The Taming of the Queen

WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1545

The cold wet days of this early spring seem to last for ever, as if there never will be warm days of summer. The light gets brighter in the mornings and the daffodils flower coldly on the banks of the river, but the gardens are wet, and the city outside the great walls of the palace is awash: the ill-drained streets flooded with cold, dirty water. When we ride there is no pleasure in it, for the horses labour in the mud, and the frozen rain comes in scuds into our faces. We come home early, hunched in the saddle, chilled and bedraggled.

Trapped indoors by days of rain, my ladies and I continue our studies, reading texts from the Bible and translating them, both as practice for our Latin and as a stimulus to thoughtful discussions on the meanings of the words. I notice that I have become more and more aware of the sonorous beauty of the Bible, the music of the language, the rhythm of the punctuation. I set myself the task of trying to write better English, so the beauty of my translation matches the importance of the words. Before I write a sentence, I listen to the sound in my head before I put it on the page. I start to think that words can be pitch-perfect just as a musical note can be, that there is a beat in prose, just as there is in poetry. I realise that I am undertaking an apprenticeship in writing and reading, and I am my own master and my own student. And I realise that I love the work.

We are studying one morning when there is a little knock at the narrow door that leads down a stone stair to the stable yard. My maid puts her head into the room. ‘The preacher is here,’ she says quietly.

She has waited at one of the many gates to bring the man directly to my rooms. It is not that they are instructed to come in secret – the king himself knows that I have preachers from his own chapel, from Saint Paul’s Cathedral, and from the other churches. But I don’t see why the court in general – those who do not attend our sermons and readings, others who criticise my interest – should know what we study and who we meet. If they want to learn, they can come and sit with us. If they simply want to know for the sake of gossip, they can do without. I don’t need the Lord Chancellor to look down his long nose at me, or his household to whisper the names of the serious pious men who come to talk to me and my ladies, as if we were meeting gallants. I don’t need Stephen Gardiner’s men to keep a list of the names of everyone who comes to talk to me, and then send his clerks to follow them to their homes and question their neighbours.

‘There’s an odd thing, Your Majesty,’ the maid says tentatively.

I look up. ‘What odd thing?’

‘The person who claims to be your preacher is a woman, Your Majesty. I didn’t know if it was all right?’

I can feel a giggle starting, and I dare not look at Nan. ‘Why should it not be all right, Miss Mary?’

The girl shrugs. ‘I didn’t know that a good woman could preach, Your Majesty. I thought a good woman had to be silent. It’s what my father always told me.’

‘Your father thought, no doubt, that he was telling the truth,’ I say carefully, conscious of Nan’s bright eyes and hidden smile. ‘But we know that God’s Word comes equally to men and women and so men and women can equally speak of it.’

She does not understand. I can see by her glazed eyes that she only wants to know if she should let this odd being – a woman preacher – into my rooms; or have the stable boys throw her back into the cobbled streets that circle the palace.

‘Can you speak, Miss Mary?’ I ask her.

She dips a curtsey. ‘Of course, Your Majesty.’

‘Can you read?’

‘I can read a little, if it is writ plain.’

‘Then if the Bible is writ plain you could read God’s Word. And then you could tell others of it.’

She drops her head. We make out from her embarrassed mutter that the Bible is not for the likes of her, she knows only what the priest tells her, and he only speaks loud enough for them to hear at the back at Christmas and Easter.

‘It is for you,’ I insist. ‘The Bible is written into English for you to read. And Our Saviour came from heaven for you and for everyone, as He makes it plain in the Bible that He gave us.’

Slowly her head comes up. ‘I could read the Bible?’ she asks me directly.

‘You could,’ I promise her. ‘You should.’

‘And a woman could understand it?’

‘She can.’

‘And so this woman can preach?’

‘Why not?’

This silences her again. Centuries of male priests and men teachers, monk scholars and bullying fathers, have told her and me – told every woman in England – that a woman cannot preach. But under my hand I have the Bible in English, given by my husband to the people of England, which says that Jesus came for everyone – not just for male priests and men teachers, monk scholars and bullying fathers.

‘Yes, she can,’ I say to conclude the lesson. ‘And you can show her in. What is her name?’

‘Mistress Anne Askew.’

