The Taming of the Queen

WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1545

The king summons me, and Nan and Catherine Brandon follow me along the privy gallery to his rooms. All the windows are open to the spring sunshine and the birds are singing in the trees in the gardens below. We can hear the gulls crying over the River Thames and see the bright flicker of sunlight on their white wings. Henry is in good humour, his thickly bandaged leg resting on a stool, a pile of papers before him, each dense with type.

‘See this!’ he says joyfully to me. ‘You who think you’re such a great scholar. See this!’

I curtsey and step forward to kiss him. He takes my face in both his big hands and pulls me closer so that I kiss him on his mouth. He smells of some sort of spirits and sweets.

‘I never call myself a scholar,’ I say at once. ‘I know I am an ignorant woman compared to you, my lord. But I am glad for the chance to study. What is this?’

‘It is our pages back from the printer!’ he exclaims. ‘The liturgy at last. Cranmer says that we will put a copy into every church in England and end their mumbling away in Latin that neither the congregation nor the priest can understand. That’s not the Word of God; that’s not what I want for my church.’

‘You’re right.’

‘I know! And look, you can see the prayers that you have translated, and Cranmer’s work is in here, too, and I have polished it and in some parts set it into better language, and translated some parts myself. And here it is! My book.’

I take up the sheets and read the first few pages. It is beautiful, just as I hoped it would be. It is simple and clear, with a rhythm and a cadence like poetry, but there is nothing forced or overly worked about it. I look at a line that took me half a day to translate, changing one word for another, scratching it out and starting again. Now, in print, it looks as if it could never have been other, it reads as if it has been the prayer of the English forever. I feel that deep joy of a writer seeing her work in print for the first time. The absorbing private work has become public, it has stepped out into the world. It will be judged and I am full of confidence that it is good work.

‘My liturgy, in my church.’ For the king, it is ownership that gives him joy. ‘My church, in my kingdom. I have to be both king and pope in England. I have to guard the people from enemies outside and lead them to God within.’

Nan and Catherine give a little impressed murmur of awe. They know every phrase and passage, having passed it from one hand to another, improving and polishing the phrasing, reading Thomas Cranmer’s changes aloud for him, checking my words with me.

‘You can take this,’ the king says grandly. ‘You can read these pages and check them for foolish mistakes by the printer’s boys. And you can tell me what you think of this, my greatest work.’

One of his pages steps forward and gathers up the pile of papers. ‘Mind,’ the king says, wagging a finger at me, ‘I want your real opinion, nothing designed to please me. All I ever want from you is the truth, Kateryn.’

I curtsey as the guards hold the doors open for us. ‘I will read with attention and give you my true opinion,’ I promise. ‘This will be the hundredth time I have read these words and I hope to read them a thousand times. Indeed, all of England will read them a thousand times, they will be read every day in church.’

‘You must always speak honestly to me,’ he says warmly. ‘You are my helpmeet and my partner. You are my queen. We will go forward together, Kateryn, leading the people from darkness into light.’

Nan, Catherine and I say not a word until we are back in the safety of my rooms and the door is shut.

‘How wonderful!’ Catherine exclaims. ‘That the king should put his own name to the work. Stephen Gardiner can say nothing against it if it is under the king’s own seal of approval. How you are leading him, Your Majesty! How far we are going towards true grace!’

Nan spreads the pages out on the table and I take up a pen to mark any errors when a sudden quiet tap on the little door that leads directly from the stable stairs makes us look up. The preachers who wish to enter discreetly use this door by appointment; perhaps a bookseller with a book that one of Gardiner’s spies would name as heretical. All other visitors, great and small, visitors of state and petitioners, come up the broad public stairs and are announced at my presence chamber, as the huge double doors swing open.

‘See who it is,’ I say quietly, and Nan goes to the door and opens it. The guard who stands below, at the bottom of the stair, watches as a young man comes in and bows to me and to Joan Denny.

‘Oh, this is Christopher, who serves my husband,’ Joan says, surprised. ‘What are you doing here, Christopher? You should have come in the main door. You gave us a fright.’

‘Sir Anthony said to come to you unobserved,’ he replies, and he turns to me. ‘Sir Anthony said to tell Your Majesty at once that Mistress Anne Askew has been arrested and questioned.’

‘No!’

He nods. ‘She was arrested and questioned by an inquisitor and then by the Lord Mayor of London himself. Now she is in the keeping of Bishop Bonner.’

‘She is charged?’

‘Not yet. He is questioning her.’

‘On the very day that the king gives you the prayers in English?’ Nan whispers to me incredulously. ‘On the very day that he promises that England will be freed from superstition? He has her arrested and questioned?’

‘God help us and keep us; this is his dogfight,’ I say, my voice shaky with dread. ‘Set up one cur and then another. Let the two of them fight it out.’

