or the chaffinch, the red of a wax seal or the heart of the rose: implanted in his landscape, cered in his inner eye, and caught in the glint of a ruby, in the colour of blood, the cardinal is alive and speaking. Look at my face: I am not afraid of any man alive.
At Hampton Court in the great hall they perform an interlude; its name is ‘The Cardinal's Descent into Hell’. It takes him back to last year, to Gray's Inn. Under the eye of the officials of the king's household, the carpenters have been working furiously and for bonus rates, erecting frames upon which to drape canvas cloths painted with scenes of torture. At the back of the hall, the screens are entirely hung with flames.
The entertainment is this: a vast scarlet figure, supine, is dragged across the floor, howling, by actors dressed as devils. There are four devils, one for each limb of the dead man. The devils wear masks. They have tridents with which they prick the cardinal, making him twitch and writhe and beg. He had hoped the cardinal died without pain but Cavendish had said no. He died conscious, talking of the king. He had started out of sleep and said, whose is that shadow on the wall?
The Duke of Norfolk walks around the hall chortling, ‘Isn't it good, eh? It's good enough to be printed! By the Mass, that's what I shall do! I shall have it printed, so I can take it home with me, and at Christmas we can play it all over again.’
Anne sits laughing, pointing, applauding. He has never seen her like this before: lit up, glowing. Henry sits frozen by her side. Sometimes he laughs, but he thinks if you could get close you would see that his eyes are afraid. The cardinal rolls across the floor, kicking out at the demons, but they harry him, in their woolly suits of black, and cry, ‘Come, Wolsey, we must fetch you to Hell, for our master Beelzebub is expecting you to supper.’
When the scarlet mountain pops up his head and asks, ‘What wines does he serve?’ he almost forgets himself and laughs. ‘I'll have no English wine,’ the dead man declares. ‘None of that cats' piss my lord of Norfolk lays on.’
Anne crows; she points; she points to her uncle; the noise rises high to the roof beams with the smoke from the hearth, the laughing and chanting from the tables, the howling of the fat prelate. No, they assure him, the devil is a Frenchman, and there are catcalls and whistles, and songs break out. The devils now catch the cardinal's head in a noose. They haul him to his feet, but he fights them. The flailing punches are not all fake, and he hears their grunts, as the breath is knocked out of them. But there are four hangmen, and one great scarlet bag of nothingness, who chokes, who claws; the court cries, ‘Let him down! Let him down alive!’
The actors throw up their hands; they prance back and let him fall. When he rolls on the ground, gasping, they thrust their forks into him and wind out lengths of scarlet woollen bowel.
The cardinal utters blasphemies. He utters farts, and fireworks blast out from corners of the hall. From the corner of his eye, he sees a woman run away, a hand over her mouth; but Uncle Norfolk marches about, pointing: ‘Look, there his guts are wound out, as the hangman would draw them! Why, I'd pay to see this!’
Someone calls, ‘Shame on you, Thomas Howard, you'd have sold your own soul to see Wolsey down.’ Heads turn, and his head turns, and nobody knows who has spoken; but he thinks it might be, could it be, Thomas Wyatt? The gentlemen devils have dusted themselves down and got their breath back. Shouting ‘Now!’ they pounce; the cardinal is dragged off to Hell, which is located, it seems, behind the screens at the back of the hall.
He follows them behind the screens. Pages run out with linen towels for the actors, but the satanic influx knocks them aside. At least one of the children gets an elbow in the eye, and drops his bowl of steaming water on his feet. He sees the devils wrench off their masks, and toss them, swearing, into a corner; he watches as they try to claw off their knitted devil-coats. They turn to each other, laughing, and begin to pull them over each other's heads. ‘It's like the shirt of Nessus,’ George Boleyn says, as Norris wrenches him free.
George tosses his head to settle his hair back into place; his white skin has flared from contact with the rough wool. George and Henry Norris are the hand-devils, who seized the cardinal by his forepaws. The two foot-devils are still wrestling each other from their trappings. They are a boy called Francis Weston, and William Brereton, who – like Norris – is old enough to know better. They are so absorbed in themselves – cursing, laughing, calling for clean linen – that they do not notice who is watching them and anyway they do not care. They splash themselves and each other, they towel away their sweat, they rip the shirts from the pages' hands, they drop them over their heads. Still wearing their cloven hooves, they swagger out to take their bow.
In the centre of the space they have vacated, the cardinal lies inert, shielded from the hall by the screens; perhaps he is sleeping.
He walks up to the scarlet mound. He stops. He looks down. He waits. The actor opens one eye. ‘This must be Hell,’ he says. ‘This must be Hell, if the Italian is here.’
The dead man pulls off his mask. It is Sexton, the fool: Master Patch. Master Patch, who screamed so hard, a year ago, when they wanted to part him from his master.
Patch holds out a hand, to be helped to his feet, but he does not take it. The man scrambles up by himself, cursing. He begins to pull off his scarlet, dragging and tearing at the cloth. He, Cromwell, stands with his arms folded, his writing hand tucked into a hidden fist. The fool casts away his padding, fat pillows of wool. His body is scrawny, wasted, his chest furred with wiry hairs. He speaks: ‘Why you come to my country, Italian? Why you no stay in your own country, ah?’
Sexton is a fool, but he's not soft in the head. He knows well he's not an Italian.
‘You should have stayed over there,’ Patch says, in his own London voice. ‘Have your own walled town by now. Have a cathedral. Have your own marzipan cardinal to eat after dinner. Have it all for a year or two, eh, till a bigger brute comes along and knocks you off the trough?’
He picks up the costume Patch has cast off. Its red is the fiery, cheap, quick-fading scarlet of Brazil-wood dye, and it smells of alien sweat. ‘How can you act this part?’
‘I act what part I'm paid to act. And you?’ He laughs: his shrill bark, which passes as mad. ‘No wonder your humour's so bitter these days. Nobody's paying you, eh? Monsieur Cremuel, the retired mercenary.’
‘Not so retired. I can fix you.’
‘With that dagger you keep where once was your waist.’ Patch springs away, he capers. He, Cromwell, leans against the wall; he watches him. He can hear a child sobbing, somewhere out of sight; perhaps it is the little boy who has been hit in the eye, now slapped again for dropping the bowl, or perhaps just for crying. Childhood was like that; you are punished, then punished again for protesting. So, one learns not to complain; it is a hard lesson, but one never lost.
Patch is trying out various postures, obscene gestures; as if preparing for some future performance. He says, ‘I know what ditch you were spawned in, Tom, and it was a ditch not far from mine.’ He turns to the hall where, unseen and beyond the dividing screen, the king, presumably, continues his pleasant day. Patch plants his legs apart, he sticks out his tongue. ‘The fool has said in his heart, there is no Pope.’ He turns his head; he grins. ‘Come back in ten years, Master Cromwell, and tell me who's the fool then.’
‘You're wasting your jokes on me, Patch. Wearing out your stock-in-trade.’
‘Fools can say anything.’
‘Not where my writ runs.’
‘And where is that? Not even in the backyard where you were christened in a puddle. Come and meet me here, ten years today, if you're still alive.’
‘You would have a fright if I was dead.’
‘Because I'll stand still, and let you knock me down.’
‘I could crack your skull against the wall now. They'd not miss you.’
‘True,’ Master Sexton says. ‘They would roll me out in the morning and lay me on a dunghill. What's one fool? England is full of them.’
He