The Taming of the Queen

MANOR OF THE MORE, HERTFORDSHIRE, SUMMER 1543

The plague is worsening in London, it is going to be one of the deadly years. Left behind us, hundreds are dying in the filthy streets as we ride further and further away from the city, making our way north, hunting and feasting. Guards are posted along the road from London to prevent anyone following the court, and the gates to every palace are bolted shut as soon as we are inside.

In a plague year at my home at Snape Castle I used to order the nursing of sick people in the village, send out tisanes and herbs to prevent the spread of the disease, and pay the burial parties for the pauper graves. I would have the newly-orphaned children to eat in the castle kitchens, and ban travellers from visiting. It’s odd to me that now I am Queen of England and all the people are my people, I act as if I don’t care for any of them, and they can’t even beg for food at the kitchen doors.

The king decides to order a Rogation, a day of processions with prayers. Everyone must call on the help of God to save England, at this time of her need. There are to be nationwide pilgrimages of faith, and a service in every church in the land. The day is made known from every pulpit, and every congregation is commanded to process around their parish, praying and singing psalms. Only if every parish in England prays for all the people of England will the plague leave us. But instead of an outpouring of faith and hope, the occasion is a complete failure. Hardly anyone attends and nobody gives alms. It’s not like it used to be. There are no monks and no choirs to lead the processions, no-one has any sacred relics to parade, the gold and silver holy vessels have been taken away and melted down, the abbeys and monasteries are all closed, their hospitals closed too. As a demonstration of national faith all it shows is that nobody cares any more.

‘The people won’t pray for their own country?’ Henry demands of Stephen Gardiner Bishop of Winchester, as if it is all his fault. We are on the royal barge, taking the air on the river, when Bishop Gardiner remarks that he would have to walk on water to convince the people of Watford to say their prayers. ‘Have they run mad? Do they think they can get eternal life by arguing for it?’

He shrugs. ‘They have lost their faith,’ he says. ‘All they want to do now is dispute the Bible. I would have them sing the old psalms, observe the old ways, and leave understanding to their betters. After we took the English Bible from the churches I thought that they would pray in the words we allowed them.’

‘It is those very words that fail to speak to them,’ Thomas Cranmer disagrees. ‘They don’t understand what they mean. They can’t read Latin. Sometimes they can’t even hear the priest. People don’t want empty ritual any more. They don’t want to process singing a hymn that they can’t understand. If they could pray in English they would do so. You gave them an English Bible, Your Majesty, and then took it away again. Restore it to them, let them have a reason for their faith. Let us do more! Let us give them an English liturgy too.’

The king is silent and glances towards me to show that I can speak. ‘You think that people don’t like the Latin prayers any more?’ I ask Archbishop Cranmer. ‘Do you really think they would be devout if they were allowed to pray in their own language?’

‘The language of the sewers,’ Bishop Gardiner remarks quietly to Henry. ‘Shall every potboy write his own Ave Maria? Shall the street sweepers compose their own blessings?’

‘Row faster,’ Henry remarks to the rowers, hardly attending to this. ‘Steer us into the middle of the river where we can catch the current.’

The barge-master alters the rhythm of the drum that keeps the rowers to time, and the steersman directs us into the centre of the river where there is a cool breeze over the deeper current. ‘No-one may enter into our palace from the city,’ Henry tells me. ‘People may wave from the bank, they can pay their respects, but they may not come on board. I don’t want them anywhere near me. No-one from the city can come even into the gardens. They bring disease. I cannot risk it.’

‘No, no, certainly not,’ I say soothingly. ‘My household knows this as well as yours, my lord. I have told them. Nobody will even take a delivery from London.’

‘Not even books,’ he says suspiciously. ‘And no visiting preachers or scholars, Kate. No-one coming from the city churches. I won’t have it.’

‘They are all carrying diseases,’ Gardiner asserts. ‘All of these heretic Lutheran preachers are blasted with illness and half of them crazed with misunderstanding. They come from Germany and Switzerland, sick and mad.’

The face I turn up to Henry, as he sits on the raised throne above me, is completely serene. ‘Of course, my lord,’ I say, though I am lying. As I promised Prince Edward, I am now studying Latin with a scholar from Cambridge, and I take deliveries of books from the London printers. Some come to me from the Protestant printers of Germany, too, the so-called heretic printers, publishing books of scholarship and theology in Flanders. Christendom is alive as it has never been before, with study and thought about the Bible, about the form that services should take, even about the nature of the Mass. The king himself, when he was younger, joined these discussions and wrote his own documents. Now, under the influence of the Howards and Stephen Gardiner, disappointed in the country’s response to the changes he has made, fearful of the excited movements spreading across Europe, he does not want discussion, he does not want to press on with reform.

When the North rose against him, demanding that the abbeys be reopened and the chantries sing for the dead again, that the old lords take their power and the Plantagenets be honoured, the king decided that he wanted no arguments at all: not of his rule, not of his church, not of his heirs. The king hates thinking as much as he hates illness, and now he says that books carry both.

‘Surely Her Majesty can have no interest in books from London, or hedgerow preachers,’ Stephen Gardiner prompts sweetly. ‘Why would a lady so perfect in so many ways want to study like a dirty old clerk?’

‘So that I can talk with His Majesty,’ I say simply. ‘So that I can write in Latin to his son the prince. So that such a great scholar-king does not have a wife who is a fool.’

Will Somers, sitting on the edge of the barge, dangling his long legs towards the water, turns at this. ‘Only one Fool here!’ he reminds us. ‘And I can’t admit an amateur foolish woman in my guild. How big would such a guild have to be? I should recruit thousands.’

The king smiles. ‘You are no fool, Kateryn, and you may read what you wish, but I will have no deliveries or visitors from London until the city is free from illness.’

I bow my head. ‘Of course.’

‘I trust that Your Majesty is not reading books of folly,’ Stephen Gardiner suggests spitefully.

I can feel myself bristle at the patronising tone. ‘Oh, I hope not,’ I say with false sweetness. ‘For it is your sermons that I have been reading, my lord.’

‘I do this to protect you as well as the court,’ Henry points out.

‘I know that you do, and I am grateful for your care of us all,’ I say, and it is true. He guards against disease as if it were our worst enemy. He will keep me safe if he possibly can. Nobody has ever thought of my health before. Nobody has ever devised ways to keep me safe. Until I was married to Henry there was no-one who cared enough to guard me.

We listen to the musicians who are following in their barge behind us. They are playing a pretty air. ‘Hear this?’ the king says, beating the time on the arm of his chair. ‘I wrote this.’

‘It’s lovely,’ I say. ‘How clever of you, my lord.’

‘Perhaps I shall write some more music,’ he says. ‘I think you have inspired me. I shall write a little song for you.’ He pauses, listening to his own tune with admiration. ‘Anyway, it is better that no-one comes from London,’ he continues. ‘It’s pleasant to have little business to do in the summer. They never stop with their demands and their requests, urging me to rule for one against another, to favour one against another, to cut a tax or pay a fee. I get tired of them. I am sick of them all.’

I nod as if I think that the burden of showing a shifting favouritism is very heavy.

‘You shall help me,’ he says. ‘When we open the court again and all the requests come in. You shall read them and judge with me. I shall trust you to sit beside me and be my only advisor.’

‘So there are two fools here, after all,’ Will remarks. ‘Myself, a guaranteed and apprenticed Fool, and here is a new Fool, a fool for love.’

Henry chuckles. ‘Just as you say, Will,’ he agrees. ‘I am a fool for love.’