Wolf Hall - Bring Up the Bodies

and his mind explores their geography: in these waking nights before sullen or frozen dawns, he thinks not of the freedom his holdings allow, but of the trampling intrusion of others, their easements and rights of way, their fences and vantage points, that allow them to impinge on his boundaries and interfere with his quiet possession of his future. Christ knows, he is no country boy: though where he grew up, in the streets near the quays, Putney Heath was at his back, a place to go missing. He spent long days there, running with his brethren, boys as rough as himself: all of them in flight from their fathers, from their belts and fists, and from the education they were threatened with if they ever stood still. But London pulled him to her urban gut; long before he sailed the Thames in Master Secretary’s barge, he knew the currents and the tide, and he knew how much could be picked up, casually, at watermen’s trades, by unloading boats and running crates in barrows uphill to the fine houses that lined the Strand, the houses of lords and bishops: the houses of men with whom, daily, he now sits down at the council board.
    The winter court perambulates, its accustomed circuit: Greenwich and Eltham, the houses of Henry’s childhood: Whitehall and Hampton Court, once the cardinal’s houses. It is usual these days for the king, wherever the court resides, to dine alone in his private rooms. Outside the royal apartments, in the outer Watching Chamber or the Guard Chamber – in whatever that outer hall is named, in the palaces in which we find ourselves – there is a top table, where the Lord Chamberlain, head of the king’s private household, holds court for the nobility. Uncle Norfolk sits at this table, when he is with us at court; so does Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, and the queen’s father, the Earl of Wiltshire. There is a table, somewhat lower in status, but served with due honour, for functionaries like himself, and for the old friends of the king who happen not to be peers. Nicholas Carew sits there, Master of the Horse; and William Fitzwilliam, Master Treasurer, who of course has known Henry since he was a boy. William Paulet, Master Comptroller, presides at the head of this board: and he wonders, until it is explained to him, at their habit of lifting their goblets (and their eyebrows) in a toast to someone not there. Till Paulet explains, half-embarrassed, ‘We toast the man who sat here before me. Master Comptroller who was. Sir Henry Guildford, his blessed memory. You knew him, Cromwell, of course.’
    Indeed: who did not know Guildford, that practised diplomat, that most studied of courtiers? A man of the king’s own age, he had been Henry’s right arm since he came to the throne, he an unpractised, well-meaning, optimistic prince of nineteen. Two glowing spirits, earnest in pursuit of glory and a good time, the master and servant had aged together. You would have backed Guildford to survive an earthquake; but he did not survive Anne Boleyn. His partisanship was clear: he loved Queen Katherine and said so. (And if I did not love her, he said, then propriety alone, and my Christian conscience, would compel me to back her case.) The king had excused him out of long friendship; only let us, he had pleaded, leave the matter unmentioned, the disagreement unstated. Do not mention Anne Boleyn. Make it possible for us to stay friends.
    But silence had not been enough for Anne. The day I am queen, she had told Guildford, is the day you lose your job.
    Madam, said Sir Henry Guildford: the day you become queen, is the day I resign.
    And so he did. Henry said: Come on, man! Don’t let a woman nag you out of your post! It’s just women’s jealousy and spite, ignore it.
    But I fear for myself, Guildford said. For my family and my name.
    Do not abandon me, said the king.
    Blame your new wife, Henry Guildford said.
    And so he quit the court. And went home to the country. ‘And died,’ says William Fitzwilliam, ‘within a few short months. They say, of a broken heart.’
    A sigh runs around the table. That’s the way it takes men; life’s work over, rural ennui stretching ahead: a procession of days, Sunday to Sunday, all without shape. What is there, without Henry? Without the radiance of his smile? It’s like perpetual November, a life in the dark.
    ‘Wherefore we remember him,’ Sir Nicholas Carew says. ‘Our old friend. And we drink a toast – Paulet here does not mind – to the man who