Wolf Hall - Bring Up the Bodies

slavish garment”?’
    ‘Chrysostom,’ Cranmer murmurs.
    ‘But let that pass,’ he, Cromwell, says hastily. ‘If this marriage is dissolved, Majesty, Parliament will petition you to marry again.’
    ‘I dare say it will. How may a man do his duty, to both his realm and to God? We sin even in the very act of generation. We must have offspring, and kings especially must, and yet we are warned against lust even in marriage, and some authorities say, do they not, that to love your wife immoderately is a kind of adultery?’
    ‘Jerome,’ Cranmer whispers: as if he would just as soon disown the saint. ‘But there are many other teachings that are more comfortable, and that praise the married state.’
    ‘Roses snatched from the thorns,’ he says. ‘The church does not offer much comfort to the married man, though Paul says we should love our wives. It is hard, Majesty, not to think marriage is sinful inherently, since the celibates have spent many centuries saying that they are better than we are. But they are not better. Repetition of false teachings does not make them true. You agree, Cranmer?’
    Just kill me now, the archbishop’s face says. Against all the laws of king and church, he is a married man; he married in Germany when he was among the reformers, he keeps Frau Grete secretly, he hides her in his country houses. Does Henry know? He must know. Will Henry say? No, because he is intent on his own plight. ‘Now I cannot see why I ever wanted her,’ the king says. ‘That is why I think she has practised on me with charms and enchantments. She claims she loves me. Katherine claimed she loved me. They say love, and mean the opposite. I believe Anne has tried to undermine me at every turn. She was always unnatural. Think how she would taunt her uncle, my lord of Norfolk. Think how she would scorn her father. She would presume to censure my own conduct, and press on me advice in matters well beyond her understanding, and give me such words as no poor man would willingly hear from his wife.’
    Cranmer says, ‘She was bold, it is true. She knew it for a fault and would try to bridle herself.’
    ‘Now she shall be bridled, by God.’ Henry’s tone is ferocious; but the next moment he has modulated it, to the plaintive accents of the victim. He opens his walnut writing box. ‘Do you see this little book?’ It is not really a book, or not yet, just a collection of loose leaves, tied together; there is no title page, but a sheet black with Henry’s own laboured hand. ‘It is a book in the making. I have written it. It is a play. It is a tragedy. It is my own case.’ He offers it.
    He says, ‘Keep it sir, till we have more leisure to do justice to it.’
    ‘But you ought to know,’ the king insists. ‘Her nature. How ill she has behaved to me, when I gave her everything. All men should know and be warned about what women are. Their appetites are unbounded. I believe she has committed adultery with a hundred men.’
    Henry looks, for a moment, like a hunted creature: hounded by women’s desire, dragged down and shredded. ‘But her brother?’ Cranmer says. He turns away. He will not look at the king. ‘Is it likely?’
    ‘I doubt she could resist him,’ Henry says. ‘Why spare? Why not drink the cup to the filthy dregs? And while she was indulging her own desires, she was killing mine. When I would approach her, only to do my duty, she would give me such a look as would daunt any man. I know now why she did so. She wanted to be fresh for her lovers.’
    The king sits. He begins to talk, to ramble. Anne took him by the hand, these ten years ago and more. She led him into the forest, and at the sylvan edge, where the broad light of day splinters and filters into green, he left his good judgement, his innocence. She drew him on all day, till he was trembling and exhausted, but he could not stop even to catch his breath, he could not go back, he had lost the path. All day he chased her, until the light faded, and he followed her by the light of torches: and then she turned on him, and stifled the torches, and left him alone in the dark.
     
     
    The door opens softly: he looks up, and it is Rafe, where once it would have been Weston, perhaps. ‘Majesty, my lord of Richmond is here to say good night. May he come in?’
    Henry breaks off. ‘Fitzroy. Of course.’
    Henry’s bastard is now a princeling of sixteen, though his fine skin, his open gaze, make him seem younger than his age. He has