The Taming of the Queen (18 page)

‘You have made a family out of three children with three very different mothers,’ he says. Still, I cannot be sure if this is a good or a bad thing to have done. ‘You have taken the son of an angel and the daughter of a whore and the daughter of a Spanish princess and brought them together.’

‘They are all the children of one great father,’ I remind him faintly.

His hand shoots out as if he is slapping a fly and grabs my wrist too quickly for me to flinch. ‘You are certain?’ he asks. ‘You are certain of Elizabeth?’

I can almost smell my fear over the stink of the wound. I think of her mother, Anne Boleyn, sweating at the May Day joust, knowing her danger but not knowing what form it would take. ‘Certain?’

‘You don’t think I was cuckolded?’ he demands. ‘You don’t think she is another man’s child? Do you deny her mother’s guilt? I had her mother beheaded for that guilt.’

She is the spit of him. Her brassy hair, her white skin, her stubborn little pout of a mouth. But if I deny her mother’s guilt I accuse him of being a wife-killer, a jealous fool who put an innocent woman to death on the gossip of old midwives. ‘Whatever Anne Boleyn did in later years, I believe that Elizabeth is yours,’ I say carefully. ‘She is a little copy of you. She is Tudor through and through.’

He nods, greedy for reassurance.

‘Whatever her dam, nobody could deny her sire,’ I continue.

‘You see me in her?’

‘Her scholarship alone,’ I say, denying Anne Boleyn’s powerful intelligence and commitment to reform, in order to secure the safety of her daughter. ‘Her love of books and languages – that’s all you.’

‘And you say that, who see my children altogether, as no-one else has ever done?’

‘Lord husband, I brought them together as I thought it would be your wish.’

‘It is,’ he says finally. His stomach churns – I can hear it gurgle – and then he belches noisily. ‘It is.’

I can smell the sourness of his breath. ‘I am glad to have done the right thing for love of you and for love of your children,’ I say cautiously. ‘I wanted the whole country to see the beautiful royal family that you have made.’

He nods. ‘I am going to restore the girls to their place,’ he announces. ‘I am going to name them both as princesses. Mary will follow Prince Edward to the throne if she should survive him and he has no heir – God forbid it. After her: Elizabeth, and after her: my niece, Lady Margaret Douglas, and my Scots sister’s line.’

It is against the will of God and against tradition that the king shall name who comes after him. It is God who chooses kings, just as he chose this one – a second son – by taking all other heirs to Himself. God calls a king to his throne, God creates the order of birth and the survival of his chosen. But since the king rules the church in England and he holds the throne in England, who is going to stop him naming his heirs? Certainly not those men that he bundled from the room for arguing with him. Certainly not I.

‘Prince Edward will be king,’ I confirm. ‘And his children as yet unborn, who come after him.’

‘God bless them,’ he says mistily. He pauses. ‘I have always feared for him,’ he continues very quietly. ‘The child of a sainted mother, you know.’

‘I know,’ I say. Jane again. ‘God bless her.’

‘I think of her all the time. I think of her sweet nature and her early death. She died to give me an heir, she died in my service.’

I nod as if I am overwhelmed at the thought of her sacrifice.

‘When I am ill, when I fear I may never get well, I think that at least I will be with her.’

‘Don’t say it,’ I murmur, and I really mean it.

‘And people say terrible things. They say there is a curse, they speak of a curse, they say such things – a curse on Tudor boys, on our line.’

‘I’ve never heard it,’ I say stoutly. Of course I have. The rebels in the North were certain that the Tudor line would die out for its sins against the church and against the Plantagenets. They called him the Mouldwarp – a beast who was undermining his own kingdom.

‘You haven’t?’ he says hopefully.

I shake my head. Everyone said that the Tudors were cursed for killing the York princes in the Tower. How should a prince-killer be blessed? But if the king thought this, how could he dare to plan a future, he who killed the Plantagenet heirs: Lady Margaret Pole, and her innocent son and grandson? He, who beheaded two wives on suspicion?

‘I have heard nothing like that.’

‘Good. Good. But it’s why I keep him so safe. I guard him against murderers, against disease, against ill fortune. I guard him as my only treasure.’

‘I will guard him too,’ I promise.

‘So we will trust to God for Edward, pray that he gets strong sons, and in the meantime I shall put an act through parliament to name the girls as coming after him.’

England has never had a reigning queen, but I am not going to point this out either. I don’t know how to raise the question of who will be Lord Protector during Edward’s minority. That is to suggest the king might die within the next eleven years, and he won’t want to hear that.

I smile. ‘This is generous of you, my lord. The girls will be glad to know that they have your favour. That will mean more to them than being listed to succeed. To know that their father loves and acknowledges them is all that your girls want. They are blessed with such a father.’

‘I know,’ he says. ‘You have shown me that. I have been surprised.’

‘Surprised?’ I repeat.

He looks awkward. It makes him, for a moment, endearingly vulnerable, a weak father: not a cursed tyrant. ‘I have had to think of them always as heirs or usurpers,’ he says, fumbling for the words. ‘D’you see? I’ve had always to consider whether I accept them as my daughters or put them aside. I have had to think of their mothers, and my terrible wars with their mothers, and not think of them. I have had to suspect them as if they were my enemies. I’ve never before had them at court, together, with their brother, and just seen them, all three, as my children. Just seen them as themselves.’

