The Taming of the Queen

GREENWICH PALACE, SPRING 1546

In February the king’s fever returns.

‘No-one can care for me like William Butts used to do,’ he says miserably. ‘I shall die for lack of good doctoring.’

He demands that I come to his bedside but he is ashamed of the smell in the room that no oils and herbs can conceal, and he does not like me to see his linen shirt wet in the armpits and stained at the front with constant sweat. But worse than this, he is starting to think that this is not ill health, but old age. He is sinking into a dark fearfulness of death that nothing but the return of his health will lift.

‘Doctor Wendy will do his best for you,’ I say. ‘He is so faithful and careful. And I pray for you every morning and night.’

‘And bad news from Boulogne,’ he remembers miserably. ‘That young fool Henry Howard is squandering everything I have gained there. He’s boastful, Kateryn. He’s vain. I have recalled him and I will send out Edward Seymour to take his place. I can trust Edward to keep my castle safe.’

‘He will keep it safe,’ I say soothingly. ‘You need not fear.’

‘But what if I don’t get better?’ His eyes, tiny in his puffy face, squint at me as fearfully as a child. ‘There is Edward, of no age, there is Mary who would turn to Spain in a moment. If I were to die now, this month, the country would be at war again by Easter. I wouldn’t trust any one of them not to take arms, and they would say they were fighting for the pope or fighting for the Bible, and all they would do would be to plunge this country into an internal war, and the French would invade.’

I sit at his bedside and take his damp hand. ‘No, no,’ I say. ‘For you will get better.’

‘If I had a second son, I would be at peace,’ he frets. ‘If you were carrying a child at least I would know that there was the chance of another son.’

‘Not yet,’ I say carefully. ‘But I don’t doubt that God will be good to us.’

He looks dissatisfied. ‘You will be Regent General,’ he reminds me. ‘It will all fall on you. You will have to keep them at peace while Edward grows up.’

‘I know I can,’ I say. ‘For so many of your councillors love you and have promised their duty to your son. There would be no war. There would be a loving care of him. The Seymour brothers would protect him, their nephew. John Dudley would support them. Thomas Cranmer would serve him as he does you. But it will never happen, for you will be well as the weather turns brighter.’

‘I see you only name reformers?’ he demands, his eyes sharp and suspicious. ‘You are of the reform party, as people say. You are not on my side, you are on theirs.’

‘No indeed, I acknowledge the good men of all points of view. No-one can doubt that Stephen Gardiner loves you and your son. The Howards are true to you and to Prince Edward. We would all protect him and bring him to the throne.’

‘So you do think I will die!’ He crows at having trapped me. ‘You think you will outlive another old husband and enjoy a widow’s estate.’ His face flushes red as his anger rises. ‘You sit there, at my sickbed, and imagine the day you will be free of me and free to take some worthless lad as your next husband, the fourth! You, who have wedded and bedded three men, are thinking of the next!’

I hide my shock at his sudden fury and I stay very calm. ‘My lord husband, I am sure you will recover from this fever, as you have from the injuries of your youth. I was trying to reassure you so that you would not worry on your sickbed. I pray for nothing but your health and I know that it will be restored to you.’

He glares at me, as if he would see past my steady gaze and into my heart. I meet his eyes without flinching, for so much that I say is true. I honour him, I love him as a loyal subject and an honourable wife who has promised before God to love him. I never think of his death. It has been a long time since I dreamed of being free. I truly believe that he will recover from this illness and go on and on. This marriage will be my last. I may go to my grave loving Thomas Seymour, but I never think now that we will be together some day. There are no imaginable circumstances in which we could be together. He never looks at me, and I keep my passionate thoughts to myself and see his smile only in rare erotic dreams.

‘You cannot doubt my love for you,’ I whisper.

‘You pray for my health,’ the king says, soothed at the thought of me on my knees.

‘I do. Daily.’

‘And when the preachers come to your room and you read the Bible do you speak of a wife’s obedience to her husband?’

‘We do. We all know that a wife worships God in her husband. That is unquestioned.’

‘And do you doubt purgatory?’ he asks.

‘I think a good Christian goes to heaven because of the saving grace of Jesus,’ I say carefully.