She comes in and curtseys as low as if I am an empress, then she shoots a little smile at Catherine Brandon and curtseys again to the ladies. I see at once why Mary hesitated to allow her into my chamber. She is an outstandingly pretty young woman, dressed like a country lady, the young wife of a wealthy farmer or town merchant. She’s not nobility, but one of those on the rise who probably have an old name and have used it to get a new fortune. Her white cap on her glossy brown hair is trimmed with expensive white lace. It frames an exquisite heart-shaped face with bright brown eyes and a ready smile. She is wearing a plain gown of wool in brown with a kirtle of red silk. Her sleeves are plain brown too, and round her neck she has a filet of good linen. She looks like a young woman that we might meet on a progress, voted as Queen of the May for her pure beauty, shining among the other girls of the village. We might see her in a tableau, chosen to play the princess to a painted dragon in a prosperous town. She is so lovely that any mother would get her married young, any father would see that she married extremely well.

She is certainly not how I imagine a woman inspired by God. I was expecting someone older, with a scrubbed, plain face, engraved with benevolent lines. Someone more like one of the abbesses of my childhood, certainly someone more austere than this little beauty.

‘Have we met before?’ She seems oddly familiar, and I am sure that I recognise her dazzling smile.

‘I did not dare to hope that Your Majesty would remember me,’ she says politely. I hear the rolling Lincolnshire accent. ‘My father, Sir William, served your father-in-law, Lord Brough, at Gainsborough and I used to be invited to the hall when you held a feast and dancing. I always came to the hall for the Twelve Days of Christmas, and at Easter, too, and at Maytime. But I was a little girl. I didn’t expect you to recognise me now.’

‘I thought I knew you.’

‘You were the most learned young lady I’d ever seen,’ she confesses. ‘We talked together once, and you told me that you were reading Latin with your brother. I understood then that a woman can study, a woman can learn. It set me on my path to learn and memorise the Bible. You were my inspiration.’

‘I’m glad that I talked to you, if this is the result. Your reputation as a gospeller goes before you. Do you think you can teach us?’

She bows her head. ‘I can only tell you what I have read and what I know,’ she replies.

‘Have you read more than me and these learned ladies?’

She gives me a sweet respectful smile. ‘I doubt it, Your Majesty, for I had to learn from my Bible when I was blessed with it, and I had it snatched from my hands many a time. I had to fight for my understanding. But I expect that you all have been given a Bible and taught by the finest scholars.’

‘Her Majesty is writing her own book,’ Nan interrupts boastfully. ‘The king has asked her to translate prayers from the Latin to give to the people. She works with the king himself. She studies with the great scholar Thomas Cranmer. Together, they are working on an English missal.’

‘It is true then?’ she demands of me. ‘We will hear the prayers in English in the churches? We will be allowed to know what the priest has been saying for all these years?’

‘Yes.’

‘God be praised,’ she says simply. ‘You are blessed to be doing such work.’

‘It is the king who gives the liturgy to his people,’ I say. ‘And Thomas Cranmer who translates it. I have just helped.’

‘I shall be so glad to read the prayers,’ she says fervently. ‘And God will be glad to hear them, as He must hear the prayers of all of the people, in whatever language they speak, even when they are silent.’

I cannot help but be intrigued. ‘Do you think that God, who gave us the Word, understands without words? Beyond words?’

‘He must do,’ she says. ‘He understands my thoughts, even when they are in my mind before I have put words to them. He understands my prayers when they are nothing more than a wordless calling to Him, like a hen clucking back to a poultry woman.’ She corrects herself. ‘A sparrow does not fall but He knows it; He must understand what a sparrow feels. He must know what I mean when I go chuck chuck chuck. He must understand parables and simple stories since His own Son spoke in parables and simple stories, in whatever language they had in Bethlehem.’

I smile but I am impressed. I had not thought of the language of God as the language before words, as the language spoken in the heart, and I like the thought of God understanding our prayers as if we were clucking hens, pecking at His feet. ‘And did you come to this understanding through private study?’ I ask. ‘Were you taught at home?’

