“They have been witnessing miracles at Thetford for three hundred years, ever since they turned up a cache of relics, neatly labelled, that included rocks from Mount Calvary, part of Our Lady’s sepulchre, and fragments of the manger in which the child Jesus was laid. Now comes the greatest miracle of all, Thomas Cromwell, the Putney boy: who holds that the passage of time does not add lustre to fakes, and that there is no need to reverence a lie because of its antiquity.”
