Bring Up the Bodies - Hilary Mantel

Bring Up the Bodies

by Hilary Mantel

Cast of Characters

THOMAS CROMWELL, a blacksmiths son: now Secretary to the King, Master of the Rolls, Chancellor of Cambridge University, and deputy to the king as head of the church in England.

GREGORY CROMWELL, his son.

RICHARD CROMWELL, his nephew.

RAFE SADLER, his chief clerk, brought up by Cromwell as his son.

HELEN, RAFES beautiful wife.

THOMAS AVERY, the household accountant.

THURSTON, his master cook.

CHRISTOPHE, a servant.

DICK PURSER, keeper of the watchdogs.

ANTHONY, a jester.

THOMAS WOLSEY, cardinal, papal legate, Lord Chancellor: dismissed from office, arrested and died, 1530.

JOHN FISHER, Bishop of Rochester: executed 1535.

THOMAS MORE, Lord Chancellor after Wolsey: executed 1535.

ELIZABETH, ANNE AND GRACE CROMWELL: Thomas Cromwells wife and daughters, died 152728: also Katherine Williams and Elizabeth Wellyfed, his sisters.

HENRY VIII.

ANNE BOLEYN, his second wife.

ELIZABETH, Annes infant daughter, heir to the throne.

HENRY FITZROY, Duke of Richmond, the kings illegitimate son.

KATHERINE OF ARAGON, Henrys first wife, divorced and under house arrest at Kimbolton.

MARY, Henrys daughter by Katherine and the alternative heir to the throne: also under house arrest.

MARIA DE SALINAS, a former lady-in-waiting to Katherine of Aragon.

SIR EDMUND BEDINGFIELD, Katherines keeper.

GRACE, his wife.

THOMAS HOWARD, Duke of Norfolk, uncle to the queen: ferocious senior peer and an enemy of Cromwell.

HENRY HOWARD, Earl of Surrey, his young son.

THOMAS BOLEYN, Earl of Wiltshire, the queens father: Monseigneur.

GEORGE BOLEYN, Lord Rochford, the queens brother.

JANE, Lady Rochford, Georges wife.

MARY SHELTON, the queens cousin.

And offstage: MARY BOLEYN, the queens sister, now married and living in the country, but formerly the kings mistress.

OLD SIR JOHN, notorious for having had an affair with his daughter-in-law.

LADY MARGERY, his wife.

EDWARD SEYMOUR, his eldest son.

THOMAS SEYMOUR, a younger son.

JANE SEYMOUR, his daughter, lady-in-waiting to both Henrys queens.

BESS SEYMOUR, her sister, married to Sir Anthony Oughtred, Governor of Jersey: then widowed.

CHARLES BRANDON, Duke of Suffolk: widower of Henry VIIIs sister Mary: a peer of limited intellect.

THOMAS WYATT, a gentleman of unlimited intellect: Cromwells friend: widely suspected of being a lover of Anne Boleyn.

HARRY PERCY, Earl of Northumberland: a sick and indebted young nobleman, once betrothed to Anne Boleyn.

FRANCIS BRYAN, the Vicar of Hell, related to both the Boleyns and the Seymours.

NICHOLAS CAREW, Master of the Horse: an enemy of the Boleyns.

WILLIAM FITZWILLIAM, Master Treasurer, also an enemy of the Boleyns.

HENRY NORRIS, known as gentle Norris, chief of the kings privy chamber.

FRANCIS WESTON, a reckless and extravagant young gentleman.

WILLIAM BRERETON, a hard-nosed and quarrelsome older gentleman.

MARK SMEATON, a suspiciously well-dressed musician.

ELIZABETH, Lady Worcester, a lady-in-waiting to Anne Boleyn.

HANS HOLBEIN, painter.

THOMAS CRANMER, Archbishop of Canterbury: Cromwells friend.

STEPHEN GARDINER, Bishop of Winchester: Cromwells enemy.

