The Taming of the Queen

The portrait painter comes to finish his sketches of the two princesses. I think that Princess Mary stands straighter and taller than usual, as if she knows that this may be the last taking of her likeness as an English princess, as if it is her last portrait before she is sent away. Perhaps she thinks that this portrait will be copied and sent to her proposed husbands.

I go to her side to pull her train a little straighter, to show off the beautiful brocade, and I whisper in her ear: ‘You’re not posing as an icon, you know. You can smile,’ and am rewarded by her swift fugitive giggle.

‘I do know,’ she says. ‘It’s just that people will see this portrait years from now, perhaps hundreds of years from now.’

Princess Elizabeth, blooming under the attention of the painter, is as pink as the inside of a little shell. She spent so long hidden from sight that she loves the male gaze.

I sit and watch the two girls as they stand at a distance but half-facing each other. The painter has his sketches of their faces, and a careful note of the colours of their gowns. All of this will be transferred to the great work like a tisserand weaving flowers on a tapestry on the loom from pictures that she has sketched in the garden.

Then the painter turns to me. ‘Your Majesty?’

‘I am not in my gown,’ I protest.

‘For today, I just want to capture your likeness,’ he says. ‘The way that you hold yourself. Will you be so good as to sit as you will be seated? Perhaps you can imagine that the king is on your right. Would you tilt your head towards him? But I need you to look straight at me.’

I sit as he directs, but I cannot lean towards the space where the king would be. The painter, de Vent, is very exact. Gently he moves the angle of my head this way and that until Mary laughingly takes the place where her father will be positioned, and I sit beside her and tip my head just slightly, as if I am listening.

‘Exquisite, yes,’ de Vent says. ‘But it is too flat. The new fashions . . . Your Majesty, would you allow me?’

He come closer and turns my chair a little towards where the king will sit. ‘And will you let your eyes go this way?’ He points to the window. ‘So.’

He steps back to gaze at me. I look where he directs, and in my line of sight, outside the window, a blackbird lands on a branch of a tree and opens its yellow beak in a trill of song. At once I am transported to that spring when I ran through the palace to Thomas’s rooms and heard a blackbird, drunk with joy and confused by torches, singing at night like a nightingale.

‘Mon Dieu!’ I hear de Vent whisper, and I am recalled to the present.

‘What is it?’

‘Your Majesty, if I could capture that light in your eyes and that beauty in your face I would be the greatest painter in the world. You are illuminated.’

I shake my head. ‘I was daydreaming. It was nothing.’

‘I wish I could capture that radiance. You have shown me what I should do. Now I shall make some sketches.’

I raise my head, and look out of the window, and watch the blackbird as it ruffles its wings in a little scud of rain and then flies away.

WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1545

The king summons me, and Nan and Catherine Brandon follow me along the privy gallery to his rooms. All the windows are open to the spring sunshine and the birds are singing in the trees in the gardens below. We can hear the gulls crying over the River Thames and see the bright flicker of sunlight on their white wings. Henry is in good humour, his thickly bandaged leg resting on a stool, a pile of papers before him, each dense with type.

‘See this!’ he says joyfully to me. ‘You who think you’re such a great scholar. See this!’

I curtsey and step forward to kiss him. He takes my face in both his big hands and pulls me closer so that I kiss him on his mouth. He smells of some sort of spirits and sweets.

‘I never call myself a scholar,’ I say at once. ‘I know I am an ignorant woman compared to you, my lord. But I am glad for the chance to study. What is this?’

‘It is our pages back from the printer!’ he exclaims. ‘The liturgy at last. Cranmer says that we will put a copy into every church in England and end their mumbling away in Latin that neither the congregation nor the priest can understand. That’s not the Word of God; that’s not what I want for my church.’

‘You’re right.’

‘I know! And look, you can see the prayers that you have translated, and Cranmer’s work is in here, too, and I have polished it and in some parts set it into better language, and translated some parts myself. And here it is! My book.’