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arranged. If he were Clement, he would borrow heavily this year to hire in troops to ring his territories. It’s probably too late; for the summer season’s fighting, you need to be recruiting by Candlemas. He says, “Will you not start the king’s suit within your own jurisdiction? Make him take the first steps, then he will see if he really wants what he says he wants.”
    â€œThat is my intention. What I mean to do is to convene a small court here in London. We will approach him in a shocked fashion: King Harry, you appear to have lived all these years in an unlawful manner, with a woman not your wife. He hates—saving His Majesty—to appear in the wrong: which is where we must put him, very firmly. Possibly he will forget that the original scruples were his. Possibly he will shout at us, and hasten in a fit of indignation back to the queen. If not, then I must have the dispensation revoked, here or in Rome, and if I succeed in parting him from Katherine I shall marry him, smartly, to a French princess.”
    No need to ask if the cardinal has any particular princess in mind. He has not one but two or three. He never lives in a single reality, but in a shifting shadow-mesh of diplomatic possibilities. While he is doing his best to keep the king married to Queen Katherine and her Spanish-Imperial family, by begging Henry to forget his scruples, he will also plan for an alternative world, in which the king’s scruples must be heeded, and the marriage to Katherine is void. Once that nullity is recognized—and the last eighteen years of sin and suffering wiped from the page—he will readjust the balance of Europe, allying England with France, forming a power bloc to oppose the young Emperor Charles, Katherine’s nephew. And all outcomes are likely, all outcomes can be managed, even massaged into desirability: prayer and pressure, pressure and prayer, everything that comes to pass will pass by God’s design, a design reenvisaged and redrawn, with helpful emendations, by the cardinal. He used to say, “The king will do such and such.” Then he began to say, “We will do such and such.” Now he says, “This is what I will do.”
    â€œBut what will happen to the queen?” he asks. “If he casts her off, where will she go?”
    â€œConvents can be comfortable.”
    â€œPerhaps she will go home to Spain.”
    â€œNo, I think not. It is another country now. It is—what?—twenty-seven years since she landed in England.” The cardinal sighs. “I remember her, at her coming-in. Her ships, as you know, had been delayed by the weather, and she had been day upon day tossed in the Channel. The old king rode down the country, determined to meet her. She was then at Dogmersfield, at the Bishop of Bath’s palace, and making slow progress toward London; it was November and, yes, it was raining. At his arriving, her household stood upon their Spanish manners: the princess must remain veiled, until her husband sees her on her wedding day. But you know the old king!”
    He did not, of course; he was born on or about the date the old king, a renegade and a refugee all his life, fought his way to an unlikely throne. Wolsey talks as if he himself had witnessed everything, eyewitnessed it, and in a sense he has, for the recent past arranges itself only in the patterns acknowledged by his superior mind, and agreeable to his eye. He smiles. “The old king, in his later years, the least thing could arouse his suspicion. He made some show of reining back to confer with his escort, and then he leapt—he was still a lean man—from the saddle, and told the Spanish, to their faces, he would see her or else. My land and my laws, he said; we’ll have no veils here. Why may I not see her, have I been cheated, is she deformed, is it that you are proposing to marry my son Arthur to a monster?”
    Thomas thinks, he was being