RICHARD SAMPSON, legal adviser to the king in his matrimonial affairs.

THOMAS WRIOTHESLEY, known as Call-Me-Risley, Clerk of the Signet.

RICHARD RICHE, Solicitor General.

THOMAS AUDLEY, Lord Chancellor.

EUSTACHE CHAPUYS, ambassador of Emperor Charles V.

JEAN DE DINTEVILLE, a French envoy.

HUMPHREY MONMOUTH, wealthy merchant, friend of Cromwell and evangelical sympathiser: patron of William Tyndale, the Bible translator, now in prison in the Low Countries.

ROBERT PACKINGTON: a merchant of similar sympathies.

STEPHEN VAUGHAN, a merchant at Antwerp, friend and agent of Cromwell.

MARGARET POLE, niece of King Edward IV, supporter of Katherine of Aragon and the princess Mary.

HENRY, Lord Montague, her son.

HENRY COURTENAY, Marquis of Exeter.

GERTRUDE, his ambitious wife.

SIR WILLIAM KINGSTON, the constable.

LADY KINGSTON, his wife.

EDMUND WALSINGHAM, his deputy.

LADY SHELTON, aunt of Anne Boleyn.

A French executioner.

Family Trees

Part One

I.

Falcons.

Wolf Hall, Wiltshire: September 1535

His children are falling from the sky. He watches from horseback, acres of England stretching behind him; they drop, gilt-winged, each with a blood-filled gaze. Grace Cromwell hovers in thin air. She is silent when she takes her prey, silent as she glides to his fist. But the sounds she makes then, the rustle of feathers and the creak, the sigh and riffle of pinion, the small cluck-cluck from her throat, these are sounds of recognition, intimate, daughterly, almost disapproving. Her breast is gore-streaked and flesh clings to her claws.

Later, Henry will say, Your girls flew well today. The hawk Anne Cromwell bounces on the glove of Rafe Sadler, who rides by the king in easy conversation. They are tired; the sun is declining, and they ride back to Wolf Hall with the reins slack on the necks of their mounts. Tomorrow his wife and two sisters will go out. These dead women, their bones long sunk in London clay, are now transmigrated. Weightless, they glide on the upper currents of the air. They pity no one. They answer to no one. Their lives are simple. When they look down they see nothing but their prey, and the borrowed plumes of the hunters: they see a flittering, flinching universe, a universe filled with their dinner.

All summer has been like this, a riot of dismemberment, fur and feather flying; the beating off and the whipping in of hounds, the coddling of tired horses, the nursing, by the gentlemen, of contusions, sprains and blisters. And for a few days at least, the sun has shone on Henry. Sometime before noon, clouds scudded in from the west and rain fell in big scented drops; but the sun re-emerged with a scorching heat, and now the sky is so clear you can see into Heaven and spy on what the saints are doing.

As they dismount, handing their horses to the grooms and waiting on the king, his mind is already moving to paperwork: to dispatches from Whitehall, galloped down by the post routes that are laid wherever the court shifts. At supper with the Seymours, he will defer to any stories his hosts wish to tell: to anything the king may venture, tousled and happy and amiable as he seems tonight. When the king has gone to bed, his working night will begin.

Though the day is over, Henry seems disinclined to go indoors. He stands looking about him, inhaling horse sweat, a broad, brick-red streak of sunburn across his forehead. Early in the day he lost his hat, so by custom all the hunting party were obliged to take off theirs. The king refused all offers of substitutes. As dusk steals over the woods and fields, servants will be out looking for the stir of the black plume against darkening grass, or the glint of his hunters badge, a gold St Hubert with sapphire eyes.

Already you can feel the autumn. You know there will not be many more days like these; so let us stand, the horseboys of Wolf Hall swarming around us, Wiltshire and the western counties stretching into a haze of blue; let us stand, the kings hand on his shoulder, Henrys face earnest as he talks his way back through the landscape of the day, the green copses and rushing streams, the alders by the waters edge, the early haze that lifted by nine; the brief shower, the small wind that died and settled; the stillness, the afternoon heat.

