The Taming of the Queen Read online

  ‘So you do think I will die!’ He crows at having trapped me. ‘You think you will outlive another old husband and enjoy a widow’s estate.’ His face flushes red as his anger rises. ‘You sit there, at my sickbed, and imagine the day you will be free of me and free to take some worthless lad as your next husband, the fourth! You, who have wedded and bedded three men, are thinking of the next!’

  I hide my shock at his sudden fury and I stay very calm. ‘My lord husband, I am sure you will recover from this fever, as you have from the injuries of your youth. I was trying to reassure you so that you would not worry on your sickbed. I pray for nothing but your health and I know that it will be restored to you.’

  He glares at me, as if he would see past my steady gaze and into my heart. I meet his eyes without flinching, for so much that I say is true. I honour him, I love him as a loyal subject and an honourable wife who has promised before God to love him. I never think of his death. It has been a long time since I dreamed of being free. I truly believe that he will recover from this illness and go on and on. This marriage will be my last. I may go to my grave loving Thomas Seymour, but I never think now that we will be together some day. There are no imaginable circumstances in which we could be together. He never looks at me, and I keep my passionate thoughts to myself and see his smile only in rare erotic dreams.

  ‘You cannot doubt my love for you,’ I whisper.

  ‘You pray for my health,’ the king says, soothed at the thought of me on my knees.

  ‘I do. Daily.’

  ‘And when the preachers come to your room and you read the Bible do you speak of a wife’s obedience to her husband?’

  ‘We do. We all know that a wife worships God in her husband. That is unquestioned.’

  ‘And do you doubt purgatory?’ he asks.

  ‘I think a good Christian goes to heaven because of the saving grace of Jesus,’ I say carefully.

  ‘At his death? At the exact hour and minute of his death?’

  ‘I don’t know when, exactly.’

  ‘So will you pay for Masses for me? Will you establish a chantry for me?’

  How to answer this? ‘Whatever you wish,’ I promise him. ‘Whatever Your Majesty would prefer. But I don’t expect to see it.’

  His little mouth trembles. ‘Death,’ he repeats. ‘Thank God I am afraid of nothing. It’s just that I cannot imagine the country without me. I cannot imagine a world without me here, without the king that I have become, the husband that I am.’

  I smile tenderly. ‘I can’t imagine such a thing either.’

  ‘And your loss.’ He gives a little choke. ‘Yours, especially.’

  His grief is catching; tears come to my own eyes. I press his hand to my lips. ‘Not for years yet,’ I assure him. ‘If ever. I might die before you.’

  ‘You might,’ he says, cheered at once. ‘I suppose you might. You might die in childbirth like so many women. Because you are quite old to have a first child, aren’t you?’

  ‘I am,’ I say. ‘But I pray that God will grant us a child. Perhaps in the summer when you are well again?’

  ‘Well enough to come to your bed and make another Tudor heir?’ he asks.

  I turn down my eyes and nod modestly.

  ‘You long for me,’ he says, his mouth moist now and smiling.

  ‘I do,’ I whisper.

  ‘I should think so!’ the king says more cheerfully. ‘I should think so.’

  Despite this promise he continues to be feverish and his leg gives him terrible pain for a long dark month. He is no better in spring – which comes slowly to the gardens of Greenwich Palace and makes the trees bud with life and shiver into leaf on the riverside walks, and the birds sing so loudly that they wake me at dawn every morning, which comes earlier and earlier and is warmer every day.

  The lenten lilies swell and then flower beside the paths, their bright trumpet blooms like a shout of joy and hope, but the king keeps to his rooms with a table crowded with draughts and tinctures and herbs and jars of leeches, the shutters tightly closed against the dangerous fresh air. Doctor Wendy composes one physic after another, trying to keep the fever down, trying to cleanse out the suppurating wound on Henry’s leg, which gapes still wider, like a bloody mouth, as it eats into the flesh towards the bone. Two pages are dismissed, one for fainting at the sight of it, and one for saying in chapel that we should pray for the king as he is being eaten alive. Henry’s friends and courtiers gather around him, as if they are all under siege from disease, and each one tries to improve his position with the king in case this is not just another flaring up of fever and pain, but the beginning of a final illness.

  It falls to me to dine before the court, to order the entertainments, and to make sure that the royal household runs as smoothly reporting to me as it does when it is reporting to the king. I even confer with the rivals Edward Seymour and Thomas Howard to see that there is nothing troubling, difficult or dangerous in the Privy Council reports to the king before they take them in to him. When the Spanish envoys visit with a new plan for a treaty against France so that the emperor can move against the Lutherans and Protestants in his land, they call on me in my rooms before they attend the king.

  They do this in the morning, in order to avoid the embarrassment of arriving at my rooms when the preachers of reform are there. They would be horrified to bump into Anne Askew: a reformer and an intelligent woman. It is bitter for me to have to smile and greet them, knowing that they are seeking the friendship of England only to be strong enough to hunt down and murder men and women in Germany who believe as we do. But they come and speak of their plans, trusting that I will serve the interests of my country before anything, and I do my duty and greet them with politeness and assure them of our friendship.

  It is well known that the afternoon is the time for our sermon and our study. The best preachers in England travel down the river to attend my rooms and speak of the Word of God and how it can be applied in daily life, and how the man-made rituals can be scoured from a clean pure church. In these long weeks of Lent we have some inspiring sermons. Anne Askew comes several times, and Hugh Latimer often. Members of the court come to listen, even one of the Howards, Tom, the old duke’s second son, makes his bow and asks if he may sit at the back and listen. I know that his lordship would be appalled to know that his son thinks as I do, but the yeast is spreading through the thick dough of court and the people will rise to holiness. I’m certainly not going to forbid a good young man to come to Jesus, even if he is a Howard.

  These are the best theologians that England has, in touch with the reformers in Europe, and as I listen to them and sometimes debate with them, I am inspired to write a new book, one that I don’t mention to the king because I know that it will go too far for him. But I am more and more convinced by the rightness of the Lutheran view, and more and more opposed to the superstitious paganism of the old church, and I want to write – I have to write. When I have a thought in my head, when I breathe a prayer in the chapel, I have a great desire to see it set down on a page. I feel as if I can think only when I see the words flowing from the nib of my quill, that my thoughts only make sense when they are black ink on cream paper. I love the sensation of a thought in my head and the vision of the word on the page. I love that God gave the Word to the world, and that I can work in His chosen form.

  The king started the reform but now he is old and fearful he has halted. I wish he would go further. The influence of Stephen Gardiner, even at a distance, seems to blight any new thinking. The power of Spain should not dictate the beliefs of English men and women. The king hopes to create his own religion, an idiosyncratic combination of all the views of Christendom, picking the elements that he likes, the rituals that move him, the prayers that strike him. But this cannot be the way to worship God. The king cannot cling to the empty gestures of his childhood for sentiment, he cannot retain the expensive ritual that the old church loves. He has to think, he has to reason, he has to lead the church with wisd