The Taming of the Queen Read online

  ‘It’s nothing for you to trouble yourself about,’ Nan says. ‘Really, nothing. All the servants have moved the queen’s household a score of times, a hundred times. All you have to do is to ride beside the king and look happy.’

  ‘But all the bedding! And all the clothes!’ I exclaim.

  ‘Everyone knows their part,’ she repeats. ‘You need do nothing but go where you are sent.’

  ‘My birds?’

  ‘The falconers will take care of them. They’ll go in their own cart behind the falcons and hawks.’

  ‘My jewels?’ I ask.

  ‘I take care of them,’ she says. ‘I’ve done this for years, Kat, honestly. All you have to do is to ride beside the king if he wants you there, and look beautiful.’

  ‘And if he doesn’t want me?’

  ‘Then you ride with your companions and your master of horse.’

  ‘I don’t even have a master of horse yet, I haven’t filled all my household posts.’

  ‘We’ll appoint them as we travel. It’s not for lack of applicants! All the clerks will travel with us, and most of the court. The Privy Council meets wherever the king happens to be, it’s not like we are leaving court, we take everything with us.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Oatlands first,’ she says with satisfaction. ‘I think it is one of the best palaces, on the river, newly built, as beautiful as any of them. You’ll love it there, and the bedrooms aren’t haunted!’

  OATLANDS PALACE, SURREY, SUMMER 1543

  Nan is completely right: the court breaks itself up and reforms with practised ease, and I love my rooms in Oatlands Palace. It was built on the river near Weybridge to be a honeymoon palace for Anne of Cleves, so Nan cannot truly claim that it is not haunted. Anne of Cleves’ sorrow and disappointment are in every courtyard. Her maid-in-waiting Katherine Howard was triumphantly married to the king, here in the chapel; I imagine he chased her, panting endearments, limping as fast as he could go through the beautiful gardens.

  The palace was built with the stone of the abbey at Chertsey, every beautiful sandstone block pulled down from where it was dedicated to God to stand forever. The tears of the faithful must have fallen in the mortar; but nobody thinks of that now. It is a huge sunny palace, near to the river, designed like a castle with a tower at each corner and a huge courtyard inside. My rooms look towards the south and they are sunny and light. The king’s rooms adjoin them, and he warns me that he can walk in at any time to see what I am doing.

  Over the next few days Nan and I draw up the list of posts in my household and start to fill them with the king’s choices, with our friends and family and then, when we have satisfied everyone who has a claim on me, with those whose careers we want to advance. I look at the list prepared by Nan and her friends who support the religious reforms. Giving them a place as my household officials at court and in my rooms as my companions strengthens their numbers at the very moment that they are losing the king’s support.

  He has approved the publication of a statement of doctrine called The King’s Book, which tells people that they have to make confession and believe in the miracle of the Mass. The wine becomes blood, the bread becomes flesh – the king says it is so, and everyone must believe. He has taken away the great English Bible from every church in every parish and only the rich and the noble are allowed to read the Bible in English, and they can only do so at home. The poor and the uneducated are as far from the Word of God as if they were in Ethiop.

  ‘I want some scholarly ladies,’ I say to Nan, almost shyly. ‘I always felt that I should have read more and studied more. I want to improve my French and Latin. I want to have companions who will study with me.’

  ‘Certainly you can hire tutors,’ she says. ‘They’re as easy to get as parakeets. And you could have an afternoon sermon preached every day, Katherine of Aragon did. You have a range of opinion in your rooms already. Catherine Brandon is a reformer, while Lady Mary is probably secretly faithful to Rome. Of course she would never deny that her father is Supreme Head of the church,’ Nan lifts a warning finger to me, ‘everyone has to be very, very careful what they say. But now that the king is restoring the rituals that he banned, and taking away the English Bible that he gave to his people, Lady Mary hopes that he will go further and reconcile with the pope.’

  ‘I have to understand this,’ I say. ‘We lived so far from London, we heard almost nothing, and I couldn’t get hold of books. And anyway, my husband Lord Latimer believed in the old ways.’

  ‘There are many that still do,’ Nan warns me. ‘A frightening number still do, and they are rising in favour. But we have to fight them and win this argument. We have to get the Bible back into the churches for the people. We cannot let the bishops take the Word of God from the people. It is to condemn people to ignorance. Even you will have to study discreetly, with an eye on the law of heresy. We don’t want Stephen Gardiner sticking his ugly nose into your rooms, like he does everywhere else.’

  The king comes to me almost every night, but often wants nothing more from me than conversation, or to share a glass of wine before he goes to his own bed. We sit together like an old loving couple, he in a glorious embroidered nightgown strained across his massive chest and belly, with his sore leg propped on a footstool, me in my black satin with my hair in a plait.

  His physician comes with him to give him his evening doses: drugs to ease the pain of his leg, for his headaches as his eyes are failing, to make his bowels move, to clear his urine, which is dangerously dark and sticky. Henry winks when he tells me that his physician has given him something to help with vigour. ‘Perhaps we will make a son,’ he suggests. ‘What about a little Duke of York to follow my prince?’

  ‘In that case I’ll have some of that physic?’ Will Somers takes the liberties allowed to an official Fool. ‘I could do with a bit of vigour at night-time. I would be a bull, but I am a little lamb; truly, I am a little lamb.’

  ‘Do you skip and prance?’ the king smiles as the physician hands him another draught.

  ‘I gambol. I gamble away my fortune!’ Will clinches the joke with a pun, making the king laugh as he drinks, so that Will thumps him familiarly on the back. ‘Choke up, Nuncle. Don’t cough up your own vigour!’

  I smile and say nothing while the physician is measuring out the series of little draughts, but when everyone has gone from the room, I say: ‘My lord husband, you have not forgotten that I had no child from two previous marriages?’

  ‘But you had precious little joy in them, didn’t you?’ he asks bluntly.

  I give a little embarrassed laugh. ‘Well, yes, I wasn’t married for my own joy.’

  ‘Your first husband was little more than a boy, afraid to say boo to a goose, probably unmanned, and your second was a dotard, probably impotent,’ the king declares inaccurately. ‘How should you have got a child from either of them? I have studied these things, and I know. A woman needs pleasure in order to take a child. She has to have a crisis of pleasure, just as her husband does. This is ordained by God. So at last, dearest wife, you have a chance of becoming a mother. Because I know how to please a woman till she weeps for joy, till she cries out for more.’

  I am silent, remembering the involuntary cry that I used to make when Thomas was moving inside me, his breath coming fast and my pleasure mounting. Afterwards I would find that my throat was sore and I would know that I had screamed with my face against his naked chest.

  ‘I give you my word,’ the king says.

  I push away my thoughts and smile at him. I know that there can be no pleasure for me in a dead woman’s bed. It can’t be possible that his damp fumblings can give me a child, and the rue should prevent a monster-birth. But since two earlier wives were divorced for lack of a son I would be a fool to say that I don’t think we’ll get one – whatever sensual pleasures he promises.

  Besides, oddly, I find that I don’t want to hurt his feelings. I’m not going to tell Henry that I cannot feel desire