The Taming of the Queen

WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON, AUTUMN 1545

We come to Whitehall as the weather turns cold and the frost in the garden makes the yew trees in the allées silvery white on the tips of their branches and green and dark in their shades. The bowls of the fountains are skinned with ice, and I order all the furs to be brought from the wardrobe rooms at my house, Baynard’s Castle. Once again they drape Kitty Howard’s sables around my neck, but this year I find that they are scented with my perfume and the ghost of the girl queen is gone into the cold twilight.

Nicholas de Vent has completed his great portrait of the five of us and it is waiting for its formal unveiling, fixed in its place, just as we specified that it should be, shrouded in a cloth of gold. Nobody has seen it since it left his studio; we are waiting for the king to announce that he wants to see it.

‘Will Your Majesty come and unveil the portrait?’ Anne Seymour asks me. ‘His Majesty asked my lord husband to escort you.’

‘Now?’ I ask. I am reading a book, as simple as a child’s primer, that explains the mystery of the Mass, the reality of purgatory. It is a book approved by the Privy Council and it is written in exactly their pompous tone of certainty. I close it, and wonder how it is that men, even thoughtful men, can sound as if they never consider anything but always simply know.

‘Yes, now,’ she says. ‘The painter is here; everyone is gathering.’

‘Is the king coming?’

‘His Majesty is resting,’ she says. ‘His leg is bad. He says he will see it later.’

I get to my feet. ‘I’ll come,’ I say. I see Elizabeth’s bright face bob up. She is such a vain child, she longs to see what the painter will have made of her. She sat for him in her best gown, in the hope that in the final design she will be placed centre stage, close to her father’s hand, an acknowledged Tudor princess. Princess Mary and I exchange a wry look over Elizabeth’s head. We may not be excited like a girl at the thought of this portrait, but we are both glad to be publicly acclaimed. This picture will hang in Whitehall Palace for years, perhaps for centuries. People will copy it and have the copies in pride of place in their own homes. It will show the royal children with their father, and me: seated at his side. It will mark my achievement – a great achievement – of bringing the royal children to their father. I may not give him a child as Jane Seymour did, I will not be his wife for twenty-three years like Katherine of Aragon, but I have done something that no wife has managed to do before – I have put the children at the heart of the royal family. The two girls and the precious heir are in the same portrait as their father. It is a picture of a royal family and I am there as their acknowledged mother. I am queen, I am regent, I am their mother, and the portrait will show my children around me, my husband beside me; and those who doubt my influence and think that they can conspire against me can look at this portrait and see the woman at the heart of the royal family.

‘We’ll come at once,’ I say.

I am eager to see how I look. After trying many colours I chose to wear my red undergown, with an extravagant overgown of cloth of gold trimmed with ermine. The painter himself selected it from the royal wardrobe. He said that he wanted the colours of the picture to be all red and gold, to show our wealth, to show our unity, to show our grandeur in royal colours. I did not say that red is my favourite, but of course I know that it sets off my white skin and my auburn hair. He asked me to change my headdress, from my favourite French hood, a semi-circular frame that I wear set back on my hair, to the more old-fashioned gable type. Nan brought his choice from the royal treasury and set it on my head. ‘Jane Seymour’s,’ she said briefly. ‘Gold leaf.’

‘I would never wear this!’ I exclaim, but he pushed it gently back so that my hair showed a little, so that it framed my face.

‘It is a privilege to paint a beautiful woman,’ he said quietly, and he showed me how he wanted me to sit, perched on the edge of a chair, my gold gown a pool around my feet.

Now I smile at Princess Mary. ‘I am gripped with vanity,’ I say. ‘I can’t wait to see it.’

‘Me too,’ she says. She takes Elizabeth’s hand and I lead the way, with Edward Seymour at my side and the women of my chamber following behind. We get to the great hall, and the men of the court, even some of the Privy Council, are already there, curious to see this great picture that has cost so much to commission and taken so long to produce. No-one has seen it assembled. We all posed individually, the painter mostly working from earlier portraits of the king, so this will be a surprise for us all. I see Nicholas de Vent, the artist, looking anxious, as well he might.

‘Is His Majesty not coming?’ he asks as he bows to me.

