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and broken its spine, they toss it into their travelling crates. Cavendish flinches: ‘For God's sake, gentlemen, line those chests with a double thickness of cambric. Would you shred the fine work that has taken nuns a lifetime?’ He turns: ‘Master Cromwell, do you think we can get these people out before dark?’

      ‘Only if we help them. If it's got to be done, we can make sure they do it properly.’

      This is an indecent spectacle: the man who has ruled England, reduced. They have brought out bolts of fine holland, velvets and grosgrain, sarcenet and taffeta, scarlet by the yard: the scarlet silk in which he braves the summer heat of London, the crimson brocades that keep his blood warm when snow falls on Westminster and whisks in sleety eddies over the Thames. In public the cardinal wears red, just red, but in various weights, various weaves, various degrees of pigment and dye, but all of them the best of their kind, the best reds to be got for money. There have been days when, swaggering out, he would say, ‘Right, Master Cromwell, price me by the yard!’

      And he would say, ‘Let me see,’ and walk slowly around the cardinal; and saying ‘May I?’ he would pinch a sleeve between an expert forefinger and thumb; and standing back, he would view him, to estimate his girth – year on year, the cardinal expands – and so come up with a figure. The cardinal would clap his hands, delighted. ‘Let the begrudgers behold us! On, on, on.’ His procession would form up, his silver crosses, his sergeants-at-arms with their axes of gilt: for the cardinal went nowhere, in public, without a procession.

      So day by day, at his request and to amuse him, he would put a value on his master. Now the king has sent an army of clerks to do it. But he would like to take away their pens by force and write across their inventories: Thomas Wolsey is a man beyond price.

      ‘Now, Thomas,’ the cardinal says, patting him. ‘Everything I have, I have from the king. The king gave it to me, and if it pleases him to take York Place fully furnished, I am sure we own other houses, we have other roofs to shelter under. This is not Putney, you know.’ The cardinal holds on to him. ‘So I forbid you to hit anyone.’ He affects to be pressing his arms by his sides, in smiling restraint. The cardinal's fingers tremble.

      The treasurer Gascoigne comes in and says, ‘I hear Your Grace is to go straight to the Tower.’

      ‘Do you?’ he says. ‘Where did you hear that?’

      ‘Sir William Gascoigne,’ the cardinal says, measuring out his name, ‘what do you suppose I have done that would make the king want to send me to the Tower?’

      ‘It's like you,’ he says to Gascoigne, ‘to spread every story you're told. Is that all the comfort you've got to offer – walk in here with evil rumours? Nobody's going to the Tower. We're going’ – and the household waits, breath held, as he improvises – ‘to Esher. And your job,’ he can't help giving Gascoigne a little shove in the chest, ‘is to keep an eye on all these strangers and see that everything that's taken out of here gets where it's meant to go, and that nothing goes missing by the way, because if it does you'll be beating on the gates of the Tower and begging them to take you in, to get away from me.’

      Various noises: mainly, from the back of the room, a sort of stifled cheer. It's hard to escape the feeling that this is a play, and the cardinal is in it: the Cardinal and his Attendants. And that it is a tragedy.

      Cavendish tugs at him, anxious, sweating. ‘But Master Cromwell, the house at Esher is an empty house, we haven't a pot, we haven't a knife or a spit, where will my lord cardinal sleep, I doubt we have a bed aired, we have neither linen nor firewood nor … and how are we going to get there?’

      ‘Sir William,’ the cardinal says to Gascoigne, ‘take no offence from Master Cromwell, who is, upon the occasion, blunt to a fault; but take what is said to heart. Since everything I have proceeds from the king, everything must be delivered back in good order.’ He turns away, his lips twitching. Except when he teased the dukes yesterday, he hasn't smiled in a month. ‘Tom,’ he says, ‘I've spent years teaching you not to talk like that.’

      Cavendish says to him, ‘They haven't seized my lord cardinal's barge yet. Nor his horses.’

      ‘No?’ He lays a hand on Cavendish's shoulder: ‘We go upriver, as many as the barge will take. Horses can meet us at – at Putney, in fact – and then we will … borrow things. Come on, George Cavendish, exercise some ingenuity, we've done more difficult things in these last years than get the household to Esher.’

      Is this true? He's never taken much notice of Cavendish, a sensitive sort of man who talks a lot about table napkins. But he's trying to think of a way to put some military backbone into him, and the best way lies in suggesting that they are brothers from some old campaign.

      ‘Yes, yes,’ Cavendish says, ‘we'll order up the barge.’

      Good, he says, and the cardinal says, Putney? and he tries to laugh. He says, well, Thomas, you told Gascoigne, you did; there's something about that man I never have liked, and he says, why did you keep him then? and the cardinal says, oh, well, one does, and again the cardinal says, Putney, eh?

      He says, ‘Whatever we face at journey's end, we shall not forget how nine years ago, for the meeting of two kings, Your Grace created a golden city in some sad damp fields in Picardy. Since then, Your Grace has only increased in wisdom and the king's esteem.’

      He is speaking for everyone to hear; and he thinks, that occasion was about peace, notionally, whereas this occasion, we don't know what this is, it is the first day of a long or a short campaign; we had better dig in and hope our supply lines hold. ‘I think we will manage to find some fire irons and soup kettles and whatever else George Cavendish thinks we can't do without. When I remember that Your Grace provisioned the king's great armies, that went to fight in France.’

      ‘Yes,’ the cardinal says, ‘and we all know what you thought about our campaigns, Thomas.’

      Cavendish says, ‘What?’ and the cardinal says, ‘George, don't you call to mind what my man Cromwell said in the House of Commons, was it five years past, when we wanted a subsidy for the new war?’

      ‘But he spoke against Your Grace!’

      Gascoigne – who hangs doggedly to this conversation – says, ‘You didn't advance yourself there, master, speaking against the king and my lord cardinal, because I do remember your speech, and I assure you so will others, and you bought yourself no favours there, Cromwell.’

      He shrugs. ‘I didn't mean to buy favour. We're not all like you, Gascoigne. I wanted the Commons to take some lessons from the last time. To cast their minds back.’

      ‘You said we'd lose.’

      ‘I said we'd be bankrupted. But I tell you, all our wars would have ended much worse without my lord cardinal to supply them.’

      ‘In the year 1523 –’ Gascoigne says.

      ‘Must we refight this now?’ says the cardinal.

      ‘– the Duke of Suffolk was only fifty miles from Paris.’

      ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘and do you know what fifty miles is, to a half-starved infantryman in winter, when he sleeps on wet ground and wakes up cold? Do you know what fifty miles is to a baggage train, with carts up to the axles in mud? And as for the glories of 1513 – God defend us.’

      ‘Tournai! Thérouanne!’ Gascoigne shouts. ‘Are you blind to what occurred? Two French towns taken! The king so valiant in the field!’

      If we were in the field now, he thinks, I'd spit at your feet. ‘If you like the king so much, go and work for him. Or do you already?’

      The cardinal clears his throat softly. ‘We all do,’ Cavendish says, and the cardinal says, ‘Thomas, we are the works of his hand.’

      When they get out to the cardinal's barge his flags are flying: the Tudor rose, the Cornish choughs. Cavendish says, wide-eyed, ‘Look at all these little boats, waffeting up and down.’ For a moment, the cardinal thinks the Londoners have turned out to wish him well. But

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