‘That is Hippocrates,’ Henry says. ‘He tells us, life is short and our task so great that we will die before we can …’
The king breaks off. It is an offence for his subjects to speculate about his death or predict it, but it is not an offence for him to speak of it himself; yet he looks chary, as if he thinks it should be. ‘“Life is short and art is long, the opportunity sudden and fleeting: experiment dangerous, judgement difficult.” I think I have the sense of it.’
He bows. ‘I am the better instructed, sir.’
Daily, daily, one must practise the courtier’s art, and nightly, the art of governance: and never get it right. Chaucer says it in our own English tongue. ‘The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.’
Just before 5 a.m. on Monday, 13 November, the merchant Robert Packington, a member of Parliament, leaves his house in the City of London to attend early Mass. A thick mist blankets the streets around Cheapside, and bells are ringing from all the parishes nearby. As Packington crosses towards the church of St Thomas of Acon, he falls to the ground. Some day-labourers, gathered on Soper’s Lane waiting for hire, will claim to have heard a boom, a blast, a crack, or a soft detonation like a giant’s fist punching a cushion.
Other churchgoers are close behind. They sprint towards the fallen man, shouting, and the labourers shout too, and the noise brings the neighbours into the street, lanterns in their hands, nightcaps on their heads, faces gaping, blankets thrown over their shoulders. By the time they reach Packington he is dead. Looming out of the mist, a woman screams, ‘Help! Murder!’ Men run for the watch.
A crowd gathers. Packington is recognised: he is well-known in the Mercers’ Company and one of our chief citizens. A surgeon arrives, and identifies the wound as a gunshot wound. No one saw the assailant.
Before seven o’clock he, Lord Cromwell, is under siege at Austin Friars. I can tell you nothing, he says, shouldering through the crowd of guildsmen; I just want witnesses. Where did the attacker come from? In what direction go? And how, in so thick a mist, did he pick out Packington? Because we suppose Packington was his target – you do not crack at random at good men going to Mass.
‘Fetch Stephen Vaughan,’ he says. He has brought his trusted friend over, to keep an eye on the Mint, and he is the man for this business, as for all business requiring sternness and a quick eye; and he has known Packington for years. The coroner comes down with his clerks. The news is broken to the dead man’s brothers. The Lord Mayor puts up a reward for information. Packington’s friends add to it. Meanwhile the labourers have carried the body back to the dead man’s house, and someone has paid them to scrub the blood away. Packington cannot have known he was shot. The surgeon says he would have felt nothing, unless the sensation of flying as West Cheap came up to meet him. He would have been dead before he could say a Pater Noster.
No one saw a strange man in the street. No one saw fire in the murk – as it might be, the match-flare for an arquebus. No one was seen carrying a parcel or wrapping, that could have disguised an arquebus. It seems possible a pistol was employed, that a man could carry in his coat and fire with one hand; moreover, a wheel-lock device, which needs no flare. There are few such weapons in London. Some countries have banned them, but that does not weigh with felons. If the pistol is still with its owner, it convicts him. If it was hidden, it will soon be found. Unless, of course, it’s at the bottom of the river: in which case he is not just a whoreson, but a whoreson with a rich paymaster, to toss such a weapon away.
Packington was a gospeller, he was a Bible man, these many years he has travelled between here and Flanders, not only on cloth business but on the business of scripture; he carried Testaments home, when it was death to do it. ‘He saw Tyndale just before –’ a mercer tells him, and he holds up a palm: ‘I cannot hear what you are telling me. If you met Tyndale yourself I must not know.’ I am your brother in Christ, he thinks, but I am also the king’s servant.
By noon he, the Lord Privy Seal, has visited Packington’s widow, a daughter of the Skinners’ Company. Rob had two stepchildren with her, and five of his own from his first marriage; the city wants to know who will make decisions for them. Chief Justice Baldwin, father of Robert’s first wife, steps forward as their guardian. ‘Guard yourself, Cromwell,’ the judge tells him. ‘I doubt not this killer has stalked you and you have never seen him.’
‘What remedy?’ he says.
‘Body armour?’ Baldwin says.
