The Taming of the Queen

WINDSOR CASTLE, AUTUMN 1546

We go on progress after the French visit and the king is even able to hunt. He cannot walk, but his indomitable spirit drives him on and they lift him into the saddle, and once astride he can ride to hounds. At each of our beautiful palaces on the river they build a hide for him, equipped with bows and arrows, and drive the game towards him. Dozens of deer and many stags go down before the royal box, with arrows in their eyes and their faces ripped open. It is more intensely cruel than when we are in the open field. The king takes careful aim with the beautiful beast herded towards him, the animal goes down with a barb in its face and a hound tearing at its hindquarters. Henry is not troubled by the cold savagery of killing a trapped animal. He watches the huntsman cut the throat of a struggling beast with complete calm. Indeed, I almost think that the suffering pleases him. He watches the little black hooves kicking until they are still and then he gives a short laugh.

He is watching the death throes of some poor doe when he suddenly remarks, ‘What do you think of Thomas Seymour as a match for Princess Elizabeth? I know the Seymours would like it.’

I flinch, but he is not looking at me but at the glaze that is coming over the sloe-black eye of the wounded deer.

‘Whatever you think best,’ I say. ‘Of course, she is still young. She could be betrothed and stay with me until she is sixteen.’

‘Do you think he would make her a good husband? He’s a handsome devil, isn’t he? Does she like him? Would he get a boy on her, d’you think? Is she eager for him?’

I hold my scented leather glove to my lips to hide the tremble that I can feel. ‘I can’t say. She’s very young still. She likes him well enough, as she should, as her half-brother’s uncle. I think that he would make her a good husband. His courage cannot be questioned. What do you think, Your Majesty?’

‘He’s handsome, isn’t he? As randy as a dog? He’s a terrible man for the ladies.’

‘No more than many others,’ I say. I have to take care. I cannot think what I should say to keep myself safe and promote Thomas’s hopes.

‘D’you like him?’

‘I hardly know him,’ I say. ‘I know his brother far better, because his wife is in my rooms. When I speak with Sir Thomas he is always interesting, and he has served you most loyally, hasn’t he?’

‘He has,’ the king concedes.

‘He has been a great help in the safety of England, the fleet and the ports?’

‘Yes; but to give him a daughter would be an exceptional reward. And it would make the Seymours greater still.’

‘But an English marriage would keep her in England,’ I say. ‘And that would be a comfort to us both.’

He looks as if he is considering it, as if the thought of keeping her at home moves him. ‘I know Elizabeth,’ he says. ‘She would have him if I let her. She is a slut, just like her mother.’

Although our stay at Windsor is in fine weather, suddenly, for no apparent reason, the king withdraws from court. I do not think he is ill, but he takes to his rooms with a small circle of gentlemen and will see no-one. The court, accustomed to sunny days of informal sports and pastimes, continues without him as if they hardly care that the lynchpin and the source of all power and wealth is absent. They have become accustomed to his going and then his reappearing. They do not see this as a sign of decline; they think he will come and go for ever. But the men who advise him, the men who are watchful of him every day, and hopeful for the future, gather closely around him, almost as if they dare not trust him with each other, dare not trust him alone.

From behind the closed doors the word seeps out, the men in his rooms tell their wives who attend me: he is ill again, and this time he seems deeply tired by the pain of the old wound and the fever. He sleeps for much of the day, waking up to order enormous meals but having no appetite when the servers bring the heaped platters to his bedside.

The old court – the papists like Thomas Howard, Paget and Wriothesley – are slowly, irresistibly excluded. It is the reformers who are in the ascendant now. Sir Thomas Heneage is dismissed from his intimate post of groom of the stool after years of faithful service, without warning and with no reason given. We are quietly triumphant, for the new groom is to be Joan’s husband, Sir Anthony Denny, and he joins Nan’s husband, Sir William Herbert, to stand beside the king when he labours on his close stool and blows out constipated wind.

