‘It is my friend. . .’
‘You have no better friend than me.’
I understand him. ‘We are as one,’ I repeat dully.
‘Holy unity,’ he says.
I bow my head.
‘And loving silence.’
‘She’s dead,’ Nan tells me brutally, as they are brushing my hair before dinner. The movement of the heavy brush through my thick hair, the occasional painful pull, seems to be part of her news. I don’t put up my hand to stop Susan, the maid, from grooming me as if I were a mare going to the stallion. My head rocks to one side and then the other with the harsh pulling motion. I see my face in the mirror, my white skin, my hurt eyes, my bruised mouth. My head going one way and then another like a nodding doll.
‘Who is dead?’ But I know.
‘Anne Askew. I just had word from London. Catherine Brandon is at her London house. She sent me a note. They killed her this morning.’
I choke. ‘God forgive them. God forgive me. God send her soul to heaven.’
‘Amen.’
I gesture that Susan is to go away but Nan says: ‘You have to have your hair brushed and your hood pinned. You have to go to dinner. Whatever has happened.’
‘How can I?’ I ask simply.
‘Because she died never mentioning your name. She took the rack for you and death for you, so that you could go to dinner and, when your chance comes again, you can defend the reform of the church. She knew you must be free to speak to the king even if all the rest of us are killed. Even if you lose us all, one by one. If you are the last one left, you must save reform in England. Or she will have died for nothing.’
I see Susan’s aghast face in the mirror behind my own.
‘It’s all right,’ I say to her. ‘You need not bear witness.’
‘But you must,’ Nan says to me. ‘Anne died without admitting that she knew any one of us, so that we would be free to go on thinking, talking and writing. So that you would carry the torch.’
‘She suffered.’ It’s not a question. She was in the torture room of the Tower, alone with three men. No woman has ever been there before.
‘God bless her. They broke her body so badly that she could not walk to the stake. John Lascelles, Nicholas Belenian and John Adams were burned at the same time, but the men walked to their pyres. She was the only one tortured. The guards had to carry her tied to a chair. They said her feet were turned in as if she was wearing them backwards, and her shoulders and her elbows were all pulled out. Her spine was disjointed, her neck was pulled from her shoulders.’
I dip my head and I put my hands over my eyes. ‘God keep her.’
‘Amen,’ Nan says. ‘A king’s messenger came to offer her pardon as they tied the chair to the stake.’
‘Oh, Nan! Could she have recanted?’
‘All they wanted was your name. They would have taken her down if she had said your name.’
‘Oh, God forgive me.’
‘She listened to the priest preaching the sermon before they brought the torches to set the fire, and she said “Amen” only when she agreed with him.’
‘Nan, I should have done more!’
‘You couldn’t have done more. Truly, there was nothing more that any of us could do. If she had wanted to escape death she could have told them what they wanted to hear. They were clear enough with her what it should be.’
‘Just my name?’
‘All this has been done only so they could name you as a heretic to the king and kill you.’
‘They burned her?’ It must be a terrible death, tied to a stake with the faggots heaped around your feet, the smell of the smoke as the flames take hold, the sight of family and praying friends dimming as the smoke rises and then the terrible crackle as your hair catches and then your skirt smoulders, and then the pain – I break off to rub my eyes – I cannot imagine the pain as a gown catches fire, as sleeves take the flames to the arms, to the shoulders, to her delicate white neck.
‘Catherine Brandon sent her a purse of gunpowder and she wore it in her gown. When the flames grew hot it blew off her head. She didn’t have to suffer long.’
‘That was all we could do for her? That was the best that we could do?’
‘Yes.’
‘But she had to let them strap her broken arms and legs to the chair, she had to wear a gunpowder purse around her twisted neck?’
‘Yes. I don’t mean to say that she didn’t suffer. Just that she did not . . . cook.’
At Nan’s simple words I choke on vomit. I put my head on the table among the silver hairbrush and the silver comb and I heave, spilling bile on the table, over the silver brushes and glass bottles.
