Free Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

to talk, and talks, talks, talks, all the way to Putney. “Do they hate me so much? What have I done but promote their trades and show them my goodwill? Have I sown hatred? No. Persecuted none. Sought remedies every year when wheat was scarce. When the apprentices rioted, begged the king on my knees with tears in my eyes to spare the offenders, while they stood garlanded with the nooses that were to hang them.”
    â€œThe multitude,” Cavendish says, “is always desirous of a change. They never see a great man set up but they must pull him down—for the novelty of the thing.”
    â€œFifteen years Chancellor. Twenty in his service. His father’s before that. Never spared myself . . . rising early, watching late . . .”
    â€œThere, you see,” Cavendish says, “what it is to serve a prince! We should be wary of their vacillations of temper.”
    â€œPrinces are not obliged to consistency,” he says. He thinks, I may forget myself, lean across and push you overboard.
    The cardinal has not forgotten himself, far from it; he is looking back, back twenty years to the young king’s accession. “Put him to work, said some. But I said, no, he is a young man. Let him hunt, joust, and fly his hawks and falcons . . .”
    â€œPlay instruments,” Cavendish says. “Always plucking at something or other. And singing.”
    â€œYou make him sound like Nero.”
    â€œNero?” Cavendish jumps. “I never said so.”
    â€œThe gentlest, wisest prince in Christendom,” says the cardinal. “I will not hear a word against him from any man.”
    â€œNor shall you,” he says.
    â€œBut what I would do for him! Cross the Channel as lightly as a man might step across a stream of piss in the street.” The cardinal shakes his head. “Waking and sleeping, on horseback or at my beads . . . twenty years . . .”
    â€œIs it something to do with the English?” Cavendish asks earnestly. He’s still thinking of the uproar back there when they embarked; and even now, people are running along the banks, making obscene signs and whistling. “Tell us, Master Cromwell, you’ve been abroad. Are they particularly an ungrateful nation? It seems to me that they like change for the sake of it.”
    â€œI don’t think it’s the English. I think it’s just people. They always hope there may be something better.”
    â€œBut what do they get by the change?” Cavendish persists. “One dog sated with meat is replaced by a hungrier dog who bites nearer the bone. Out goes the man grown fat with honor, and in comes a hungry and a lean man.”
    He closes his eyes. The river shifts beneath them, dim figures in an allegory of Fortune. Decayed Magnificence sits in the center. Cavendish, leaning at his right like a Virtuous Councillor, mutters words of superfluous and belated advice, to which the sorry magnate inclines his head; he, like a Tempter, is seated on the left, and the cardinal’s great hand, with its knuckles of garnet and tourmaline, grips his own hand painfully. George would certainly go in the river, except that what he’s saying, despite the platitudes, makes a bleak sense. And why? Stephen Gardiner, he thinks. It may not be proper to call the cardinal a dog grown fat, but Stephen is definitely hungry and lean, and has been promoted by the king to a place as his own private secretary. It is not unusual for the cardinal’s staff to transfer in this way, after careful nurture in the Wolsey school of craft and diligence; but still, this places Stephen as the man who—if he manages his duties properly—may be closer than anyone to the king, except perhaps for the gentleman who attends him at his close-stool and hands him a diaper cloth. I wouldn’t so much mind, he thinks, if Stephen got that job.
    The cardinal closes his eyes. Tears are seeping from beneath his lids. “For it is a