The Taming of the Queen

‘Her Majesty is writing her own book,’ Nan interrupts boastfully. ‘The king has asked her to translate prayers from the Latin to give to the people. She works with the king himself. She studies with the great scholar Thomas Cranmer. Together, they are working on an English missal.’

‘It is true then?’ she demands of me. ‘We will hear the prayers in English in the churches? We will be allowed to know what the priest has been saying for all these years?’

‘Yes.’

‘God be praised,’ she says simply. ‘You are blessed to be doing such work.’

‘It is the king who gives the liturgy to his people,’ I say. ‘And Thomas Cranmer who translates it. I have just helped.’

‘I shall be so glad to read the prayers,’ she says fervently. ‘And God will be glad to hear them, as He must hear the prayers of all of the people, in whatever language they speak, even when they are silent.’

I cannot help but be intrigued. ‘Do you think that God, who gave us the Word, understands without words? Beyond words?’

‘He must do,’ she says. ‘He understands my thoughts, even when they are in my mind before I have put words to them. He understands my prayers when they are nothing more than a wordless calling to Him, like a hen clucking back to a poultry woman.’ She corrects herself. ‘A sparrow does not fall but He knows it; He must understand what a sparrow feels. He must know what I mean when I go chuck chuck chuck. He must understand parables and simple stories since His own Son spoke in parables and simple stories, in whatever language they had in Bethlehem.’

I smile but I am impressed. I had not thought of the language of God as the language before words, as the language spoken in the heart, and I like the thought of God understanding our prayers as if we were clucking hens, pecking at His feet. ‘And did you come to this understanding through private study?’ I ask. ‘Were you taught at home?’

Anne Askew takes her stand, one hand resting gently on my table, her head raised. I realise that this is her sermon, speaking from the heart, speaking of her own personal experience and of the presence of the Word of God in her life. ‘I was taught with my brothers until they went to university,’ she begins. ‘It was an educated home but not a learned one. My father attended your husband the king, when he was a young man. When I was sixteen years old he married me to a neighbour, Thomas Kyme, and we had two children together before he called me a heretic and threw me out of the house because I read the Bible that King Henry, in his wisdom, gave to all the people of England.’

‘It is only for noblemen and ladies now,’ Nan cautions her, with a glance at the closed door. ‘Not for women like you.’

‘It was put into our church, at the back of the church, where the poorest man and the humblest woman could go in and read, if they could read,’ the surprising young woman corrects her. ‘They told us that it was for the people to read, that the king had given it to his people. They may have taken it away again, but we remember that the king gave it to the people of England – all the people of England – for us to read. The lords took it back, the princes of the church who think themselves so great took it away from us; but the king gave it to us, God bless him.’

‘Where did you go?’ I ask. ‘When your husband threw you out of your home?’

‘I went to Lincoln,’ she says with a smile. ‘I sat at the back of the great cathedral and I took a Bible in my hands and I read it in the sight of the congregation and in the sight of the benighted pilgrims who come through the doors, kissing the floor and creeping on their knees. Poor souls, they chinked with the pilgrim badges they had pinned on their clothes but they thought it was a heresy that a woman should read God’s Word in a church. Imagine that! To think it is a heresy for a believer to read a Bible in church!

‘I read it aloud to everyone who came and went in that great building, buying and selling favours, trading pilgrim badges and relics, all the fools and hucksters. I read the Bible to teach them that the only way to God is not through chips of stone and bits of bone, flasks of holy water and prayers written backwards on scraps of paper and pinned to a coat. It is not through sacred rings and kissing the foot of a statue. I showed them that the only way to God is through His Holy Word, in His own holy words.’

‘You’re a brave woman,’ I remark.