The Taming of the Queen

HAMPTON COURT PALACE, SUMMER 1546

The fine weather continues and the king himself is as sunny as the mornings. He declares that he is well again, much better, he has never been better, he feels like a young man. I watch him and I think that he will live for ever. He returns to the full life of the court and takes every meal seated on his great throne, calling for one dish after another as the kitchen wrestles with cartloads of ingredients that arrive rumbling down the lanes to the huge arched kitchen doors, and sends out one heaped dish after another. The king is in his former place, at the centre of the court, the great cog that turns everything, and the machine that is the court becomes once more a huge clockwork engine that takes in food and grinds out amusement.

He even rises from his chair to take slow steps in the garden or in to dinner. The pages walk beside him – he has a heavy hand on each of their shoulders – but he declares that he can walk almost unaided and will do so again. He swears that he will ride, and when I and my ladies dance before him, or when the masquers come in and choose their partners, he says that perhaps next week he will be up and jigging.

He bellows for diversion, and the choristers and the musicians and the players go into a frenzy of creation so that the king can see a new piece or hear a new song every night. He roars with laughter at the slightest joke. Will Somers was never in his life so popular, and takes up magnificently incompetent juggling. At every meal he has rolls of manchet bread spinning around his head and flying out of control around the hall so the dogs leap up and snatch them from the air before Will can catch them, and then he complains that no-one understands his artistry, and chases the dogs and goes under the table with them and there is a noisy joyful riot as people place bets on dogs or Will. The king gambles, losing a small fortune with his courtiers, who are wise enough to return it to him in the next game. The king has a lust for life, a joy in life, which people say they have not seen for years. They say it is to my credit that I have made him young and happy again. They ask how I have pleased him.

One evening at dinner I see a stranger, dressed as grandly as a hidalgo of Spain, make his bow to the king and take his place at the table for noblemen.

‘Who’s that?’ I ask Catherine Brandon as she stands behind my chair.

She leans forward so that she can speak quietly in my ear. ‘That, Your Majesty, is Guron Bertano. Apparently, he is an emissary from the pope. ’

I nearly shriek. ‘From the pope?’

She nods, her lips folded together.

‘The pope has sent a diplomat, here? To our court? After all that has gone before?’

‘Yes,’ she says shortly.

‘This is impossible,’ I say hastily. The king has been excommunicated for years. He called the pope the antichrist. How can it be that he is now entertaining his messenger?

‘Apparently the pope is going to receive the English Church back into communion with Rome. They just have to agree the details.’

‘We become Roman Catholic again?’ I mutter incredulously. ‘After all the suffering? Despite all the advances that we have made, despite the sacrifices?’

‘Are you not hungry, my love?’ Henry booms from my left side.

I turn quickly and smile. ‘Oh, yes,’ I say.

‘The venison is very fine.’ He nods to the server. ‘Give the queen more venison.’

I pause while the dark meat is served to my golden plate, the thick dark gravy poured.

‘The flesh of the doe is always sweeter than that of the buck,’ Henry winks at me.

‘I am glad to see you are in such good spirits, my lord husband.’

‘I am at play,’ Henry says. His gaze follows mine to where the emissary of the pope sits quietly at the table, eating with relish. ‘And I alone understand the game.’

‘You are to be congratulated,’ Edward Seymour says to me thinly as my court of ladies is walking beside the river before the day gets too hot. His lordship is home from Boulogne, relieved of command at last, and taking up his influence at the Privy Council once again. Lord Wriothesley has not recovered from his scolding in the king’s garden, Stephen Gardiner has been very quiet, the papal messenger has gone home with only the vaguest of promises, and we all hope that the forces of reform are quietly taking the upper hand once more. I should be glad.

‘I am?’

‘You have managed something that no previous wife has done.’

I glance around but Edward Seymour is not likely to be indiscreet, and nobody is listening. ‘I have?’

‘You displeased the king and then you won his forgiveness. You are a clever woman, Your Majesty. Your experience is unique.’

I bow my head. I cannot speak of it. I am shamed, I am unspeakably shamed. And Anne Askew is dead.

‘You manage him,’ he says. ‘You are a formidable diplomat.’

I can feel myself flush at the memory. I do not need Edward to remind me of that night. I will never forget it. I feel as if I will never raise my head up from what I did. I cannot bear that Edward should even speculate about what I did to get the king to tear up the warrant for my arrest. ‘His Majesty is merciful,’ I say quietly.

‘More than that,’ Edward says. ‘He is changing his mind. There are to be no more burnings for heresy. The mood of the country has turned against it, and the king has turned with them. He says that Anne Askew should have been pardoned, and that Anne Askew will be the last. This is your influence, Your Majesty, and everyone who wants to see the church reformed will be grateful to you. There are many who thank God for you. There are many who know that you are a scholar, a theologian and a leader.’

‘It’s too late for some,’ I say quietly.