I am about to say ‘no’, when the great doors to the king’s presence chamber open and his wheeled chair comes out, with the king half sitting, half lying in it, his great leg sticking out before him, his face red and swollen stiff in a grimace of pain.

The artist gives a little exclamation of surprise. He has not seen the king since we first discussed the portrait and then de Vent copied the king’s likeness from the great portraits by Hans Holbein, which the king prefers above any other. I imagine that the painting behind the screens will show a handsome man of about forty years with his wife and young family around him. He will have two well-shaped legs in ivory hose with the usual blue garter tied under the knee to show off the strong calf. He will not be sprawled like a ship wrecked in dry dock, sweating with the effort of raising his enormous head.

I go to him, curtsey and kiss his hot cheek. ‘What a pleasure to see Your Majesty,’ I say. ‘And you’re looking so well.’

‘I wanted to see what he had made of us,’ he says shortly. He nods at de Vent. ‘Unveil it.’

It is a huge picture, nearly five feet high and more than ten feet long, and the cover gets caught on the top right-hand corner so we see it revealed inch by inch from the left, while a page runs to fetch a stool so that he can reach to the corner where the gold cloth is snagged, hiding the full picture.

First a beautifully ornate pillar shining with silver and gold engraving, and a ceiling, bright as stained glass, with red and white Tudor roses. Then a doorway. There is a little gasp of surprise, for there is Princess Mary’s Fool, walking past the archway in Whitehall Palace garden as if to say that all life is passing, that it is a court of fools. In the garden behind her are the carved heraldic beasts on posts as if to say that all glory is folly. I glance at the king to see if he is surprised to see Jane the Fool in the top corner of his royal portrait, but I observe his slow nod, and I know that he approved this, even the position of the Fool. He will think that he is making some kind of profound statement about fame and the world. Another pair of matching gold pillars frame the figure of a woman in the foreground. It is Princess Mary in her dark red gown with the greeny-brown overgown, cut square at her throat, trimmed with white silk slashings on her sleeves and white lace cuffs at her wrists. She wears a French hood, pushed back from her pale face, and a crucifix at her throat. I look carefully at the portrait and then I turn and give her a warm approving smile. It is fitting. She looks regal and dignified, her two hands clasped before her, her face turned towards the viewer with a small smile. If anyone copies this to show to a suitor, a foreign prince seeking her in marriage, it will be a fair likeness. She looks both queenly and girlish. The painter has captured her dignity and her charm. I see her rising blush and she gives me a little nod. This is a good likeness; we are both pleased.

The cover drops a little and the court gasps to see Prince Edward, square as his father, standing stocky and bold in a bulky jacket and red stockings, a red hat crammed on his little head, his sleeves ridiculously stuffed. A few people applaud. This could be the Holbein portrait of the king cut down to three feet tall. The painted prince leans with a confident elbow on his father’s knee, as Edward would never dare to lean in real life, and Henry’s hand is on his shoulder, holding him close, as he has never done. The boy is presented to the eye as if Henry had just given birth to him from between his wide-straddled legs: this is his son and heir, the pose insists. This is the boy of the king’s own making, in his image, his little red egg.

Behind them both, as a backdrop and extending over their heads, is the cloth of estate showing the royal crest, above that a gold seal like a holy halo that the old idolatrous church painters used to enamel over the heads of painted saints. In the middle of the picture, still half-concealed by the drape, which the pages are desperately tugging, is the king himself. The painter has made him the heart of the picture, plumb centre in the blazing colours of a golden sun. His huge puffed sleeves, fat as a pair of bolsters, are in cloth of gold, slashed with white silk, the skirts of his short robe are red and gold, his parted sturdy legs are blazing silver in ivory stockings, the strong calves gleaming, the round knees like two little moons. His gown is trimmed with sable, thrown off the huge padded shoulders, his face is big, pale and unlined, and his codpiece – ‘My God,’ I murmur at the very sight of it. The huge ivory codpiece is boldly erect at the very centre of his body, at the heart of the picture. Enormous and gleaming palely, among all the red and the gold, it does everything but announce to the viewer: here is the king’s cock. Admire!

I bite the inside of my lips so that I do not allow even the whisper of a giggle to escape me, I don’t dare look at Catherine Brandon. The painter must have lost his wits to be so brash; even the king’s monstrous vanity cannot think that this is anything but ridiculous. But then the page finally frees the curtain that has concealed the rest of the portrait, the fabric drops to the floor and at last I see my own likeness.

