The Taming of the Queen Read online

  There is a tap on the door, the guards swing it open, and in walks Anne Askew, as trim and as pretty as if she had just come from the seamstress. She steps in, a gleeful little smile on her face, and dips a deep curtsey to me.

  ‘God bless us!’ Nan exclaims and, forgetting herself completely, crosses herself as if she were seeing a ghost.

  ‘You’re a welcome stranger!’ I say. ‘It’s a long time since we saw you! I was glad to know you were safe, that Bishop Bonner had released you, but we heard he sent you home. I didn’t think to see you again at court.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I was sent home to my husband,’ she says, quite matter-of-fact. ‘And I thank Your Majesty for letting it be known that I am under your protection. You saved me from more questioning, and a trial, I know. They did send me home to my husband, I was paroled into his keeping, but I have left him again and here I am.’

  I smile at the boldness of the young woman. ‘Mistress Anne, you make it sound easy.’

  ‘As easy as sin,’ she says cheerfully. ‘But it is not sin, I promise you. My husband knows nothing of me, nor of my faith. I am as strange to him as a deer in the sheep pen. There is no way that we could marry in the sight of God and no way that such vows could be binding. He thinks as I do, though he has not the courage to say it to the bishop. He does not want me in his home, any more than I can tolerate being there. We cannot be yoked together – a deer and a sheep.’

  Nan gets to her feet, alert as a yeoman of the guard. ‘But should you be here?’ she asks. ‘You cannot bring heresy to the queen’s rooms. You cannot come here if you have been ordered to stay with your husband, whether he is a sheep and you a deer or both of you a pair of fools.’

  Anne puts out her hand to halt Nan’s anxious torrent of words. ‘I would never bring danger to Her Majesty’s door,’ she says calmly. ‘I know who I have to thank for my release. I owe you a debt for life,’ she adds with a little curtsey to me. Then she turns back to Nan. ‘They were satisfied with my answers. They questioned me over and over but I did not say a word that was not in the Bible and they had no handle to hold me, nor rope to hang me.’

  Nan hides an involuntary shudder at the mention of the hangman and glances towards me. ‘Bishop Bonner has no complaint against you?’ she repeats incredulously.

  Anne lets out a ringing, confident laugh. ‘That’s a man who would always be complaining about something. But there was nothing he could fix on me. The Lord Mayor asked me did I think the Host was holy, and I did not answer, because I know that it is illegal to speak of the bread of the Mass. He asked me if a mouse ate the Host would the mouse be holy? I just said, “Alack, poor mouse.” That was the best of his questions: trying to trap me with a holy mouse!’

  Despite myself I cannot help but laugh, and Catherine Brandon catches my eye and she giggles.

  ‘Anyway, thank God that they released you, and obeyed the queen,’ Catherine says, recovering. ‘We are winning the argument, almost everyone is persuaded by the queen’s thinking. The king listens to her, and the whole court thinks as we do.’

  ‘And the queen has translated a book of prayers that have come out under her own name,’ Nan says proudly.

  Anne turns her brown gaze to me. ‘Your Majesty, this is to use your education and your position for the good of all true believers, and especially for the good of women. To be a woman and to write! To be a woman and to publish!’

  ‘She is the first,’ Nan boasts. ‘The first woman to publish in the new printed books in England, the very first woman to publish in the English language. The first to write her own prayers and not merely translate.’

  ‘Hush,’ I say. ‘There are many scholars like me, and many better read. There have been women writers before me. But I am blessed with a husband who allows me to study and write, and we are all blessed with a king who allows the prayers of the church to be understood by his people.’

  ‘Thank God for him,’ Anne Askew says fervently. ‘Do you think he will allow the Bible back into the churches again for everyone to read?’

  ‘I am certain of it,’ I say. ‘For since he has commissioned a translation of the Mass, he is bound to want the Bible to be read to the people in English, and the Bible will be restored to the churches once more.’

  ‘Amen,’ Anne Askew says. ‘And my work will be done. For all I ever do is recite the words of the Bible that I have memorised, and explain what the words mean. Half the gospellers in London are nothing more than speaking Bibles. If the Bible were allowed back into the churches we would all be at peace. If the people can read it for themselves again it will be like the feeding of the multitude. It will be a miracle of our age.’

  WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON, AUTUMN 1545

  We come to Whitehall as the weather turns cold and the frost in the garden makes the yew trees in the allées silvery white on the tips of their branches and green and dark in their shades. The bowls of the fountains are skinned with ice, and I order all the furs to be brought from the wardrobe rooms at my house, Baynard’s Castle. Once again they drape Kitty Howard’s sables around my neck, but this year I find that they are scented with my perfume and the ghost of the girl queen is gone into the cold twilight.

  Nicholas de Vent has completed his great portrait of the five of us and it is waiting for its formal unveiling, fixed in its place, just as we specified that it should be, shrouded in a cloth of gold. Nobody has seen it since it left his studio; we are waiting for the king to announce that he wants to see it.

  ‘Will Your Majesty come and unveil the portrait?’ Anne Seymour asks me. ‘His Majesty asked my lord husband to escort you.’

  ‘Now?’ I ask. I am reading a book, as simple as a child’s primer, that explains the mystery of the Mass, the reality of purgatory. It is a book approved by the Privy Council and it is written in exactly their pompous tone of certainty. I close it, and wonder how it is that men, even thoughtful men, can sound as if they never consider anything but always simply know.

  ‘Yes, now,’ she says. ‘The painter is here; everyone is gathering.’

  ‘Is the king coming?’

  ‘His Majesty is resting,’ she says. ‘His leg is bad. He says he will see it later.’

  I get to my feet. ‘I’ll come,’ I say. I see Elizabeth’s bright face bob up. She is such a vain child, she longs to see what the painter will have made of her. She sat for him in her best gown, in the hope that in the final design she will be placed centre stage, close to her father’s hand, an acknowledged Tudor princess. Princess Mary and I exchange a wry look over Elizabeth’s head. We may not be excited like a girl at the thought of this portrait, but we are both glad to be publicly acclaimed. This picture will hang in Whitehall Palace for years, perhaps for centuries. People will copy it and have the copies in pride of place in their own homes. It will show the royal children with their father, and me: seated at his side. It will mark my achievement – a great achievement – of bringing the royal children to their father. I may not give him a child as Jane Seymour did, I will not be his wife for twenty-three years like Katherine of Aragon, but I have done something that no wife has managed to do before – I have put the children at the heart of the royal family. The two girls and the precious heir are in the same portrait as their father. It is a picture of a royal family and I am there as their acknowledged mother. I am queen, I am regent, I am their mother, and the portrait will show my children around me, my husband beside me; and those who doubt my influence and think that they can conspire against me can look at this portrait and see the woman at the heart of the royal family.

  ‘We’ll come at once,’ I say.

  I am eager to see how I look. After trying many colours I chose to wear my red undergown, with an extravagant overgown of cloth of gold trimmed with ermine. The painter himself selected it from the royal wardrobe. He said that he wanted the colours of the picture to be all red and gold, to show our wealth, to show our unity, to show our grandeur in royal colours. I did not say that red is my favourite, but of course I