I get up and turn from the table. Wordlessly, Susan clears up, brings me a cloth to wipe my face, small ale for me to rinse and spit. Two maids scurry in behind her and wipe my vomit from the floor. Then I sit again before my looking-glass and see the whey face of the woman that Anne Askew died to save.
Nan waits for me to catch my breath.
‘I am telling you now, because the king will know that it has been done according to his orders. When he comes to your rooms this evening he will know that the greatest woman in England has been burned today, and they are sweeping up her ashes from the cobbles of Smithfield as we walk in to dinner.’
I raise my head. ‘This is unbearable.’
‘Unbearable,’ she agrees.
Catherine Brandon returns to court so pale that nobody doubts her story that she was sick. She comes to my room. ‘She didn’t mention your name,’ she said. ‘Not when they gave her a chance to get off the fire. Not even then. Nicholas Throckmorton attended and she met his eye and she smiled at him and nodded as if to say that we had nothing to fear.’
‘She smiled?’
‘She said “Amen” to the prayers and smiled. He said the crowd was horrified at her death. There were no cheers, just a long low groan. He said that this will be the last woman preacher burned in England. The people won’t stand for it.’
We are waiting in my presence chamber and half the court is here already. The king is wheeled in beaming. We all curtsey, and I take my place beside the chair. He extends his hand, and I take it. The grip is so warm and wet that for a moment I imagine that he has blood on his hands, but then I see it is a flicker of red light from the stained-glass windows.
‘All well?’ he asks brightly, though he must know that I have learned of Anne’s death.
‘All well,’ I say quietly, and we go in to dinner.
HAMPTON COURT PALACE, SUMMER 1546
The fine weather continues and the king himself is as sunny as the mornings. He declares that he is well again, much better, he has never been better, he feels like a young man. I watch him and I think that he will live for ever. He returns to the full life of the court and takes every meal seated on his great throne, calling for one dish after another as the kitchen wrestles with cartloads of ingredients that arrive rumbling down the lanes to the huge arched kitchen doors, and sends out one heaped dish after another. The king is in his former place, at the centre of the court, the great cog that turns everything, and the machine that is the court becomes once more a huge clockwork engine that takes in food and grinds out amusement.
He even rises from his chair to take slow steps in the garden or in to dinner. The pages walk beside him – he has a heavy hand on each of their shoulders – but he declares that he can walk almost unaided and will do so again. He swears that he will ride, and when I and my ladies dance before him, or when the masquers come in and choose their partners, he says that perhaps next week he will be up and jigging.
He bellows for diversion, and the choristers and the musicians and the players go into a frenzy of creation so that the king can see a new piece or hear a new song every night. He roars with laughter at the slightest joke. Will Somers was never in his life so popular, and takes up magnificently incompetent juggling. At every meal he has rolls of manchet bread spinning around his head and flying out
of control around the hall so the dogs leap up and snatch them from the air before Will can catch them, and then he complains that no-one understands his artistry, and chases the dogs and goes under the table with them and there is a noisy joyful riot as people place bets on dogs or Will. The king gambles, losing a small fortune with his courtiers, who are wise enough to return it to him in the next game. The king has a lust for life, a joy in life, which people say they have not seen for years. They say it is to my credit that I have made him young and happy again. They ask how I have pleased him.
One evening at dinner I see a stranger, dressed as grandly as a hidalgo of Spain, make his bow to the king and take his place at the table for noblemen.
‘Who’s that?’ I ask Catherine Brandon as she stands behind my chair.
She leans forward so that she can speak quietly in my ear. ‘That, Your Majesty, is Guron Bertano. Apparently, he is an emissary from the pope. ’
I nearly shriek. ‘From the pope?’
She nods, her lips folded together.
‘The pope has sent a diplomat, here? To our court? After all that has gone before?’
‘Yes,’ she says shortly.
