, was directed over her shoulder. Even when she said her last words, asking the people to pray for the king, she was looking over the head of the crowd. Still, she did not let hope weaken her. Few women are so resolute at the last, and not many men. He had seen her start to tremble, but only after her final prayer. There was no block, the man from Calais did not use one. She had been required to kneel upright, with no support. One of her women bound a cloth across her eyes. She did not see the sword, not even its shadow, and the blade went through her neck with a sigh, easier than scissors through silk. We all – well, most of us, not Brandon – regret that it had to come to this.

Now the elm chest is carried towards the chapel, where the flags have been lifted so she can go in by the corpse of her brother, George Boleyn. “They shared a bed when they were alive,” Brandon says, “so it’s fitting they share a tomb. Let’s see how they like each other now.”

“Come, Master Secretary,” says the Constable of the Tower. “I have arranged a collation, if you will do me the honour. We were all up early today.”

“You can eat, sir?” His son Gregory has never seen anyone die.

“We must work to eat and eat to work,” Kingston says. “What use to the king is a servant who is distracted, merely for want of a piece of bread?”

“Distracted,” Gregory repeats. Recently his son was sent off to learn the art of public speaking, and the result is that, though he still lacks the command that makes for rhetorical sweep, he has become more interested in words if you take them one by one. Sometimes he seems to be holding them up for scrutiny. Sometimes he seems to be poking them with a stick. Sometimes, and the comparison is unavoidable, he seems to approach them with the tail-wagging interest a dog takes in another dog’s turds. He asks the constable, “Sir William, has a queen of England ever been executed before?”

“Not to my knowledge,” the constable says. “Or at least, young man, not on my watch.”

“I see,” he says: he, Cromwell. “So the errors of the last few days are just because you lack practice? You can’t do a thing just once and get it right?”

Kingston laughs heartily. Presumably because he thinks he’s making a joke. “Here, my lord Suffolk,” he says to Charles Brandon. “Cromwell says I need more practice in lopping heads.”

I didn’t say that, he thinks. “The arrow chest was a lucky find.”

“I’d have put her on a dunghill,” Brandon says. “And the brother underneath her. And I’d have made their father witness it. I don’t know what you are about, Cromwell. Why did you leave him alive to work mischief?”

He turns on him, angry; often, anger is what he fakes. “My lord Suffolk, you have often offended the king yourself, and begged his pardon on your knees. And being what you are, I have no doubt you will offend again. What then? Do you want a king to whom the notion of mercy is foreign? If you love the king, and you say you do, pay some heed to his soul. One day he will stand before God and answer for every subject. If I say Thomas Boleyn is no danger to the realm, he is no danger. If I say he will live quiet, that is what he will do.”

The courtiers tramping across the green eye them: Suffolk with his big beard, his flashing eye, his big chest, and Master Secretary subfusc, low-slung, square. Warily, they separate and flow around the quarrel, reuniting in chattering parties at the other side.

“By God,” Brandon says. “You read me a lesson? I? A peer of the realm? And you, from the place where you come from?”

“I stand just where the king has put me. I will read you any lesson you should learn.”

He thinks, Cromwell, what are you doing? Usually he is the soul of courtesy. But if you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?

He glances sideways at his son. We are three years older, less a month, than at Anne’s coronation. Some of us are wiser; some of us are taller. Gregory had said he could not do it, when told he should witness her death: “I cannot. A woman, I cannot.” But his boy has kept his face arranged and his tongue governed. Each time you are in public, he has told Gregory, know that people are observing you, to see if you are fit to follow me in the king’s service.

They step aside to bow to the Duke of Richmond: Henry Fitzroy, the king’s bastard son. He is a handsome boy with his father’s fine flushed skin and red-blond hair: a tender plant, willowy, a boy who has not yet grown into his great height. He sways above them both. “Master Secretary? England is a better place this morning.”

Gregory says, “My lord, you also did not kneel. How is that?”

Richmond blushes. He knows he is in the wrong, and shows it as his father always does; but like his father, he will defend himself with a stout self-righteousness. “I would not be a hypocrite, Gregory. My lord father has declared to me how Boleyn would have poisoned me. He says she boasted she would do it. Well, now her monstrous adulteries are all found out, and she is properly punished.”

“You are not ill, my lord?” He is thinking, too much wine last night: toasting his future, no doubt.

“I am only tired. I will go and sleep. Put this spectacle behind me.”

Gregory’s eyes follow Richmond. “Do you think he can ever be king?”

“If he is, he’ll remember you,” he says cheerfully.

“Oh, he knows me already,” Gregory says. “Did I do wrong?”

“It is not wrong to speak your mind. On selected occasions. They make it painful for you. But you must do it.”

“I don’t think I shall ever be a councillor,” Gregory says. “I don’t think I could ever learn it – when to speak and when to keep silence, when I should look and when I should not. You told me, the moment you see the blade in the air, then she is dying – at that moment, you said, bow your head and close your eyes. But I saw you – you were looking.”

