The Taming of the Queen

There is plague in the City of London and the king rules that our wedding shall be small and private with no crowds of common people that might bring infections. It will not take place in a great ceremony in the abbey, the fountains are not going to flow with wine, the people are not to roast oxen and dance in the streets. They are to take physic and stay in their homes, and nobody is allowed to come from the pestilential city to the clean river and the green meadows of the countryside around Hampton Court.

This, my third wedding, is to take place in the queen’s oratory, a small, beautifully decorated room off the queen’s chambers. I remind myself that this will be my private chapel, just off my closet, where I will be able to meditate and pray alone when this is all over. Once I have said my vows this very room – and all the others on the queen’s side – will be mine, for my exclusive use.

The room is crowded, and the courtiers shuffle back as I enter in my new gown, and walk slowly towards the king. He stands, a man-mountain, as broad as he is tall, before the altar, which is a blaze of light: hot white wax candles in branching golden candelabra on a jewel-encrusted altar cloth, gold and silver jugs, bowls, pyxes, plates, and, towering over it all, a great golden crucifix studded with diamonds. All the treasures looted from the greatest religious houses of the kingdom have silently found their way into the king’s keeping and now blaze, like pagan sacrifices, on the altar, overwhelming the open pages of the English Bible, choking the simplicity of the chapel till the little room is more like a treasure hoard than a place of worship.

My hand is lost in the king’s big sweating palm. Before us, Bishop Stephen Gardiner holds out the book of service and reads the marriage vows in the steady voice of a man who has seen queens come and go and quietly improved his own position. The bishop was a friend of my second husband, Lord Latimer, and shared his belief that the monasteries should serve their communities, that the church should be unchanged but for the head, that the wealth of the chantries and the abbeys should never have been stolen by greedy new men, and that the country now is poorer for throwing priests and nuns into the marketplaces and breaking the sacred shrines.

The service is in simple English, but the oration is in Latin, as if the king and his bishop want to remind everyone that God speaks Latin, and the poor and the uneducated, and almost all women, will never understand Him.

Behind the king, in a smiling crowd, are his most personal friends and courtiers. Edward Seymour, Thomas’s older brother – who will never know that I sometimes search his dark eyes for a family resemblance to the man that I love – Nan’s husband, William Herbert, standing with Anthony Browne, and Thomas Heneage. Behind me are the ladies of the court. First among them are the king’s daughters, Lady Mary and Lady Elizabeth, and his niece Lady Margaret Douglas. Behind the three of them come my sister, Nan, Catherine Brandon and Jane Dudley. Other faces swim together; it is hot and the room is overcrowded. The king bellows his oath as if he were the herald announcing a triumph. I speak my words clearly, my voice steady, and then it is done and he turns to me, and his sweating face is beaming. He bends down to me, and now, amid a ripple of applause, he kisses the bride.

His mouth is like a little limpet, wet and inquisitive, his saliva tainted from his decaying teeth. He smells of rotting food. He releases me, and his sharp little eyes interrogate my face to see how I respond. I look downwards as if I am overcome by desire and I find a smile and peep up at him coyly, like a girl. It is no worse than I thought it would be, and anyway I will have to get used to it.

Bishop Gardiner kisses my hands, bows low to the king, offers congratulations, and everyone surges forward, filled with joy that it is done. Catherine Brandon, whose roguish prettiness keeps her dangerously high in the king’s favour, is especially warm in her praise of the wedding and the happiness we are certain to enjoy. Her husband, Charles Brandon, stands behind his exquisite young wife and winks at the king – one old dog to another. The king waves them all aside and offers me his arm, so that we can lead the way out of the room and to dinner.