‘This is impossible,’ I say hastily. The king has been excommunicated for years. He called the pope the antichrist. How can it be that he is now entertaining his messenger?
‘Apparently the pope is going to receive the English Church back into communion with Rome. They just have to agree the details.’
‘We become Roman Catholic again?’ I mutter incredulously. ‘After all the suffering? Despite all the advances that we have made, despite the sacrifices?’
‘Are you not hungry, my love?’ Henry booms from my left side.
I turn quickly and smile. ‘Oh, yes,’ I say.
‘The venison is very fine.’ He nods to the server. ‘Give the queen more venison.’
I pause while the dark meat is served to my golden plate, the thick dark gravy poured.
‘The flesh of the doe is always sweeter than that of the buck,’ Henry winks at me.
‘I am glad to see you are in such good spirits, my lord husband.’
‘I am at play,’ Henry says. His gaze follows mine to where the emissary of the pope sits quietly at the table, eating with relish. ‘And I alone understand the game.’
‘You are to be congratulated,’ Edward Seymour says to me thinly as my court of ladies is walking beside the river before the day gets too hot. His lordship is home from Boulogne, relieved of command at last, and taking up his influence at the Privy Council once again. Lord Wriothesley has not recovered from his scolding in the king’s garden, Stephen Gardiner has been very quiet, the papal messenger has gone home with only the vaguest of promises, and we all hope that the forces of reform are quietly taking the upper hand once more. I should be glad.
‘I am?’
‘You have managed something that no previous wife has done.’
I glance around but Edward Seymour is not likely to be indiscreet, and nobody is listening. ‘I have?’
‘You displeased the king and then you won his forgiveness. You are a clever woman, Your Majesty. Your experience is unique.’
I bow my head. I cannot speak of it. I am shamed, I am unspeakably shamed. And Anne Askew is dead.
‘You manage him,’ he says. ‘You are a formidable diplomat.’
I can feel myself flush at the memory. I do not need Edward to remind me of that night. I will never forget it. I feel as if I will never raise my head up from what I did. I cannot bear that Edward should even speculate about what I did to get the king to tear up the warrant for my arrest. ‘His Majesty is merciful,’ I say quietly.
‘More than that,’ Edward says. ‘He is changing his mind. There are to be no more burnings for heresy. The mood of the country has turned against it, and the king has turned with them. He says that Anne Askew should have been pardoned, and that Anne Askew will be the last. This is your influence, Your Majesty, and everyone who wants to see the church reformed will be grateful to you. There are many who thank God for you. There are many who know that you are a scholar, a theologian and a leader.’
‘It’s too late for some,’ I say quietly.
‘Yes, but others are still in prison,’ he says. ‘You could ask for their release.’
‘He does not seek my advice,’ I remind him.
‘A woman like you can put a thought into her husband’s head and congratulate him for thinking it,’ Edward says, smiling broadly. ‘You know how it is done. You are the only woman ever to manage it.’
I think that I started my reign as a scholar and learned how to study, and now I have become a whore and have learned whore’s tricks.
‘It is not ignoble to humble yourself for a cause like this,’ Edward says as if he knows what I am thinking. ‘The papists are in retreat, the king has turned against them. You could get good men released and the king to change the law to free people to pray as they wish. You have to work with your charm and your beauty – with the skills of Eve and the spirit of Our Lady. This is what it is to be a woman of power.’
‘That’s odd, for I feel powerless,’ I say.
‘You must use what you have,’ he says, the advice of a good man to a whore for time immemorial. ‘You must use what you are allowed.’
I take great care not to say one word that sounds like a challenge to the king. I ask him to explain his thinking on the significance of purgatory, and I am interested when he tells me that there is no evidence for such a state in the Bible and that the theory of purgatory was created by the church solely to finance chantries and Masses. I listen with the air of an eager disciple as he propounds things that I have thought ever since I began my studies. Now he is glancing into books that I have read and hidden for my own safety, and he tells me the things that strike him as if they are a great novelty and I should learn them from him. Little Lady Jane Grey knows these opinions, Princess Elizabeth has read them; I taught them both myself. But now I sit beside the king and exclaim when he describes the blindingly obvious, I admire his discovery of the widely known and I remark on his perception.
