The Concubine (17 page)

D
R. BUTTS HAD BEEN SUFFICIENTLY
sensitive to the atmosphere prevailing in London not to have bothered about any suggestions for the relief of Cardinal Campeggio’s gout. Something, it seemed, had gone wrong with the first interview between the King and the Italian, who thereafter had been treated with the exact amount of respect to which his rank and commission entitled him, but with no sign of favor. So, when Cardinal Wolsey and Cardinal Campeggio rode out on a bright September morning to go to Grafton where the King and the Lady were staying, Campeggio’s swollen hands still shrank from the touch of the reins, his feet from the pressure of the stirrups.

Horseriding was indeed so painful to him that he had tried using a litter, but the jolting had put his whole body in misery. There was only one comfortable means of transport for him, and that was by water. As he rode along, he reflected, without rancor, that had he given Henry the verdict he desired, the King would have taken pity on his wretched state and ridden back to London so that the formal leave-taking could have been performed at Greenwich or Westminster or Windsor, places all accessible by barge. In a covert kind of way Campeggio was being punished, and knew it, and conscious that he had merely carried out his orders, bore the misery with fortitude.

Wolsey, jogging alongside, envied Campeggio, who was going back to his master to report a job well done; who knew where he was going, and what kind of reception he would get; where, in fact, he stood. Wolsey knew none of these things. The last seventy days had been wretched beyond his fears; not on account of what had happened but because so little had.

Hour by hour, since leaving the hall in Blackfriars, Wolsey had expected to be summoned into the presence and denounced, scolded, raved at, punished. But once face-to-face with Henry he would, sooner or later, have been given an opportunity to state his case and to explain his reasons for siding, at the critical moment, with Campeggio. He had a good case, and his reasons were valid.

The King had sent no word. Wolsey’s messages, written and verbal, had been ignored. It was as though, for Henry, Wolsey had ceased to exist on that hot July day.

And not for Henry alone. Wolsey had made one attendance, in the usual manner, to his Court of Star Chamber and found it deserted save for officials and ushers. The empty space cried aloud that men no longer came to him for justice, no longer looked upon him as arbiter. Yet he was still in office, still held the Great Seal of England in its velvet bag. His ancient enemies, the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, had made one attempt to take it from him; they had arrived, late at night when he was abed, and demanded that he yield it up. He asked, as a matter of routine, to be shown the authority, direct from the King, which was the only thing which legally could oblige him to relinquish the Seal and was greatly surprised—because this was the kind of development which he had hourly expected—to find that they had none. He had then said, with that calm so often decried as insolence, that he had received the Seal from the King’s own hand, and could only deliver it to someone who brought an order for him to do so, signed by the King. They had gone, furious, away; and they had not come back. And so, on this September morning, though the King had ignored him for seventy days, he was still Chancellor of England and the Keeper of the Seal.

And he was on his way to see the King; on a necessary errand, the escorting of a visiting dignitary to his formal leave-taking.

When he thought of meeting Henry he had the old bother with his bumping heart and his breathing. It was a thing which few people in this cynical world would either believe or be able to understand, but he was, in reality, devoted to Henry in a way which had nothing to do with ambition or policy. He was twenty years older than his King, he had trained him in statecraft and taken great pride in his budding ability; to a large degree his feeling toward Henry was paternal, but their relationship was almost infinitely complicated, Henry being his King, his patron, his master, and his friend, as well as being, physically, the man Wolsey, or any other sensible man, would wish to be, and mentally an equal. They shared, too, a sense of style, a liking for ostentation, for the grand, generous gesture, and their love of England.

Their attitudes upon the latter point, were, Wolsey admitted to himself, subtly differentiated. What he himself had done at Blackfriars, un-English upon the face of it, was in the long run, and would be seen to be eventually, for England’s good. To have proceeded with the business and defied the Pope, would have been to divorce Henry from Catherine, certainly, but also to divorce England from Christendom and reduce her to the level of those wretched little German states which had gone over to Lutheranism.

And
, Wolsey said to himself, he had saved Henry from a disastrous marriage.

He was shrewd enough to have seen, long ago, that Mistress Anne Boleyn—Lady Anne Rochfort as they now called her—was different from any other woman in one thing only—her ability to say “no” and to go on saying it. And what did that prove? Merely that she had no true feeling for Henry and was as ambitious and self-seeking as her father and brother. And her uncle, Norfolk. Wolsey could see, in a way, what had happened to Henry; he’d accepted the challenge; for to a man who could command anything, a single repulse, such as any other man would dismiss with a shrug and the reflection that there were as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it, must be a challenge. And
fish
was a very apt word. She was cold as a fish. No normal woman, with warm human blood in her veins, could possibly have held out against such a wooing as the King had made to her all these years. She’d said “no” once and got a diamond bracelet or some other trinket, and with true Boleyn cunning she’d decided that by saying the same thing enough times she’d get the Crown.

And Wolsey did not
blame
Henry. He remembered his own youth, his hot pursuit of Joan Larke, his noncanonical marriage. It was something that got into men and rendered them not fully responsible; there’d been times when, had Joan Larke stipulated any fantastic conditions before admitting him to her bed, he would have moved heaven and earth to comply with them. He remembered, and remembering understood.