‘At his death? At the exact hour and minute of his death?’

‘I don’t know when, exactly.’

‘So will you pay for Masses for me? Will you establish a chantry for me?’

How to answer this? ‘Whatever you wish,’ I promise him. ‘Whatever Your Majesty would prefer. But I don’t expect to see it.’

His little mouth trembles. ‘Death,’ he repeats. ‘Thank God I am afraid of nothing. It’s just that I cannot imagine the country without me. I cannot imagine a world without me here, without the king that I have become, the husband that I am.’

I smile tenderly. ‘I can’t imagine such a thing either.’

‘And your loss.’ He gives a little choke. ‘Yours, especially.’

His grief is catching; tears come to my own eyes. I press his hand to my lips. ‘Not for years yet,’ I assure him. ‘If ever. I might die before you.’

‘You might,’ he says, cheered at once. ‘I suppose you might. You might die in childbirth like so many women. Because you are quite old to have a first child, aren’t you?’

‘I am,’ I say. ‘But I pray that God will grant us a child. Perhaps in the summer when you are well again?’

‘Well enough to come to your bed and make another Tudor heir?’ he asks.

I turn down my eyes and nod modestly.

‘You long for me,’ he says, his mouth moist now and smiling.

‘I do,’ I whisper.

‘I should think so!’ the king says more cheerfully. ‘I should think so.’

Despite this promise he continues to be feverish and his leg gives him terrible pain for a long dark month. He is no better in spring – which comes slowly to the gardens of Greenwich Palace and makes the trees bud with life and shiver into leaf on the riverside walks, and the birds sing so loudly that they wake me at dawn every morning, which comes earlier and earlier and is warmer every day.

The lenten lilies swell and then flower beside the paths, their bright trumpet blooms like a shout of joy and hope, but the king keeps to his rooms with a table crowded with draughts and tinctures and herbs and jars of leeches, the shutters tightly closed against the dangerous fresh air. Doctor Wendy composes one physic after another, trying to keep the fever down, trying to cleanse out the suppurating wound on Henry’s leg, which gapes still wider, like a bloody mouth, as it eats into the flesh towards the bone. Two pages are dismissed, one for fainting at the sight of it, and one for saying in chapel that we should pray for the king as he is being eaten alive. Henry’s friends and courtiers gather around him, as if they are all under siege from disease, and each one tries to improve his position with the king in case this is not just another flaring up of fever and pain, but the beginning of a final illness.

It falls to me to dine before the court, to order the entertainments, and to make sure that the royal household runs as smoothly reporting to me as it does when it is reporting to the king. I even confer with the rivals Edward Seymour and Thomas Howard to see that there is nothing troubling, difficult or dangerous in the Privy Council reports to the king before they take them in to him. When the Spanish envoys visit with a new plan for a treaty against France so that the emperor can move against the Lutherans and Protestants in his land, they call on me in my rooms before they attend the king.

They do this in the morning, in order to avoid the embarrassment of arriving at my rooms when the preachers of reform are there. They would be horrified to bump into Anne Askew: a reformer and an intelligent woman. It is bitter for me to have to smile and greet them, knowing that they are seeking the friendship of England only to be strong enough to hunt down and murder men and women in Germany who believe as we do. But they come and speak of their plans, trusting that I will serve the interests of my country before anything, and I do my duty and greet them with politeness and assure them of our friendship.

It is well known that the afternoon is the time for our sermon and our study. The best preachers in England travel down the river to attend my rooms and speak of the Word of God and how it can be applied in daily life, and how the man-made rituals can be scoured from a clean pure church. In these long weeks of Lent we have some inspiring sermons. Anne Askew comes several times, and Hugh Latimer often. Members of the court come to listen, even one of the Howards, Tom, the old duke’s second son, makes his bow and asks if he may sit at the back and listen. I know that his lordship would be appalled to know that his son thinks as I do, but the yeast is spreading through the thick dough of court and the people will rise to holiness. I’m certainly not going to forbid a good young man to come to Jesus, even if he is a Howard.

