I report on his good behaviour to the king, and Henry says that he will meet the admiral himself, and take him to Mass in the chapel royal.
‘You have served me and my family well today,’ Henry says to me when I go to his room in the evening to tell him of the visit and the ceremonies, of how well Prince Edward acted as host in his father’s absence, of how proud we must be of Jane Seymour’s boy. ‘You have been as a mother to him,’ the king says. ‘Far more than his own mother, who never knew even knew him.’
I notice that tonight he speaks of her death as a dereliction of her duty. ‘You have been as a regent to the country today. I am grateful to you.’
‘I have done nothing more than I should,’ I coo.
‘I am glad that you are pictured with him in the family portrait,’ he says. ‘It is right that you are honoured as his stepmother.’
I hesitate. Clearly, he has forgotten that it is Jane Seymour, the dead wife, who is in the portrait. I sat for it, but I did not get my face in the frame. There is no portrait of me together with the little boy that I love.
He continues, regardless. ‘You have been an honour to your country and to your beliefs,’ he says. ‘You have quite persuaded me over these last few months of the rightness of your place at the head of the country and of your convictions.’
I glance around the room. There is no-one here to disagree. The usual courtiers are in earshot but now they are almost all friendly to me or to the cause of reform. Stephen Gardiner is absent. There was some argument over a small estate of land and the king took sudden offence. Gardiner will have to wheedle his way back into favour, but in the meantime, it is a pleasure to be without him. Wriothesley has not been at the king’s side since the day in the garden when he came to arrest me.
‘I am always guided by Your Majesty,’ I say.
‘And I think you are right about the Mass,’ he says casually. ‘Or do you call it the Communion?’
I smile, pretending confidence while I feel the ground shuddering and weakening beneath me. ‘I call it whatever Your Majesty thinks best,’ I say. ‘It is your church, it is your liturgy. You know better than I, better than anyone, how it should be understood.’
‘Let’s call it the Communion then, the Communion for all the people of the church,’ he says, suddenly expansive. ‘Let us say that it is not literally the body and blood of Our Lord – for how are the common people to understand such a thing? They will think we mean some magic or some trickery. To those of us who think deeply, who meditate on these things, we who understand the power of language, it may be the body and the blood as well as bread and wine; but to the ordinary people we can say to them that it is a form of words. Likewise also when they had supped he took the cup saying: This cup is the new testament in my blood which shall for you be shed. It is clear that He gave them bread, He blessed bread, He gave them wine and told them it was a testament. We, who understand so much more than the village dullards, should not muddle them and confuse them.’
I dare not look up in case this is a trap set for me, but I feel myself tremble with the strength of my feeling. If the king is coming to this realisation, if the king is coming to this clarity, then Anne did not die in vain and I did not throw down my scholarship and take a beating like a slave in vain, for God has brought the king enlightenment through her ashes and my shame.
‘Is Your Majesty saying that we should understand that the words are symbolic?’
‘Isn’t it what you think?’
I will not be tempted into declaring my opinion. ‘Your Majesty, you will find me a very stupid woman, but I hardly know what to think. I was brought up to believe one thing, and then taught to consider another. Now, as a married woman, I have to know what my husband believes for he is there to guide me.’
He smiles. This is exactly right; this is what he wants to hear. This is what a tamed wife parrots to her husband. ‘Kate, I will tell you – I think we need to create a sincere religion in which the communion is the centre of the liturgy but its power is symbolic,’ he pronounces. The rounded phrase and the sonorous delivery tells me that he has prepared this. He may even have written it down and learned it by heart. Someone may even have coached him – Anthony Denny? Thomas Cranmer?
‘Thank you,’ I say sweetly. ‘Thank you for guiding me.’
‘And I am going to suggest to the French ambassador that we work together, France and England, to drive out the superstition and heresy of the old church and create a new church in France and in England, based on the Bible, based on the new learning, and that we spread it throughout all our lands, and then throughout the world.’
This is incredible. ‘You will?’
‘Kate, I want a learned thoughtful people walking in the ways of God, not a pack of fearful fools plagued by witches and priests. All of Europe but the papal states are persuaded that this is the way to understand God. I want to be part of this. I want to advise them, I want England to lead them. And if the day ever comes, I want to leave you as a regent and my son as a king to reign over people who say prayers that they understand and take part in a Mass – in a Communion that makes sense to them, as Our Lord described – not some kind of mumpsimus-sumpsimus invented in Rome.’
‘I think it too, I think it too!’ I can no longer contain my enthusiasm.
He smiles at me. ‘We’ll bring the new learning, the new religion into England,’ he says. ‘You will see this, even if I do not.’
WINDSOR CASTLE, AUTUMN 1546
We go on progress after the French visit and the king is even able to hunt. He cannot walk, but his indomitable spirit drives him on and they lift him into the saddle, and once astride he can ride to hounds. At each of our beautiful palaces on the river they build a hide for him, equipped with bows and arrows, and drive the game towards him. Dozens of deer and many stags go down before the royal box, with arrows in their eyes and their faces ripped open. It is more intensely cruel than when we are in the open field. The king takes careful aim with the beautiful beast herded towards him, the animal goes down with a barb in its face and a hound tearing at its hindquarters. Henry is not troubled by the cold savagery of killing a trapped animal. He watches the huntsman cut the throat of a struggling beast with complete calm. Indeed, I almost think that the suffering pleases him. He watches the little black hooves kicking until they are still and then he gives a short laugh.
