The Taming of the Queen

LEEDS CASTLE, KENT, AUTUMN 1544

The king’s arrival at his castle is staged like a masque. It is all for show. The steward of his household and the master of horse have arranged all the details with my stewards and we have our places as precisely as if we were learning a dance. At eight o’clock the grateful people of Kent start to assemble on either side of the road leading to the castle and the first yeomen of the guard take their posts along the road to hold back the wildly excited crowd, or, in the case of their not being wildly excited, to lead the cheers and command applause.

The gardeners and builders have erected triumphal arches with boughs of bay and laurel, the trumpeters are positioned on the turrets of the castle and the musicians ready at the entrance. We can hear the hammering hooves of the outliers and then those in the first rank, and now I can see, from where I stand at the gateway of the castle with Mary and Elizabeth on one side, Edward on the other, the rippling standards of the royal party and the great flag of England coming on.

It is impossible to miss the king. He looks magnificent in his black Italian armour, his enormous warhorse in matching metal, the biggest horse in the rank, the rider towering above the rest: bigger, brighter, higher than any other on the road. People do cheer, quite spontaneously, and the king turns his head and smiles to one side and another, and behind him his almoner throws coins to encourage the enthusiasm.

I am nervous. The procession with ambassadors, noblemen, supporters and the cream of the army comes slowly forward, the beautiful horses tossing their heads and blowing, the archers with their bows across their backs, the infantry in newly clean jackets, some sporting battered helmets, and at the head of them, always drawing the eye, the great king.

He pulls up his horse and four men run to their appointed places to get him out of the saddle. A wheeled platform is brought to the side of the horse, he is helped down and steadied where he stands. He turns, and waves to me. The crowd cheer, the soldiers leading the applause, and then the four men guide him down the steps to the ground.

His squires come forward and unstrap his cuisses and the rerebrace from his arms, but he keeps on his breastplate and holds his helmet under his arm for the warlike look of it. I keep my eyes fixed adoringly on him. Somewhere, Thomas is on his horse, watching me.

One page gets one side of him and one the other, but he does not lean on them to walk. Even now, at the moment of our greeting I know that I must not approach him; he will come to me. He walks towards me and I see that the men are lined up so that they can see our greeting. The king comes closer and closer, and I and all my household, sink into low deferential curtseys. His children bow almost to the ground. At once I feel his hand under my elbow, raising me up, and he turns and, in sight of everyone, kisses me passionately on the mouth.

I guard my expression. There must not be the smallest flinch from this stale wet kiss. The king turns his back to me to face his army. ‘I have led you out, and I have led you home!’ he bellows. ‘I have brought you back in honour. We have come back in triumph.’

There is a roar of approval from his men and, peeping around him, I find I am smiling at their excitement. It is impossible not to be caught up in their joy in their victory. It is a triumph, a great triumph, that they have reclaimed English lands in France; they have shown the power and might of our King Henry, and they have come home with a victory.

We sit, side by side, before the altar at Leeds Castle chapel in special low chairs which give the appearance of our devoutly kneeling. Behind us the children have their heads reverently bowed. The king prays earnestly for a few moments and then gently touches my hand to get my attention. ‘And Edward is well?’ he says.

Before us, the priest faces the altar and blesses the bread and the wine, the choir’s voices soar into their celebratory anthem. I turn my attention from my prayers to my husband; from the sacred to the profane. Not for the first time I wonder if Henry can really believe that a miracle is taking place: the wine becoming holy blood, the bread becoming the body of Christ, since he turns his head and talks to his friends while the sacred act is taking place. Does he really think that a true miracle happens before him every day? And if so, why would he ignore it?

‘As you see. He is well. And your daughters.’

‘You said there was plague?’

‘We went on progress and avoided all signs of it. It’s over now.’

‘I have secured his inheritance in France. Another city under English control. And we will gain more. This is just our foothold.’

‘It has been a wonderful campaign,’ I say enthusiastically.

He nods. He closes his eyes as the priest approaches and folds his big hands together like a child at prayer. His rosebud mouth opens, his big tongue rolls out as he takes the sacred bread into his mouth and swallows it in one great gulp. The server comes with the goblet and whispers: ‘Sanguis autem Christi.’