These are the best theologians that England has, in touch with the reformers in Europe, and as I listen to them and sometimes debate with them, I am inspired to write a new book, one that I don’t mention to the king because I know that it will go too far for him. But I am more and more convinced by the rightness of the Lutheran view, and more and more opposed to the superstitious paganism of the old church, and I want to write – I have to write. When I have a thought in my head, when I breathe a prayer in the chapel, I have a great desire to see it set down on a page. I feel as if I can think only when I see the words flowing from the nib of my quill, that my thoughts only make sense when they are black ink on cream paper. I love the sensation of a thought in my head and the vision of the word on the page. I love that God gave the Word to the world, and that I can work in His chosen form.

The king started the reform but now he is old and fearful he has halted. I wish he would go further. The influence of Stephen Gardiner, even at a distance, seems to blight any new thinking. The power of Spain should not dictate the beliefs of English men and women. The king hopes to create his own religion, an idiosyncratic combination of all the views of Christendom, picking the elements that he likes, the rituals that move him, the prayers that strike him. But this cannot be the way to worship God. The king cannot cling to the empty gestures of his childhood for sentiment, he cannot retain the expensive ritual that the old church loves. He has to think, he has to reason, he has to lead the church with wisdom, not with nostalgia for the past and fear of Spain.

I will have to write with care, always aware that my rivals at court will read it and use it against me if they can; but I am driven to tell the truth as I see it. I am going to call this new work The Lamentation of a Sinner as an echo of the title of a book by another learned lady, Margaret of Navarre, who wrote Mirror of the Sinful Soul. She had the courage to write and publish under her own name, and some day so will I. She was accused of heresy but it did not stop her thinking and writing, and I will not stop either. I will make it clear that the only forgiveness of sins, and the only way to heaven, is through personal faith and a complete commitment to Christ. The lie of purgatory, the nonsense of the chantries, the superstitions of indulgences, pilgrimages, Masses – none of these mean anything to God. They have all been created by man to make money. All that God requires of us was explained by His Son in the precious gospels. We do not need the long explanations of scholars, we do not need the magic and tricks of the monks. We need the Word. Nothing but the Word.

I am the sinner of the title, though my greatest sin I keep concealed. In my daily life I sin in my constant love for Thomas. His face comes to me when I am dreaming and when I am waking and – worst of all – when I am praying and should have my mind on the cross. The only thing that comforts me for sacrificing him is the knowledge that I have given him up so that I can do God’s work. I have given him for my soul, for the souls of all Christians in England that they may pray in a true church. I have surrendered the great love of my life for God, and I will bring reformed religion into England so that my suffering is worthwhile.

I pray for him; I fear he is in constant danger. His ships are commanded to take his brother, Edward, as the new commander, and reinforcements to Boulogne, and I have a long night of vigil when I think that Thomas may attack the French fleet, within the very reach of their shore guns, to clear the seas for his brother’s safety. I go down in the morning, white-faced, to see Edward Seymour leave. He is leading his men down to Portsmouth to take ship.

‘Godspeed,’ I say to him miserably. I cannot send him with a message for Thomas. I cannot even name him, not even to his brother. ‘I shall pray for you and for all in your company,’ I say. ‘I wish you very well.’

He bows. He turns and kisses his wife, Anne, goodbye and then he mounts his horse, wheels it around and salutes us all, as if he were a hero in a portrait, and leads his men out, south down the muddy lanes to Portsmouth and over the rough seas, stormy with spring gales, to France.

For several weeks we wait for news from Boulogne. We hear that they have landed safely and are preparing to engage the French forces. We are on the brink of war again with Edward commanding on land and Thomas at sea, but then the king decides that he is not yet ready to fight the French, and orders them all back. He says that John Dudley and Edward Seymour must meet with the French envoys and write a treaty of peace.

I don’t think of the small English force trying to defend Boulogne. I don’t even think of the fleet on the dark seas with the high spring tides. I just think that my prayers have been answered by a caring God, a God that loves Thomas for his bright courage as I do. God has saved Thomas Seymour because I prayed for him with all my heart, with my sinful, sorry heart, and I go to the chapel and gaze up at the cross and thank God that there will be no war and death has missed Thomas once again.