‘Give me that!’ Truth comes at him again. He grips a handful of the lover’s jacket and dumps him down on a stool.
‘Do what they will, and do their worst,
For all they do is vanity,
For asunder my heart shall burst,
Surer than change my fantasy.’
He passes the paper back to Avery. ‘By her “foe”, do you think she means me? I hope not, considering I saved her life. She told me she was done with you, my lord, but it seems not.’
Lord Thomas jumps up. He is ready for him. Again he puts him down. ‘Wait – I have also a verse from you to her.
‘Thus fare ye well, my wordly treasure,
Desiring God that, of his grace,
To send in time his will and pleasure,
And shortly to get us out of this place.’
He raises an eyebrow. ‘Are you going somewhere?’
Truth is winded. That was a hard dunt in the belly.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘let us say you simply wanted a rhyme.’
‘The king should release me.’ Truth rearranges himself, his crumpled person. ‘As matters stand in the north, he needs every man.’
‘Every man he can trust.’
‘The Yorkshiremen have you on the run. Their abbots will curse you.’
‘Curses with me have none effect, because I give them no credit. They may curse till they combust.’
Truth says, ‘My brother Norfolk will speak for me to the king.’
‘I think the duke has forgot you. He is busy with the rebels. Not fighting. Bargaining.’
‘Is he?’ Truth looks mortified.
‘We are outnumbered in the field. He has no choice but to give way.’
‘He will not keep promises to low men,’ Truth says. ‘He will not be bound. No more will the king be bound to you, Cromwell. The harder you try to bind him by your deeds, the more he will detest you. I pity you, for there is no way forward for you. He will hate you for your successes as much as your failures.’
Truth has done some thinking, while he has been locked away. He says, ‘I make sure that my successes are the king’s, while my failures are my own.’
‘But you cannot do without the Howards,’ Tom Truth says. ‘You cannot rule without noble blood. And my brother Norfolk would rather fight in an honourable contest –’
He interrupts him: ‘Honour is a luxury, when someone is trying in earnest to kill you. Your brother knows that. As for you, your bad verse will choke you. I need not lift a finger. There are some prisoners I forbid to have paper. I might forbid you. For your own good, of course.’
He gets up. Avery steps out of his way. At the door a spirit jumps up and intercepts him: George Boleyn, arms gripping him, head heavy on his shoulder, tears seeping into his linen and leaving a residual salt damp that lasts till he can change his shirt.
By the first week of December, any sympathy for the rebels – sympathy which he has retained, for their ignorance – has melted away. Their communications from the peace talks are vomitous torrents of insult and threat. The commanders are obliged to exclude Richard Cromwell from the sessions, as the rebels will not sit down with him. All Cromwells, they declare, should be killed or banished. Parliament has no authority to dissolve abbeys – and it is not a real parliament anyway, because it is packed with the king’s sycophants and elbow-hangers.
All this – and yet they expect a general pardon. They will get it, because their numbers are so great, even though they do not spare the king himself, reminding him that a prince who rules without virtue can be deposed, and they do not find any virtue in his adherence to Cromwell. They mention Edward II, Richard II: kings murdered by their own subjects, because they kept favourites, persons of high ambition and low morals. To compare Lord Cromwell, as they do, to Piers Gaveston … when their jibes are read out, certain councillors bite their lips, others turn their faces away. Because you would not feel it safe to laugh, if you had seen the king’s white face.
Richard Riche says privately, perhaps it is an argument why the king should show himself to his subjects in the north. They would soon perceive he is not the sort of man who keeps a catamite. And that, even if he were, he would not so use the Lord Privy Seal.
He says, it is not for any unnatural vice that the people hated Gaveston: it was because he was base-born, and the king made him an earl. It was because the king made him rich, and he went in silks. But then, he was not English-born: that weighed too, with the ignorant.
Do not mock Ricardo Riche. At least, not to his face. He has stood up well to the hatred directed at him in recent weeks. He understands that there are sins that governors may, perhaps must, commit. The commandments for a prince are not the same as those that govern his subjects. He must lie for his country’s good. We do not need a translation from the Italian, to understand that.
The rebels call him, Lord Cromwell, a Lollard. It is a term almost antique, though when he was young, men and women were burned for it. He hears a woman’s voice in the air, on a breeze blown from his childhood: ‘A Loller, that’s one who says the God on the altar is a piece of bread.’