“Of course I was.” He takes his son’s arm. “It would be like the late queen to pin her head back on, pick up the sword and chase me to Whitehall.” She may be dead, he thinks, but she can still ruin me.

Thomas Cromwell is now fifty years old. The same small quick eyes, the same thickset imperturbable body; the same schedules. He is at home wherever he wakes: the Rolls House on Chancery Lane, or his city house at Austin Friars, or at Whitehall with the king, or in some other place where Henry happens to be. He rises at five, says his prayers, attends to his ablutions and breaks his fast. By six o’clock he is receiving petitioners, his nephew Richard Cromwell at his elbow.

Master Secretary’s barge takes him up and down to Greenwich, to Hampton Court, to the mint and armouries at the Tower of London. Though he is a commoner still, most would agree that he is the second man in England. He is the king’s deputy in the affairs of the church. He takes licence to enquire into any department of government or the royal household. He carries in his head the statutes of England, the psalms and the words of the Prophets, the columns of the king’s account books and the lineage, acreage and income of every person of substance in England. He is famous for his memory, and the king likes to test it, by asking him for details of obscure disputes from twenty years back. He sometimes carries a sprig of dried rosemary or rue, and crumbles it in his palm as if inhaling the scent would help him. But everyone knows it is only a performance. The only things he cannot remember are the things he never knew.

His chief duty (it seems just now) is to get the king new wives and dispose of the old. His days are long and arduous, packed with laws to be drafted and ambassadors to beguile. He goes on working by candle-light through summer dusks, through winter sunsets when it is dark by half past three. Even his nights are not his to waste. Often he sleeps in a chamber near the king and Henry wakes him in the small hours and asks him questions about treasury receipts, or tells him his dreams and asks what they mean.

Sometimes he thinks he would like to marry again, as it is seven years since he lost Elizabeth and his daughters. But no woman would tolerate this kind of life.

When he gets home, young Rafe Sadler is waiting for him. He pulls off his cap at the sight of his master. “Sir?”

“Done,” he says.

Rafe waits, eyes on his face.

“Nothing to tell. A prayerful end. The king?”

“We hardly saw him. Went between bedchamber and oratory and spoke with his chaplain.” Rafe is in the king’s privy chamber now, his liaison man. “I thought I should come in case you have any message for him.”

Verbal message, he means. Something better not committed to ink. He thinks about it. What do you say to a man who has just killed his wife? “No message. Get home to your wife.”

“Helen will be glad to know the lady is beyond her misfortunes now.”

He is surprised. “She does not pity her, does she?”

Rafe looks uneasy. “She thinks that Anne was a protector of the gospel, and that cause is, as you know, near my wife’s heart.”

“Oh, well, yes,” he says. “But I can protect it better.”

“And besides, I think, with women, when something happens to one of them, all of them feel it. They are more pitiful than us, and it would be a harsh world if they were not.”

“Anne was not pitiful,” he says. “Have you not told Helen how she threatened me with beheading? And she was planning, as we now know, to cut short the life of the king himself.”

“Yes, sir,” Rafe says, as if he is humouring him. “That was stated in court, was it not? But Helen will ask – forgive me, from a woman it is a natural question – what will happen to Anne Boleyn’s little daughter? Will the king disown her? He can’t be sure he is her father, but he can’t be sure he is not.”

“It hardly matters,” he says. “Even if Eliza is Henry’s child, she is still a bastard. As we now learn, his marriage to Anne was never valid.”

Rafe rubs the crown of his head so that his red hair stands up in a tuft. “So as his union with Katherine was not valid either, he has never been married in his life. Twice a bridegroom yet never a husband – has it ever happened to a king before? Even in the Old Testament? Please God Mistress Seymour will go to work and give him a son. We cannot seem to keep an heir. The king’s daughter by Katherine, she is a bastard. His daughter by Anne, she is a bastard. Which leaves his son Richmond, who of course has always been a bastard.” He squashes on his hat. “I’m going.”

He skitters out, leaving the door open. From the stairs he calls, “I’ll see you tomorrow, sir.”

He gets up, shuts the door; but he lingers, his hand on the wood. Rafe grew up in his house, and he misses his constant presence; these days he has his own house, his own young family in it, new duties at court. It is his pleasure, to make Rafe’s career. He is as dear to him as a son could be, dutiful, dogged, attentive and – the vital point – liked and trusted by the king.

He resumes his desk. It is only May, he thinks, and already two queens of England are dead. Before him is a letter from Eustache Chapuys, the Imperial ambassador; though it is not a letter Eustache intended for his desk, and its news must be already out of date. The ambassador is using a new cipher, but it should be possible to see what he is saying. He must be rejoicing, telling the Emperor Charles that the king’s concubine is living her last hours.

He works at the letter till he can pick out the proper names, including his own, then turns to other business. Leave it for Mr Wriothesley, the prince of decipherers.

• Edited extract from the first chapter of The Mirror & the Light, published by 4th Estate (RRP £25) on 5 March. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.