The Taming of the Queen Read online

  ‘Where did you go?’ I ask. ‘When your husband threw you out of your home?’

  ‘I went to Lincoln,’ she says with a smile. ‘I sat at the back of the great cathedral and I took a Bible in my hands and I read it in the sight of the congregation and in the sight of the benighted pilgrims who come through the doors, kissing the floor and creeping on their knees. Poor souls, they chinked with the pilgrim badges they had pinned on their clothes but they thought it was a heresy that a woman should read God’s Word in a church. Imagine that! To think it is a heresy for a believer to read a Bible in church!

  ‘I read it aloud to everyone who came and went in that great building, buying and selling favours, trading pilgrim badges and relics, all the fools and hucksters. I read the Bible to teach them that the only way to God is not through chips of stone and bits of bone, flasks of holy water and prayers written backwards on scraps of paper and pinned to a coat. It is not through sacred rings and kissing the foot of a statue. I showed them that the only way to God is through His Holy Word, in His own holy words.’

  ‘You’re a brave woman,’ I remark.

  She smiles at me. ‘No, I am a simple woman,’ she corrects me. ‘When I understand something true, it goes to my heart. I have understood this: that we have to read and know the Word of God. This, and nothing else, will bring us to heaven. All the rest of it: the threat of purgatory, the promise of forgiveness in return for payment, the statues that bleed and the pictures that leak milk, all these things are the invention of a church that has gone far from the Word of God. It is for me, and for those who care about truth, to cling to the Word of God and turn our face from the masquing. The church does not put on mystery plays once a year any more, it plays them every day all the year. It is all costume and show and pretence. But the Bible is the truth and there is nothing but the Bible.’

  I nod. She speaks simply, but she is absolutely right.

  ‘So I came in the end to London, and spoke before the great men of this city. My brother helped me, and my sister is Mrs Jane St Paul, whose husband serves the duchess.’ She curtseys to Catherine Brandon, who nods her head in reply. ‘I found a safe house with honest kinsmen who think as I do, and I listened to preachers and spoke with many learned men, far more learned than me. And a good man, a preacher that you know, I think, Your Majesty, John Lascelles, took me to meet other good men and speak with them.’

  An almost imperceptible breath from Nan tells me that she knows the name. I glance at her.

  ‘He bore witness against Queen Katherine,’ she says.

  ‘I have met a few people of your court,’ Anne goes on, looking around and smiling. ‘Lady Denny and Lady Hertford. And others listen to gospellers and believe in the reform of the church.’ She takes a breath. ‘And then I went to the church for a divorce,’ she says.

  Nan gives a little scream of shock. ‘How? How could you?’

  ‘I went to the church and I said that since my husband was a believer in the old ways and I am for the new, we never made vows that meant the same thing. We did not join hands in the same church, the true God can have nothing to do with the vows that they made me swear, in a language that I didn’t understand, and so our marriage should be dissolved.’

  ‘Mistress Anne, a woman can’t get her marriage dissolved at will,’ Catherine protests.

  Nan and I exchange glances. Our own brother’s wife ran away from him and he was awarded a divorce as a gift from the king. The king is head of the church, marriage and divorce are in his gift, they are not for a woman to take.

  ‘Why should not a woman leave a marriage? If she can make it, surely she can unmake it,’ Anne Askew replies. ‘What was sworn can be unsworn. The king himself—’

  ‘We don’t speak of the king,’ Nan says swiftly.

  ‘The law does not recognise a woman except when she is alone in the world,’ Anne Askew says authoritatively. ‘Only a woman without father or husband has any legal rights in this world. That, in itself, is unjust. But think of this: I am a woman alone, a feme sole. My father is dead and I deny my husband. The law must deal with me as an adult equal person as I am before God. I will go to heaven because I have read and accepted the Word of God. I demand justice because I have read and accepted the word of the law.’

  Nan exchanges a quick worried look with me. ‘I don’t know the rights and the wrongs of this,’ she says. ‘But I know it is not a fit discourse for a queen’s household.’ She glances at Princess Elizabeth, who is listening carefully. ‘Not for young ears.’

  I shake my head. I am married to a man who declares his own annulments. He is divorced when he says it is so. Anne Askew suggests that a woman might claim as much power as the king.

  ‘You had better speak of your faith,’ I command her. ‘I have translated Psalm 145: All things be under Thy dominion and rule. Speak of that to us.’

  She bows her head as if to gather her thoughts for a moment, and then she speaks simply and eloquently, and in her voice I hear the ring of complete conviction, and in her face I see the shine of innocence.

  She stays all the morning and I send her home with a purse of coins and an invitation to come again. I am fascinated by her, inspired by this woman who says that she can choose where she lives, choose or reject a husband, this woman who knows that God forgives her sins, because she confesses them to Him – not to a priest – she speaks to Him directly. I think this is the first woman I have ever met who strikes me as being one who makes her own life, who walks her own path, who is responsible for herself. This is a woman who has not been tamed to be as others want; she has not been cut down to fit her circumstances.

  The portrait painter comes to finish his sketches of the two princesses. I think that Princess Mary stands straighter and taller than usual, as if she knows that this may be the last taking of her likeness as an English princess, as if it is her last portrait before she is sent away. Perhaps she thinks that this portrait will be copied and sent to her proposed husbands.

  I go to her side to pull her train a little straighter, to show off the beautiful brocade, and I whisper in her ear: ‘You’re not posing as an icon, you know. You can smile,’ and am rewarded by her swift fugitive giggle.

  ‘I do know,’ she says. ‘It’s just that people will see this portrait years from now, perhaps hundreds of years from now.’

  Princess Elizabeth, blooming under the attention of the painter, is as pink as the inside of a little shell. She spent so long hidden from sight that she loves the male gaze.

  I sit and watch the two girls as they stand at a distance but half-facing each other. The painter has his sketches of their faces, and a careful note of the colours of their gowns. All of this will be transferred to the great work like a tisserand weaving flowers on a tapestry on the loom from pictures that she has sketched in the garden.

  Then the painter turns to me. ‘Your Majesty?’

  ‘I am not in my gown,’ I protest.

  ‘For today, I just want to capture your likeness,’ he says. ‘The way that you hold yourself. Will you be so good as to sit as you will be seated? Perhaps you can imagine that the king is on your right. Would you tilt your head towards him? But I need you to look straight at me.’

  I sit as he directs, but I cannot lean towards the space where the king would be. The painter, de Vent, is very exact. Gently he moves the angle of my head this way and that until Mary laughingly takes the place where her father will be positioned, and I sit beside her and tip my head just slightly, as if I am listening.

  ‘Exquisite, yes,’ de Vent says. ‘But it is too flat. The new fashions . . . Your Majesty, would you allow me?’

  He come closer and turns my chair a little towards where the king will sit. ‘And will you let your eyes go this way?’ He points to the window. ‘So.’

  He steps back to gaze at me. I look where he directs, and in my line of sight, outside the window, a blackbird lands on a branch of a tree and opens its yellow beak in a trill of song. At once I am transported to th