Sir, how are you not burned? Rafe Sadler demands. A redhead like the king, he has turned a mottled, freckled pink, and even his eyes look sore. He, Thomas Cromwell, shrugs; he hangs an arm around Rafes shoulders as they drift indoors. He went through the whole of Italy the battlefield as well as the shaded arena of the counting house without losing his London pallor. His ruffian childhood, the days on the river, the days in the fields: they left him as white as God made him. Cromwell has the skin of a lily, the king pronounces. The only particular in which he resembles that or any other blossom. Teasing him, they amble towards supper.

The king had left Whitehall the week of Thomas Mores death, a miserable dripping week in July, the hoof prints of the royal entourage sinking deep into the mud as they tacked their way across to Windsor. Since then the progress has taken in a swathe of the western counties; the Cromwell aides, having finished up the kings business at the London end, met up with the royal train in mid-August. The king and his companions sleep sound in new houses of rosy brick, in old houses whose fortifications have crumbled away or been pulled down, and in fantasy castles like toys, castles never capable of fortification, with walls a cannonball would punch in as if they were paper. England has enjoyed fifty years of peace. This is the Tudors covenant; peace is what they offer. Every household strives to put forward its best show for the king, and weve seen some panic-stricken plastering these last weeks, some speedy stonework, as his hosts hurry to display the Tudor rose beside their own devices. They search out and obliterate any trace of Katherine, the queen that was, smashing with hammers the pomegranates of Aragon, their splitting segments and their squashed and flying seeds. Instead if there is no time for carving the falcon of Anne Boleyn is crudely painted up on hatchments.

Hans has joined them on the progress, and made a drawing of Anne the queen, but it did not please her; how do you please her, these days? He has drawn Rafe Sadler, with his neat little beard and his set mouth, his fashionable hat a feathered disc balanced precariously on his cropped head. Made my nose very flat, Master Holbein, Rafe says, and Hans says, And how, Master Sadler, is it in my power to fix your nose?

He broke it as a child, he says, running at the ring. I picked him up myself from under the horses feet, and a sorry bundle he was, crying for his mother. He squeezes the boys shoulder. Now, Rafe, take heart. I think you look very handsome. Remember what Hans did to me.

Thomas Cromwell is now about fifty years old. He has a labourers body, stocky, useful, running to fat. He has black hair, greying now, and because of his pale impermeable skin, which seems designed to resist rain as well as sun, people sneer that his father was an Irishman, though really he was a brewer and a blacksmith at Putney, a shearsman too, a man with a finger in every pie, a scrapper and brawler, a drunk and a bully, a man often hauled before the justices for punching someone, for cheating someone. How the son of such a man has achieved his present eminence is a question all Europe asks. Some say he came up with the Boleyns, the queens family. Some say it was wholly through the late Cardinal Wolsey, his patron; Cromwell was in his confidence and made money for him and knew his secrets. Others say he haunts the company of sorcerers. He was out of the realm from boyhood, a hired soldier, a wool trader, a banker. No one knows where he has been and who he has met, and he is in no hurry to tell them. He never spares himself in the kings service, he knows his worth and merits and makes sure of his reward: offices, perquisites and title deeds, manor houses and farms. He has a way of getting his way, he has a method; he will charm a man or bribe him, coax him or threaten him, he will explain to a man where his true interests lie, and he will introduce that same man to aspects of himself he didnt know existed. Every day Master Secretary deals with grandees who, if they could, would destroy him with one vindictive swipe, as if he were a fly. Knowing this, he is distinguished by his courtesy, his calmness and his indefatigable attention to Englands business. He is not in the habit of explaining himself. He is not in the habit of discussing his successes. But whenever good fortune has called on him, he has been there, planted on the threshold, ready to fling open the door to her timid scratch on the wood.