The Taming of the Queen

COWDRAY HOUSE, MIDHURST, SUSSEX, SUMMER 1545

The battle is inconclusive, they tell me, when the smoke finally clears and the fleets limp their different ways: the French back to France, the English ships into port. They report to the king that England was triumphant. We sent out a few tiny ships against a great French armada, and the French soldiers that landed on the coast of Sussex and the Isle of Wight burned a few barns but were driven off by the farmhands.

‘Englishmen,’ Sir Anthony Denny whispers encouragingly to the king. ‘For God and for Harry!’

But the king is not stirred by the battle cry of an earlier, greater king. He is shocked, his great carcass beached in his bed like his great ship is beached on the seabed, underwater in the Solent. They come almost hourly to tell him that it is not as bad as it seems. They say that they will raise the Mary Rose, that it will be no more than a matter of days before they have hauled her to the surface and pumped out the water. But after a while they stop boasting that she can be reclaimed from the sea, and the beautiful ship and her sailors, and the fighting men – four hundred of them, five hundred, nobody knows how many were enlisted – will be left to the chantry of the tides and the singing of the sea.

As soon as the king can ride we go by stages to Cowdray House at Midhurst, hoping that one of the king’s most boastful courtiers, Sir Anthony Browne, can raise his spirits and comfort him. The king sits on his horse in silence, looking around him, looking everywhere at green fields, strips of crops, flocks of sheep, herds of cows, as if he can see nothing but the heeling over of his proud ship and the terrible gurgle in the water as she sailed downward to drown. I am beside him and I know that my face is frozen like a stone angel on a tomb. The country that we ride through is quiet, the people resentful. They know that the French nearly landed, that the royal fleet cannot defend them. This is a countryside of inlets and tidal rivers, terribly exposed to an invasion. They are afraid that the French will refit and come again, and there are many people who whisper that if the French came and restored the abbeys and the churches and the holy shrines, then they would be a blessing to England.

I do not ask about Thomas Seymour. I do not dare to say his name. I think if I say so much as ‘Thomas’ that I will cry out and if I start, I will never be able to stop. I think there is a sea of tears in me as deep as the tides that sigh through the rigging of his ship.

‘The king has granted Lady Carew a great pension,’ Nan says quietly to me as she is brushing my hair before putting on my gold net and my hood.

‘Lady Carew?’ I ask indifferently.

‘Her husband went down on the ship,’ she says. Nobody says ‘Mary Rose’ any more. It is as if she is a ghost, another lost queen, a nameless woman missing from Henry’s court.

‘Poor lady,’ I say.

‘The king made him vice-admiral the very night before, and gave him the command,’ she says. ‘He replaced Thomas Seymour, who was furious at the slight. He always had the luck of the devil, did Tom. He had to make another ship his flagship and he came through unscathed.’

She looks up from the work of twisting my hair into ringlets and tucking them into the net and sees my face in the mirror. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asks. ‘Are you ill?’

I put my hand to my stomacher. I can feel my heart pound through the tightly laced silk. ‘I am sick,’ I whisper. ‘Nan, I am terribly sick. Let me lie down for a moment.’

They all crowd round me and I close my eyes to blot out the sight of the anxious avid faces. Then someone lifts me at my shoulders and two of them bear up my feet and I feel them put me onto my bed. Someone cuts my laces and loosens my stomacher so I can breathe more easily. Nan slips off my silk slippers and chafes my icy feet.

Someone holds a cup of warm ale to my lips and I sip, and then lean back on the pillows and open my eyes.

‘You don’t feel hot,’ one of the ladies volunteers nervously. They are all terrified of the Sweat. It can kill a man in four hours, and there is no easy way to tell if he will die. He complains of heat at dinner and he sweats to death by nightfall. It is a Tudor plague; it came in with this king’s father.

‘I am sick in my belly,’ I say. ‘Something I ate.’

Two of them exchange secret smiles. ‘Oh – do you feel sick in the mornings?’ Anne Seymour says, suggestively, hopefully.

I shake my head. I don’t want this sort of rumour starting. Even now, as I am struggling with the news that Thomas is alive, I have to watch what I say, what they say, what anyone says about me. ‘No,’ I insist, ‘and no-one is to say such a thing. It is not that, and the king would be much displeased if you gossiped about me.’

‘I was just hoping for the best for you,’ Anne defends herself.

I close my eyes. ‘I need to sleep,’ is all I say.

I hear Nan chivy everyone from my room and then the shutting of my bedroom door and the rustle of her dress as she sits beside my bed. Without opening my eyes I reach out my hand and she takes it in her comforting grasp.

‘Such a terrible day,’ I say. ‘I can’t stop seeing it.’

‘I know,’ she says. ‘Try to sleep.’