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February 27 - March 30, 2025
Heresy knows no borders, the Inquisitors declare. No traveller of any nation is exempt from our enquiries.
It’s always the wrong bits of the past people want back.
‘Oh, paper,’ Wyatt says. ‘I think it was not by a serpent, but by paper and ink that evil came into the world. Such lies are written of me, in and out of cipher,
He is able to read sighs, construe by contraries. His word is just what a diplomat’s word should be: as clear as glass and as unstable as water.
I urge you both, undertake no course without deep thought: but learn to think very fast.
Nothing will console him but theology.
God speaks to you as your father and mother spoke, as your nurse: and if you cannot read, others will read it for you, in this close, this loving, this familiar tongue.
King Arthur never occupied himself with such matters. In his day, castles repaired themselves, and all beggars were Christ in disguise.
‘Philip, when you go to see one of these ladies—French, Imperial, it is indifferent—you must seem, when you are ushered into her presence, to be silenced by utter astonishment. Your eyes must dart away from her, as if in panic; and then slowly, slowly—as if you hardly dare do it—you must raise your eyes to her face.’ ‘Yes, I see,’ Philip Hoby says. ‘And then, once again, you look away. But this time, as if it pained you to do it. Drop your gaze, Philip, and look at your boots, and make a heavy sigh.’
The sky has become a mirror, against which the sun moves: light without shadow, like the light at the beginning of the world.
he feels himself riding into nowhere, a blank, where only memory stirs. He thinks of those who he has known who have died by fire, as if they have fallen into the sun.
Francis is a mine of implication. His least word is a treasure trove of hints for the suspicious mind.
The grandees of England claim descent from emperors and angels. To them, Henry Tudor is the son of Welsh horse-thieves: a parvenu, a usurper, a man to whom oaths may be broken.
Hot as a devil’s fart, word rattled around Europe that the knave was a martyr for our Holy Mother Church, whereas really he was a martyr for his own pride. Within two years the Pope made him a saint.
There is no record that the four knights cut off Becket’s head. His admirers did that, later.
‘Look,’ he says to Rafe: he hands over Bonner’s letter. What caterpillars these men be, who digest all before them, who fatten on the king’s favour, who bite jagged holes in the commonwealth. They cocoon in dusty corners; one day they will split their casing and emerge in gaudy, flaunting their Roman vestments.
Printers can read as if through a mirror.
A heap of ashes may be eloquent.’
There is a pure, clean world, where men subsist on milk and apples, and bread so white and soft it is like eating light.
I took up residence in the pit of his stomach. What do I ever do?
The Venetians, you know, they draw a line on their ships to see that they don’t overload them. I have no load line. Or none that the king can see.’
We shall be unruly women, with no master.’
He thinks, if it could be held that Katherine of Aragon was no wife, if it could be held that Anne Boleyn was no wife, might it not be discovered that Margaret Vernon was no nun? Could we not find an error in the paperwork? Then she would be free.
They are down, the great families, falling like skittles when a giant bowls; swept from the shelves like jugs in an earthquake.
‘The light of Christ leads us to some murky places.’
‘Have you ever seen a hawk keep killing, when the prey is dead?’
Dead men are at work. Their cause is not lost. They labour on, screened from us by smoke.
If Henry is the mirror, he is the pale actor who sheds no lustre of his own, but spins in a reflected light. If the light moves he is gone.
He sands his paper. Puts down his pen.
Our law of treason is capacious. It encompasses words and bad intentions. We let More bring himself down that way, we let the Boleyns do it. Is a man a victim, who walks onto a knife? Are you innocent, if you set up the damage for yourself?
Now church bells are cast into cannon, ploughshares beaten into swords, the cross of Christ becomes a bludgeon, a club to beat out the brains of the opposition. What’s ink in Whitehall is blood in the borderlands, what’s a quibble in the law courts is a stabbing in the streets. Mild monkish blessings are turned to curses, and the giggling of courtiers tails off into an uneasy hush. Each man is watching the other, for signs of treason, signs of weakness. You cannot greet the world in the morning with anything less than ferocity, or by evening you will be destroyed.
As the king’s doctors remark, the ailments of great men have too little credit, when their lives are passed in view. They inherit thrones, but so much else.
‘I have often pitied you, Cremuel,’ Chapuys says. ‘Henry is a man of great endowments, lacking only consistency, reason and sense. But at least you can meet him face to face. You can see what he makes of what you are telling him. With my master at such a distance, I always fear I will be misunderstood. Or that those who have the good fortune to come into the Emperor’s presence will exercise the art of interpretation against me.
as they say the home of the Virgin Mary flew to Italy, and rebuilt itself among people who appreciate it.
When he was a boy in Putney he used to pick up coins from the mud of the foreshore. They were thin and worn and bore the features of monarchs almost erased. You could not spend the money; it was not even good to clink in your hand. All you could do was put it in a box and wonder about it. If so many coins are washed up, how many does the river conceal, in its channels and deeps? A treasury of princes, squinting up at the hazy light, each with a spoiled single eye, like Francis Bryan.
If kings do not see you they forget you.
‘Our rulers count up our derelictions,’ he says. ‘They may say nothing, but they keep a secret book.’
Bishops and cardinals slay each other, and humble men suffer for their crimes.
Since the snake bit him, something of its nature had entered his blood, and he could lie coiled till needed.
Italy keeps its secrets.
Anna by that name, not use Anne. But women are to be named and renamed, it is their nature, and they have no country of their own; they go where their husbands take them, where their father and brothers send them.
such ventures cost too much, and one never knows the final bill.’
Lead cross, crystal cross, Isle of Avalon: they wrung out the pennies from the credulous and awed. Some say Jesus himself trod this ground, a bruit that the townsfolk encourage: at St George’s Inn they have an imprint of Christ’s foot, and for a fee you can trace around it and take the paper home. They claim that, after the crucifixion, Joseph of Arimathea turned up, with the Holy Grail in his baggage. He brought a relic of Mount Calvary itself, part of the hole in which the foot of the cross was placed.
sink from man’s sight, with your muddles and your mistranscriptions, with the shaking of your flaky fingerbones and the compound jumble of your skulls.
Inheritance is a strange thing. No one knows what traces our fathers leave.
It is not written that great men shall be happy men. It is nowhere recorded that the rewards of public office include a quiet mind.
Can you make a new England? You can write a new story. You can write new texts and destroy the old ones, set the torn leaves of Duns Scotus sailing about the quadrangles, and place the gospels in every church. You can write on England, but what was written before keeps showing through, inscribed on the rocks and carried on floodwater, surfacing from deep cold wells. It’s not just the saints and martyrs who claim the country, it’s those who came before them: the dwarves dug into ditches, the sprites who sing in the breeze, the demons bricked into culverts and buried under bridges; the bones
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When the council meets they should, he feels, put down sand to soak up the blood. It is like the champ clos for a tournament, sturdily fenced to stop the spectators getting in or the combatants getting out. The king stands in a watchtower, judging every move.
Manuals of advice tell us you should fear weak men more than strong men. But we are all weak, in the presence of the king. Even Thomas Wyatt, who can face down a lion.
‘I hear he took your blessing. You could see the marks.’