‘What d’you mean?’ Nan asks, frightened by my tone. ‘What are you saying?’

‘What shall we do?’ Catherine Brandon demands. ‘What can we do to help Anne?’

I turn to Christopher. ‘Go back,’ I say. ‘Take this purse.’ Nan goes to a drawer in my table and brings out a small purse of gold that I keep for my charitable giving. ‘See if there are men around Bishop Bonner that will take a bribe. Find out what the bishop requires of Mistress Askew, whether he needs an oath, or a recantation or an apology. Find out what it is that he wants. And be sure that the bishop knows that I have heard Anne preach, that she is a kinswoman to George St Paul, who works for the Brandons, that I have never heard a word from her that is anything but devout, holy, and within the law, that this very day the king has his liturgy in English back from the printers. And that I expect her to be released.’

He bows as Nan makes a little fearful noise. ‘Is it wise to confess acquaintance with her? To let yourself be identified with her?’

‘Anyone can discover that she has preached here,’ I say. ‘Everyone knows that her sister works at court. What the bishop needs to know is that we, her friends, will stand by her. He needs to be aware that when he questions her, he is questioning one of my preachers, a friend to the Suffolk household. He must be told that she has important allies and we know where she is.’

Christopher nods that he understands, and swiftly turns and goes out of the door.

‘And send a message back as soon as she is released,’ I call after him. ‘And if they proceed against her, come back at once.’

We have to wait. We wait all the day, and we try to pray for Anne Askew. I dine with the king and my ladies dance for him, and we smile until our cheeks ache. I glance at him sideways as he is listening to the music and beating time with his hand, and I think: do you know that a woman who thinks as I do, who has preached before me, who loved me when she was a little girl and whose gifts I admire, is being questioned for the offence of heresy, which might take her to the stake? Do you know this and are you waiting to see what I will do? Is it a test, to see if I will act for her? Or do you know nothing? Is this nothing more than the clockwork movements of the old church, set in motion like automata, the ambition of the Bishop of London, the bigotry of Stephen Gardiner, the endless conspiracy of the old churchmen grinding on and on and resisting change? Should I tell you of this and ask for your help? Am I sitting beside the man who would save Anne, or beside the king who is playing her as a piece in one of his games?

Henry turns and smiles at me. ‘I shall come to your rooms tonight, sweetheart,’ he says.

And I think: that proves it. He must know nothing. Not even a king as old and as duplicitous as this King of England could possibly smile and bed his wife while her friend was being interrogated on his orders.

I do not speak of Anne to my husband, though as he strives to reach his pleasure he groans: ‘You please me, ah, Kateryn, you do please me. You can have anything . . .’

When he is quiet and falling asleep he repeats: ‘You please me, Kateryn. You can have any favour.’

‘I want nothing,’ I say. I would feel like a whore if I named a favour now. Anne Askew prides herself on being a free woman; she defied her husband and her father. I should not buy her freedom with the sexual pleasure of a man old enough to be our father.

He understands this. He has a sly smile as he lies back on the heaped pillows, his eyes half-closed, drowsy. ‘Ask me later then,’ he says, ‘if you would detach payment from the deed.’

‘The deed is a gift of love,’ I say pompously, and then I feel that I have earned his scoffing laugh.

‘You make it gracious by naming it so,’ he says. ‘It is one of the things that I like about you, Kateryn: you do not see everything as a trade, you don’t see everyone else as a rival or an enemy.’

‘No, I don’t,’ I say. ‘But it must be a grim world if you see it like that. How would one bear to live in it?’

‘By dominating it,’ he answers easily. ‘By being the greatest trader with the most to deal in; by being the master of everyone, whether they know it or not.’

Two things save Anne Askew: her own keen intelligence, and my protection. She confesses to nothing but believing the scriptures, and when they try to trap her with details of the liturgy she says that she does not know, that she is a simple woman, that all she does is read her Bible, the king’s own Bible, and try to follow its precepts. Anything else is too complex for a faithful God-fearing woman like herself. The Lord Mayor tries to trap her with questions of theology and she keeps her head and says that she cannot speak of such things. She irritates Edmund Bonner, the Bishop of London, almost beyond speaking, but he can do nothing against her when he hears from the people of his household that Anne Askew preaches to the queen and her ladies, and that the queen and her friends and companions – the greatest ladies in the land – heard no heresy. The queen – so high in favour with the king that he stayed all last night in her rooms – cannot be denied. She has not yet spoken to the king in favour of her court preacher, but clearly she can do so. In a frightened hurry, they release Anne Askew, and send her home to her husband. As bullies and men this is the only way they can devise to control a woman. I laugh when they tell me. I believe it will be more of a punishment for him than for her.