He snaps his fingers for his page who is waiting in the doorway. The youth comes forward and takes the king’s weight on his shoulder. ‘I will leave you to your amusements. You did not have sunny mornings and little birds when you were married to old Latimer.’
‘Indeed, I did not.’ I am thinking desperately how to ask him about Thomas. ‘Are we in danger, lord husband?’
‘Of course we are, and it’s all his fault. I shall command the Privy Council to try Tom Seymour for treason for the reckless loss of my fleet.’
The cock bird flutters to the top of one of the cages, alarmed by the king’s rough tone, so I am able to turn my face away and say lightly: ‘Surely he cannot be guilty of treason? He has been such a good and loyal servant to you, and you have always loved him.’
‘I’ll have that handsome head on a spike,’ he says with sudden cold violence. ‘Would you take a wager on it?’ and he goes out of the door.
Silently, like a ghost, I make my way to the king’s side of the old palace. Nobody is with me. I told my ladies that I had a headache and would lie down and sleep, then I slipped from my bedroom to make my way to the king’s rooms, through the small winding galleries to the secret door into his bedroom, then through his deserted privy chambers to his inner presence chamber where the Privy Council meet. It is like my dream, creeping about on my own, seen by no-one. I could be climbing a dark stair, in a silent tower. It is like my dream in the quiet rooms with no-one here. There is no guard on the door between the inner presence chamber and the empty rooms. I can stand outside the door and listen to what they say. I swear to myself that if I hear them say that they will arrest Thomas I will send a message to warn him, whatever the risk. I cannot stand by, struck dumb with fear, when the king takes bets about putting his head on a spike on London Bridge.
His brother, Edward, speaks up for him. I can hear him reading aloud from a letter Thomas has sent defending himself. Edward’s voice is clear and I can make out every word through the thick door.
‘And look here,’ Edward says. ‘Let me read you this, Your Majesty. Thomas writes:
Call all the masters and captains that were in this journey and if any of them are able to say that we might lay longer in Dover Road, the Downes, or Bollen Rode as the wind did change, without putting ourselves and the king’s ships in greater danger then let me bear the blame, and if we have done but as the weather would serve I should desire your lordships to blame the weather and let me, with the rest in my company be excused to encourage us to serve on the sea another time . . .’
‘Oh, he writes a good letter,’ Henry grumbles. ‘Nobody ever said he was lacking in charm. But how many ships are missing?’
‘It is the mischance of war,’ Edward replies. I hear the crackle of the paper as he slides the letter across the table for the king to read. ‘Nobody knows better than Your Majesty the dangers a man may run when he goes to war. You, who have sailed to France in the most hazardous weather! Thomas is lucky to report to a king who knows better than any other in Christendom what dangers a brave man has to face. You have been in terrible danger, Your Majesty. You know how a man of courage has to throw the dice and hope that it falls his way. It is the very essence of chivalry – the chivalry that you love so well – that a man takes his life in his hands to serve you.’
‘He was reckless,’ the king says flatly.
‘In a season of storms,’ I hear the old Duke of Norfolk Thomas Howard’s rumbling complaint. ‘Madness to go out! Why could he not wait for spring, as we always do? Typical of a Seymour that he thought he could outrun an autumn wind.’
‘The coast has to be defended against the French,’ John Dudley intervenes. ‘And the French are not waiting for fair weather. He couldn’t risk leaving our fleet in port. What if they had attacked? He writes that their barges can bombard from a distance, they can go among moored ships with or without wind. They carry weapons, they are rowed by their crew and they can make war in any season in any water. He had to destroy them before they invaded us.’
I hear the king’s thick hacking cough and his juicy hawk and spit. ‘You all seem satisfied with his conduct,’ he says grudgingly.
I hear a protesting bark from Henry Howard.
‘All except the Howards and their party,’ the king says grimly. ‘As usual.’
‘Certainly there was no deliberate attempt to risk the fleet,’ someone points out.
‘Well, I am not satisfied,’ says Stephen Gardiner. ‘Clearly he has been reckless. Clearly, he should be punished.’
‘Easy to say from a warm fireside,’ Edward mutters.
I hold my breath. Thomas’ popularity with the court is playing in his favour, and besides, everybody knows that he is risking his life at sea while they are dry-shod.
‘He can keep his commission,’ Henry decides. ‘Make sure you tell him I am most displeased. He must come and report to me himself.’
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?’
