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a man, do it. Don’t write him a letter about it. Don’t bluster and threaten and put him on his guard.”
    â€œIf you ever plan to be off your guard, let me know. It is something I should like to see. Do you know who . . . But I suppose they don’t sign their letters. I shall not give up my project. I have personally and carefully selected these institutions, and His Holiness has approved them under seal. Those who object misunderstand my intention. No one is proposing to put old monks out on the roads.”
    This is true. There can be relocation; there can be pensions, compensation. It can be negotiated, with goodwill on both sides. Bow to the inevitable, he urges. Deference to the lord cardinal. Regard his watchful and fatherly care; believe his keen eye is fixed on the ultimate good of the church. These are the phrases with which to negotiate. Poverty, chastity and obedience: these are what you stress when you tell some senile prior what to do. “They don’t misunderstand,” he says. “They just want the proceeds themselves.”
    â€œYou will have to take an armed guard when next you go north.”
    The cardinal, who thinks upon a Christian’s last end, has had his tomb designed already, by a sculptor from Florence. His corpse will lie beneath the outspread wings of angels, in a sarcophagus of porphyry. The veined stone will be his monument, when his own veins are drained by the embalmer; when his limbs are set like marble, an inscription of his virtues will be picked out in gold. But the colleges are to be his breathing monument, working and living long after he is gone: poor boys, poor scholars, carrying into the world the cardinal’s wit, his sense of wonder and of beauty, his instinct for decorum and pleasure, his finesse. No wonder he shakes his head. You don’t generally have to give an armed guard to a lawyer. The cardinal hates any show of force. He thinks it unsubtle. Sometimes one of his people—Stephen Gardiner, let’s say—will come to him denouncing some nest of heretics in the city. He will say earnestly, poor benighted souls. You pray for them, Stephen, and I’ll pray for them, and we’ll see if between us we can’t bring them to a better state of mind. And tell them, mend their manners, or Thomas More will get hold of them and shut them in his cellar. And all we will hear is the sound of screaming.
    â€œNow, Thomas.” He looks up. “Do you have any Spanish?”
    â€œA little. Military, you know. Rough.”
    â€œYou took service in the Spanish armies, I thought.”
    â€œFrench.”
    â€œAh. Indeed. And no fraternizing?”
    â€œNot past a point. I can insult people in Castilian.”
    â€œI shall bear that in mind,” the cardinal says. “Your time may come. For now . . . I was thinking that it would be good to have more friends in the queen’s household.”
    Spies, he means. To see how she will take the news. To see what Queen Catalina will say, in private and unleashed, when she has slipped the noose of the diplomatic Latin in which it will be broken to her that the king—after they have spent some twenty years together—would like to marry another lady. Any lady. Any well-connected princess whom he thinks might give him a son.
    The cardinal’s chin rests on his hand; with finger and thumb, he rubs his eyes. “The king called me this morning,” he says, “exceptionally early.”
    â€œWhat did he want?”
    â€œPity. And at such an hour. I heard a dawn Mass with him, and he talked all through it. I love the king. God knows how I love him. But sometimes my faculty of commiseration is strained.” He raises his glass, looks over the rim. “Picture to yourself, Tom. Imagine this. You are a man of some thirty-five years of age. You are in good health and of a hearty appetite, you have your bowels opened every day, your joints are supple, your bones