The Taming of the Queen Read online

  ‘Isn’t this rather ridiculous?’ I ask the king, as we sit beside the fire in his room after dinner. ‘Surely Hereward the Wake had no coat of arms to leave to the Howards, even if they are descended from him, which nobody can prove. Does this matter at all?’

  Around us the court murmurs and plays cards. I can hear the rattle of dice. Soon the king will assemble his cronies, and my ladies and I will withdraw.

  Henry’s face is mean, his eyes squinting. ‘It matters,’ he says shortly. ‘It matters to me.’

  ‘But for him to claim descent from Hereward the Wake . . . this is like a fairy story.’

  ‘It’s a very dangerous story,’ he says. ‘No-one has royal descent in this country but me.’ He pauses. He will be thinking of the former royal family, the Plantagenets. One by one he has sent them to their deaths for nothing worse than their fathers’ name. ‘There is only one family that can trace themselves back to Arthur of England, and that is ours. Any challenge is going to be met with extreme punishment.’

  ‘But why?’ I ask, as gently as I can. ‘If it is an old shield that he has shown many times before. If it is the silly pride of a young man. If the college of heralds saw it years ago, and you have not objected before?’

  He raises one fat finger and instantly I am silent. ‘Do you remember what the dog-master does?’ he asks me quietly.

  I nod.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘He sets one dog against another.’

  ‘He does. And when any single dog becomes big and strong, what does he do with it?

  He snaps his fingers when I don’t answer.

  ‘He lets the others pull it down,’ I say, unwillingly.

  ‘Of course.’

  I am silent for a moment. ‘It means that you will never have great men about you,’ I remark. ‘No thoughtful advisors, no-one that you can respect. No-one can stay with you and grow great in your service. No-one can be rewarded for loyalty. You can have no tried and tested friends.’

  ‘That’s true,’ he agrees with me. ‘Because I don’t want anyone like that. I’ve had men like that before, when I was a young man, friends that I loved and men who were brilliant thinkers, who could solve a problem the moment they heard it. If you had seen Thomas Wolsey in his prime! If you had known Thomas More! Thomas Cromwell would work all night, every night – nothing ever stopped him. He never failed at anything he set his hand to. I could set him a problem at dinner and he would bring me a warrant of arrest at chapel before breakfast.’

  He breaks off, his little eyes under the pink swollen eyelids look towards the door as if his friend Thomas More might come in at any moment, his thoughtful face warm with laughter, his cap under his arm, his love for the king and for his family the greatest influence in his life, but nothing in the world greater than his love of God.

  ‘I want Nobody now,’ the king says coldly. ‘Because Nobody gives nothing away, Nobody loves no-one. The world is filled with people seeking only their own ambitions and working for their own causes. Even Thomas More—’ he breaks off with a little self-pitying sob. ‘He chose loyalty to the church over his love for me. He chose his faith over life itself. You see? No-one is ever faithful till death. If anyone tells you anything different they are playing you for a fool. I will never be a fool again. I know that every smiling friend is an enemy, every advisor is pursuing his own interest. Everyone wants my place, everyone wants my fortune, everyone wants my inheritance.’

  I can’t argue against this intense bitterness. ‘But you love your children,’ I say quietly.

  He looks across at Princess Mary, who is quietly talking to Sir Anthony Denny in a corner. He looks for Princess Elizabeth and sees her peeping upwards into the smiling face of Thomas Seymour.

  ‘Not particularly,’ he says, and his voice is like cold glass. ‘Who loved me as a child? No-one.’

  The young man Henry Howard, dearest friend of Henry’s dead illegitimate son, sends an imploring letter to the king from his prison in the Tower, reminding him that he and Henry Fitzroy were like brothers, that they spent every day together, that they rode and swam and played and wrote poetry together, that they were all in all to each other. They swore loyalty to one another and he would never, ever conspire against his best friend’s father, who had been a father to him.

  Henry tosses the letter to me. ‘But I have read his interrogation,’ he says. ‘I have sifted the evidence against him. I have looked at his heraldry and I have heard what he said about me.’

  If I let him recite his wrongs he will get angrier and angrier. He will raise his finger and point it at me, he will speak to me as if I am the guilty young man. He draws an intense pleasure in enacting his rage. He prompts himself like an actor to play the part for the thrill that it gives him. He likes to feel his heart race with bad temper; he likes a fight, even if it is in an empty room with a white-faced woman trying to calm him.

  ‘But you are not taken in by all this,’ I say, trying to appeal to Henry’s scholarly, critical mind before he unleashes his temper. ‘You are sifting the evidence, studying it. You are not believing everything that they tell you?’

  ‘It is you that should be afraid of what they tell me!’ he says in sudden irritation. ‘For if this treasonous dog that you speak for so sweetly had got his way, it would have been you in the Tower, not him; and his sister would have your place. He is your enemy, Kateryn, far more than he is mine. He plotted to inherit my power; but he would have killed you.’

  ‘If he is your enemy, then he is mine,’ I whisper. ‘Of course, Your Majesty.’

  ‘He would have had you dead on some trumped-up charge of heresy or treason,’ the king goes on, ignoring the fact that it would have been his signature on the warrant. ‘And he would have put his sister in your place. We would have had another Howard queen. I would have had another of their whores thrust into my bed! What do you think of that? How can you bear to think of that?’

  I shake my head. Of course there is nothing I can say. Who would have signed the warrant? Who would have sent me to my death? Who would have married the Howard girl?

  ‘You would be dead,’ Henry says. ‘And then at my death the Howards would have commanded my son . . .’ He takes a little breath. ‘Jane’s son,’ he says mistily. ‘In the grip of the Howard family.’

  ‘But, my lord husband. . .’

  ‘That was the prize. That’s the prize for them all. That’s what they all want, however they gurn and gloze. They all want command of the regency on my death and control of the new king. That is what I have to defend Edward against. That is what you will defend him against.’

  ‘Of course, husband, you know—’

  ‘Poor Henry Howard,’ he says. His voice quavers and the easy tears come quickly. ‘You know I loved that boy as if he were my own? I remember him as such a beautiful boy playing with Fitzroy. They were like brothers.’

  ‘Can’t he be pardoned?’ I ask quietly. ‘He writes very sorrowfully, I cannot believe that he does not regret . . .’

  He nods his head. ‘I will consider it,’ he says grandly. ‘If I can pardon him, I will. I will be just. But I will be merciful too. I loved him; and my boy, my beloved Henry Fitzroy, loved him. If I can forgive Howard for the sake of his playmate, then I will.’

  The court is to divide. The king is going to Whitehall to oversee the deaths of the Howards, father and son, and the complete destruction of their treasonous house, and the princesses and I are to go to Greenwich. The Seymours, Thomas and his brother Edward, will stay with the king, help him untangle the plot and name the guilty men. Under the king’s bright suspicious gaze the interrogations of servants, tenants, and enemies are read and reread, and then, I am certain, rewritten. All the vindictive spite that was directed at the reformers, my ladies and me, is now turned, like the mouth of a cannon, towards the Howards, and the great guns are ready to roar. The king’s sentiment, his mercy, his sense of justice, are put aside in an orgy of false evidence. The king wants to kill someone and the cou