Wolf Hall - Bring Up the Bodies

king, with news of the funeral arrangements.
    ‘I said to him, Majesty, you will bring the body to St Paul’s? He said, she can be laid to rest in Peterborough, Peterborough is an ancient and honourable place and it will cost less. I was astonished. I persisted, I said to him, these things are done by precedent. Your Majesty’s sister Mary, the Duke of Suffolk’s wife, was taken to Paul’s to lie in state. And do you not call Katherine your sister? And he said, ah but, my sister Mary was a royal lady, once married to the King of France.’ Wriothesley frowns. ‘And Katherine is not royal, he claims, though both her parents were sovereigns. The king said, she will have all she is entitled to as Dowager Princess of Wales. He said, where is the cloth of estate that was put over the hearse when Arthur died? It must be somewhere in the Wardrobe. It can be reused.’
    ‘That makes sense,’ he says. ‘The Prince of Wales’s feathers. There wouldn’t be time to weave a new one. Unless we keep her lingering above ground for it.’
    ‘It appears that she asked for five hundred masses for her soul,’ Wriothesley says. ‘But I was not about to tell Henry that, because from day to day one never knows what he believes. Anyway, the trumpets blew. And he marched off to Mass. And the queen with him. And she was smiling. And he had a new gold chain.’
    Wriothesley’s tone suggests he is curious: just that. It passes no judgement on Henry.
    ‘Well,’ he says, ‘if you’re dead, Peterborough is as good a place as any.’
    Richard Riche is up in Kimbolton taking an inventory, and has started a spat with Henry about Katherine’s effects; not that Riche loved the old queen, but he loves the law. Henry wants her plate and her furs, but Riche says, Majesty, if you were never married to her, she was a feme sole not a feme covert , if you were not her husband you have no right to lay hands on her property.
    He has been laughing over it. ‘Henry will get the furs,’ he says. ‘Riche will find the king a way around it, believe me. You know what she should have done? Bundled them up and given them to Chapuys. There’s a man who feels the chill.’
     
     
    A message comes, for Anne the queen from the Lady Mary, in reply to her kind offer to be a mother to her. Mary says she has lost the best mother in the world and has no need for a substitute. As for fellowship with her father’s concubine, she would not degrade herself. She would not hold hands with someone who has shaken paws with the devil.
    He says, ‘Perhaps the timing was awry. Perhaps she had heard of the dancing. And the yellow dress.’
    Mary says she will obey her father, so far as her honour and her conscience allow. But that is all she will do. She will not make any statement or take any oath that requires her to recognise that her mother was not married to her father, or to accept a child of Anne Boleyn as heir of England.
    Anne says, ‘How does she dare? Why does she even think she can negotiate? If my child is a boy, I know what will happen to her. She had better make her peace with her father now, not come crying to him for mercy when it is too late.’
    ‘It’s good advice,’ he says. ‘I doubt she will take it.’
    ‘Then I can do no more.’
    ‘I honestly think you cannot.’
    And he does not see what more he can do for Anne Boleyn. She is crowned, she is proclaimed, her name is written in the statutes, in the rolls: but if the people do not accept her as queen…
     
     
    Katherine’s funeral is planned for 29 January. The early bills are coming in, for the mourning attire and candles. The king continues elated. He is ordering up court entertainments. There is to be a tournament in the third week of the month and Gregory is down as a contestant. Already the boy is in a sweat of preparation. He keeps calling in his armourer, sending him off and calling him back again; changing his mind about his horse. ‘Father, I hope I am not drawn against the king,’ he says. ‘Not that I fear him. But it will be hard work, trying to remember it is him, and also trying to forget it is him, trying your best to get a touch but please God no more than a touch. Suppose I should have the bad luck to unhorse him? Can you imagine if he came down, and to a novice like me?’
    ‘I wouldn’t worry,’ he says. ‘Henry was jousting before you could walk.’
    ‘That’s the whole difficulty, sir. He is not as quick as he was. So the gentlemen say. Norris says,