Maybe the exercise in the open air just at this briskening season had something to do with it, but whatever the reason, the optimism without which self-confidence is impossible began to rise in him anew. He reflected that had Henry intended to disgrace him publicly, he would hardly have waited seventy days, he’d have done it in the full flush of anger. It was just possible that the silence and the withdrawal had another cause. Henry might be having trouble with the Lady, who must have seen, by the result of the Blackfriars trial, that the road to the Crown was not as easy as maybe she had supposed. There’d been no public outcry, for one thing. The sycophants and the self-seekers had followed the King’s example in shunning Wolsey—that was only to be expected, but the ordinary common man of the London streets had accepted the advoking of the case to Rome without protest. He didn’t want Anne Boleyn for his Queen, and she would have to be very stupid not to realize it. She wasn’t stupid, Wolsey granted her that. She had indeed a very pretty wit which he acknowledged, even though it had occasionally been exercised at his expense. He had not forgotten his return from France, in the summer of 1527. During his absence she had returned to Court and been established in her anomalous position, neither wife nor mistress: and he, returning from a mission to a foreign country, had sent the formal message to the King, announcing his arrival and asking where he and the King should meet, so that he might make his report. The Lady had replied to the messenger, before the King should speak, “Where else should he come but where the King is?” And that was, of course, the actual true answer, though not couched in diplomatic words. Everybody had found it vastly amusing…

Wolsey pursued his own train of thought for some time, and then looked sideways at Campeggio. He didn’t like the man, and considered that his action at Blackfriars had been unfriendly, though proper enough, but they were still upon good, if not intimate terms. He might risk some plain speech now. So he edged his horse a little closer to Campeggio’s slow-paced mount, and said,

“When I come into the King’s presence it will be for the first time since the Court rose, as you know. I displeased him and he may be short with me. It would ease matters if I knew the answer to one question. You have the answer, or should do. Would His Holiness be more disposed to grant the annulment, when the case comes up in Rome, if His Grace were minded to take for his next wife some lady other than the Lady Anne?”

Campeggio said, after a small pause for thought,

“The case will be tried upon its merits. I am not a seer, nor am I conversant with His Holiness’s intentions; but I think it would be safe to say that he will take into consideration the ultimate good of all concerned and such consideration must include the future of this country as part of Christendom.”

It was answer enough for Wolsey, with his long experience of circles where nobody ever said a plain yes or no. He said, musingly,

“She is not—and when I say unfortunately I mean from the practical, not the moral standpoint—his mistress. In some respects her behavior may be open to criticism, but her character is not.”

“Had she been his mistress this situation would hardly have arisen.”

“There I must disagree. The phrase, ‘the King’s conscience,’ may be becoming a joke, but I assure you that it was active long before this infatuation befell him. And the Princess Mary’s legitimacy was being questioned before Anne Boleyn had all her second teeth.”

“Not openly, nor with quite such vigor. That doubt exists is undeniable, otherwise why am I here?” He shifted his rein and flexed his painful fingers. “The Roman Courts will find an answer,” he said, with an air of dismissing the subject.

“If the King should ask you whether their verdict will be in his favor or not, what would you tell him?”

“His Grace would never ask me such a question,” Campeggio said reprovingly. “I have done what I was sent to do, and now I come to take leave. No one has ever suggested that the King of England is lacking in manners.”

Only people of low birth pressed questions likely to embarrass.

“He will ask me—if we have any conversation at all.”

“If you are wise you will say what I just said, that you are not a seer.”

Clearly, Campeggio had no idea of what he had done, of what he had compelled Wolsey to do. One answer like that, at such a tricky time, could land a man in the Tower!

Shortly after, he wished that he
were
in the Tower. There was at least a certain dignity about an arrest, on whatever trumped-up excuse; and the Tower was private. Yes, he would have found it easier to walk in by the Traitors’ Gate than to suffer the public humiliation in the courtyard of Grafton manor house.

Like many of its kind, Grafton had grown gradually, with rooms added as the need arose, each set with its stairway. One stairway, and the apartments to which it led, had been prepared and set ready for Cardinal Campeggio’s occupation. When the Cardinals’ cavalcade came to a standstill in the courtyard, men had come forward, some to take his horse, some to escort him to his stairway, some to carry his baggage, some to show his servants to their quarters.

For Wolsey nothing. No welcome, no accommodation. Only the sly gloating in the many watching eyes, the air of waiting to see what he would do now.

They expected him to break down. There was, he knew, a supposed difference between the behavior of the well-born and the lowly in moments of crisis, but Wolsey had lived long enough and seen enough of the world to know that subject to the right pressure men of the highest lineage could crawl and fawn and weep. The butcher’s son from Ipswich was determined to show, in this moment of ordeal, an example of that ground-level fortitude which kept poor men alive.

He sat on his mule—thankful that he had not alighted, and with his own dismayed little retinue behind him, he watched Campeggio being received. His expression revealed nothing; he might have been a figure cut from rock and painted and garbed to look like a Cardinal. His mind was made up. So long as the mule could stand—and mules had great powers of endurance—he would sit here. When the mule dropped he would stand until he fell, too. He had a right to be here; to escort the visiting Cardinal to his leave-taking was part of his duty; and if he were made to look like an uninvited guest, that was not his fault, or even his concern.

He did not believe that the King had ordered matters in this fashion. Henry was angered, yes; but he was incapable of retaliation in this petty, malicious way. This was the work of the Lady, that night-crow who sat on Henry’s shoulder and whispered. She, even more than the King, had been angered by his behavior at Blackfriars, and her revenge was this attempt to keep him out of the King’s presence. She imagined that, rebuffed, he would turn and ride away. Norfolk-born herself; Wolsey thought wryly, she should have known a Suffolk man better; the stubborn refusal-to-be-shifted quality of East Anglians was a byword.

Firmness was rewarded. After ten agonizing minutes that seemed like half a lifetime, out came Sir Harry Norris, the King’s favorite, the Groom of the Stole; and he must have come direct from the King. He said,

“My lord, this house is very small, and Cardinal Campeggio, a stranger in the land, was offered the only available accommodation. If you could bear the inconvenience, and make shift with my own apartments, I should be honored.”