The Taming of the Queen (24 page)

And now, suddenly, he is here, walking into my rooms as if he could ever be an invited guest, bowing to me, and to the princesses, his hand on his heart, his dark eyes veiled and secretive, as if I have summoned him with the passionate thudding of my pulses, as if he can feel the heat of my skin burning his own, as if I had shouted aloud that he must come to me, that I will die if he does not come to me.

‘I have come, Your Majesty, at the command of the king, who asked me to bring you to him, through the privy garden, on your own.’

I am already on my feet, the precious royal jacket fallen to the floor, the thread whipping out of the needle’s eye as I walk away from it, the needle still in my hand.

‘I’ll bring the princesses,’ I say. I can hardly speak. I cannot breathe.

‘His Majesty said you were to come alone,’ he replies. The tone is courteous, his mouth smiles, but his eyes are cold. ‘I think he has a surprise for you.’

‘I’ll come at once then,’ I say.

I can hardly see the smiling faces of my ladies as Nan silently takes the needle from my hand, Thomas Seymour presents his arm to me, and I put my hand on his and let him draw me from the room and down the broad stone stairs to where the doors to the sunlit gardens stand open.

‘It must be a trap,’ I say in a hushed monotone. ‘Is this a trap?’

He shakes his head at my question, then nods to the guards, who raise their pikes and let us out into the sunshine. ‘No. Just walk.’

‘He means to trap me by sending you to me. He will see . . . I shouldn’t go with you.’

‘The only thing to do is to behave as if nothing is out of the ordinary. You should come, and we should go without delay, taking exactly the time that it always takes to walk through the gardens. Your ladies are watching from your windows, the noblemen will be watching from the king’s windows. We are going to walk along together without pausing, and without looking at each other.’

‘But you never look at me!’ I burst out.

A sharp pinch of my fingers reminds me to keep steadily walking. I think this is like some sort of purgatory. I have to walk beside the man that I adore, match my steps to his, and take no pleasure in it, while my heart hammers against my ribs with all the things that I want to say.

‘Of course I don’t,’ he says.

‘Because you have stopped loving me.’ My voice is very low, strained with pain as I accuse him.

‘Oh, no,’ he says lightly, and turns to me with a smile. He glances up to the king’s rooms and nods to an acquaintance at the oriel window. ‘Because I love you desperately. Because I can’t sleep for thinking of you. Because I burn up with desire for you. Because I dare not look at you, because if I did, every man and woman at court would see all that in my eyes.’

I almost stumble as my knees go weak and I feel a pulse deep in my belly at his words.

‘Walk on!’ he raps out.

‘I thought—’

‘I know what you thought. You thought wrong,’ he says abruptly. ‘Keep walking. Here is His Majesty.’

The king is seated on a great chair they have brought out to the sunny garden, his foot propped on a stool.

‘I can’t tell you . . .’ I whisper.

‘I know,’ he says. ‘We can’t speak.’

‘Can we meet?’

He presents me to the king and bows low. ‘No,’ he says as he steps backwards.

I am to be honoured. The king’s beaming smile tells me that I am to be trusted with a greater post than any queen has held before, except for the greatest: Katherine of Aragon. The king tells me privately in the garden, and then announces to the country, that I am to serve as Regent General. Half of the council are to go with him to France, the other half to stay with me as advisors. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer is to be my principal councillor, and I see how the king balances the advice I shall hear: the next greatest man in my service will be the Lord Chancellor, Thomas Wriothesley, Cranmer’s natural enemy and an increasingly doubtful friend of mine. When he returns from laying waste to Scotland to teach them to welcome our proposals, Edward Seymour will advise me, and Sir William Petre, the quiet soft-spoken king’s Secretary, will serve me too.

This is an extraordinary step to greatness for me. I feel the eyes of the two princesses on me when they learn the news. They will see a woman rule a country, they will see that it is possible. It is one thing to tell them that a woman is capable of judgement and holding power, it is another for them to see their stepmother, a woman of thirty-two years, actually running the kingdom. I fear that I cannot do it, and yet I know that I can. I have watched the king day after day and deplored his changeable opinions and whimsical commands. Even without advisors from both sides of the religious argument, I would choose a moderate middle course. The kingdom must be held to reform but I will have no persecutions. Never will I do as Henry does: suddenly investigate one man, let him tremble with fear and put him under arrest, secretly knowing all the time that he will not be tried. I think there is a sort of madness in the way that my husband exercises power and – though I would never criticise him – I can at least rule in a way that I think has more sense and humanity.

