He has been studying the Seymour brothers intently since the visit to Wolf Hall. He will have to work with them; Henry’s women come trailing families, he does not find his brides in the forest hiding under a leaf. Edward is grave, serious, yet he is ready to unfold his thoughts to you. Tom is close, that’s what he thinks; close and cunning, brain busily working beneath that show of bonhomie. But it’s perhaps not the best brain. Tom Seymour will give me no trouble, he thinks, and Edward I can carry with me. His mind is already moving ahead, to a time when the king indicates his pleasure. Gregory and the Emperor’s ambassador, between them, have suggested the way forward. ‘If he can annul twenty years with his true wife,’ Chapuys has said to him, ‘I am sure it is not beyond your wit to find some grounds to free him from his concubine. No one has ever believed the marriage was good in the first place, except those who are employed to say yes to him.’

He wonders, though, about the ambassador’s ‘no one’. No one in the Emperor’s court, perhaps: but all England has sworn to the marriage. It is not a light matter, he tells his nephew Richard, to undo it legally, even if the king commanded it. We shall wait a little, we will not go to anyone, let them come to us.

He asks for a document to be drawn up, showing all grants to the Boleyns since 1524. ‘Such a thing would be good to have at my hand, in case the king calls for it.’

He does not mean to take anything away. Rather, enhance their holdings. Load them with honours. Laugh at their jokes.

Though you must be careful what you laugh at. Master Sexton, the king’s jester, has jested about Anne and called her a ribald. He thought he had licence, but Henry lumbered across the hall and clouted him, banged his head on the panelling and banished him the court. They say Nicholas Carew gave the man refuge, out of pity.

Anthony is aggrieved about Sexton. One jester does not like to hear of the downfall of another; especially, Anthony says, when his only vice is foresight. Oh, he says, you have been listening to the gossip in the kitchen. But the fool says, ‘Henry kicks out the truth and Master Sexton with it. But these days it has a way of creeping under the bolted door and down the chimney. One day he will give in and invite it to stand by the hearth.’

William Fitzwilliam comes to the Rolls House and sits down with him. ‘So how does the queen, Crumb? Still perfect friends, though you dine with the Seymours?’

He smiles.

Fitzwilliam jumps up, wrenches the door open to see no one is lurking, then sits down again, and resumes. ‘Cast your mind back. This Boleyn courtship, this Boleyn marriage. How did the king look, in the eyes of grown men? Like one who only studies his own pleasures. Like a child, that is to say. To be so impassioned, to be so enslaved by a woman, who after all is made just as other women are – some said it was unmanly.’