The Taming of the Queen

WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON, SUMMER 1544

The astronomer’s predictions convince the king that he should start for France while Mars is high in his chart. The physicians strap up his wound and give him drugs that ease the pain and keep him as elated as a young man drunk at his first joust. The Privy Council surrenders to the king’s enthusiasm and comes to Whitehall Palace to see him set sail in the royal barge to go down-river to Gravesend, and from there to ride to Dover. He will cross the Narrow Seas to meet the Spanish emperor and decide on the pincer attack of their two armies on Paris.

The king’s rooms at Whitehall are filled with maps and lists of equipment that need to be assembled and the goods that must be sent out after him. Already, the army in France is complaining that they have not enough powder and shot; already we are robbing the Scots border forces to supply the invasion of France. Once a day, every day without fail, the king remarks that the only man who could organise a war was Cardinal Wolsey and that the people who tormented that great almoner should go down to hell themselves for robbing England of such a treasure. Sometimes he stumbles on the name and curses everyone for robbing him of Thomas Cromwell. It makes us all oddly uneasy, as if the red-robed cardinal might be summoned from the grave by his old master’s need, the fur-robed councillor come quietly behind him; as if the king can recall the beheaded and press them into service once again.

My ladies and I are all sewing standards and rolling strips of linen for bandages. I am embroidering the king’s thick jacket with Tudor roses and gold fleurs-de-lys when the door opens and half a dozen noblemen walk in with Thomas Seymour at their head, his handsome face quite impassive.

I realise that I am staring at him completely aghast, my needle suspended. He has not looked at me since we parted as lovers, at dawn more than a year ago, and we swore then that we would never again speak to each other, nor seek each other out. My sense of being called by God has failed to dilute my passion for him though I prayed that it would. I never enter a room without searching for his face. I never see him dance with one of my ladies without hating her for his hand on her waist, for the attentive tilt of his head, for her sluttish flushed face. I never look for him at dinner but somehow he is always at the corner of my eye. Outwardly I am pale and grave; inside, I burn up for him. I wait to see him every day, at Mass, at breakfast, at the hunt. I make sure that no-one ever sees me notice him. No-one can ever tell that I am acutely, passionately aware when he is in the room, bowing to me, or walking across the chamber, or that he has thrown himself casually onto a bench at the window and is talking quietly with Mary Howard. Morning and evening, breakfast and dinner, I keep my face completely impassive as my eyes glide over his dark head and then I look away as if I have not seen him at all.

And now, suddenly, he is here, walking into my rooms as if he could ever be an invited guest, bowing to me, and to the princesses, his hand on his heart, his dark eyes veiled and secretive, as if I have summoned him with the passionate thudding of my pulses, as if he can feel the heat of my skin burning his own, as if I had shouted aloud that he must come to me, that I will die if he does not come to me.

‘I have come, Your Majesty, at the command of the king, who asked me to bring you to him, through the privy garden, on your own.’

I am already on my feet, the precious royal jacket fallen to the floor, the thread whipping out of the needle’s eye as I walk away from it, the needle still in my hand.

‘I’ll bring the princesses,’ I say. I can hardly speak. I cannot breathe.

‘His Majesty said you were to come alone,’ he replies. The tone is courteous, his mouth smiles, but his eyes are cold. ‘I think he has a surprise for you.’

‘I’ll come at once then,’ I say.

I can hardly see the smiling faces of my ladies as Nan silently takes the needle from my hand, Thomas Seymour presents his arm to me, and I put my hand on his and let him draw me from the room and down the broad stone stairs to where the doors to the sunlit gardens stand open.

‘It must be a trap,’ I say in a hushed monotone. ‘Is this a trap?’

He shakes his head at my question, then nods to the guards, who raise their pikes and let us out into the sunshine. ‘No. Just walk.’

‘He means to trap me by sending you to me. He will see . . . I shouldn’t go with you.’

‘The only thing to do is to behave as if nothing is out of the ordinary. You should come, and we should go without delay, taking exactly the time that it always takes to walk through the gardens. Your ladies are watching from your windows, the noblemen will be watching from the king’s windows. We are going to walk along together without pausing, and without looking at each other.’

‘But you never look at me!’ I burst out.

A sharp pinch of my fingers reminds me to keep steadily walking. I think this is like some sort of purgatory. I have to walk beside the man that I adore, match my steps to his, and take no pleasure in it, while my heart hammers against my ribs with all the things that I want to say.

‘Of course I don’t,’ he says.

‘Because you have stopped loving me.’ My voice is very low, strained with pain as I accuse him.