With my ladies’ husbands in key positions in the king’s chamber, with Anne Seymour’s husband, Edward, more and more the principal advisor, my rooms and the king’s rooms are all but united: husbands serve the king, wives serve me, all of us of one mind. The king’s favourites are almost all reformers, and most of my ladies are for the new learning. When the court talks of religion there is a united enthusiasm for change. So there are almost no contradictory voices as the king’s quarrel with Gardiner, over some lands, turns dramatically sour. The king flares up into a sudden fury and without another word, Gardiner – once so favoured – is not admitted into the inner circle.

No-one speaks up for him. His old allies, Bishop Bonner, Thomas Wriothesley and Richard Rich, are rapidly changing sides and seeking new friends. Of course they follow the royal favour before their loyalty to him. Thomas Wriothesley is Edward Seymour’s newest recruit, while Bonner, the persecuting Bishop of London, keeps to his diocese and does not dare to come to court. Even the new Spanish ambassador is no friend of Gardiner – he can see that the papist cause is in decline. Richard Rich, with his eye on a new patron, follows John Dudley like a puppy. Only Thomas Howard will still speak to the isolated bishop, but Howard is out of favour himself, his son blamed for the troubles among the English army at Boulogne, and Mary Howard disgraced by her outrageous snub to the Seymours.

Stephen Gardiner’s fall is as rapid as a sinner going down to hell. Within a day he is banned from the private royal rooms, forced to stand with the common petitioners in the presence chamber, then, the day after, the guards at the main door are told to exclude him and he can only ride into the yard but not stable his horse. The pitiful thing is that he does not go. He thinks that he will be returned to power if he can just get into Henry’s presence. He thinks an explanation or an apology will save him. He looks back on years of service and loyalty and thinks that the king will not turn against such an old friend. He has forgotten that once the king locks someone out, that person is lost, sometimes arrested, often killed. He failed to observe that the only person ever to recover from the king’s hatred is me. He does not know what I had to do. He does not know the price I paid. Nobody will ever know. I don’t acknowledge it to myself.

Gardiner does all he can. He offers to return the disputed lands, and he dawdles around the stable gates, trying to look as if he is just arriving or just leaving, still the welcome visitor that he was before. He sends in apologies by anyone who will take a message for him. He gets hold of everyone who walks through and tells them there has been a mistake, that he is the king’s greatest friend and loyal servant, that nothing has changed, and will they speak of him to the king?

Of course they will not. Nobody wants Gardiner back at the king’s side, pouring suspicion into his ear, prompting him to see heresy and treason and to see it everywhere. There is no household that he did not spy on, there are few people who did not feel his bright suspicious eyes on them. There is no sermon that he did not inspect for heresy, no courtier that he did not threaten. Now he has lost the king’s favour, nobody has to fear him. And nobody is going to take the risk of mentioning his name to the king, who says that this former beloved advisor is nothing but a troublemaker and he will not hear a word about him.

The frightened old man sees disaster ahead of him. He remembers Wolsey, dropped dead on the York road, returning to London for a trial where they would have beheaded him. He remembers Cromwell, stripped of his badge of office, hacked to death on the scaffold, condemned by the laws that he invented. He remembers John Fisher going to the scaffold in his best coat, certain of heaven, Thomas More trapped by Richard Rich, he remembers the queens – four of them – and how he advised against them as they fell from favour, and he dragged them down.

He gets hold of his former friend and ally Lord Wriothesley and begs him to speak – just once, one word only – to the king, but Wriothesley melts through the bishop’s fingers as if he were oily blood from a false miracle statue. One moment he is there, and then he is gone. Wriothesley is not going to risk his uncertain place at court for loyalty to a friend. The king frightened Wriothesley when he shouted at him in the garden, Wriothesley has turned his coat and is working with the Seymour affinity.

In desperation Gardiner begs my ladies to speak to me, as if I would have any reason to return my declared enemy to power; as if he did not promise the king he had evidence of capital treason against me. In the end Stephen Gardiner understands that he has lost his friends, his influence and his place, and goes quietly to his own palace, to burn compromising papers and plot his return.

The reformists at court celebrate a victory over the dangerous man, but I have no doubt that he will come back. I know that, just as the papists dragged me down and broke my spirit, we are now triumphing against them and they are lying sleepless and fearful at nights; but the king will bait one pack of dogs against another over and over, and we will have to fight it out without principle, without shame, again and again.