‘Chrysostom,’ Cranmer murmurs.

‘But let that pass,’ he, Cromwell, says hastily. ‘If this marriage is dissolved, Majesty, Parliament will petition you to marry again.’

‘I dare say it will. How may a man do his duty, to both his realm and to God? We sin even in the very act of generation. We must have offspring, and kings especially must, and yet we are warned against lust even in marriage, and some authorities say, do they not, that to love your wife immoderately is a kind of adultery?’

‘Jerome,’ Cranmer whispers: as if he would just as soon disown the saint. ‘But there are many other teachings that are more comfortable, and that praise the married state.’

‘Roses snatched from the thorns,’ he says. ‘The church does not offer much comfort to the married man, though Paul says we should love our wives. It is hard, Majesty, not to think marriage is sinful inherently, since the celibates have spent many centuries saying that they are better than we are. But they are not better. Repetition of false teachings does not make them true. You agree, Cranmer?’

Just kill me now, the archbishop’s face says. Against all the laws of king and church, he is a married man; he married in Germany when he was among the reformers, he keeps Frau Grete secretly, he hides her in his country houses. Does Henry know? He must know. Will Henry say? No, because he is intent on his own plight. ‘Now I cannot see why I ever wanted her,’ the king says. ‘That is why I think she has practised on me with charms and enchantments. She claims she loves me. Katherine claimed she loved me. They say love, and mean the opposite. I believe Anne has tried to undermine me at every turn. She was always unnatural. Think how she would taunt her uncle, my lord of Norfolk. Think how she would scorn her father. She would presume to censure my own conduct, and press on me advice in matters well beyond her understanding, and give me such words as no poor man would willingly hear from his wife.’

Cranmer says, ‘She was bold, it is true. She knew it for a fault and would try to bridle herself.’

‘Now she shall be bridled, by God.’ Henry’s tone is ferocious; but the next moment he has modulated it, to the plaintive accents of the victim. He opens his walnut writing box. ‘Do you see this little book?’ It is not really a book, or not yet, just a collection of loose leaves, tied together; there is no title page, but a sheet black with Henry’s own laboured hand. ‘It is a book in the making. I have written it. It is a play. It is a tragedy. It is my own case.’ He offers it.

He says, ‘Keep it sir, till we have more leisure to do justice to it.’

‘But you ought to know,’ the king insists. ‘Her nature. How ill she has behaved to me, when I gave her everything. All men should know and be warned about what women are. Their appetites are unbounded. I believe she has committed adultery with a hundred men.’