Wolf Hall - Bring Up the Bodies

might term it, to some foreign power? Put this to them and show them that they are at a disadvantage; it is not enough to assert their fidelity to the king, they must be ready to show it, and they can do that by making your work easy.
    His men know better than to try to cheat him, but just to make sure he sends them out in pairs, one to watch the other. The abbeys’ bursars will offer bribes, to understate their assets.
    Thomas More, in his room in the Tower, had said to him, ‘Where will you strike next, Cromwell? You are going to pull all England down.’
    He had said, I pray to God, grant me life only as long as I use my power to build and not destroy. Among the ignorant it is said that the king is destroying the church. In fact he is renewing it. It will be a better country, believe me, once it is purged of liars and hypocrites. ‘But you, unless you mend your manners towards Henry, will not be alive to see it.’
    Nor was he. He doesn’t regret what happened; his only regret is that More wouldn’t see sense. He was offered an oath upholding Henry’s supremacy in the church; this oath is a test of loyalty. Not many things in life are simple, but this is simple. If you will not swear it, you indict yourself, by implication: traitor, rebel. More would not swear; then what could he do but die? What could he do but splash to the scaffold, on a day in July when the torrents never stopped, except for a brief hour in the evening and that too late for Thomas More; he died with his hose wet, splashed to the knees, and his feet paddling like a duck’s. He doesn’t exactly miss the man. It’s just that sometimes, he forgets he’s dead. It’s as if they’re deep in conversation, and suddenly the conversation stops, he says something and no answer comes back. As if they’d been walking along and More had dropped into a hole in the road, a pit as deep as a man, slopping with rainwater.
    You do, in fact, hear of such accidents. Men have died, the track giving way under their feet. England needs better roads, and bridges that don’t collapse. He is preparing a bill for Parliament to give employment to men without work, to get them waged and out mending the roads, making the harbours, building walls against the Emperor or any other opportunist. We could pay them, he calculated, if we levied an income tax on the rich; we could provide shelter, doctors if they needed them, their subsistence; we would all have the fruits of their work, and their employment would keep them from becoming bawds or pickpockets or highway robbers, all of which men will do if they see no other way to eat. What if their fathers before them were bawds, pickpockets or highway robbers? That signifies nothing. Look at him. Is he Walter Cromwell? In a generation everything can change.
    As for the monks, he believes, like Martin Luther, that the monastic life is not necessary, not useful, not commanded of Christ. There’s nothing imperishable about monasteries. They’re not part of God’s natural order. They rise and decay, like any other institutions, and sometimes their buildings fall down, or they are ruined by lax stewardship. Over the years any number of them have vanished or relocated or become swallowed into some other monastery. The number of monks is diminishing naturally, because these days the good Christian man lives out in the world. Take Battle Abbey. Two hundred monks at the height of its fortunes, and now – what? – forty at most. Forty fat fellows sitting on a fortune. The same up and down the kingdom. Resources that could be freed, that could be put to better use. Why should money lie in coffers, when it could be put into circulation among the king’s subjects?
    His commissioners go out and send him back scandals; they send him monkish manuscripts, tales of ghosts and curses, meant to keep simple people in dread. The monks have relics that make it rain or make it stop, that inhibit the growth of weeds and cure diseases of cattle. They charge for the use of them, they do not give them free to their neighbours: old bones and chips of wood, bent nails from the crucifixion of Christ. He tells the king and queen what his men have found in Wiltshire at Maiden Bradley. ‘The monks have part of God’s coat, and some broken meats from the Last Supper. They have twigs that blossom on Christmas Day.’
    ‘That last is possible,’ Henry says reverently. ‘Think of the Glastonbury thorn.’
    ‘The prior has six children, and keeps