The Taming of the Queen

‘Yes,’ she says shortly.

‘This is impossible,’ I say hastily. The king has been excommunicated for years. He called the pope the antichrist. How can it be that he is now entertaining his messenger?

‘Apparently the pope is going to receive the English Church back into communion with Rome. They just have to agree the details.’

‘We become Roman Catholic again?’ I mutter incredulously. ‘After all the suffering? Despite all the advances that we have made, despite the sacrifices?’

‘Are you not hungry, my love?’ Henry booms from my left side.

I turn quickly and smile. ‘Oh, yes,’ I say.

‘The venison is very fine.’ He nods to the server. ‘Give the queen more venison.’

I pause while the dark meat is served to my golden plate, the thick dark gravy poured.

‘The flesh of the doe is always sweeter than that of the buck,’ Henry winks at me.

‘I am glad to see you are in such good spirits, my lord husband.’

‘I am at play,’ Henry says. His gaze follows mine to where the emissary of the pope sits quietly at the table, eating with relish. ‘And I alone understand the game.’

‘You are to be congratulated,’ Edward Seymour says to me thinly as my court of ladies is walking beside the river before the day gets too hot. His lordship is home from Boulogne, relieved of command at last, and taking up his influence at the Privy Council once again. Lord Wriothesley has not recovered from his scolding in the king’s garden, Stephen Gardiner has been very quiet, the papal messenger has gone home with only the vaguest of promises, and we all hope that the forces of reform are quietly taking the upper hand once more. I should be glad.

‘I am?’

‘You have managed something that no previous wife has done.’

I glance around but Edward Seymour is not likely to be indiscreet, and nobody is listening. ‘I have?’

‘You displeased the king and then you won his forgiveness. You are a clever woman, Your Majesty. Your experience is unique.’

I bow my head. I cannot speak of it. I am shamed, I am unspeakably shamed. And Anne Askew is dead.

‘You manage him,’ he says. ‘You are a formidable diplomat.’

I can feel myself flush at the memory. I do not need Edward to remind me of that night. I will never forget it. I feel as if I will never raise my head up from what I did. I cannot bear that Edward should even speculate about what I did to get the king to tear up the warrant for my arrest. ‘His Majesty is merciful,’ I say quietly.

‘More than that,’ Edward says. ‘He is changing his mind. There are to be no more burnings for heresy. The mood of the country has turned against it, and the king has turned with them. He says that Anne Askew should have been pardoned, and that Anne Askew will be the last. This is your influence, Your Majesty, and everyone who wants to see the church reformed will be grateful to you. There are many who thank God for you. There are many who know that you are a scholar, a theologian and a leader.’

‘It’s too late for some,’ I say quietly.

‘Yes, but others are still in prison,’ he says. ‘You could ask for their release.’

‘He does not seek my advice,’ I remind him.

‘A woman like you can put a thought into her husband’s head and congratulate him for thinking it,’ Edward says, smiling broadly. ‘You know how it is done. You are the only woman ever to manage it.’

I think that I started my reign as a scholar and learned how to study, and now I have become a whore and have learned whore’s tricks.

‘It is not ignoble to humble yourself for a cause like this,’ Edward says as if he knows what I am thinking. ‘The papists are in retreat, the king has turned against them. You could get good men released and the king to change the law to free people to pray as they wish. You have to work with your charm and your beauty – with the skills of Eve and the spirit of Our Lady. This is what it is to be a woman of power.’

‘That’s odd, for I feel powerless,’ I say.

‘You must use what you have,’ he says, the advice of a good man to a whore for time immemorial. ‘You must use what you are allowed.’

I take great care not to say one word that sounds like a challenge to the king. I ask him to explain his thinking on the significance of purgatory, and I am interested when he tells me that there is no evidence for such a state in the Bible and that the theory of purgatory was created by the church solely to finance chantries and Masses. I listen with the air of an eager disciple as he propounds things that I have thought ever since I began my studies. Now he is glancing into books that I have read and hidden for my own safety, and he tells me the things that strike him as if they are a great novelty and I should learn them from him. Little Lady Jane Grey knows these opinions, Princess Elizabeth has read them; I taught them both myself. But now I sit beside the king and exclaim when he describes the blindingly obvious, I admire his discovery of the widely known and I remark on his perception.