I am enormously, absurdly touched. ‘Each one of them is a child to be proud of,’ I tell him. ‘You can love each one as your own.’

‘You have shown me that,’ he says. ‘Because you deal with Edward like a little boy, and Elizabeth as a little girl, and Mary as a young woman. I see them through your eyes. I see the girls without thinking of their poisonous dams, almost for the first time.’

He takes my hand and kisses it. ‘I thank you for this,’ he says very quietly. ‘Truly, I do, Kateryn.’

‘My dear,’ comes easily from my lips.

‘I love you,’ he says.

And I reply easily, without thought, ‘I love you, too.’

We are hand-clasped for a moment, united in tenderness, and then I see his eyes narrow as a pulse of pain grips his whole body. He grits his teeth, determined not to cry out.

‘Should I leave you to rest now?’ I ask.

He nods. Anthony Denny is on his feet at once, to show me from the room and I see in the way that he glances at the king without curiosity that he knew all of this, before it was explained to me. Denny is the king’s confidant and friend, one of the closest of the circle. His quiet confidence reminds me that I should remember that just as I hint that the Howards and Wriothesley and Gardiner are self-serving fools, there are those, close to the king, who could do just the same to me. And that Denny is one of several men whose fortunes have been made in royal service, who have the king’s ear in his most private moments, and whisper to him alone, just as I do.

I allow myself the pleasure of telling the king’s daughters that they are to be princesses again. I speak to them separately. I am aware that this makes them rivals once more, and that they can only succeed to the throne on the death of their brother, that Elizabeth can only succeed through the unlikely combination of the death of her younger brother and her older sister.

I find her at her studies in my privy chamber with her cousin little Lady Jane Grey and Richard Cox, their tutor, and I call her aside to tell her that this is a symbol of her father’s favour. Of course, she jumps at once to the idea of her inheritance.

‘Do you think a woman can rule a kingdom?’ she asks me. ‘The word would suggest not. It’s not called a queendom, is it?’

The cleverness of the ten-year-old girl makes me smile. ‘If you are ever called to rule this kingdom or any other you will take on the courage and wit of a man. You will call yourself a prince,’ I assure her. ‘You will learn what every clever woman has to learn: how to adopt the power and courage of a man and yet to know that you are a woman. Your education can be that of a prince, your mind can be that of a king, you can have the body of a weak and feeble woman and the stomach of a king.’

‘When is it to happen? When do I get my title back?’

‘It has to go through the parliament,’ I warn her.

She nods. ‘Have you told Lady Mary?’

What a Tudor she is, this little girl; these are a statesman’s questions: when is it official? And which daughter was told first? ‘I’m going to tell her now,’ I say. ‘Wait here.’

Lady Mary is in my presence chamber, embroidering a part of an altar cloth that we are making. She has delegated the boring blue sky to one of the ladies and she herself is working on the more interesting flowers that will form the border. They all rise and curtsey as I come in from the privy chamber and I gesture that they may sit and continue with their work. Joan, Anthony Denny’s wife, is reading from the manuscript of our translation of Fisher’s psalms, and I beckon Lady Mary into the oriel window so we can speak privately. We sit on the window bench, our knees touching, her earnest gaze on my face.

‘I have some very good news for you,’ I say. ‘You will learn it from the Privy Council, but I wanted to tell you before the announcement. The king has decided to name the succession, and you are to be called Princess Mary and inherit the throne after Edward.’ She looks down, veiling her dark eyes with her eyelashes, and I see her lips move in a prayer of thanksgiving. Only her rising blush tells me that she is deeply moved. But it is not for a chance at the throne. She has not Elizabeth’s ambition. ‘So, finally, he accepts my mother’s purity,’ she says. ‘He withdraws his claim that they were not married in the sight of God. My mother was a widow to his brother and then a true wife to him.’

I put my hand on her knee to silence her. ‘He said no word of that, nor do I, nor should you. He names you as princess, and Elizabeth as princess also. Elizabeth comes after you in the succession, Lady Margaret Douglas and her line after her. He said nothing about the old matter of your mother’s marriage and him putting her aside.’

She opens her mouth to argue for only a moment, and then she nods. Anyone of any intelligence can see that if the king names his daughters as legitimate then he must, logically, accept his marriage to their mothers as valid. But – as this highly intelligent daughter realises – this is not a logical man. This is a king who can command reality. The king has ruled that they are princesses again, just as once he ruled that they were both bastards, on a whim, with no good reason.

‘Then he will arrange a marriage for me,’ she says. ‘And for Elizabeth. If we are princesses then we can be married to kings.’

‘You can,’ I say smiling. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. It will be the next step. But I don’t know that I can bear to spare either of you.’

She puts her hand on top of mine. ‘I don’t want to leave you,’ she says. ‘But it is time I was married. I need my own court and I want to have a child of my own to love.’

We sit hand-clasped for a moment. ‘Princess Mary,’ I say, trying out her new title, ‘I cannot tell you how glad I am that you are come to your own again, and that I can call you aloud what I have always called you in my heart. My mother never spoke of you as anything but a princess, and never thought of your mother as anything but a great queen.’

She blinks the tears from her dark eyes. ‘My mother would have been glad to see this day,’ she says wistfully.

‘She would,’ I say. ‘But her legacy to you is your descent and your education. Nobody can take either, and she gave you them both.’

A Spanish duke, Don Manriquez de Lara, is to come to court though the king is still unwell.