I can feel a giggle starting, and I dare not look at Nan. ‘Why should it not be all right, Miss Mary?’
The girl shrugs. ‘I didn’t know that a good woman could preach, Your Majesty. I thought a good woman had to be silent. It’s what my father always told me.’
‘Your father thought, no doubt, that he was telling the truth,’ I say carefully, conscious of Nan’s bright eyes and hidden smile. ‘But we know that God’s Word comes equally to men and women and so men and women can equally speak of it.’
She does not understand. I can see by her glazed eyes that she only wants to know if she should let this odd being – a woman preacher – into my rooms; or have the stable boys throw her back into the cobbled streets that circle the palace.
‘Can you speak, Miss Mary?’ I ask her.
She dips a curtsey. ‘Of course, Your Majesty.’
‘Can you read?’
‘I can read a little, if it is writ plain.’
‘Then if the Bible is writ plain you could read God’s Word. And then you could tell others of it.’
She drops her head. We make out from her embarrassed mutter that the Bible is not for the likes of her, she knows only what the priest tells her, and he only speaks loud enough for them to hear at the back at Christmas and Easter.
‘It is for you,’ I insist. ‘The Bible is written into English for you to read. And Our Saviour came from heaven for you and for everyone, as He makes it plain in the Bible that He gave us.’
Slowly her head comes up. ‘I could read the Bible?’ she asks me directly.
‘You could,’ I promise her. ‘You should.’
‘And a woman could understand it?’
‘She can.’
‘And so this woman can preach?’
‘Why not?’
This silences her again. Centuries of male priests and men teachers, monk scholars and bullying fathers, have told her and me – told every woman in England – that a woman cannot preach. But under my hand I have the Bible in English, given by my husband to the people of England, which says that Jesus came for everyone – not just for male priests and men teachers, monk scholars and bullying fathers.
‘Yes, she can,’ I say to conclude the lesson. ‘And you can show her in. What is her name?’
‘Mistress Anne Askew.’
She comes in and curtseys as low as if I am an empress, then she shoots a little smile at Catherine Brandon and curtseys again to the ladies. I see at once why Mary hesitated to allow her into my chamber. She is an outstandingly pretty young woman, dressed like a country lady, the young wife of a wealthy farmer or town merchant. She’s not nobility, but one of those on the rise who probably have an old name and have used it to get a new fortune. Her white cap on her glossy brown hair is trimmed with expensive white lace. It frames an exquisite heart-shaped face with bright brown eyes and a ready smile. She is wearing a plain gown of wool in brown with a kirtle of red silk. Her sleeves are plain brown too, and round her neck she has a filet of good linen. She looks like a young woman that we might meet on a progress, voted as Queen of the May for her pure beauty, shining among the other girls of the village. We might see her in a tableau, chosen to play the princess to a painted dragon in a prosperous town. She is so lovely that any mother would get her married young, any father would see that she married extremely well.
She is certainly not how I imagine a woman inspired by God. I was expecting someone older, with a scrubbed, plain face, engraved with benevolent lines. Someone more like one of the abbesses of my childhood, certainly someone more austere than this little beauty.
‘Have we met before?’ She seems oddly familiar, and I am sure that I recognise her dazzling smile.
‘I did not dare to hope that Your Majesty would remember me,’ she says politely. I hear the rolling Lincolnshire accent. ‘My father, Sir William, served your father-in-law, Lord Brough, at Gainsborough and I used to be invited to the hall when you held a feast and dancing. I always came to the hall for the Twelve Days of Christmas, and at Easter, too, and at Maytime. But I was a little girl. I didn’t expect you to recognise me now.’
‘I thought I knew you.’
‘You were the most learned young lady I’d ever seen,’ she confesses. ‘We talked together once, and you told me that you were reading Latin with your brother. I understood then that a woman can study, a woman can learn. It set me on my path to learn and memorise the Bible. You were my inspiration.’
‘I’m glad that I talked to you, if this is the result. Your reputation as a gospeller goes before you. Do you think you can teach us?’
She bows her head. ‘I can only tell you what I have read and what I know,’ she replies.
‘Have you read more than me and these learned ladies?’
She gives me a sweet respectful smile. ‘I doubt it, Your Majesty, for I had to learn from my Bible when I was blessed with it, and I had it snatched from my hands many a time. I had to fight for my understanding. But I expect that you all have been given a Bible and taught by the finest scholars.’
‘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 praye
rs 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.’