The Taming of the Queen

I take up the sheets and read the first few pages. It is beautiful, just as I hoped it would be. It is simple and clear, with a rhythm and a cadence like poetry, but there is nothing forced or overly worked about it. I look at a line that took me half a day to translate, changing one word for another, scratching it out and starting again. Now, in print, it looks as if it could never have been other, it reads as if it has been the prayer of the English forever. I feel that deep joy of a writer seeing her work in print for the first time. The absorbing private work has become public, it has stepped out into the world. It will be judged and I am full of confidence that it is good work.

‘My liturgy, in my church.’ For the king, it is ownership that gives him joy. ‘My church, in my kingdom. I have to be both king and pope in England. I have to guard the people from enemies outside and lead them to God within.’

Nan and Catherine give a little impressed murmur of awe. They know every phrase and passage, having passed it from one hand to another, improving and polishing the phrasing, reading Thomas Cranmer’s changes aloud for him, checking my words with me.

‘You can take this,’ the king says grandly. ‘You can read these pages and check them for foolish mistakes by the printer’s boys. And you can tell me what you think of this, my greatest work.’

One of his pages steps forward and gathers up the pile of papers. ‘Mind,’ the king says, wagging a finger at me, ‘I want your real opinion, nothing designed to please me. All I ever want from you is the truth, Kateryn.’

I curtsey as the guards hold the doors open for us. ‘I will read with attention and give you my true opinion,’ I promise. ‘This will be the hundredth time I have read these words and I hope to read them a thousand times. Indeed, all of England will read them a thousand times, they will be read every day in church.’

‘You must always speak honestly to me,’ he says warmly. ‘You are my helpmeet and my partner. You are my queen. We will go forward together, Kateryn, leading the people from darkness into light.’

Nan, Catherine and I say not a word until we are back in the safety of my rooms and the door is shut.

‘How wonderful!’ Catherine exclaims. ‘That the king should put his own name to the work. Stephen Gardiner can say nothing against it if it is under the king’s own seal of approval. How you are leading him, Your Majesty! How far we are going towards true grace!’

Nan spreads the pages out on the table and I take up a pen to mark any errors when a sudden quiet tap on the little door that leads directly from the stable stairs makes us look up. The preachers who wish to enter discreetly use this door by appointment; perhaps a bookseller with a book that one of Gardiner’s spies would name as heretical. All other visitors, great and small, visitors of state and petitioners, come up the broad public stairs and are announced at my presence chamber, as the huge double doors swing open.

‘See who it is,’ I say quietly, and Nan goes to the door and opens it. The guard who stands below, at the bottom of the stair, watches as a young man comes in and bows to me and to Joan Denny.

‘Oh, this is Christopher, who serves my husband,’ Joan says, surprised. ‘What are you doing here, Christopher? You should have come in the main door. You gave us a fright.’

‘Sir Anthony said to come to you unobserved,’ he replies, and he turns to me. ‘Sir Anthony said to tell Your Majesty at once that Mistress Anne Askew has been arrested and questioned.’

‘No!’

He nods. ‘She was arrested and questioned by an inquisitor and then by the Lord Mayor of London himself. Now she is in the keeping of Bishop Bonner.’

‘She is charged?’

‘Not yet. He is questioning her.’

‘On the very day that the king gives you the prayers in English?’ Nan whispers to me incredulously. ‘On the very day that he promises that England will be freed from superstition? He has her arrested and questioned?’

‘God help us and keep us; this is his dogfight,’ I say, my voice shaky with dread. ‘Set up one cur and then another. Let the two of them fight it out.’

‘What d’you mean?’ Nan asks, frightened by my tone. ‘What are you saying?’

‘What shall we do?’ Catherine Brandon demands. ‘What can we do to help Anne?’

I turn to Christopher. ‘Go back,’ I say. ‘Take this purse.’ Nan goes to a drawer in my table and brings out a small purse of gold that I keep for my charitable giving. ‘See if there are men around Bishop Bonner that will take a bribe. Find out what the bishop requires of Mistress Askew, whether he needs an oath, or a recantation or an apology. Find out what it is that he wants. And be sure that the bishop knows that I have heard Anne preach, that she is a kinswoman to George St Paul, who works for the Brandons, that I have never heard a word from her that is anything but devout, holy, and within the law, that this very day the king has his liturgy in English back from the printers. And that I expect her to be released.’