The Taming of the Queen

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.

WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON, WINTER 1546

The king’s health worsens as the season turns, and Doctor Wendy says that he has uncontrollable fevers that cannot be cooled. While he sweats and rages in his delirium the heat rises from his overburdened heart to his brain and may prove too much for him. The doctor suggests a course of baths and the court moves to Whitehall so that the king can be dipped in hot water and swaddled like a baby in scented drying sheets to draw the poisons from him. This seems to help and he recovers a little; but then he says that he wants to go to Oatlands.

Edward Seymour comes to my rooms to consult with me. ‘He’s hardly well enough to travel,’ he says. ‘I thought the court would stay here for Christmas.’

‘Doctor Wendy says that he should not be crossed.’

‘Nobody wants to cross him,’ Edward rejoins. ‘God knows that. But he cannot risk his health going by barge on the winter river to Oatlands.’

‘I know. But I can’t tell him that.’

‘He listens to you,’ he reminds me. ‘He trusts you with everything, his thoughts, his son, his country.’

‘He listens to his grooms of the chamber as much as he does to me,’ I say stubbornly. ‘Ask Anthony Denny or William Herbert to speak to him. I will agree with them if he asks me. But I can’t advise him against his wishes.’ I think of the whip that he keeps in a cupboard somewhere in his bedroom. I think of the ivory codpiece stained with blood from the broken skin of my lips. ‘I do what he commands,’ I say shortly.

Edward looks at me with a thoughtful expression. ‘In the future,’ he says carefully, ‘in the future, you may have to make decisions for his son, and for his country. You may be the one who commands.’

It is illegal to speak of the death of the king. It is treason to even suggest that his health is failing. I shake my head in silence.

OATLANDS PALACE, SURREY, WINTER 1546

With Gardiner absent there is only one group of men surviving at court that still favours the old church, but it is a great family that has survived many changes. Nothing can destroy the Howards. They will parlay their daughters and throw their own heirs overboard rather than let their house sink. The Howards, Dukes of Norfolk, have kept their place next to the throne even when the kings have changed, even when two girls of their house have risen to the throne and walked to the scaffold. Thomas Howard is not easily dislodged.

But one evening his son and heir goes missing. Henry Howard, recalled from the command of Boulogne because of his terrible arrogance and risk-taking, does not appear at his father’s table at dinner, and his servants have not seen him; none of his friends know where he can be.

This is a wild young man, a fool who boasted that he could hold Boulogne forever, who has displeased the king with his rowdy grandeur more than once, but always played his way back into favour. He was the best friend of Henry Fitzroy, the king’s bastard son, and has always before been able to draw on that brotherly tragic love to win royal forgiveness.

Although everyone is quick to say that it is no surprise that the duke’s heir is missing from his father’s table, that the Howards are always storming off, everyone knows the young man would not disappear into the stews of London without his retinue and friends. Henry Howard is far too pleased with himself to go anywhere without a full entourage to admire him: somebody must know where he is.

One man knows: Lord Thomas Wriothesley. Slowly, it emerges that his men were seen bundling the young earl into a boat on the river late at night. Apparently there were a dozen of them in the Wriothesley livery and they had the young man between them, carrying him as he struggled and cursed them, and then they slung him in the bottom of the barge and sat on him. The boat went swiftly downstream into the darkness, and then it seemed to simply disappear. It was not an arrest, there was no warrant, and they did not arrive at the Tower. If it was a kidnap then Wriothesley has somehow found the mad courage to attack a son of the House of Norfolk, and to do it in the precincts of a royal palace. Nobody knows how he could do this, on what authority, nor on what quiet stretch of the dark river the barge with its honoured cargo can be moored, nor where the heir of the Howards is tonight.