He is watching the death throes of some poor doe when he suddenly remarks, ‘What do you think of Thomas Seymour as a match for Princess Elizabeth? I know the Seymours would like it.’
I flinch, but he is not looking at me but at the glaze that is coming over the sloe-black eye of the wounded deer.
‘Whatever you think best,’ I say. ‘Of course, she is still young. She could be betrothed and stay with me until she is sixteen.’
‘Do you think he would make her a good husband? He’s a handsome devil, isn’t he? Does she like him? Would he get a boy on her, d’you think? Is she eager for him?’
I hold my scented leather glove to my lips to hide the tremble that I can feel. ‘I can’t say. She’s very young still. She likes him well enough, as she should, as her half-brother’s uncle. I think that he would make her a good husband. His courage cannot be questioned. What do you think, Your Majesty?’
‘He’s handsome, isn’t he? As randy as a dog? He’s a terrible man for the ladies.’
‘No more than many others,’ I say. I have to take care. I cannot think what I should say to keep myself safe and promote Thomas’s hopes.
‘D’you like him?’
‘I hardly know him,’ I say. ‘I know his brother far better, because his wife is in my rooms. When I speak with Sir Thomas he is always interesting, and he has served you most loyally, hasn’t he?’
‘He has,’ the king concedes.
‘He has been a great help in the safety of England, the fleet and the ports?’
‘Yes; but to give him a daughter would be an exceptional reward. And it would make the Seymour
s greater still.’
‘But an English marriage would keep her in England,’ I say. ‘And that would be a comfort to us both.’
He looks as if he is considering it, as if the thought of keeping her at home moves him. ‘I know Elizabeth,’ he says. ‘She would have him if I let her. She is a slut, just like her mother.’
Although our stay at Windsor is in fine weather, suddenly, for no apparent reason, the king withdraws from court. I do not think he is ill, but he takes to his rooms with a small circle of gentlemen and will see no-one. The court, accustomed to sunny days of informal sports and pastimes, continues without him as if they hardly care that the lynchpin and the source of all power and wealth is absent. They have become accustomed to his going and then his reappearing. They do not see this as a sign of decline; they think he will come and go for ever. But the men who advise him, the men who are watchful of him every day, and hopeful for the future, gather closely around him, almost as if they dare not trust him with each other, dare not trust him alone.
From behind the closed doors the word seeps out, the men in his rooms tell their wives who attend me: he is ill again, and this time he seems deeply tired by the pain of the old wound and the fever. He sleeps for much of the day, waking up to order enormous meals but having no appetite when the servers bring the heaped platters to his bedside.
The old court – the papists like Thomas Howard, Paget and Wriothesley – are slowly, irresistibly excluded. It is the reformers who are in the ascendant now. Sir Thomas Heneage is dismissed from his intimate post of groom of the stool after years of faithful service, without warning and with no reason given. We are quietly triumphant, for the new groom is to be Joan’s husband, Sir Anthony Denny, and he joins Nan’s husband, Sir William Herbert, to stand beside the king when he labours on his close stool and blows out constipated wind.
With my ladies’ husbands in key positions in the king’s chamber, with Anne Seymour’s husband, Edward, more and more the principal advisor, my rooms and the king’s rooms are all but united: husbands serve the king, wives serve me, all of us of one mind. The king’s favourites are almost all reformers, and most of my ladies are for the new learning. When the court talks of religion there is a united enthusiasm for change. So there are almost no contradictory voices as the king’s quarrel with Gardiner, over some lands, turns dramatically sour. The king flares up into a sudden fury and without another word, Gardiner – once so favoured – is not admitted into the inner circle.
No-one speaks up for him. His old allies, Bishop Bonner, Thomas Wriothesley and Richard Rich, are rapidly changing sides and seeking new friends. Of course they follow the royal favour before their loyalty to him. Thomas Wriothesley is Edward Seymour’s newest recruit, while Bonner, the persecuting Bishop of London, keeps to his diocese and does not dare to come to court. Even the new Spanish ambassador is no friend of Gardiner – he can see that the papist cause is in decline. Richard Rich, with his eye on a new patron, follows John Dudley like a puppy. Only Thomas Howard will still speak to the isolated bishop, but Howard is out of favour himself, his son blamed for the troubles among the English army at Boulogne, and Mary Howard disgraced by her outrageous snub to the Seymours.
