Barnes rolls his eyes. ‘You send me out naked. If you want allies, you must offer something in return.’
It is more than five years since the German princes formed a league, which they call the Schmalkald League, to defend themselves against the Emperor, who is their overlord. As England needs friends, people to stand with her against the Pope, who better than these princes? Like Henry, they have offered to lead their subjects out of darkness. If an evangelical alliance were also a diplomatic alliance, there is a chance of a new Europe, with new rules. But for now we are still playing by the old ones: setting France against Emperor, one great power against the other, seeing our safety only in their disputes, trembling whenever they come into amity; sneakily trying to disrupt their treaties and stir up mistrust, and bending our efforts to provoke, belie and betray. It is not work for a great nation. Barnes says, ‘It is up to you, my lord, to show the king how things could be different, and better.’
‘But he doesn’t like different!’ He is exasperated now. ‘I think, Rob, as we have been keeping the gospel alive in your absence, you must let us judge the best way to proceed.’
‘You talk as if I had been travelling for my own pleasure. It has all been on the king’s business, and a sad business it is. Folk in Germany believe we are living through the Last Days.’
‘They’ve been saying that for ten years or more. If you talk to Henry about the Last Days he thinks you’re threatening him. And that never does any good.’
It is difficult to be at ease, he thinks, with men who believe that, since the misunderstanding in Eden, we have had neither reason nor will of our own. ‘The king says if, as Luther holds, our only salvation comes through faith in Christ, who has elected some of us, not others, to life eternal, and if our works are so besmirched as to be entirely useless in God’s eyes, and cannot help us to salvation – then why should any man do charity to his neighbour?’
‘Works follow election,’ Barnes says. ‘They do not precede it. It is simple enough. The man who is saved will show it, by his Christian life.’
‘Do you think I am saved?’ he says. ‘I am covered in lamp black and my hands smell of coin, and when I see myself in a glass I see grime – I suppose that is the beginning of wisdom? About my fallen state, I have no choice but agree. I must meddle with matters that corrupt – it is my office. In the golden age the earth yielded all we required, but now we must dig for it, quarry it, blast it, we must drive the world, we must gear and grind it, roll and hammer and pulp it. There must be dinners cooked, Rob. There must be slates chalked, and ink set to page, and money made and bargains struck, and we must give the poor the means to work and eat. I bear in mind that there are cities abroad where the magistrates have done much good, with setting up hospitals, relieving the indigent, helping young tradesmen with loans to get a wife and a workshop. I know Luther turns his face from what ameliorates our sad condition. But citizens do not miss monks and their charity, if the city looks after them. And I believe, I do believe, that a man who serves the commonweal and does his duty gets a blessing for it, and I do not believe –’
He breaks off, before the magnitude of what he does not believe. ‘I sin,’ he says, ‘I repent, I lapse, I sin again, I repent and I look to Christ to perfect my imperfection. I cling to faith but I will not give up works. My master Wolsey taught me, try everything. Discard no possibility. Keep all channels open.’
‘You cite your cardinal? In these times?’
‘Admit it.’ He laughs. ‘You were terrified of him, Rob.’
Barnes leaves him. He looks downcast and is muttering about Dun Scotus. A worldly man, a clever man, but he is afraid to be in England now: as if she were Ultima Thule, where earth, air and water mix to form a jellied broth, and a night lasts six months, and the people dye themselves blue. There was a day, before Wolsey, when the princes of Europe no more regarded England than they regarded this soup-land, where they had never set foot. England bred sheep and sheep sustained it, but the women were said to be loose and the men bloody-minded; if they were not killing abroad, they were killing at home. The cardinal, out of his great ingenuity, had found some way to turn this reputation to use. He made his country count: he, with his guile and his well-placed bribes, his sorcerer’s wit and his conjurer’s wiles, his skills to make armies and bullion from thin air, to conjure weaponry from mist. I hold the balance, gentlemen, he would say: in any little war of yours, I may intervene, or not. The King of England has deep coffers, he would lie, and a race of warriors at his back: your Englishman is so martial in his character that he sleeps in harness, and every clerk has a broadsword at his side, and every scrivener will stick you with a penknife, and even the ploughman’s horse paws the ground.
