Of course they will not. Nobody wants Gardiner back at the king’s side, pouring suspicion into his ear, prompting him to see heresy and treason and to see it everywhere. There is no household that he did not spy on; there are few people who did not feel his bright suspicious eyes on them. There is no sermon that he did not inspect for heresy, no courtier that he did not threaten. Now he has lost the king’s favour, nobody has to fear him. And nobody is going to take the risk of mentioning his name to the king, who says that this former beloved advisor is nothing but a troublemaker and he will not hear a word about him.

The frightened old man sees disaster ahead of him. He remembers Wolsey, dropped dead on the York road, returning to London for a trial where they would have beheaded him. He remembers Cromwell, stripped of his badge of office, hacked to death on the scaffold, condemned by the laws that he invented. He remembers John Fisher going to the scaffold in his best coat, certain of heaven, Thomas More trapped by Richard Rich, he remembers the queens—four of them—and how he advised against them as they fell from favor, and he dragged them down.

He gets hold of his former friend and ally Lord Wriothesley and begs him to speak—just once, one word only—to the king, but Wriothesley melts through the bishop’s fingers as if he were oily blood from a false miracle statue. One moment he is there, and then he is gone. Wriothesley is not going to risk his uncertain place at court for loyalty to a friend. The king frightened Wriothesley when he shouted at him in the garden, Wriothesley has turned his coat and is working with the Seymour affinity.

In desperation Gardiner begs my ladies to speak to me, as if I would have any reason to return my declared enemy to power; as if he did not promise the king he had evidence of capital treason against me. In the end Stephen Gardiner understands that he has lost his friends, his influence, and his place, and goes quietly to his own palace, to burn compromising papers and plot his return.

The reformists at court celebrate a victory over the dangerous man, but I have no doubt that he will come back. I know that, just as the papists dragged me down and broke my spirit, we are now triumphing against them and they are lying sleepless and fearful at nights; but the king will bait one pack of dogs against another over and over, and we will have to fight it out without principle, without shame, again and again.

WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON,

WINTER 1546