The Tudor Court

The order comes at first light: set out everything. So the groom spends the morning carrying gilt plate up to the long gallery, where trestle tables stand dressed in cloth like altars, and his one ambition is that the count should be right. Every man who has served the cardinal these twenty years is commanded to account for whatever passed through his hands. He has been eleven years in the wardrobe. A missing ounce is a rope.

He sets the cups out by weight, heaviest nearest the wall. At the end of each table lies a book of inventory, and in the book every parcel: its weight, its value, its place. A stranger holding that book will own this room more exactly than the men who have dusted it for years. Two evenings past, in this same gallery, the cardinal put the Great Seal of England into the hands of two dukes. Nobody shouted. Clerks wrote.

Now word runs through the house that my lord goes upriver today. From the leads you can see the Thames thick with boats — wherries and tilt-boats riding at ease off the privy stairs, London come out to watch a cardinal taken to the Tower. They will be disappointed. The barge turns against the tide for Putney, and the crowd's silence follows it like a wake.

The groom goes back to the gallery, where the light is failing and the plate burns like a field of small fires. No soldier has entered the house. No door has been forced. The palace is passing to the king line by line, entry by entry, and when the last page is checked it will simply belong to someone else. He licks his thumb, and turns it.

They swear the men in the church house, because the market hall is let. Two commissioners at a trestle, a clerk with a roll, the Gospels bound in worn calf, and outside in the sun the parish waiting in an orderly queue. The priest stands at the head of it, since the flock will do as the shepherd does — the commissioners said so, pleasantly, twice. What he wants is small: some reading of the words that will let him sleep tonight.

He has studied the oath like scripture. Swear to the succession of the new queen's children: he can do that; princes are God's business, not his. But the words walk further than the title says. Renounce all foreign authority — and there it is, the bishop of Rome folded quietly inside a question about babies. The clerk calls his name. He lays his hand on the book. 'Say it plainly,' the commissioner tells him, not unkindly. 'It goes ill with mumblers.'

He says it plainly. The clerk writes his name on the roll — a fair secretary hand, better than the parish deserves — and the priest stands aside to watch his neighbours swear: the miller, the smith, two brothers who are not speaking to each other, a boy who giggles from nerves and is made to say it twice. Every name goes down. The roll will be certified to London, where a man he has never met will file it.

In the Tower, they say, sit a bishop and the cleverest lawyer in England, who would not say the words. The priest has said them. He walks home through his own churchyard, over his own dead, who were never asked to swear to anything, and understands that England now exists twice — once in its fields, and once on its rolls — and that the second England is the one the king believes.

In the chapter house the sisters sit in order of profession, more than fifty of them, and at the table where the abbess should preside sits Dr Tregonwell, the king's commissioner, with his own clerk and his own ink. The youngest nun watches the papers being squared and wants one thing in the world: to hear her number again. Yesterday the pensions were read out. Hers was not among the great ones. She would like it said once more, aloud, before she sets her hand to the deed.

Everyone in the cloister knows what my lady abbess offered: five hundred marks to the king, a hundred pounds to Lord Cromwell, for leave to live on here under some other name, in some other dress — nuns unnamed as nuns, praying under an alias. The answer was no. The king's men do not want the house reformed, renamed or amended. They want it entered in the books, and the books closed.

The deed lies on the table, vellum, engrossed fair, and beside it the abbey's great seal — St Edward in his doorway, older than any woman in the room. My lady Zouche signs like a woman paying a bill she has argued down. The sisters follow in order of seniority, and the wax takes the impression it has taken for three hundred years, this once for the unmaking. When her turn comes, the youngest nun writes her name smaller than she meant to.

Then it is done, and what is left is arithmetic. The house was weighed four years ago, valued to the shilling; everything since has been the paperwork catching up with the price. Her pension will lodge her with a widow in the town — it will not run to a fire of her own. Dr Tregonwell's clerk enters each sum twice, once for the roll and once for London, and six hundred and fifty years of unbroken prayer end without one door being forced.