‘Yes, but others are still in prison,’ he says. ‘You could ask for their release.’

‘He does not seek my advice,’ I remind him.

‘A woman like you can put a thought into her husband’s head and congratulate him for thinking it,’ Edward says, smiling broadly. ‘You know how it is done. You are the only woman ever to manage it.’

I think that I started my reign as a scholar and learned how to study, and now I have become a whore and have learned whore’s tricks.

‘It is not ignoble to humble yourself for a cause like this,’ Edward says as if he knows what I am thinking. ‘The papists are in retreat, the king has turned against them. You could get good men released and the king to change the law to free people to pray as they wish. You have to work with your charm and your beauty – with the skills of Eve and the spirit of Our Lady. This is what it is to be a woman of power.’

‘That’s odd, for I feel powerless,’ I say.

‘You must use what you have,’ he says, the advice of a good man to a whore for time immemorial. ‘You must use what you are allowed.’

I take great care not to say one word that sounds like a challenge to the king. I ask him to explain his thinking on the significance of purgatory, and I am interested when he tells me that there is no evidence for such a state in the Bible and that the theory of purgatory was created by the church solely to finance chantries and Masses. I listen with the air of an eager disciple as he propounds things that I have thought ever since I began my studies. Now he is glancing into books that I have read and hidden for my own safety, and he tells me the things that strike him as if they are a great novelty and I should learn them from him. Little Lady Jane Grey knows these opinions, Princess Elizabeth has read them; I taught them both myself. But now I sit beside the king and exclaim when he describes the blindingly obvious, I admire his discovery of the widely known and I remark on his perception.

‘I shall release the men held on charges of heresy,’ he says to me. ‘A man should not be imprisoned for his conscience, not if he is questioning reverently and thoughtfully.’

Silently, I nod as if I am overwhelmed by the king’s vision.

‘You will be glad to know that a preacher like Hugh Latimer can be free to speak again?’ Henry prompts me. ‘He used to preach in your rooms, didn’t he? You can have your afternoon sermons again.’

I speak with meticulous care. ‘I should be glad to know that innocent men are free. Your Majesty is merciful, and a careful judge of what is right.’

‘Will you have your afternoon sermons again?’

I don’t know what he wants to hear, and I am determined to say only what he wants to hear. ‘If it is your wish. I like to listen to the preachers so that I may understand Your Majesty’s thoughts. It helps me to follow your intricate thinking if I study the fathers of the church.’

‘D’you know what Jane Seymour’s motto was?’ he suddenly demands.

I flush. ‘Yes, Your Majesty.’

‘What was it?’

‘I believe it was Bound to Obey and Serve.’

He bellows suddenly: a roar of shocking laughter, opening his mouth wide, showing his yellow teeth and his furred tongue. ‘Say it again! You say it!’

‘Bound to Obey and Serve.’

He laughs but there is no humour in his voice at all. I make sure that I am smiling, as if I am willing to be amused but too slow to understand the joke, as if I, as a dull woman, can have no sense of humour, but I am happy to admire his wit.

The admiral of France, Claude d’Annebault, who negotiated the peace with Edward Seymour, comes to Hampton Court for a great reception. The royal children, especially Prince Edward, are to welcome him. The king says that he is tired and asks me to watch that Edward does all that he should, and maintains the dignity of the Tudor throne. Edward is only eight, and torn between excitement and apprehension at the part he has to play. He comes to my rooms before the Frenchman arrives and asks me what exactly is to happen and what exactly he is to do. He is so precise, so anxious to be accurate, like a little astronomer, that I call my master of horse and my principal steward and we draw out, on a great sheet of paper, a plan of the gardens. Then, with his old tin soldiers from the nursery, we represent the arrival of the French delegation, and use little dolls to represent us, going out to meet them.

There are to be two hundred French gentlemen and the whole of the Privy Council and the court will come to meet them. We will house them in tents of cloth of gold in the gardens and we will build temporary banqueting houses for the feasts. We draw this little village on our plan, and we take another piece of paper and list the ten days and every reception, hunt, masque, sport and feast.

Princess Elizabeth is there too, and Lady Jane, and we laugh and call for bonnets and headgear and soon we are play-acting the arrival of the French. Edward plays himself but all the rest of us are Frenchmen and courtiers in great hats, sweeping exaggerated bows and making long speeches until we fail the masque with our laughter and have to be ourselves again.

‘But it will be like this?’ Edward asks earnestly. ‘And I will stand just here?’ He points at the platform that we have marked on the plan.

‘Why worry? Elizabeth demands of him. ‘You’re the prince and our Lady Mother is regent – whatever the two of you choose to do must be how it is to be done. You’re Prince of Wales, you cannot do anything wrong.’

Edward gives me his sweetest smile. ‘I shall follow you, Lady Mother.’

‘You are the prince,’ I say. ‘And Elizabeth is correct. Whatever you do is the right thing.’

