‘You may live out your days as a trivet,’ Riche says. ‘Or a hinge.’

He thinks, you must laugh, Thomas Howard, you must laugh or burst into flames: which will it be? If you combust we can at least throw water on you. With a spasm, a shudder, the duke turns his back on them to master himself: ‘Tell Henry,’ he says. ‘Tell him I renounce the wench. Tell him I no longer call her niece.’

He, Cromwell, says, ‘You will have the chance to show loyalty. If it comes to a trial, you will preside over the court.’

‘At least, we think that is the procedure,’ Riche chips in. ‘A queen has never come to trial before. What does the Lord Chancellor say?’

‘I say nothing.’ Audley holds up his palms. ‘You and Wriothesley and Master Secretary have worked it all between you, as you usually do. Only – Cromwell, you will not put the Earl of Wiltshire among the judges?’

He smiles. ‘Her father? No. I would not do that.’

‘How will we charge Lord Rochford?’ Fitzwilliam asks. ‘If he is indeed to be charged?’

Norfolk says, ‘It is the three for trial? Norris, Rochford, and the fiddle player?’

‘Oh no, my lord,’ he says calmly.

‘There’s more? By the Mass!’

‘How many lovers has she had?’ Audley says, with a keenness barely suppressed.

Riche says, ‘Lord Chancellor, you have seen the king? I have seen him. He is pale and ill from the strain. That, in fact, is treason in itself, if any harm should happen to his royal body. Indeed, I think we may say harm has already occurred.’

If dogs could smell out treason, Riche would be a bloodhound, that prince among trufflers.

He says, ‘I keep an open mind as to how these gentlemen are to be charged, whether with concealing a treason or with the offence itself. If they claim to be only a witness to the misdeeds of others they must say who those others are, they must earnestly and openly tell us what they know; but if they withhold names, we must suspect they are themselves among the guilty.’

The boom of the cannon catches them unawares, shuddering across the water; you feel the jolt inside, in your bones.

That evening a message comes to him from Kingston at the Tower. Write down everything she says and everything she does, he had told the constable, and Kingston – a dutiful, civil and prudent man, though sometimes obtuse – can be relied on for that. As the councillors walked away to the barge, Anne asked him, ‘Master Kingston, shall I go into a dungeon?’ No, madam, he had assured her, you shall have the chambers where you lay before your coronation.

At that, he reports, she fell into a storm of weeping, ‘It is too good for me. Jesus have mercy on me.’ Then she knelt down on the stones and prayed and wept, said the constable: then, most strangely, or so it seemed to him, she began to laugh.