‘Amen,’ the king confirms, and takes the goblet and tips it and drinks deep.

They come to me. In the sacred silence as the priest holds up the wafer before me, I whisper in my heart: ‘Thank you, Lord, for preserving the king from the many dangers of war.’ The holy wafer is heavy and thick in my mouth. I swallow as the priest comes towards me with the goblet of wine. ‘And keep Thomas Seymour under your protection and in your grace,’ I finish my secret prayer. ‘God bless Thomas.’

The royal kitchens excel themselves with the victory feast. We sit down to dinner after Mass at ten in the morning and I think we will never stop eating. One great dish after another marches out of the kitchens, carried shoulder-high through the court: great golden platters piled high with meat or fish or fowl, golden bowls of stews and sauces, trays with pastries, massive constructions of pies. The centrepiece of the feast is a roast within a roast, a bird stuffed and packed into another bird: lark into mistle thrush into chicken. Chicken into goose, goose into peacock, peacock into swan and the whole thing encased in a castle of pastry wondrously made into a model of Boulogne. The court cheers and everyone hammers their knives on the tables as four men bear the pie on a massive tray through the hall to the king, and set it on a trestle before him. The choir in the gallery above the great hall sing an anthem of victory, and the king, sweating and exhausted by the marathon feast, beams with pleasure.

My clockmaker has made a miniature cannon of clockwork, and now Will Somers, prancing and leaping under the standard of Saint George, wheels it into the hall on its own little carriage. With enormous comedy, while people cheer and shout encouragement, Will approaches the tiny gold cannon with a little candle, pretends to shrink from it in terror, and finally enacts the lighting of the fuse.

Skilfully he touches a hidden button, and the little cannon spits a flame and ejects a ball with a bang towards the pastry walls of the pie castle. It is weighted, it is well-aimed: the tower crumbles under the attack, and there is a roar of applause.

The king is delighted. He hauls himself to his feet. ‘Henricus vincit!’ he bellows, and the whole court shouts back at him, ‘Hail! Caesar! Hail! Caesar!’

I smile and applaud. I dare not look across to the table of the lords, where Thomas will be observing this ecstatic greeting of a meat pie. Unseen, I pinch my fingertips to remind myself not to sneer. The court is right to celebrate, the king is right to revel in his triumph. It is my place to show delight, and besides, in my heart I am proud of him. I rise to my feet and raise my glass in a toast to the king. The whole court follows me. Henry stands, swaying slightly, taking in the adulation of his wife, of his daughters, of his people. I don’t look at Thomas.

Dinner goes on and on. After everyone has had a slice of the pie castle and eaten all the rest of the meat and the fish, in come the sweetmeats and the puddings, serving after serving of sugar maps of France and marchpane models of the king’s war courser. Fruit, dried and stewed, comes in pies and sugar baskets and great bowls. The voider course of dried fruits and nuts is placed on every table and sweet wines from Portugal are brought in for those who can bear to go on drinking and eating.

The king’s appetite is prodigious. He eats as if he has not had a meal since he left England. He eats and eats as his face grows redder and redder, and he sweats so much that a page stands at his side with a clean linen napkin and mops his brow and damp neck. He calls for more wine to be poured into his huge glass, he beckons dish after dish to come back to him. I sit beside him and nibble on little things so that we are dining together, but this is an ordeal that lasts all day.

I am afraid he is going to make himself ill. I glance across at the royal physicians and wonder if they dare to suggest that he finish this giant meal. All of the court have pushed back their plates, some have dropped their heads on the table, too drunk to stay awake. Only the king goes on eating with relish, and sending out the best dishes to his favourites, who bow and smile and thank him, and have to serve themselves and mime their delight at yet another dish.

Finally, as the sun is setting, he pushes back his plate and waves the servers away. ‘No, no, I have had enough. Enough!’ He glances towards me and wipes the glistening fat from his mouth. ‘What a feast!’ he says. ‘What a celebration.’

I try to smile. ‘Welcome home, lord husband. I am glad you have dined well.’

‘Well? I am choked with food, my belly aches with it.’

‘Did you overeat?’

‘No, no. A man of my stature likes a good dinner. I need a good dinner after what I have endured.’

‘Then I am glad that you had one.’