The visit goes off just as we planned it. Prince Edward rides out with an escort of gentlemen and yeomen of the guard, all dressed in cloth of gold. He looks very small with the great yeomen towering over him, but he handles his little horse well and he greets the visitors with dignity in perfect French. I am so proud of his scholarship that I hug him on his return and dance him around my private chamber.

I report on his good behaviour to the king, and Henry says that he will meet the admiral himself, and take him to Mass in the chapel royal.

‘You have served me and my family well today,’ Henry says to me when I go to his room in the evening to tell him of the visit and the ceremonies, of how well Prince Edward acted as host in his father’s absence, of how proud we must be of Jane Seymour’s boy. ‘You have been as a mother to him,’ the king says. ‘Far more than his own mother, who never knew even knew him.’

I notice that tonight he speaks of her death as a dereliction of her duty. ‘You have been as a regent to the country today. I am grateful to you.’

‘I have done nothing more than I should,’ I coo.

‘I am glad that you are pictured with him in the family portrait,’ he says. ‘It is right that you are honoured as his stepmother.’

I hesitate. Clearly, he has forgotten that it is Jane Seymour, the dead wife, who is in the portrait. I sat for it, but I did not get my face in the frame. There is no portrait of me together with the little boy that I love.

He continues, regardless. ‘You have been an honour to your country and to your beliefs,’ he says. ‘You have quite persuaded me over these last few months of the rightness of your place at the head of the country and of your convictions.’

I glance around the room. There is no-one here to disagree. The usual courtiers are in earshot but now they are almost all friendly to me or to the cause of reform. Stephen Gardiner is absent. There was some argument over a small estate of land and the king took sudden offence. Gardiner will have to wheedle his way back into favour, but in the meantime, it is a pleasure to be without him. Wriothesley has not been at the king’s side since the day in the garden when he came to arrest me.

‘I am always guided by Your Majesty,’ I say.

‘And I think you are right about the Mass,’ he says casually. ‘Or do you call it the Communion?’

I smile, pretending confidence while I feel the ground shuddering and weakening beneath me. ‘I call it whatever Your Majesty thinks best,’ I say. ‘It is your church, it is your liturgy. You know better than I, better than anyone, how it should be understood.’

‘Let’s call it the Communion then, the Communion for all the people of the church,’ he says, suddenly expansive. ‘Let us say that it is not literally the body and blood of Our Lord – for how are the common people to understand such a thing? They will think we mean some magic or some trickery. To those of us who think deeply, who meditate on these things, we who understand the power of language, it may be the body and the blood as well as bread and wine; but to the ordinary people we can say to them that it is a form of words. Likewise also when they had supped he took the cup saying: This cup is the new testament in my blood which shall for you be shed. It is clear that He gave them bread, He blessed bread, He gave them wine and told them it was a testament. We, who understand so much more than the village dullards, should not muddle them and confuse them.’

I dare not look up in case this is a trap set for me, but I feel myself tremble with the strength of my feeling. If the king is coming to this realisation, if the king is coming to this clarity, then Anne did not die in vain and I did not throw down my scholarship and take a beating like a slave in vain, for God has brought the king enlightenment through her ashes and my shame.

‘Is Your Majesty saying that we should understand that the words are symbolic?’

‘Isn’t it what you think?’

I will not be tempted into declaring my opinion. ‘Your Majesty, you will find me a very stupid woman, but I hardly know what to think. I was brought up to believe one thing, and then taught to consider another. Now, as a married woman, I have to know what my husband believes for he is there to guide me.’

He smiles. This is exactly right; this is what he wants to hear. This is what a tamed wife parrots to her husband. ‘Kate, I will tell you – I think we need to create a sincere religion in which the communion is the centre of the liturgy but its power is symbolic,’ he pronounces. The rounded phrase and the sonorous delivery tells me that he has prepared this. He may even have written it down and learned it by heart. Someone may even have coached him – Anthony Denny? Thomas Cranmer?

‘Thank you,’ I say sweetly. ‘Thank you for guiding me.’

‘And I am going to suggest to the French ambassador that we work together, France and England, to drive out the superstition and heresy of the old church and create a new church in France and in England, based on the Bible, based on the new learning, and that we spread it throughout all our lands, and then throughout the world.’

This is incredible. ‘You will?’

‘Kate, I want a learned thoughtful people walking in the ways of God, not a pack of fearful fools plagued by witches and priests. All of Europe but the papal states are persuaded that this is the way to understand God. I want to be part of this. I want to advise them, I want England to lead them. And if the day ever comes, I want to leave you as a regent and my son as a king to reign over people who say prayers that they understand and take part in a Mass – in a Communion that makes sense to them, as Our Lord described – not some kind of mumpsimus-sumpsimus invented in Rome.’

‘I think it too, I think it too!’ I can no longer contain my enthusiasm.

He smiles at me. ‘We’ll bring the new learning, the new religion into England,’ he says. ‘You will see this, even if I do not.’