Stephen Gardiner’s fall is as rapid as a sinner going down to hell. Within a day he is banned from the private royal rooms, forced to stand with the common petitioners in the presence chamber, then, the day after, the guards at the main door are told to exclude him and he can only ride into the yard but not stable his horse. The pitiful thing is that he does not go. He thinks that he will be returned to power if he can just get into Henry’s presence. He thinks an explanation or an apology will save him. He looks back on years of service and loyalty and thinks that the king will not turn against such an old friend. He has forgotten that once the king locks someone out, that person is lost, sometimes arrested, often killed. He failed to observe that the only person ever to recover from the king’s hatred is me. He does not know what I had to do. He does not know the price I paid. Nobody will ever know. I don’t acknowledge it to myself.
Gardiner does all he can. He offers to return the disputed lands, and he dawdles around the stable gates, trying to look as if he is just arriving or just leaving, still the welcome visitor that he was before. He sends in apologies by anyone who will take a message for him. He gets hold of everyone who walks through and tells them there has been a mistake, that he is the king’s greatest friend and loyal servant, that nothing has changed, and will they speak of him to the king?
Of course they will not. Nobody wants Gardiner back at the king’s side, pouring suspicion into his ear, prompting him to see heresy and treason and to see it everywhere. There is no household that he did not spy on, there are few people who did not feel his bright suspicious eyes on them. There is no sermon that he did not inspect for heresy, no courtier that he did not threaten. Now he has lost the king’s favour, nobody has to fear him. And nobody is going to take the risk of mentioning his name to the king, who says that this former beloved advisor is nothing but a troublemaker and he will not hear a word about him.
The frightened old man sees disaster ahead of him. He remembers Wolsey, dropped dead on the York road, returning to London for a trial where they would have beheaded him. He remembers Cromwell, stripped of his badge of office, hacked to death on the scaffold, condemned by the laws that he invented. He remembers John Fisher going to the scaffold in his best coat, certain of heaven, Thomas More trapped by Richard Rich, he remembers the queens – four of them – and how he advised against them as they fell from favour, and he dragged them down.
He gets hold of his former friend and ally Lord Wriothesley and begs him to speak – just once, one word only – to the king, but Wriothesley melts through the bishop’s fingers as if he were oily blood from a false miracle statue. One moment he is there, and then he is gone. Wriothesley is not going to risk his uncertain place at court for loyalty to a friend. The king frightened Wriothesley when he shouted at him in the garden, Wriothesley has turned his coat and is working with the Seymour affinity.
In desperation Gardiner begs my ladies to speak to me, as if I would have any reason to return my declared enemy to power; as if he did not promise the king he had evidence of capital treason against me. In the end Stephen Gardiner understands that he has lost his friends, his influence and his place, and goes quietly to his own palace, to burn compromising papers and plot his return.
The reformists at court celebrate a victory over the dangerous man, but I have no doubt that he will come back. I know that, just as the papists dragged me down and broke my spirit, we are now triumphing against them and they are lying sleepless and fearful at nights; but the king will bait one pack of dogs against another over and over, and we will have to fight it out without principle, without shame, again and again.
WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON, WINTER 1546
The king’s health worsens as the season turns, and Doctor Wendy says that he has uncontrollable fevers that cannot be cooled. While he sweats and rages in his delirium the heat rises from his overburdened heart to his brain and may prove too much for him. The doctor suggests a course of baths and the court moves to Whitehall so that the king can be dipped in hot water and swaddled like a baby in scented drying sheets to draw the poisons from him. This seems to help and he recovers a little; but then he says that he wants to go to Oatlands.
Edward Seymour comes to my rooms to consult with me. ‘He’s hardly well enough to travel,’ he says. ‘I thought the court would stay here for Christmas.’
‘Doctor Wendy says that he should not be crossed.’
‘Nobody wants to cross him,’ Edward rejoins. ‘God knows that. But he cannot risk his health going by barge on the winter river to Oatlands.’
‘I know. But I can’t tell him that.’
‘He listens to you,’ he reminds me. ‘He trusts you with everything, his thoughts, his son, his country.’
‘He listens to his grooms of the chamber as much as he does t
o me,’ I say stubbornly. ‘Ask Anthony Denny or William Herbert to speak to him. I will agree with them if he asks me. But I can’t advise him against his wishes.’ I think of the whip that he keeps in a cupboard somewhere in his bedroom. I think of the ivory codpiece stained with blood from the broken skin of my lips. ‘I do what he commands,’ I say shortly.
Edward looks at me with a thoughtful expression. ‘In the future,’ he says carefully, ‘in the future, you may have to make decisions for his son, and for his country. You may be the one who commands.’
It is illegal to speak of the death of the king. It is treason to even suggest that his health is failing. I shake my head in silence.
OATLANDS PALACE, SURREY, WINTER 1546
With Gardiner absent there is only one group of men surviving at court that still favours the old church, but it is a great family that has survived many changes. Nothing can destroy the Howards. They will parlay their daughters and throw their own heirs overboard rather than let their house sink. The Howards, Dukes of Norfolk, have kept their place next to the throne even when the kings have changed, even when two girls of their house have risen to the throne and walked to the scaffold. Thomas Howard is not easily dislodged.
But one evening his son and heir goes missing. Henry Howard, recalled from the command of Boulogne because of his terrible arrogance and risk-taking, does not appear at his father’s table at dinner, and his servants have not seen him; none of his friends know where he can be.