The Taming of the Queen

I hear the scrape of his chair and the rustle of the strewing herbs as he struggles to rise and the Privy Council jump to their feet and two of them go to help him. At once I tiptoe, silently in my leather slippers, away from the door, through the inner privy chamber, and I am about to run through the king’s bedroom when I freeze in sudden terror.

There is someone in the room. I see a silent figure, seated in the window seat, knees folded up to his chin, in sunshine now where he was hidden in shadow before. A spy, a silent spy, who has been frozen like a statue, watching me. It is Will Somers, the king’s Fool. He must have seen me creep in, he must have watched me listening at the door, and now he sees me hurrying back to my own rooms, a guilty wife tiptoeing through her husband’s bedroom.

He raises his dark eyes to me and sees the naked guilt on my face.

‘Will . . .’

He makes an exaggerated comical start as if he has seen me for the first time, a great Fool’s leap of surprise that sends him bounding from his seat to tumble to the floor. If I were not so afraid, I would have laughed out loud.

‘Will . . .’ I whisper urgently. ‘Don’t fool now.’

‘Is that you? I thought you were a ghost,’ he exclaims quietly. ‘A ghost of a queen.’

‘I was listening for plans. I am afraid for the Princess Mary,’ I say quickly. ‘I fear that she will be married against her will . . .’

He shakes his head, choosing to ignore the lie. ‘I have seen too many queens,’ he says. ‘And too many of them are ghosts now. I don’t want to see a queen in danger; I don’t want to see another ghost. Indeed, I swear that I won’t see one. Not even one.’

‘You did not see me?’ I ask, catching his meaning.

‘I did not see you, nor Kitty Howard creeping down the stairs in her nightgown, nor Anne of Cleves, pretty as her portrait, crying at her bedroom door. I am a Fool, not a guard. I don’t have to see things, and I am forbidden to understand them. There’s no point in me reporting them. Who would listen to a Fool? And so God bless.’

‘God bless you, Will,’ I say fervently, and melt through the doorway into the king’s bedroom and through the private corridor to the safety of my own rooms.

WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1545

The cold wet days of this early spring seem to last for ever, as if there never will be warm days of summer. The light gets brighter in the mornings and the daffodils flower coldly on the banks of the river, but the gardens are wet, and the city outside the great walls of the palace is awash: the ill-drained streets flooded with cold, dirty water. When we ride there is no pleasure in it, for the horses labour in the mud, and the frozen rain comes in scuds into our faces. We come home early, hunched in the saddle, chilled and bedraggled.

Trapped indoors by days of rain, my ladies and I continue our studies, reading texts from the Bible and translating them, both as practice for our Latin and as a stimulus to thoughtful discussions on the meanings of the words. I notice that I have become more and more aware of the sonorous beauty of the Bible, the music of the language, the rhythm of the punctuation. I set myself the task of trying to write better English, so the beauty of my translation matches the importance of the words. Before I write a sentence, I listen to the sound in my head before I put it on the page. I start to think that words can be pitch-perfect just as a musical note can be, that there is a beat in prose, just as there is in poetry. I realise that I am undertaking an apprenticeship in writing and reading, and I am my own master and my own student. And I realise that I love the work.

We are studying one morning when there is a little knock at the narrow door that leads down a stone stair to the stable yard. My maid puts her head into the room. ‘The preacher is here,’ she says quietly.

She has waited at one of the many gates to bring the man directly to my rooms. It is not that they are instructed to come in secret – the king himself knows that I have preachers from his own chapel, from Saint Paul’s Cathedral, and from the other churches. But I don’t see why the court in general – those who do not attend our sermons and readings, others who criticise my interest – should know what we study and who we meet. If they want to learn, they can come and sit with us. If they simply want to know for the sake of gossip, they can do without. I don’t need the Lord Chancellor to look down his long nose at me, or his household to whisper the names of the serious pious men who come to talk to me and my ladies, as if we were meeting gallants. I don’t need Stephen Gardiner’s men to keep a list of the names of everyone who comes to talk to me, and then send his clerks to follow them to their homes and question their neighbours.

‘There’s an odd thing, Your Majesty,’ the maid says tentatively.

I look up. ‘What odd thing?’

‘The person who claims to be your preacher is a woman, Your Majesty. I didn’t know if it was all right?’