Door duty at the council chamber, mid-afternoon, the third dull week of a dull June, and the yeoman's whole ambition is to be furniture. A guard who sees nothing eats regularly. Past him go the usual great men. The earl of Essex arrives last, from the Parliament house — Cromwell: the brewer's son from Putney, lord privy seal, made an earl only in April. He nods at the guard, or at the doorframe. Great men's nods are hard to place.

When it happens, it happens fast. The captain comes with orders; the yeoman follows him in; the room is on its feet and shouting. The duke of Norfolk has his hands at Cromwell's collar and rips the St George from his neck — a traitor, he says, must not wear it. The earl of Southampton, who was his friend, kneels to untie the Garter below his knee. They strip the honours off him the way servants strip a bed.

Cromwell throws his bonnet on the boards. Is this, he demands of them, the reward of his service? — and he dares any man at the table to call him traitor to his face. The yeoman keeps his eyes on the middle distance and thinks that he has heard the word reward used that way once before, by a man being turned out of a farm. They take the earl out by the water stairs. No crowd. A barge, oars, the Tower plain downstream.

Inside, the shouting stops as though a door had shut on it, because a door has. The council sits again. Through the oak the yeoman hears benches scrape, a cough, and then the sound the whole afternoon has been travelling towards: a voice calling for a clerk. By evening the word in the guardroom is that the king's men are already at Austin Friars, counting. Twenty years to make such a man. A parchment will do to unmake him.

The copy comes down from the council in the afternoon, still smelling of haste, and Master Grafton wants it set by nightfall. The compositor reads the first line and his hand pauses over the case. Iane, by the grace of God quene of England. He wants what he always wants: clean work, fast, and to be paid. The trade has one more want tonight, unspoken — to be on the right side of its own front page.

He sets the dead king's reasons into type, letter by letter: the letters patent of the twenty-first of June, the councillors who witnessed them, the long lawyerly clauses why the late king's daughters cannot reign. A proclamation, every man of the trade knows, is not news; it is the thing itself. Proclaimed and printed, it has the force of law. So he is not reporting that England has a new queen. Between his thumb and forefinger, a queen is being made.

Deep in the evening they pull the first proof, and the master reads it wet, mouthing the queen's style like a man trying a coin with his teeth. At the foot stands the imprint: Richard Grafton, printer to the queen. The compositor looks at that line longer than at any other. Body text is nobody's; every man's roman looks alike. But an imprint is a signature. It says: I believed this enough to put my name under it.

At dawn the bills go up at the gates and crosses. The compositor cleans his hands with lye and cannot get the day off them. In Norfolk, they hear, another lady is writing herself queen in letters of her own. Type is made to be broken up and used again — that is its virtue. A printed imprint stays printed. The master has set his name under a reign, and whatever the bells decide, the paper will keep saying Iane.

After mass on audit day the parish crowds the church house, and the warden lays his year on the table: the wool money from the church sheep, the ale money, the sums for what has been bought back. His want is a plain man's want — to balance, and to hand the office on clean. He farms sixty acres of Devon hillside. For one year more he is also an accountant of the faith.

It has been a year of things coming home. A neighbour walks in from an outlying farm and unwraps an image of Our Lady, kept dark under thatch since the king's men came, and sets it on the table among the coins. Sir Christopher himself has given back the painted cloth of St Sidwell, his own saint, kept through everything. Nobody asks where it lay. In Morebath nobody ever needed asking.

Then the vicar reads the year from his book, as he has for thirty years and more. The book remembers what flesh would rather not: the Mass book sold for the leather on its boards, eighteen pence; the church goods carried up to Exeter and handed over; five young men fitted out from the store in the rebellion year, not all of them home again. Tonight there are new lines — the altar set up, a cope, wax — and one more in the vicar's hand: that in the late king's days the church ever decayed, and now it is comforted.

A parish remembers two ways. Flesh forgets kindly: in ten years, who sold, who hid, who told — worn smooth. The book does not forget and does not blush. It recorded the selling; it records the buying back; if the world turns again, it will take that down too, in the same brown ink. Of all Morebath's parishioners, the book is the only one that has conformed every time, and the only one that kept the whole story.