The Taming of the Queen Read online

  Some days I wake in the morning certain that today they will come for me, and I will go in my royal barge, my new royal barge, which has given me such foolish pleasure, upriver to the Tower. I will enter through the watergate on the swelling tide, and they will take me, not to the royal rooms, but to the ones that overlook the green, where the prisoners are held. A few days later and I will watch from the barred window as they build a wooden scaffold and know that it is for me. A confessor will come in and tell me that I must prepare myself for death.

  On these days I don’t know how to get out of bed. Nan and the maids dress me as if I were a cold doll with a set face. I go through the motions of queenship, attending chapel, dining before the court, walking by the river and throwing a ball for little Rig, watching the court at play, but my face is stiff and my eyes are glassy. I think that if the day comes that there is a knock on my door I will shame myself. I will never find the courage to climb the ladder to the scaffold. I will never be able to speak as Anne Boleyn spoke. My legs will fail and they will have to push me up the steps, as they did to Kitty Howard. I will not fight for my life like Margaret Pole. I will not go cheerfully in my best coat like Bishop Fisher. I am as inadequate to this task as I am to my marriage. I will fail at my death as I have failed as queen.

  Other days I wake cheerfully, certain that the king is doing what he himself told me is the best way to rule: favour one side and then the other, keep your thoughts a secret from everyone, be the master in the dogfight and let the curs fight it out before you. I assure myself that he is just tormenting me, as he torments everyone. He will get better and send for me, praise my beauty and remind me that I am no scholar, give me diamonds reset from a broken pectoral cross, tell me that I am the sweetest wife a man ever had and dress me in someone else’s gown.

  ‘George Blagge has been arrested,’ Nan tells me quietly as we walk to chapel one morning. She grips my hand as I stumble. ‘They came for him last night.’

  George Blagge is a fat plain adventurer, a favourite of the king because of his round ugly face and his terrible habit of snorting with laughter at a bawdy joke. People compose jokes just to hear Blagge snuffling with laughter, blushing rosy red and then finally unable to contain his great snorting bellow. The king calls him ‘his beloved pig’ and Will Somers does a fine impression of Blagge hearing a joke that is almost as funny as the real thing. But he will not be doing that trick again.

  ‘What has he done?’ I ask.

  George Blagge is no fool, for all that he has a laugh like a farrowing sow. In serious mood he has come to my rooms and listened to the sermons. He says little, and thinks a lot. I cannot believe that he would ever have said anything that might offend the king; to the king he is a playmate, not a philosopher.

  ‘They say he spoke disrespectfully about the Mass, and then he snorted with laughter,’ Nan whispers.

  ‘Snorted with laughter?’ I look blankly at her. ‘But that’s what he does; that amuses the king.’

  ‘Now it’s disrespect,’ she says. ‘And now he’s charged with heresy.’

  ‘For snorting?’

  She nods.

  John Dudley Lord Lisle, the rising man and a believer in religious reform, now comes home from France with a peace treaty in his pocket. All the while that Stephen Gardiner was treating with the emperor, aiming for a peace with Spain, selling the reformers to their death in exchange for a renewed loving alliance with the pope, John Dudley was secretly meeting with the French admiral and hammering out an agreement where we keep Boulogne for decades to come and the French pay us a handsome fee. This should be the moment of triumph for John Dudley, for the Seymours, and for all of us who share the reform faith. We have won the race to peace, we have made peace with the French and not with the papist Spanish.

  He comes to my rooms to receive my congratulations. The Princess Mary is at my side, putting a brave face on the turn of events that remove England from alliance with her mother’s family.

  ‘But, my lord, if we have peace with the French, then I suppose that the king is unlikely to make his new alliance with the German princes and the Elector Palatine?’

  The studied blankness of poor Mary’s face tells me how anxiously she is awaiting his response.

  ‘Indeed, His Majesty will not need the friendship of the German princes,’ John Dudley replies. ‘We have a lasting alliance with France, we need no other.’

  ‘Perhaps no betrothal,’ I whisper to Mary and watch the colour flood into her face. I make a little gesture to give her permission to stand aside and she goes to the window bay to compose herself.

  As soon as her back is turned, the smile disappears from John Dudley’s face. ‘Your Majesty, what in God’s name is happening here?’

  ‘The king is arresting those in favour of reform,’ I say quietly. ‘People are disappearing from court, and from the London churches. There’s no sense in it. One day someone is at dinner the next they are gone.’

  ‘I hear that Nicholas Shaxton has been summoned to London to answer charges of heresy. I couldn’t believe it. He was Bishop of Salisbury! They can’t arrest a former bishop.’

  I didn’t know this. He can see the shock in my face. For one of the king’s own bishops to be arrested like this is to return to the dark days of the martyred churchmen, and John Fisher walking to the scaffold. The king had sworn he would never allow such cruelty again.

  ‘Hugh Latimer, who preached before me in the Lent season, has been summoned to explain to the Privy Council what topics he chose,’ I tell John Dudley.

  ‘The Privy Council are theologians now? They are going to debate with Latimer? I wish them the best with that.’

  ‘Stephen Gardiner will certainly debate with him. He is defending the Six Articles,’ I say. ‘And that is an easy side to take for there is a new law that nobody may speak against them.’

  ‘But the Six Articles are halfway to popery!’ he exclaims. ‘The king himself said—’

  ‘Now, they are the king’s express opinion,’ I interrupt.

  ‘His opinion for now!’

  I bow and say nothing.

  ‘Forgive me, forgive me,’ John Dudley recovers himself. ‘It’s just that I feel as if the Seymours and Cranmer and I are away from court for five minutes and the old churchmen get hold of the king, and when we return we find all the gains we have made and everything we believe are set back. Can’t you do anything?’

  ‘I can’t even see him,’ I say. ‘I can’t ask for mercy for the others because I never see him. I am afraid of what they say about me.’

  He nods. ‘I’ll do what I can,’ he says. ‘But perhaps you should limit your studies.’

  ‘My books are gone,’ I say bitterly. ‘See the empty shelves? My papers, too.’

  I had hoped he would say that there was no need for me to destroy my library. But he simply asks: ‘And have you stopped your sermons and talks?’

  ‘We listen only to the king’s chaplains, and their sermons are as dull as they can make them.’

  ‘What subjects?’

  ‘Wifely obedience,’ I say drily, but not even that makes him smile.

  Hugh Latimer, ordered to appear as a suspect before the Privy Council where he had once spoken as an authority, admits that he preached a series of sermons before me – undeniable – since half the Privy Council’s wives, and some of the Privy Council themselves, attended. He does not agree that he said anything heretical, nor anything tending to reform. He says that he preached on the Word of God, and stayed inside the current teaching of the church. They release him; but the next day they arrest another preacher from my afternoon studies, Doctor Edward Crome, and they accuse him of denying the existence of purgatory.

  This, he has to admit. Of course he denies the existence of purgatory. If they asked me, or indeed anyone with any sense, no-one could say that there is any evidence for such a place. Heaven, yes – Our Lord speaks of it Himself – hell, yes – He harrows it for sinners. But nowhere does the Bible suggest that