The Taming of the Queen

I am invited to the king’s rooms most evenings before dinner to listen to debates. Often I say what I think, and always I remind the king that the cause of reform is his cause, a process that he started in his wisdom, that his people revere him for bringing reform to England. But I can tell from the frosty silence that greets my words that the king is far from agreeing with me. He is planning something; but he does not discuss it with me. I know nothing until the first week of July, when the Privy Council announce a law that makes it a criminal offence to own a Bible in English translated either by William Tyndale or by Miles Coverdale.

This is madness. There is no understanding it. Miles Coverdale translated and improved the Tyndale Bible under the instruction of the king and it was published as the Great Bible, the king’s Bible, his gift to believers. This is the Bible that the king gave to his people only seven years ago. Everyone who can afford one has a copy. It would have been disloyal not to have a family copy. Every parish church was given one and ordered to display it. It is the best version in English; every bookcase in England has it. Now, overnight, ownership is a crime. It is a reversal so great that everything is turned around, and upside down. I think of Will Somers standing on his head as I hurry back to my private rooms and find Nan wrapping my precious, beautifully bound and illustrated volumes in rough cloth and cording up a trunk.

‘We can’t just throw them out!’

‘They have to be sent away.’

‘Where are you going to send them?’ I ask.

‘To Kendal,’ she says, naming our family home. ‘As far away as possible.’

‘It’s barely standing!’

‘Then they won’t look there.’

‘You’ve got my copy?’

‘And your notes, and Catherine Brandon’s copy, and Anne Seymour’s and Joan Denny’s and Lady Dudley’s. This new law has caught us all out without warning. The king has made us all criminals overnight.’

‘But why?’ I demand. I am near to crying with anger. ‘Why make his own Bible illegal? The king’s Bible! How can it be illegal to own a Bible? God gave the Word to his people, how can the king take it back?’

‘Exactly,’ she says. ‘You think. Why would the king make a criminal of his wife?’

I take her hands, pulling her away from tying the knots on the trunk, and I kneel beside her. ‘Nan, you have been at court all your life; I am a Parr of Kendal raised in Lincoln. I’m a straightforward Northern woman. Don’t speak in riddles to me.’

‘That’s no riddle,’ she says with bitter humour. ‘Your husband has passed a law which makes you a criminal fit for burning. Why would he do that?’

I am slow to say it. ‘He wants to get rid of me?’

She is silent.

‘Are you saying that this new law is directed against me, since they cannot catch me with anything else? Are you suggesting that they have outlawed the Bible just to make me and my ladies into criminals? So that they can come against us and charge us with heresy? Because this is ridiculous.’

I cannot read the expression on her face – she does not look like herself – and then I realise that she is afraid. Her mouth is working as if she cannot speak, her forehead is damp with sweat. ‘He’s coming for you,’ is all she says. ‘This is how he always does it. He’s coming for you, Kat, and I don’t know how to save you. I’m packing Bibles and I’m burning papers but they know you have been reading and writing, and they are changing the law ahead of me. I can’t make sure you obey the law because they are changing it faster than we can obey. I don’t know how to save you. I swore to you that you would outlive him, and now his health is failing, but he is coming for you just like . . .’

I release her hands and sit back on my heels.

‘Just like what?’

‘Just like he came for the other two.’

She knots the cords around the box and goes to the door and shouts for her manservant, a man who has been with us all our lives. She gestures to the boxes and commands him to take them at once, show them to no-one, and ride for home, for Kendal in Westmorland. As I watch him lift the first box, I realise I am longing to go with him into those wild hills.

‘They’ll pick him up at Islington village if they want to,’ I say, as the man shoulders the trunk and goes. ‘He won’t get more than a day’s ride out of the City.’

‘I know that,’ she says flatly. ‘But I don’t know what else to do.’

I look at my sister, who has served six of Henry’s queens and buried four. ‘You really think he is doing this to entrap me? That he has completely turned against me?’

She doesn’t answer. She turns the same closed face to me that I imagine she showed to little Kitty Howard when she cried that she had done nothing wrong; to Anne Boleyn when she swore that she could talk her way out of danger. ‘I don’t know. God help us all, Kateryn, because I don’t know.’

HAMPTON COURT PALACE, SUMMER 1546