‘Ah, rivals in love.’ He puts his hand to his heart.

‘By no means.’ Ah, Harry is ruffled now: he has flushed darkly, he is trembling with rage and fear.

‘And what do you think to brother George?’ he asks him. ‘You may have been surprised to encounter rivalry from that quarter. I hope you were surprised. Though the morals of you gentlemen astonish me.’

‘You do not trap me that way. Any man you name, I will say nothing against him and nothing for him. I have no opinion on George Boleyn.’

‘What, no opinion on incest? If you take it so quietly and without objection, I am forced to conjecture there may be truth in it.’

‘And if I were to say, I think there might be guilt in that case, you would say to me, “Why, Norris! Incest! How can you believe such an abomination? Is it a ploy to lead me away from your own guilt?”’

He looks at Norris with admiration. ‘Not for nothing have you known me twenty years, Harry.’

‘Oh, I have studied you,’ Norris says. ‘As I studied your master Wolsey before you.’

‘That was politic in you. Such a great servant of the state.’

‘And such a great traitor at the end.’

‘I must take your mind back. I do not ask you to remember the manifold favours you received at the cardinal’s hands. I only ask you to recall an entertainment, a certain interlude played at court. It was a play in which the late cardinal was set upon by demons and carried down to Hell.’

He sees Norris’s eyes move, as the scene rises before him: the firelight, the heat, the baying spectators. Himself and Boleyn grasping the victim’s hands, Brereton and Weston laying hold of him by his feet. The four of them tossing the scarlet figure, tumbling him and kicking him. Four men, who for a joke turned the cardinal into a beast; who took away his wit, his kindness and his grace, and made him a howling animal, grovelling on the boards and scrabbling with his paws.

It was not truly the cardinal, of course. It was the jester Sexton in a scarlet robe. But the audience catcalled as if it had been real, they yelled and shook their fists, they swore and mocked. Behind a screen the four devils pulled off their masks and their hairy jerkins, cursing and laughing. They saw Thomas Cromwell leaning against the panelling, silent, wrapped in a robe of mourning black.

Now, Norris gapes at him: ‘And that is why? It was a play. It was an entertainment, as you said yourself. The cardinal was dead, he could not know. And while he was alive, was I not good to him in his trouble? Did I not, when he was exiled from court, ride after him, and come to him on Putney Heath with a token from the king’s own hand?’

He nods. ‘I concede that others behaved worse. But you see, none of you behaved like Christians. You behaved like savages instead, falling on his estates and possessions.’