‘I shall release the men held on charges of heresy,’ he says to me. ‘A man should not be imprisoned for his conscience, not if he is questioning reverently and thoughtfully.’
Silently, I nod as if I am overwhelmed by the king’s vision.
‘You will be glad to know that a preacher like Hugh Latimer can be free to speak again?’ Henry prompts me. ‘He used to preach in your rooms, didn’t he? You can have your afternoon sermons again.’
I speak with meticulous care. ‘I should be glad to know that innocent men are free. Your Majesty is merciful, and a careful judge of what is right.’
‘Will you have your afternoon sermons again?’
I don’t know what he wants to hear, and I am determined to say only what he wants to hear. ‘If it is your wish. I like to listen to the preachers so that I may understand Your Majesty’s thoughts. It helps me to follow your intricate thinking if I study the fathers of the church.’
‘D’you know what Jane Seymour’s motto was?’ he suddenly demands.
I flush. ‘Yes, Your Majesty.’
‘What was it?’
‘I believe it was Bound to Obey and Serve.’
He bellows suddenly: a roar of shocking laughter, opening his mouth wide, showing his yellow teeth and his furred tongue. ‘Say it again! You say it!’
‘Bound to Obey and Serve.’
He laughs but there is no humour in his voice at all. I make sure that I am smiling, as if I am willing to be amused but too slow to understand the joke, as if I, as a dull woman, can have no sense of humour, but I am happy to admire his wit.
The admiral of France, Claude d’Annebault, who negotiated the peace with Edward Seymour, comes to Hampton Court for a great reception. The royal children, especially Prince Edward, are to welcome him. The king says that he is tired and asks me to watch that Edward does all that he should, and maintains the dignit
y of the Tudor throne. Edward is only eight, and torn between excitement and apprehension at the part he has to play. He comes to my rooms before the Frenchman arrives and asks me what exactly is to happen and what exactly he is to do. He is so precise, so anxious to be accurate, like a little astronomer, that I call my master of horse and my principal steward and we draw out, on a great sheet of paper, a plan of the gardens. Then, with his old tin soldiers from the nursery, we represent the arrival of the French delegation, and use little dolls to represent us, going out to meet them.
There are to be two hundred French gentlemen and the whole of the Privy Council and the court will come to meet them. We will house them in tents of cloth of gold in the gardens and we will build temporary banqueting houses for the feasts. We draw this little village on our plan, and we take another piece of paper and list the ten days and every reception, hunt, masque, sport and feast.
Princess Elizabeth is there too, and Lady Jane, and we laugh and call for bonnets and headgear and soon we are play-acting the arrival of the French. Edward plays himself but all the rest of us are Frenchmen and courtiers in great hats, sweeping exaggerated bows and making long speeches until we fail the masque with our laughter and have to be ourselves again.
‘But it will be like this?’ Edward asks earnestly. ‘And I will stand just here?’ He points at the platform that we have marked on the plan.
‘Why worry? Elizabeth demands of him. ‘You’re the prince and our Lady Mother is regent – whatever the two of you choose to do must be how it is to be done. You’re Prince of Wales, you cannot do anything wrong.’
Edward gives me his sweetest smile. ‘I shall follow you, Lady Mother.’
‘You are the prince,’ I say. ‘And Elizabeth is correct. Whatever you do is the right thing.’
The visit goes off just as we planned it. Prince Edward rides out with an escort of gentlemen and yeomen of the guard, all dressed in cloth of gold. He looks very small with the great yeomen towering over him, but he handles his little horse well and he greets the visitors with dignity in perfect French. I am so proud of his scholarship that I hug him on his return and dance him around my private chamber.