Wolf Hall: Shortlisted for the Golden Man Booker Prize

‘Nor does anyone else,’ he'd said. ‘Not as far as I can see.’

There cannot be new things in England. There can be old things freshly presented, or new things that pretend to be old. To be trusted, new men must forge themselves an ancient pedigree, like Walter's, or enter into the service of ancient families. Don't try to go it alone, or they'll think you're pirates.

This summer, with the cardinal back on dry land, he remembers that voyage. He waits for the enemy to come alongside, and for the hand-to-hand fighting to begin.

But for now he goes down to the kitchens, to see how they are getting on with their masterpieces to impress the French envoys. They have got the steeple on their sugar-paste model of St Paul's, but they are having trouble with the cross and ball on top. He says, ‘Make marzipan lions – the cardinal wants them.’

They roll their eyes and say, will it never end?

Since he returned from France their master has been uncharacteristically sour. It is not just the overt failures that make him grumble, but the dirty work behind the scenes. Squibs and slanders were printed against him and as fast as he could buy them up there was a new batch on the street. Every thief in France seemed to converge on his baggage train; at Compiègne, though he mounted a day-and-night guard on his gold plate, a little boy was found to be going up and down the back stairs, passing out the dishes to some great robber who had trained him up.

‘What happened? Did you catch him?’

‘The great robber was put in the pillory. The boy ran away. Then one night, some villain sneaked into my chamber, and carved a device by the window …’ And next morning, a shaft of early sun, creeping through mist and rain, had picked out a gallows, from which dangled a cardinal's hat.

Once again the summer has been wet. He could swear it has never been light. The harvest will be ruined. The king and the cardinal exchange recipes for pills. The king lays down cares of state should he happen to sneeze, and prescribes for himself an easy day of music-making or strolling – if the rain abates – in his gardens. In the afternoon, he and Anne sometimes retire and are private. The gossip is that she allows him to undress her. In the evenings, good wine keeps the chills out, and Anne, who reads the Bible, points out strong scriptural commendations to him.

After supper he grows thoughtful, says he supposes the King of France is laughing at him; he supposes the Emperor is laughing too. After dark the king is sick with love. He is melancholy, sometimes unreachable. He drinks and sleeps heavily, sleeps alone; he wakes, and because he is a strong man and a young man still he is optimistic, clear-headed, ready for the new day. In daylight, his cause is hopeful.

The cardinal doesn't stop work if he's ill. He just goes on at his desk, sneezing, aching, and complaining.

In retrospect, it is easy to see where the cardinal's decline began, but at the time it was not easy. Look back, and you remember being at sea. The horizon dipped giddily, and the shoreline was lost in mist.

October comes, and his sisters and Mercy and Johane take his dead wife's clothes and cut them up carefully into new patterns. Nothing is wasted. Every good bit of cloth is made into something else.

At Christmas the court sings:

As the holly groweth green

And never changes hue

So I am, and ever hath been,

Unto my lady true.

Green groweth the holly, so doth the ivy.

Though winter blasts blow ever so high.

As the holly groweth green,

With ivy all alone,

When flowers cannot be seen

And green-wood leaves be gone,

Green groweth the holly.

Spring, 1528: Thomas More, ambling along, genial, shabby. ‘Just the man,’ he says. ‘Thomas, Thomas Cromwell. Just the man I want to see.’

He is genial, always genial; his shirt collar is grubby. ‘Are you bound for Frankfurt this year, Master Cromwell? No? I thought the cardinal might send you to the fair, to get among the heretic booksellers. He is spending a deal of money buying up their writings, but the tide of filth never abates.’

More, in his pamphlets against Luther, calls the German shit. He says that his mouth is like the world's anus. You would not think that such words would proceed from Thomas More, but they do. No one has rendered the Latin tongue more obscene.

‘Not really my business,’ Cromwell says, ‘heretics' books. Heretics abroad are dealt with abroad. The church being universal.’

‘Oh, but once these Bible men get over to Antwerp, you know … What a town it is! No bishop, no university, no proper seat of learning, no proper authorities to stop the proliferation of so-called translations, translations of scripture which in my opinion are malicious and wilfully misleading … But you know that, of course, you spent some years there. And now Tyndale's been sighted in Hamburg, they say. You'd know him, wouldn't you, if you saw him?’

‘So would the Bishop of London. You yourself, perhaps.’

‘True. True.’ More considers it. He chews his lip. ‘And you'll say to me, well, it's not work for a lawyer, running after false translations. But I hope to get the means to proceed against the brothers for sedition, do you see?’ The brothers, he says; his little joke; he drips with disdain. ‘If there is a crime against the state, our treaties come into play, and I can have them extradited. To answer for themselves in a straiter jurisdiction.’

‘Have you found sedition in Tyndale's writing?’

‘Ah, Master Cromwell!’ More rubs his hands together. ‘I relish you, I do indeed. Now I feel as a nutmeg must do when it's grated. A lesser man – a lesser lawyer – would say, “I have read Tyndale's work, and I find no fault there.” But Cromwell won't be tripped – he casts it back, he asks me, rather, have you read Tyndale? And I admit it. I have studied the man. I have picked apart his so-called translations, and I have done it letter by letter. I read him, of course, I do. By licence. From my bishop.’

