The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [170]
Cromwell smiled, and sighed expansively. It never failed to surprise me how well the outdoors became him. I was used to thinking of him as a purely indoor breed. “Perhaps one day they will be tamed and civilized. But not in our lifetime,” he said. “Now we must merely contain them.”
How quickly he came to the point. The open country gave us the opportunity to discuss it, as I had planned. “The disaffected lords assembled by Chapuys—what of them? In my experience, a group never disbands without having made a gesture of some sort.” I threw it out to him.
“Yes, it is like a woman all dressed for a ball. She must dance to some tune.”
“Whose tune?”
“A northern one, most like. But as yet there’s nothing. Wait long enough, and eventually the maiden takes off her finery and goes to bed.”
We walked together, smiling and seemingly discussing the dogs. We approached another trainer, with a group of short-legged, dark hounds. He was offering them a piece of cloth to smell.
“How are the slow-hounds progressing?” I asked him.
“Excellently. They have been able to track three different men through a forest, a market-square, and a graveyard—right after a funeral!—and each time identified the proper one in a crowd.” He grinned.
“These track by scent,” I said. “They are of great use in tracking outlaws, kidnappers, and so on. My breeders are attempting to purify the strain even more—to make their scent keener and their endurance greater. Then they’ll be almost on a par with your agents, Crum.” Why I needled him in front of others, I knew not. Crum smiled, a poisonous smile. It said: Why must I endure this?
We nodded and moved on.
“You have read the report of the monastic visitations?” he asked, the moment we were out of earshot.
“Yes. The immorality your commissioners found was ... a disgrace.” I had hoped that St. Osweth’s was a degradedus s “trusted to see the King of Scots King of England.” The bailiff of Bampton hoped to see the Scots King “wear the flower of England.” The vicar of Hornchurch, Hampshire, had said, “The King and his council had made a way by will and craft to put down all manner of religious; but they would hold hard, for their part, which was their right; and the King could not pull down none, nor all his Council.”
A Sussex man, when told about my fall in the lists, had replied, “It were better he had broken his neck.” A Cambridge master called me “a mole who should be put down”; his students, “a tyrant more cruel than Nero” and “a beast and worst than a beast.”
Other statements reported by Crum’s agents were: “Cardinal Wolsey had been an honest man if he had had an honest master”; “The King is a fool and my Lord Privy Seal another”; “Our King wants only an apple and a fair wench to dally with”; and then there was a yeoman’s detailed recounting of how I had been riding near Eltham one day, seen his wife, abducted her, and taken her away to my bed.
It was certainly true, what the Kentish man said, “If the King knew his subjects’ true feeling, it would make his heart quake.” The sample I did hear, did just that. My own unsettled and miserable state, from the beginning of my Great Matter to its end, had transferred itself to them. My new contentment would also transfer itself, but it would take time.
I had lost my son, but I would cheat the Witch of claiming my daughter as well. Under Cromwell’s threats to drop her suit, and Chapuys’s advice, and the Emperor’s final lack of commitment to her cause, Mary gave in. She copied out the “suggested” letter, provided by Cromwell, in which she admitted her mother’s marriage to me was incestuous, in which she renounced all allegiance to the Pope and acknowledged me as the Supreme Head of the Church in England, and her spiritual as well as her temporal father. When I received the letter, I thanked God for it. Now all was clear for our reconciliation. I would have Mary back again; I would have my little girl!
Theologians call the parable of the Prodigal Son the sweetest yet strongest story in the Bible. Now I knew how that father