He nods. ‘Are there masquers? Will there be dancing?’

Of course, now that he has finished gorging himself he wants something else to happen, and he wants it to happen immediately. I think for a moment that Edward, aged only six, dining quietly in his rooms, has more patience than his father, who has to eat to the point of nausea and then wants to know what will happen next, immediately next.

‘There will be dancing,’ I reassure him. ‘And there is a special masque to celebrate your victory.’

‘Will you dance?’

I gesture to Anne Boleyn’s crown that sits heavily on my head. ‘I’m not dressed for dancing,’ I say. ‘I thought I would sit and watch the dancers with you.’

‘You must dance!’ he says instantly. ‘There is no more beautiful woman at court than you. I want to see my wife dance. I haven’t come home to see you sit on a chair. It will be no celebration for me if you don’t dance, Kateryn.’

‘Shall I go and change into my headdress?’

‘Yes, go,’ he says. ‘And come quickly back.’

I nod to Nan, who summons two maids-in-waiting with a snap of her fingers, and I go out through the door behind our thrones into the little lobby. ‘He wants me to change my crown for a headdress so that I can dance,’ I say wearily. ‘I have to dance.’

‘Girls, run and get Her Majesty’s golden hood from her dressing room,’ Nan says. The girls run off, and Nan tuts. ‘I should have told them to bring a comb and a net,’ she says. ‘I’ll get one from my room. Wait here.’

She bustles off and I go to the window and look out. The cool air drifts in; the buzz of the court behind the closed door seems far away. Leeds Castle is surrounded by a moat of still water, and the swallows are flying low, dipping into their silvery reflections, round and round as I watch them, and the sky turns peach and golden. It is a wonderful sunset, almost scarlet along the horizon and then paler and paler pink till the underside of the clouds are gilded and the sky above them the palest blue. For a moment I feel aware of myself – I have a sense of myself as I do when I pray alone. A woman, still young, looking out of the window at the birds and the water, positioned in time and in a place, the stars of my destiny unseen in the sky above me, the will of God before me, knowing so little and longing so much, a sun setting as if to mark the ending of a day.

‘Don’t say a word.’

I recognise Thomas’s quiet voice at once – who else do I hear in my dreams every night? – I turn, and he is standing before the closed door, looking a little more tired and a little thinner than when I last saw him in the stern of the king’s barge, going away from me without a gesture of farewell.

I am silent, waiting for him to speak.

‘It was not a great victory.’ He speaks with a low-toned fury. ‘It was a shambles. It was a mess. We didn’t have the weaponry we needed, we didn’t have the equipment for the army. We couldn’t even feed them. The men lay without cover or tents in mud and they died in their hundreds from disease. We should have marched on Paris as we agreed. Instead we wasted English lives on a city of no value that we will never be able to keep, so that he could say that he had won a city and come home.’

‘Hush,’ I say. ‘At least you’re home safe. At least he wasn’t ill.’

‘He had no idea what to do, he had no idea what should be done. He does not know how to time a march, how to allow an army time to move, to prepare to rest. He doesn’t even know enough to give orders. He says one thing and then another and then flies into a fury because nobody understands him. He orders the horses to charge in one direction and the archers in another and then he sends after them to bring them back and blames them for the mistake. And when it was falling apart around us – the men sickening, the French holding firm – he could not see that we were in trouble. He did not care that the men were in danger. He would declare that war was costly and that he was not afraid of a gamble. He has no idea of the value of life. He has no idea of the value of anything.’

I want to interrupt him; but he will not be silenced.

‘When we finally won, it was a massacre. Two thousand townsmen and women and their children trailed out of the town past him as he sat high on his horse, in his Italian armour. They went out in the wind and rain with nothing, not even a bag of food. He swore that they must walk all the way to the French lines at Abbeville; but they lay down and died on the road as his troops looted their homes. He is a killer, Kateryn, he is a merciless killer.

‘And now it is over he calls it a great victory; has no idea that it was a mess. Howard’s army was on the brink of mutiny. Boulogne will never be held. It is all vanity, a vain conquest. He has no idea that it isn’t a great victory. He knows only what he wants to know. He believes only what he wants to think. He hears only what he orders. Nobody tells him the truth and he would not know it if it were spelled out for him in the blood of his victims.’

