The Taming of the Queen

HAMPTON COURT PALACE, WINTER 1547

The messenger comes by barge, swiftly down the river in the midnight darkness, rowed as fast as the oarsmen can go against the in-running tide, from Whitehall. It’s a cold wet journey and the guards take his dripping cape at the entrance of my presence chamber and throw open the doors. One of my ladies, wakened by the hammering on the door of the privy chamber, comes running in to me to say there is an urgent message from the Privy Council at Whitehall and will I receive it?

I am afraid at once, as everyone in this court has learned to fear the uninvited knock on the door. At once I wonder who is in danger, at once I wonder if they have come for me. I throw on my thickest winter robe and go out, my bare feet in my gold-heeled shoes, to my privy chamber where one of the Seymour men is waiting, shifting from one damp footprint to another, dripping rain on the floor. Nan comes after me and my ladies-in-waiting open their chamber doors and peer out, white-faced in the torchlight. Someone crosses herself; I see Nan grit her teeth, fearing bad news.

The messenger kneels to me and pulls off his hat. ‘Your Majesty,’ he says. Something in the appalled shock of his face, in the way he takes a breath as if to make a well-rehearsed speech, the lateness of the hour, the darkness of the night, warns me what he is going to say. I look over his shoulder to see if the yeomen of the guard have come in numbers to arrest me. I wonder if the royal barge is bobbing at the pier showing no lights. I look for the courage inside myself to face this moment. Perhaps now, tonight, they have finally come for me.

He gets to his feet. ‘Your Majesty, I regret to tell you, His Majesty the king is dead.’

So, I am free, I am free and I am alive. When I embarked on this marriage nearly four years ago I did not think that this day would come when I would be free and a widow again. When I saw the warrant for my arrest in the hand of the king’s doctor I did not think that I would survive a week. But I have survived. I have outlived the king who abandoned two wives, left one to die in childbirth, and murdered two others. By betraying my love, my faith and my friend, I have survived. By surrendering my will and my pride and my scholarship, I have survived. I feel like someone in a town terribly besieged for years, coming out of my house and looking wonderingly around at the breached walls and the broken gate, at the destruction in the marketplace and the torn-down church and yet being alive and safe, though others have died and the danger has passed over me. I have saved myself but I have seen the destruction of everything that I loved.

I sit in the window of my bedroom and wait for the dawn to come. Behind me the fire glows in the grate but I don’t allow them to come in and stir it up, bring hot water, or dress me for the day. I am going to watch out the rest of the night and think of them in Whitehall, like the dogs that he said they were, tearing the kingdom apart so that one pack gets one favour and one gets another. They have a will, or at any rate they have something that they are going to declare is the king’s will, or at the least they are cobbling together something that they can take as his will, and it honours those who were first at the corpse, as if it is the result of a running race, not the testament of a dying man.

Prince Edward is his heir, of course, but in this will I am not named as regent. There is to be a Privy Council that will guide Prince Edward until he is eighteen years old. Edward Seymour has been too quick for me, too quick for us all. He has named himself as Great Chamberlain of England and will guide the Privy Council with fifteen others. Stephen Gardiner is not among them, but neither am I.

Thomas, late to the division of the spoils, will have to wrest from his brother whatever he can. He will have to hurry. The court is like a pack of hounds, tearing a fallen stag to gory pieces. There are more than eighty outstanding claims that the courtiers swear were promised them, besides the division of the king’s estates. He leaves a good dowry to both his daughters, he leaves a fortune to me. But he excludes me from the Privy Council to govern Edward; his last act is to silence me.

Though he was my husband, he is to be buried beside Jane Seymour in Saint George’s Chapel at Windsor, and he leaves a fortune for people to sing Masses for him and he establishes a chantry chapel with two priests to save him from the purgatory that he did not believe in. When they tell me this I have to grip the wooden arm of my chair to prevent myself from laughing out loud.

They tell me that he made his confession. He sent for Thomas Cranmer right at the end, and the archbishop gave him extreme unction, so he died a faithful son of the Catholic church. Apparently he told Cranmer that he had little to confess, for everything that he had done had been for the best. I smile as I think of him dying, without fear of the darkness, secure as ever in his own good opinion, dabbled with holy oil. But what was the purpose of his life if not to save his country from these rituals and superstitions? What, at the end, was he thinking?

I have lost my husband and I have survived my gaoler. I will mourn a man who loved me, in his way, and celebrate my escape from a man who would have killed me. When I undertook this marriage, against my will, I knew that it would end only in death: his or mine. There were times when I thought that he would have me killed, that I would never be able to survive him. There were times when I thought that his passion to be the one to say the last word would persuade him to silence me for ever. But I have survived his abuse, and I have survived his threats. This marriage cost me my happiness, my love, and my pride. The worst price was betraying Anne and letting her go to her death. But this, too, I shall endure; this, too, I shall forgive.

I will publish my translations of the New Testament. I will finish my book of new writing on my faith. I will write my own opinions, without fear, under my own name. This book will be the first I have written for myself, published with my name on the frontispiece, owning my authorship of all of it. I will not send it out into the world without acknowledgement. I will stand up and speak in my own voice and no man will ever silence me again.

I will raise my stepchildren in the reformed faith, and I will pray to God in English. I will see Thomas Seymour walk across the room and kiss my hand without being fearful that someone notices the gladness in my face and the desire in his eyes. I will kiss his smiling mouth, I will lie in his bed. I will live like a passionate intelligent woman and I will bring my passion and my intelligence to everything that I do.

I believe that to be a free woman is to be both passionate and intelligent; and I am a free woman at last.