Anne of Cleves gives the king an heir and is divorced. Papists and heretics writhe in the flames of their own conviction. The king’s mercy is seen as being granted an easy death – the axe as opposed to the long agony of burning at the stake.
All live within the close ambit of their own mortality.
There are the foul intrigues of the nobility, as careless of their adversaries as they are of the common peopleĬourtiers jostle for power, ladies intrigue. A queen’s blood on the Tower of London flagstones is of little consequence. The engendering of sons is the engendering of nation and primogeniture drives lordship. Kings inherit the sins of their forebears and pass them on at birth to their offspring. Henry grasps kingship, embodies it, what is grotesque in it, what is glorious. But courtiers whisper behind their hands about his ability to sire an heir. He puts on a masque for Anne of Cleves, hangs over his child bride dressed as a bear in all his age and grossness.Ī king must overwhelm. He is fickle, magisterial, he quizzes scholars on points of canon law, demands the rack for traitors, discards wives and advisers. There is “a residual foulness in the bone”. Henry is plagued by cankers and leg sores. Or perhaps he can do no other, swapping the sovereignty of his father’s fists for the service of a tyrant.Įverything focuses on the body of the king. Perhaps he sets in place his own vision of England – pragmatic, just when he can be, expedient and ruthless when he must. They lust for power, wealth, position, but it is hard to know what Cromwell wants. The great families, the Howards and Boleyns, despise him or at least despise their need of him. He is a commoner among nobility at court. As he consolidates the king’s confidence his thought circles back to those early chapters of Wolf Hall, the first meeting with the 15-year-old Thomas, beaten to a pulp by his father in the filth of a Putney midden. He intrigues with ambassadors, hands out benefices and taxes farms. Thomas Cromwell is the second most powerful man in the kingdom. Her real transgression is her failure to bear King Henry VIII’s heir, a betrayal in the flesh as grievous as as any heretic plot. Too slight to bear the weight of accusation of incest with her dead brother George, or of cuckolding the king with five others who await execution in the Tower of London.
Her ladies lose their footing in her viscera as they carry the corpse to the chest and place her head by the feet. Anne Boleyn’s body is so slight that an elm arrow chest will suffice for a coffin.
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