The Taming of the Queen Read online

  ‘I like it,’ Henry says firmly, and there is a sort of breeze as the court releases its indrawn breath. ‘Very fair. Very well done.’ He glances at me and I see he looks just a little embarrassed. ‘You will be glad to see the children painted all together, and the honour that I have done to Edward’s mother.’

  He looks at the pale painted face of his dead wife. ‘She might have sat beside me, just like that, had she had been spared,’ he says. ‘She might have seen Edward grow to be a man. Who knows? She might have given me more sons.’

  There is nothing I can say while my husband publicly mourns a previous wife, gazing into her bleached stupid face as if to find some wit now that escaped everyone during her life. I find that my teeth are gritted to hold a fixed smile as if this is not an insult to me, as if I am not publicly denied, as if the king is not telling the world that all of us who came after Jane – Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard, me – are ghost queens of less substance than her, the dead wife.

  Of course, it is Anne Seymour, the dead queen’s sister-in-law, who steps forward and addresses the king as a kinswoman and fellow-mourner, taking advantage of his tears as she always does: ‘It is her to the life.’

  Except she is dead.

  ‘Just as she was,’ he says.

  I doubt that, for she is in my best gold-heeled shoes.

  ‘She must be looking down from heaven and blessing you and her boy,’ she says.

  ‘She must be,’ he agrees eagerly.

  I note, drily, that the sainted Jane seems to have skipped purgatory, though there is a preacher imprisoned in the Tower of London right now facing a charge of heresy for suggesting that purgatory does not exist.

  ‘She was cruelly taken from me,’ he says, his little eyes blinking out easy tears. ‘And we had been married little more than a year.’

  He’s not quite right. I could tell him exactly. They were married for a year and four months, a shorter marriage even than Kitty Howard, who lasted only a year and six months before he beheaded her; but far longer than his marriage to Anne of Cleves, now so well-regarded, who was pushed out inside half a year.

  ‘She loved you so much,’ Anne Seymour says mournfully. ‘But thank God that she left such a wonderful son as her living memorial.’

  The mention of Prince Edward cheers Henry. ‘She did,’ he says. ‘At least I have one son, and he is handsome, isn’t he?’

  ‘The very image of his father,’ Anne smiles. ‘See how he stands in the portrait. He is the very image of you!’

  I lead my ladies back to my rooms. I am smiling and they are all smiling. We are all trying to show that we are untroubled, that we have seen nothing that disturbs our position, our sense of entitlement. I am the queen and these are my ladies. Nothing is wrong.

  When we get to my rooms I wait for them to settle to their sewing with a reader opening a book approved by the Bishop of London. Then I say that I have a little flux, something I ate, no doubt. I will go to my room alone. Nan comes with me because hell’s own horses would not keep Nan out of my hair right now, and she shuts the door behind us and looks at me.

  ‘Bitch,’ I say shortly.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Her.’

  ‘Anne Seymour?’

  ‘No, Jane Seymour. The dead one.’

  This is so unreasonable that not even Nan tries to correct me. ‘You’re upset.’

  ‘I am publicly humiliated, I am supplanted before everyone by a ghost. My rival is not some pretty girl like Catherine Brandon or Mary Howard but a cadaver who was not even very lively when she breathed. And yet now she is the wife that he will not forget.’

  ‘She is dead, poor lady. She cannot irritate him now. He can think of her at her best.’

  ‘Her death is her best! She was never as charming as she is now!’

  Nan makes a little gesture with her hand, as if to say ‘stop’. ‘She did the best that she could, and my God, Kat, you would not be so hard on her if you had seen her die in such a fever, crying out for God and for her husband. She may have been a ninny; but she died a woman in lonely terror.’

  ‘What is that to me, who will now have to walk past her image every time I go to dinner? Who is not allowed to wear her pearls? But who has to raise her son? Bed her husband?’

  ‘You are angry,’ Nan says.

  ‘Indeed,’ I spit. ‘I see that your studies have not been wasted on you. I am angry. Excellent. Now what?’

  ‘You’re going to have to get over it,’ she says, as steady as our mother used to be when I raged against some nursery injustice. ‘Because you’re going to have to go to dinner with your head up, smiling, showing everyone that you are happy with the portrait, and happy with your marriage, and happy with your stepchildren and their three dead mothers, and happy with the king.’

  ‘Why do I have to do this?’ I pant. ‘Why do I have to pretend that I am not publicly insulted?’

  Nan’s face is very pale and her voice is flat. ‘Because if you see a dead wife as your rival, you will be a dead wife,’ she predicts. ‘People are already saying that he will remarry. People are already saying that he does not like your religion, that you are too much for reform. You have to face them down. You have to please him. You have to walk in to dinner tonight like a woman whose position cannot be questioned.’

  ‘Who questions me?’ I yell at her. ‘Who dares to question me?’

  ‘I am afraid that you are widely questioned,’ she says quietly. ‘Already, the gossip has started. Almost everyone questions your fitness to be queen.’

  WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON, WINTER 1545

  In the quiet days before the start of the Christmas feast the king is troubled and openly irritated that neither his traditional advisors nor his new thinkers can get a truce with France. Charles of Spain is now urging that a truce be made so that he is free to turn on his own subjects. He is determined to stamp out the reformers in Flanders and the lands of the Holy Roman Empire. He says that he and Henry must forget their enmity against France to confront a greater danger. They must all three join together to make war against the Lutherans. He says that this must be the new crusade, that they must make war against people who are such sinners, they think that the Bible is the best guide to life.

  I pray for the safety of the men and women of God in England, in Germany, in every corner of Christendom, who have done nothing wrong but have read the Word of God and study it in their hearts. Then they speak. Why should they not? Why should the scholars of the church and the priests of the church and – yes – the bullies and soldiers of the church be the only ones who can announce the truth as they see it?

  Stephen Gardiner, still in Bruges, still desperately trying to gain a peace treaty with France, is passionately for peace with France and Spain, arguing in favour of a bloodstained crusade against Lutherans everywhere, especially in Germany, to start at once.

  ‘God only knows what he is offering, what he is promising on my behalf,’ Henry grumbles to me as we sit quietly playing cards together one evening.

  Around us the court is dancing and flirting, someone is singing, and there is a small group standing around us, watching the play and betting on the outcome. Catherine Brandon is at the king’s elbow. He shows her his cards and asks for her advice, and she smiles and swears she will signal to me so that I have the advantage. Most people bet on the king. He does not like to lose. He does not even like someone betting against him. I see a weak card that he plays and I do not trump it. He roars at my mistake and scoops up the trick.

  ‘Shall you summon Bishop Gardiner home?’ I ask as calmly as I can. ‘Do you agree with him that the emperor should make a war against his own people?’

  ‘For certain they go too far in Germany,’ Henry says. ‘And these German princes have been no help to me at all. I won’t defend them. Why should I? They don’t understand the ways of man, why should they grasp the ways of God?’

  I glance up and see Edward Seymour, Thomas’s brother, watching me. I know that he hopes tha