Anne Askew takes her stand, one hand resting gently on my table, her head raised. I realise that this is her sermon, speaking from the heart, speaking of her own personal experience and of the presence of the Word of God in her life. ‘I was taught with my brothers until they went to university,’ she begins. ‘It was an educated home but not a learned one. My father attended your husband the king, when he was a young man. When I was sixteen years old he married me to a neighbour, Thomas Kyme, and we had two children together before he called me a heretic and threw me out of the house because I read the Bible that King Henry, in his wisdom, gave to all the people of England.’

‘It is only for noblemen and ladies now,’ Nan cautions her, with a glance at the closed door. ‘Not for women like you.’

‘It was put into our church, at the back of the church, where the poorest man and the humblest woman could go in and read, if they could read,’ the surprising young woman corrects her. ‘They told us that it was for the people to read, that the king had given it to his people. They may have taken it away again, but we remember that the king gave it to the people of England – all the people of England – for us to read. The lords took it back, the princes of the church who think themselves so great took it away from us; but the king gave it to us, God bless him.’

‘Where did you go?’ I ask. ‘When your husband threw you out of your home?’

‘I went to Lincoln,’ she says with a smile. ‘I sat at the back of the great cathedral and I took a Bible in my hands and I read it in the sight of the congregation and in the sight of the benighted pilgrims who come through the doors, kissing the floor and creeping on their knees. Poor souls, they chinked with the pilgrim badges they had pinned on their clothes but they thought it was a heresy that a woman should read God’s Word in a church. Imagine that! To think it is a heresy for a believer to read a Bible in church!

‘I read it aloud to everyone who came and went in that great building, buying and selling favours, trading pilgrim badges and relics, all the fools and hucksters. I read the Bible to teach them that the only way to God is not through chips of stone and bits of bone, flasks of holy water and prayers written backwards on scraps of paper and pinned to a coat. It is not through sacred rings and kissing the foot of a statue. I showed them that the only way to God is through His Holy Word, in His own holy words.’

‘You’re a brave woman,’ I remark.

She smiles at me. ‘No, I am a simple woman,’ she corrects me. ‘When I understand something true, it goes to my heart. I have understood this: that we have to read and know the Word of God. This, and nothing else, will bring us to heaven. All the rest of it: the threat of purgatory, the promise of forgiveness in return for payment, the statues that bleed and the pictures that leak milk, all these things are the invention of a church that has gone far from the Word of God. It is for me, and for those who care about truth, to cling to the Word of God and turn our face from the masquing. The church does not put on mystery plays once a year any more, it plays them every day all the year. It is all costume and show and pretence. But the Bible is the truth and there is nothing but the Bible.’

I nod. She speaks simply, but she is absolutely right.

‘So I came in the end to London, and spoke before the great men of this city. My brother helped me, and my sister is Mrs Jane St Paul, whose husband serves the duchess.’ She curtseys to Catherine Brandon, who nods her head in reply. ‘I found a safe house with honest kinsmen who think as I do, and I listened to preachers and spoke with many learned men, far more learned than me. And a good man, a preacher that you know, I think, Your Majesty, John Lascelles, took me to meet other good men and speak with them.’

An almost imperceptible breath from Nan tells me that she knows the name. I glance at her.

‘He bore witness against Queen Katherine,’ she says.

‘I have met a few people of your court,’ Anne goes on, looking around and smiling. ‘Lady Denny and Lady Hertford. And others listen to gospellers and believe in the reform of the church.’ She takes a breath. ‘And then I went to the church for a divorce,’ she says.

Nan gives a little scream of shock. ‘How? How could you?’

‘I went to the church and I said that since my husband was a believer in the old ways and I am for the new, we never made vows that meant the same thing. We did not join hands in the same church, the true God can have nothing to do with the vows that they made me swear, in a language that I didn’t understand, and so our marriage should be dissolved.’

‘Mistress Anne, a woman can’t get her marriage dissolved at will,’ Catherine protests.

Nan and I exchange glances. Our own brother’s wife ran away from him and he was awarded a divorce as a gift from the king. The king is head of the church, marriage and divorce are in his gift, they are not for a woman to take.

‘Why should not a woman leave a marriage? If she can make it, surely she can unmake it,’ Anne Askew replies. ‘What was sworn can be unsworn. The king himself—’

‘We don’t speak of the king,’ Nan says swiftly.

