At Windsor, the king picks through his Italian songbook. The autumn rain beats at the glass. Dead leaves whisk through the air.
The king says, ‘Where is Thomas Wyatt?’
‘In Kent, sir. Raising his tenants.’
‘How many can he fetch?’
‘A hundred and fifty. Perhaps two hundred.’
‘How is Sir Henry Wyatt?’
‘Dying, sir.’
‘Will he leave me anything?’
‘His son, sir. Begging as his last request that you will favour him.’
Tom Wyatt: his ardour, his faith, his verse.
The king says, ‘Will Lord Montague bring his people to the muster?’
‘He needs only a day’s warning, sir.’ He thinks, it will be interesting to see if he takes the field himself.
‘Where is his brother Reginald?’
‘Just left Venice.’
‘For?’ The king finishes his thought. ‘Perhaps for Rome. In Rome they will be triumphing over me now.
‘
‘Io non trovo arma forte
Che vetar possa morte …’
What weapon is strong enough, to shield me from death? He leafs through the manuscript, which is illuminated with larkspur, vine leaves and leaping hares. ‘
Five wounds. Wife. Children. Master. Dorothea with her needle, straight between his ribs. One withheld? A man might survive them if they were evenly spaced, and he knew the direction from which they would come.
The king says, ‘How many can Edward Seymour turn out?’
‘Two hundred, sir.’
‘And the Courtenays? My lord Exeter?’
‘Five hundred, sir.’
‘Richard Riche?’
‘Forty.’
‘Forty,’ the king says. ‘He is only a lawyer, of course.’
‘I have ordered every coastal district to keep a strait watch for alien ships.’
The king plucks his lute string. ‘
Prophets – and we are awash with them, though their better forecasts are made after the event – have assured us that this year the waters of Albion will run with blood. When he closes his eyes he can see the flow: not a river tumbling and bursting its banks, not a torrent roaring over stones, but a channel that is oily, crimson, a narrow slick rivulet, boiling beneath its surface: a slow, seeping, unstoppable flood.
In Yorkshire they sing that old complaint from John Ball’s day:
Now pride reigns in every place, and greed not shy to show its face,
And lechery with never shame, and gluttony with never blame.
Envy reigns with reason, and sloth is ever in season.
God help us for now is the time.
III
Vile Blood
Aske: he is a petty gentleman, but the king places him at once – second cousin to Harry Percy, and kin to the Cliffords of Skipton Castle. Mr Wriothesley, newly attuned to the king’s mind, marvels at Henry’s knowledge of obscure family ties. In calling the process of the rebels a pilgrimage, Aske lends it the colour of piety. The aim of the Pilgrims, at divers times stated, is to have vile blood drained from the king’s council, and the nobility of England set up again; to have Christ’s laws kept, and restitution for injuries (as they call them) done to the church. Aske enforces an oath on those who come in his path.
He knows Robert Aske – to nod to, anyway. He is a member of Gray’s Inn, sometimes in London on business for the Percy family. Being a lawyer, Aske cannot claim ignorance. He is aware it is a gross presumption to offer oaths in the name of the king. And he must foresee – for he must be acquainted with the chronicles – what the end will be: how rank the puddle in which he swims and will one day sink.
We have all grown up on tales of Jack Straw and John Amend-All – those brave days when the commons marched on London and killed the judges and foreigners. They pissed in rich men’s beds, tore up their poetry books, and used altar cloths to wipe their arses. Their leaders were mean clerks and spoiled priests, Straw and Miller and Carter and Tyler, none of whom went by their right names; as for Amend-All, he is immortal, a self-made man green as spring, who noses up from his common grave whenever mutiny stirs. These rebels wrecked palaces and stormed the Tower of London itself. They smashed whatever they could find to smash – there were not so many mirrors in those days. On Cheapside they set a chopping block, and demanded the heads of fifteen of the king’s councillors, including the Lord Privy Seal. If they could not catch the men they were hunting, they hung up their coats instead and shot them with arrows.