‘Oh, no,’ he says lightly, and turns to me with a smile. He glances up to the king’s rooms and nods to an acquaintance at the oriel window. ‘Because I love you desperately. Because I can’t sleep for thinking of you. Because I burn up with desire for you. Because I dare not look at you, because if I did, every man and woman at court would see all that in my eyes.’

I almost stumble as my knees go weak and I feel a pulse deep in my belly at his words.

‘Walk on!’ he raps out.

‘I thought—’

‘I know what you thought. You thought wrong,’ he says abruptly. ‘Keep walking. Here is His Majesty.’

The king is seated on a great chair they have brought out to the sunny garden, his foot propped on a stool.

‘I can’t tell you . . .’ I whisper.

‘I know,’ he says. ‘We can’t speak.’

‘Can we meet?’

He presents me to the king and bows low. ‘No,’ he says as he steps backwards.

I am to be honoured. The king’s beaming smile tells me that I am to be trusted with a greater post than any queen has held before, except for the greatest: Katherine of Aragon. The king tells me privately in the garden, and then announces to the country, that I am to serve as Regent General. Half of the council are to go with him to France, the other half to stay with me as advisors. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer is to be my principal councillor, and I see how the king balances the advice I shall hear: the next greatest man in my service will be the Lord Chancellor, Thomas Wriothesley, Cranmer’s natural enemy and an increasingly doubtful friend of mine. When he returns from laying waste to Scotland to teach them to welcome our proposals, Edward Seymour will advise me, and Sir William Petre, the quiet soft-spoken king’s Secretary, will serve me too.

This is an extraordinary step to greatness for me. I feel the eyes of the two princesses on me when they learn the news. They will see a woman rule a country, they will see that it is possible. It is one thing to tell them that a woman is capable of judgement and holding power, it is another for them to see their stepmother, a woman of thirty-two years, actually running the kingdom. I fear that I cannot do it, and yet I know that I can. I have watched the king day after day and deplored his changeable opinions and whimsical commands. Even without advisors from both sides of the religious argument, I would choose a moderate middle course. The kingdom must be held to reform but I will have no persecutions. Never will I do as Henry does: suddenly investigate one man, let him tremble with fear and put him under arrest, secretly knowing all the time that he will not be tried. I think there is a sort of madness in the way that my husband exercises power and – though I would never criticise him – I can at least rule in a way that I think has more sense and humanity.

Half of the court are going to war with the king. They all have posts and titles and duties. They are all equipped. The king has a new suit of armour. He has barely worn so much as a breastplate since he fell and injured his leg, but for this campaign his old suit was brought out and hammered into his new broader shape. They had to rivet in extra pieces, they had to strengthen it all round; then he swore it did not suit him and he commissioned an entirely new suit from the armoury at the Tower, where the blacksmiths and armourers are hammering out metal from dawn till midnight, the forges blazing long into the night. As soon as the new suit is completed, in the new huge dimensions necessary to get a breastplate around his massive frame, with widened cuisses to fit his gross thighs, he wants another set. His final choice is Italian designed, trimmed with gilt, etched in black, an enormous amount of beautifully worked metal, a clanking shout of power and wealth.

The grooms have been exercising his horse with great weights strapped to its saddle for weeks so that it can bear up beneath him and carry him safely. It is a horse new to royal service, a heavy courser, with hooves like trenchers and legs like tree trunks. It too has massive armour plates strapped to its neck, head and body. It does not seem possible that this massive king can ride, or that his overloaded horse can bear him, but its great broad hooves make the gangplank shiver as it stamps up the ramp to his barge and Henry kisses my hand on the quayside.

‘Goodbye,’ he says. ‘Just for a little while, beloved. I shall come back to you. Don’t fear for me.’

‘I will fear for you,’ I insist. ‘Promise that you will write to me often to tell me how you are and how you are doing?’

‘I promise,’ he says. ‘I know that I leave the country in safe hands with you as regent.’

It is a great responsibility, the greatest that an Englishman could accept. And to give it to an Englishwoman is greater still. ‘I won’t fail you,’ I say.

He bows his head for my blessing and then, leaning on a page for support and hauling himself upward, he goes up the gangplank. He turns into the royal cabin, I see the door closed on his bulky silhouette, and the guards take up their posts.

At the stern of the barge, standing behind the steersman, I see Thomas Seymour. He, too, is going to war, and, I know, into far greater danger. As the drum starts to beat and they cast off the ropes, as the oars dip in the water and the barge yields to the pull and glides away from the quayside, the man that I adore exchanges one dark glance with me and then he turns away. I don’t even mouth ‘God bless you’ or ‘Keep safe’. I hold up my hand to wave to the king and then I turn away too.