‘He’s king,’ I say simply. ‘Isn’t it always like this for kings?’

‘No!’ Thomas exclaims. ‘I’ve been at the court of the King of Hungary, I have spoken with the emperor himself. They are great men who are obeyed without question but they can question themselves! They have doubts! They ask for true reports. They take advice. This is not the same. This king is blind to his own failings, deaf to counsel.’

‘Hush, hush,’ I say anxiously, glancing at the closed door.

‘Every year it gets worse,’ he insists. ‘All his honest advisors are dead or disgraced, he has killed all the friends of his childhood. Nobody around him dares to tell him the truth. His temper is completely out of control.’

‘You shouldn’t say . . .’

‘I should say! I must say – because I am warning you.’

‘Warning me of what?’

He comes a step closer; but he puts out his hands to prevent me reaching for him. ‘Don’t. I cannot be near you. I came only to tell you: he is dangerous. You have to be careful.’

‘I am unendingly careful!’ I exclaim. ‘I dream of you but I never speak of you. I never write to you, we never meet! I have given you up; I have completely given you up for him. I have broken my heart to do my duty.’

‘He will tire of you,’ he says bitterly, ‘and if you give him no cause to divorce you, he will kill you to be rid of you.’

It is such a deadly prediction that I am stunned into silence for a moment. ‘No, Thomas, you are wrong. He loves me. He made me regent. He trusts me like no other. I have brought his children to court. I am their mother. I am an exception. He has never loved a wife as he loves me.’

‘It is you that are wrong, you little fool. He made Katherine of Aragon regent. He ordered a nationwide service of thanksgiving for Katherine Howard. He can turn in a moment and kill within the week.’

‘Not so! Not so!’ I am shaking my head like one of the little figures on my clocks. ‘I swear to you that he loves me.’

‘He threw Queen Katherine into a cold damp castle and she died of neglect, if not poison,’ he lists. ‘Anne, he beheaded on false evidence. My sister would have been abandoned within the year if she had not got a child, and even then he left her to die alone. He would have executed Anne of Cleves for treason if she hadn’t agreed to a divorce. His marriage to Katherine Howard was invalid because she was married already, so he could have abandoned her to her shame, but he chose to execute her. He wanted her dead. When he is tired of you he will kill you. He kills his family, his friends, and his wives.’

‘Traitors must be executed,’ I whisper.

‘Thomas More was no traitor. Margaret Pole, the king’s cousin, was no traitor, she was an old lady of sixty-seven! Bishop John Fisher was a saint, Thomas Cromwell was a loyal servant, Robert Aske and all the Pilgrims of Grace held a royal pardon. Katherine Howard was a child, Jane Rochford was mad: he changed the law so he could behead a madwoman.’

I am trembling as if I have an ague. I clamp my jaw to stop my teeth chattering. ‘What are you saying? Thomas, what are you saying to me?’

‘I am saying what you know already, what we all know but none of us dares to say. He is a madman. Kateryn, he has been mad for years. We have sworn loyalty to a madman. And every year he is blinder and more dangerous. None of us is safe from his whims. I saw it. I finally saw it in France, for I have been blind too. He is a murderer without cause. And you will be his next victim.’

‘I’ve done nothing wrong.’

‘That is why he will kill you. He cannot bear excellence.’

I lean back against the cold stone wall. ‘Thomas, oh, Thomas, this is a terrible thing to say to me!’

‘I know. This is the man who let my sister die.’

He crosses the little hall in two swift strides and he wraps his arm around me and kisses me savagely, as if he would bite me, as if he would devour me. ‘You are the only person I would say this to!’ he says urgently in my ear. ‘You have to keep yourself safe from him. I won’t speak to you again. I may not be seen with you, for both of our sakes. Guard yourself, Kateryn! God keep you. Goodbye.’

I cling to him. ‘It can’t be goodbye again! I will see you. Surely, now you are home, now we are at peace, I will at least see you every day?’

‘I am the new admiral of the king’s navy,’ he says. ‘I shall be at sea.’

‘You’re going back into danger! Not now, when the whole court is safely home?’

‘I swear to you, I will be safer at sea than you with that killer in your bed,’ he says grimly, and he wrenches himself from me, and goes.