I am seated at the king’s left hand, in the gown that the painter and I chose together, the red underskirt and sleeves complementing the red of Prince Edward’s robe, my gold bodice and overskirt matching the king’s puffy sleeves, and the white ermine lining and sleeves marking my royalty. The English hood that Nicholas de Vent chose from the royal wardrobe is perfectly rendered, the girdle at my waist done in fine detail, my skin as pearly and as pale as the king’s magnificent legs. But my face . . .

But my face . . .

My face . . .

There is a murmur of comment in the court like the whisper of wind through the trees of an autumn wood. I hear people remark, ‘Oh, I didn’t expect . . .’ and, ‘But that isn’t . . .’ and, ‘Surely that’s . . .’ and then everyone bites off the end of their sentences as if nobody wants to observe what is painfully, terribly obvious, and grows more and more obvious, as a silence falls, and someone clears their throat, and someone else turns away, and slowly, though they don’t want to stare, no-one can resist it any longer: and everyone turns to look at me.

They look at me. And I am looking at Her.

It is not my portrait. It is not my face. I sat for it indeed, and I wore these clothes, the clothes from the royal wardrobe, the clothes that signify a Queen of England. The painter put my hands in that position, tilted my face to the light, but it is not my features under her golden hood. The king has commissioned a portrait of his third wife, Edward’s mother, and had me sit in for her, like a doll, so that the painter could get the size and the shape of a wife, any wife. But the face is not mine. The painter did not have to try to capture what he called my luminous beauty. Instead he shows the sharp outline of Jane Seymour’s hood and beneath it the bovine blankness of Jane Seymour, the dead queen, who sits at the king’s left hand, admiring him and her son, from the grave; and I might as well never have been.

I don’t know how I stand, how I smile and remark on what a beautiful picture it is, how well Elizabeth looks, on the left of the woman who supplanted her mother, a stepmother that she cannot even remember: her mother’s lady-in-waiting, the woman who danced the day that her mother was beheaded. I laugh at the portrait of Will Somers in the right-hand doorway, his monkey on his shoulder, the Whitehall gardens behind him. I hear my tinkling laugh and the way that people eagerly join with me, as if to obscure my humiliation. Nan comes to one side of me as if she would hold me up, and Catherine Brandon comes to the other, and they admire the picture and make a babble of noise. Anne Seymour, my lady-in-waiting, stays at a distance and remarks on the beauty of her dearest tragic sister-in-law.

I keep staring at the portrait. I think it is an altarpiece, an icon like those the reformers have rightly thrown out of the old corrupt church. It is like a triptych with three panels: the two princesses on either side, and the Holy Family, the Father and the Son and the transfigured mother, in the central panel. The two Fools are the worldly fools outside, while the inside world of the royal family glows like gold. Jane Seymour, overcoming death, shines like Our Lady.

Elizabeth comes and takes my hand and whispers: ‘Who is that? Who is it in your place?’

And I say, ‘Hush, it is Queen Jane, Edward’s mother,’ and at once her clever little face closes up as if I have told her a secret of shameful doings, something foul and wrong. And at once – and this is how I know she has been corrupted beyond saving – she turns a smiling face to her father and tells him what a beautiful portrait he has commissioned.

Princess Mary throws me a brief glance and says nothing, and then the court falls silent as we wait for the king to speak. We wait, and we wait, Nicholas de Vent turning his cap in his hand, sweating with nerves to see what the great patron of art, Holbein’s patron, has to say about this production, this painted lie, this masterpiece of self-aggrandisement, this grave-robbing.

‘I like it,’ Henry says firmly, and there is a sort of breeze as the court releases its indrawn breath. ‘Very fair. Very well done.’ He glances at me and I see he looks just a little embarrassed. ‘You will be glad to see the children painted all together, and the honour that I have done to Edward’s mother.’

He looks at the pale painted face of his dead wife. ‘She might have sat beside me, just like that, had she had been spared,’ he says. ‘She might have seen Edward grow to be a man. Who knows? She might have given me more sons.’