‘It says in Ecclesiasticus, “he that toucheth pitch shall be defiled.” Unless his name's Thomas More.’

‘Well now, I knew you were a Bible reader! Most apt. But if a priest hears a confession, and the matter be wanton, does that make the priest a wanton fellow himself?’ By way of diversion, More takes his hat off, and absently folds it up in his hands; he creases it in two; his bright, tired eyes glance around, as if he might be confuted from all sides. ‘And I believe the Cardinal of York has himself licensed his young divines at Cardinal College to read the sectaries' pamphlets. Perhaps he includes you in his dispensations. Does he?’

It would be strange for him to include his lawyer; but then it's strange work for lawyers altogether. ‘We have come around in a circle,’ he says.

More beams at him. ‘Well, after all, it's spring. We shall soon be dancing around the maypole. Good weather for a sea voyage. You could take the chance to do some wool-trade business, unless it's just men you're fleecing these days? And if the cardinal asked you to go to Frankfurt, I suppose you'd go? Now if he wants some little monastery knocked down, when he thinks it has good endowments, when he thinks the monks are old, Lord bless them, and a little wandering in their wits; when he thinks the barns are full and the ponds well stocked with fish, the cattle fat and the abbot old and lean … off you go, Thomas Cromwell. North, south, east or west. You and your little apprentices.’

If another man were saying this, he'd be trying to start a fight. When Thomas More says it, it leads to an invitation to dinner. ‘Come out to Chelsea,’ he says. ‘The talk is excellent, and we shall like you to add to it. Our food is simple, but good.’

Tyndale says a boy washing dishes in the kitchen is as pleasing to the eye of God as a preacher in the pulpit or the apostle on the Galilee shore. Perhaps, he thinks, I won't mention Tyndale's opinion.

More pats his arm. ‘Have you no plans to marry again, Thomas? No? Perhaps wise. My father always says, choosing a wife is like putting your hand into a bag full of writhing creatures, with one eel to six snakes. What are the chances you will pull out the eel?’

‘Your father has married, what, three times?’

‘Four.’ He smiles. The smile is real. It crinkles the corner of his eyes. ‘Your beadsman, Thomas,’ he says, as he ambles away.

When More's first wife died, her successor was in the house before the corpse was cold. More would have been a priest, but human flesh called to him with its inconvenient demands. He did not want to be a bad priest, so he became a husband. He had fallen in love with a girl of sixteen, but her sister, at seventeen, was not yet married; he took the elder, so that her pride should not be hurt. He did not love her; she could not read or write; he hoped that might be amended, but seemingly not. He tried to get her to learn sermons by heart, but she grumbled and was stubborn in her ignorance; he took her home to her father, who suggested beating her, which made her so frightened that she swore she would complain no more. ‘And she never did,’ More will say. ‘Though she didn't learn any sermons either.’ It seems he thought the negotiations had been satisfactory: honour preserved all round. The stubborn woman gave him children, and when she died at twenty-four, he married a city widow, getting on in years and advanced in stubbornness: another one who couldn't read. There it is: if you are so lenient with yourself as to insist on living with a woman, then for the sake of your soul you should make it a woman you really don't like.

Cardinal Campeggio, whom the Pope is sending to England at Wolsey's request, was a married man before he was a priest. It makes him especially suitable to help Wolsey – who of course has no experience of marital problems – on the next stage of the journey to thwart the king in his heart's desire. Though the imperial army has withdrawn from Rome, a spring of negotiations has failed to yield any definite result. Stephen Gardiner has been in Rome, with a letter from the cardinal, praising the Lady Anne, trying to disabuse the Pope of any notion he may entertain that the king is being wilful and whimsical in his choice of bride. The cardinal had sat long over the letter listing her virtues, writing it in his own hand. ‘Womanly modesty … chastity … can I say chastity?’

‘You'd better.’

The cardinal looked up. ‘Know something?’ He hesitated, and returned to his letter. ‘Apt to bear children? Well, her family is fertile. Loving and faithful daughter of the church … Perhaps stretching a point … they say she has the scriptures in French set up in her chamber, and lets her women read them, but I would have no positive knowledge of that …’

‘King François allows the Bible in French. She learned her scriptures there, I suppose.’

‘Ah, but women, you see. Women reading the Bible, there's another point of contention. Does she know what Brother Martin thinks is a woman's place? We shouldn't mourn, he says, if our wife or daughter dies in childbirth – she's only doing what God made her for. Very harsh, Brother Martin, very intractable. And perhaps she is not a Bible-woman. Perhaps it is a slur on her. Perhaps it is just that she is out of patience with churchmen. I wish she did not blame me for her difficulties. Not blame me so very much.’

Lady Anne sends friendly messages to the cardinal, but he thinks she does not mean them. ‘If,’ Wolsey had said, ‘I saw the prospect of an annulment for the king, I would go to the Vatican in person, have my veins opened and allow the documents to be written in my own blood. Do you think, if Anne knew that, it would content her? No, I didn't think so, but if you see any of the Boleyns, make them the offer. By the way, I suppose you know a person called Humphrey Monmouth? He is the man who had Tyndale in his house for six months, before he ran off to wherever. They say he sends him money still, but that can't possibly be true, as how would he know where to send? Monmouth … I am merely mentioning his name. Because … now why am I?’ The cardinal had closed his eyes. ‘Because I am merely mentioning it.’