‘The law does not recognise a woman except when she is alone in the world,’ Anne Askew says authoritatively. ‘Only a woman without father or husband has any legal rights in this world. That, in itself, is unjust. But think of this: I am a woman alone, a feme sole. My father is dead and I deny my husband. The law must deal with me as an adult equal person as I am before God. I will go to heaven because I have read and accepted the Word of God. I demand justice because I have read and accepted the word of the law.’

Nan exchanges a quick worried look with me. ‘I don’t know the rights and the wrongs of this,’ she says. ‘But I know it is not a fit discourse for a queen’s household.’ She glances at Princess Elizabeth, who is listening carefully. ‘Not for young ears.’

I shake my head. I am married to a man who declares his own annulments. He is divorced when he says it is so. Anne Askew suggests that a woman might claim as much power as the king.

‘You had better speak of your faith,’ I command her. ‘I have translated Psalm 145: All things be under Thy dominion and rule. Speak of that to us.’

She bows her head as if to gather her thoughts for a moment, and then she speaks simply and eloquently, and in her voice I hear the ring of complete conviction, and in her face I see the shine of innocence.

She stays all the morning and I send her home with a purse of coins and an invitation to come again. I am fascinated by her, inspired by this woman who says that she can choose where she lives, choose or reject a husband, this woman who knows that God forgives her sins, because she confesses them to Him – not to a priest – she speaks to Him directly. I think this is the first woman I have ever met who strikes me as being one who makes her own life, who walks her own path, who is responsible for herself. This is a woman who has not been tamed to be as others want; she has not been cut down to fit her circumstances.

The portrait painter comes to finish his sketches of the two princesses. I think that Princess Mary stands straighter and taller than usual, as if she knows that this may be the last taking of her likeness as an English princess, as if it is her last portrait before she is sent away. Perhaps she thinks that this portrait will be copied and sent to her proposed husbands.

I go to her side to pull her train a little straighter, to show off the beautiful brocade, and I whisper in her ear: ‘You’re not posing as an icon, you know. You can smile,’ and am rewarded by her swift fugitive giggle.

‘I do know,’ she says. ‘It’s just that people will see this portrait years from now, perhaps hundreds of years from now.’

Princess Elizabeth, blooming under the attention of the painter, is as pink as the inside of a little shell. She spent so long hidden from sight that she loves the male gaze.

I sit and watch the two girls as they stand at a distance but half-facing each other. The painter has his sketches of their faces, and a careful note of the colours of their gowns. All of this will be transferred to the great work like a tisserand weaving flowers on a tapestry on the loom from pictures that she has sketched in the garden.

Then the painter turns to me. ‘Your Majesty?’

‘I am not in my gown,’ I protest.

‘For today, I just want to capture your likeness,’ he says. ‘The way that you hold yourself. Will you be so good as to sit as you will be seated? Perhaps you can imagine that the king is on your right. Would you tilt your head towards him? But I need you to look straight at me.’

I sit as he directs, but I cannot lean towards the space where the king would be. The painter, de Vent, is very exact. Gently he moves the angle of my head this way and that until Mary laughingly takes the place where her father will be positioned, and I sit beside her and tip my head just slightly, as if I am listening.

‘Exquisite, yes,’ de Vent says. ‘But it is too flat. The new fashions . . . Your Majesty, would you allow me?’

He come closer and turns my chair a little towards where the king will sit. ‘And will you let your eyes go this way?’ He points to the window. ‘So.’

He steps back to gaze at me. I look where he directs, and in my line of sight, outside the window, a blackbird lands on a branch of a tree and opens its yellow beak in a trill of song. At once I am transported to that spring when I ran through the palace to Thomas’s rooms and heard a blackbird, drunk with joy and confused by torches, singing at night like a nightingale.

‘Mon Dieu!’ I hear de Vent whisper, and I am recalled to the present.

‘What is it?’

‘Your Majesty, if I could capture that light in your eyes and that beauty in your face I would be the greatest painter in the world. You are illuminated.’

I shake my head. ‘I was daydreaming. It was nothing.’

‘I wish I could capture that radiance. You have shown me what I should do. Now I shall make some sketches.’

I raise my head, and look out of the window, and watch the blackbird as it ruffles its wings in a little scud of rain and then flies away.