There is nothing I can say while my husband publicly mourns a previous wife, gazing into her bleached stupid face as if to find some wit now that escaped everyone during her life. I find that my teeth are gritted to hold a fixed smile as if this is not an insult to me, as if I am not publicly denied, as if the king is not telling the world that all of us who came after Jane – Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard, me – are ghost queens of less substance than her, the dead wife.

Of course, it is Anne Seymour, the dead queen’s sister-in-law, who steps forward and addresses the king as a kinswoman and fellow-mourner, taking advantage of his tears as she always does: ‘It is her to the life.’

Except she is dead.

‘Just as she was,’ he says.

I doubt that, for she is in my best gold-heeled shoes.

‘She must be looking down from heaven and blessing you and her boy,’ she says.

‘She must be,’ he agrees eagerly.

I note, drily, that the sainted Jane seems to have skipped purgatory, though there is a preacher imprisoned in the Tower of London right now facing a charge of heresy for suggesting that purgatory does not exist.

‘She was cruelly taken from me,’ he says, his little eyes blinking out easy tears. ‘And we had been married little more than a year.’

He’s not quite right. I could tell him exactly. They were married for a year and four months, a shorter marriage even than Kitty Howard, who lasted only a year and six months before he beheaded her; but far longer than his marriage to Anne of Cleves, now so well-regarded, who was pushed out inside half a year.

‘She loved you so much,’ Anne Seymour says mournfully. ‘But thank God that she left such a wonderful son as her living memorial.’

The mention of Prince Edward cheers Henry. ‘She did,’ he says. ‘At least I have one son, and he is handsome, isn’t he?’

‘The very image of his father,’ Anne smiles. ‘See how he stands in the portrait. He is the very image of you!’

I lead my ladies back to my rooms. I am smiling and they are all smiling. We are all trying to show that we are untroubled, that we have seen nothing that disturbs our position, our sense of entitlement. I am the queen and these are my ladies. Nothing is wrong.

When we get to my rooms I wait for them to settle to their sewing with a reader opening a book approved by the Bishop of London. Then I say that I have a little flux, something I ate, no doubt. I will go to my room alone. Nan comes with me because hell’s own horses would not keep Nan out of my hair right now, and she shuts the door behind us and looks at me.

‘Bitch,’ I say shortly.

‘Me?’

‘Her.’

‘Anne Seymour?’

‘No, Jane Seymour. The dead one.’

This is so unreasonable that not even Nan tries to correct me. ‘You’re upset.’

‘I am publicly humiliated, I am supplanted before everyone by a ghost. My rival is not some pretty girl like Catherine Brandon or Mary Howard but a cadaver who was not even very lively when she breathed. And yet now she is the wife that he will not forget.’

‘She is dead, poor lady. She cannot irritate him now. He can think of her at her best.’

‘Her death is her best! She was never as charming as she is now!’

Nan makes a little gesture with her hand, as if to say ‘stop’. ‘She did the best that she could, and my God, Kat, you would not be so hard on her if you had seen her die in such a fever, crying out for God and for her husband. She may have been a ninny; but she died a woman in lonely terror.’

‘What is that to me, who will now have to walk past her image every time I go to dinner? Who is not allowed to wear her pearls? But who has to raise her son? Bed her husband?’

‘You are angry,’ Nan says.

‘Indeed,’ I spit. ‘I see that your studies have not been wasted on you. I am angry. Excellent. Now what?’

‘You’re going to have to get over it,’ she says, as steady as our mother used to be when I raged against some nursery injustice. ‘Because you’re going to have to go to dinner with your head up, smiling, showing everyone that you are happy with the portrait, and happy with your marriage, and happy with your stepchildren and their three dead mothers, and happy with the king.’

‘Why do I have to do this?’ I pant. ‘Why do I have to pretend that I am not publicly insulted?’

Nan’s face is very pale and her voice is flat. ‘Because if you see a dead wife as your rival, you will be a dead wife,’ she predicts. ‘People are already saying that he will remarry. People are already saying that he does not like your religion, that you are too much for reform. You have to face them down. You have to please him. You have to walk in to dinner tonight like a woman whose position cannot be questioned.’

‘Who questions me?’ I yell at her. ‘Who dares to question me?’

‘I am afraid that you are widely questioned,’ she says quietly. ‘Already, the gossip has started. Almost everyone questions your fitness to be queen.’