‘But will you be there to watch?’ Gregory insists. ‘When it does occur? I could attend them at the last to offer them my prayers, but I could not do it unless you were there. I might fall down on the ground.’

He nods. It is good to be realistic in these matters. He has heard street brawlers in his youth boast of their stomach, then blench at a cut finger, and anyway being at an execution is not like being in a fight: there is fear, and fear is contagious, whereas in a scrap there is no time for fear, and not until it’s over do your legs begin to shake. ‘If I am not there, Richard will be. It is a kindly thought and though it would give you pain I feel it shows respect.’ He cannot guess the shape of the next week. ‘It depends…the annulment must go through, so it rests with the queen, on how she helps us, will she give her assent.’ He is thinking aloud: ‘It may be I am at Lambeth with Cranmer. And please, my dear son, don’t ask me why there has to be an annulment. Just know it’s what the king wants.’

He finds he cannot think of the dying men at all. Into his mind instead strays the picture of More on the scaffold, seen through the veil of rain: his body, already dead, folding back neatly from the impact of the axe. The cardinal when he fell had no persecutor more relentless than Thomas More. Yet, he thinks, I did not hate him. I exercised my skills to the utmost to persuade him to reconcile with the king. And I thought I would win him, I really thought I would, for he was tenacious of the world, tenacious of his person, and had a good deal to live for. In the end he was his own murderer. He wrote and wrote and he talked and talked, then suddenly at a stroke he cancelled himself. If ever a man came close to beheading himself, Thomas More was that man.

The queen wears scarlet and black, and instead of a hood a jaunty cap, with feathers of black and white sweeping across its brim. Remember those plumes, he tells himself; this will be the last time, or almost so. How did she look, the women will ask. He will be able to say she looked pale, but unafraid. How can it be for her, to enter that great chamber and to stand before the peers of England, all men and none of them desiring her? She is tainted now, she is dead meat, and instead of coveting her – bosom, hair, eyes – their gaze slides away. Only Uncle Norfolk glares at her fiercely: as if her head were not Medusa’s head.

In the centre of the great hall at the Tower they have built a platform with benches for the judges and peers, and there are some benches too in the side arcades, but the most part of the spectators will be standing, pushing in behind each other till the guards say ‘No more,’ and block the doorways with staves. Even then they push, and the noise rises as those who have been let through jostle in the well of the court, till Norfolk, his white baton of office in his hand, calls for silence, and from the ferocious expression on his face, the most ignorant person in that throng knows he means it.