Wolf Hall - Bring Up the Bodies

only one man who would dare question the loyalty he shows to his king, the loyalty he demonstrates daily. ‘So…’ he says at last. ‘Stephen Gardiner calls himself a gentleman.’
    Perhaps, caught in the little panes which distort and cloud, Wriothesley sees a dubious image: confusion, fear, emotions that do not often mark Master Secretary’s face. Because if Gardiner thinks this, who else? Who else will think it in the months and years ahead? He says, ‘Wriothesley, surely you don’t expect me to justify my actions to you? Once you have chosen a course, you should not apologise for it. God knows, I mean nothing but good to our master the king. I am bound to obey and serve. And if you watch me closely you will see me do it.’
    He turns, when he thinks it is fit for Wriothesley to see his face. His smile is implacable. He says, ‘Drink my health.’

III

     

Spoils
     
    LONDON, SUMMER 1536
     
    The king says, ‘What happened to her clothes? Her headdress?’
    He says, ‘The people at the Tower have them. It is their perquisite.’
    ‘Buy them back,’ the king says. ‘I want to know they are destroyed.’
    The king says, ‘Call in all the keys that admit to my privy chamber. Here and elsewhere. All the keys to all the rooms. I want the locks changed.’
    There are new servants everywhere, or old servants in new offices. In place of Henry Norris, Sir Francis Bryan is appointed chief of the privy chamber, and is to receive a pension of a hundred pounds. The young Duke of Richmond is appointed Chamberlain of Chester and North Wales, and (replacing George Boleyn) Warden of the Cinque Ports and Constable of Dover Castle. Thomas Wyatt is released from the Tower and granted a hundred pounds also. Edward Seymour is promoted Viscount Beauchamp. Richard Sampson is appointed Bishop of Chichester. The wife of Francis Weston announces her remarriage.
    He has conferred with the Seymour brothers on the motto Jane should adopt as queen. They settle on, ‘Bound to Obey and Serve’.
    They try it out on Henry. A smile, a nod: perfect contentment. The king’s blue eyes are serene. Through the autumn of this year, 1536, in glass windows, in carvings of stone or wood, the badge of the phoenix will replace the white falcon with its imperial crown; for the heraldic lions of the dead woman, the panthers of Jane Seymour are substituted, and it is done economically, as the beasts only need new heads and tails.
    The marriage is swift and private, in the queen’s closet at Whitehall. Jane is found to be the king’s distant cousin, but all dispensations are granted in proper form.
    He, Cromwell, is with the king before the ceremony. Henry is quiet, and more melancholy that day than any bridegroom ought to be. He is not thinking about his last queen; she is ten days dead and he never speaks of her. But he says, ‘Crumb, I don’t know if I will have any children now. Plato says that a man’s best offspring are born when he is between thirty years and thirty-nine. I am past that. I have wasted my best years. I don’t know where they have gone.’
    The king feels he has been cheated of his fate. ‘When my brother Arthur died, my father’s astrologer predicted that I should enjoy a prosperous reign and father many sons.’
    You’re prosperous at least, he thinks: and if you stick with me, richer than you can ever have imagined. Somewhere, Thomas Cromwell was in your chart.
    The debts of the dead woman now fall to be paid. She owes some thousand pounds, which her confiscated estate is able to meet: to her furrier and her hosier, her silkwomen, her apothecary, her linen draper, her saddler, her dyer, her farrier and her pinmaker. The status of her daughter is uncertain, but for now the child is well provided with gold fringing for her bed, and with caps of white and purple satin with gilt trim. The queen’s embroiderer is owed fifty-five pounds, and one can see where the money went.
    The fee to the French executioner is over twenty-three pounds, but it is an expense unlikely to be repeated.

     
    At Austin Friars, he takes the keys and lets himself into the little room where they store Christmas: where Mark was held, and where he cried out in fear in the night. The peacock wings will have to be destroyed. Rafe’s little girl will probably not ask for them again; children do not remember from one Christmas to the next.
    When the wings are shaken out of their linen bag he stretches the fabric, holds it up to the light and