Half of the court are going to war with the king. They all have posts and titles and duties. They are all equipped. The king has a new suit of armour. He has barely worn so much as a breastplate since he fell and injured his leg, but for this campaign his old suit was brought out and hammered into his new broader shape. They had to rivet in extra pieces, they had to strengthen it all round; then he swore it did not suit him and he commissioned an entirely new suit from the armoury at the Tower, where the blacksmiths and armourers are hammering out metal from dawn till midnight, the forges blazing long into the night. As soon as the new suit is completed, in the new huge dimensions necessary to get a breastplate around his massive frame, with widened cuisses to fit his gross thighs, he wants another set. His final choice is Italian designed, trimmed with gilt, etched in black, an enormous amount of beautifully worked metal, a clanking shout of power and wealth.

The grooms have been exercising his horse with great weights strapped to its saddle for weeks so that it can bear up beneath him and carry him safely. It is a horse new to royal service, a heavy courser, with hooves like trenchers and legs like tree trunks. It too has massive armour plates strapped to its neck, head and body. It does not seem possible that this massive king can ride, or that his overloaded horse can bear him, but its great broad hooves make the gangplank shiver as it stamps up the ramp to his barge and Henry kisses my hand on the quayside.

‘Goodbye,’ he says. ‘Just for a little while, beloved. I shall come back to you. Don’t fear for me.’

‘I will fear for you,’ I insist. ‘Promise that you will write to me often to tell me how you are and how you are doing?’

‘I promise,’ he says. ‘I know that I leave the country in safe hands with you as regent.’

It is a great responsibility, the greatest that an Englishman could accept. And to give it to an Englishwoman is greater still. ‘I won’t fail you,’ I say.

He bows his head for my blessing and then, leaning on a page for support and hauling himself upward, he goes up the gangplank. He turns into the royal cabin, I see the door closed on his bulky silhouette, and the guards take up their posts.

At the stern of the barge, standing behind the steersman, I see Thomas Seymour. He, too, is going to war, and, I know, into far greater danger. As the drum starts to beat and they cast off the ropes, as the oars dip in the water and the barge yields to the pull and glides away from the quayside, the man that I adore exchanges one dark glance with me and then he turns away. I don’t even mouth ‘God bless you’ or ‘Keep safe’. I hold up my hand to wave to the king and then I turn away too.

It is the most beautiful weather, sunny and bright and hot every day, and I wake alone in my own bed every morning in my rebuilt rooms on the south-east corner of the base court, overlooking the pond gardens facing south, far from ghosts, revelling in the satisfaction of my own company.

I have the three royal children with me, and every morning I wake to such pleasure in knowing that they are all three under the same roof, that we will pray in the same chapel, that we will eat breakfast in the great hall and spend the day together in study and in play. Edward is living with his sisters for the first time in his lonely little life. I have gathered all three of them around me as no queen has been allowed to do before. I have everything that could make a woman happy, and I am Regent General of England. Everything shall be as I decide, nobody can even argue with me. The children are with me because I say that it shall be so. There is nobody who can take Edward away from this: his family; from me: his stepmother. We will stay here, in the most beautiful of all the English palaces, because it is my choice, and later – when I choose and not before – we will go on a progress of pleasure, hunting and sailing and riding up the Thames valley, myself and the children and those of the court that I want with me.

I take my seat at the great table in the presence chamber every day and have the Privy Council report to me that the kingdom is at peace and that we are taking in taxes and fines, and we are making enough weapons and armour to keep the king’s army supplied in France. I make it a priority to supply our forces, to make sure that wages, weapons, ammunition, armour, food, even arrowheads, are shipped in the amounts that are needed. I have been compared, to my detriment, to the saintly Jane Seymour ever since I was married; I don’t want to suffer from a comparison to Thomas Wolsey too. I don’t want anyone to say that Katherine of Aragon was a better regent than Kateryn Parr.

Every morning, after breakfast and before I take the children out hunting, I have a brief meeting of my council to read any dispatches that have come in overnight, either from the king in France or from the troubled Northern lands. If there is work to do, or something that I want to make sure of, I will call them to meet with me again before dinner.

We gather in one of the grand rooms at Hampton Court, and I have had a table set in the middle, chairs around for the councillors, and a great map of France and the sea roads pinned on the wall. On the opposite wall there is as much of a map of the border lands of the North and of Scotland as can be drawn from the little knowledge that we have of the countryside. I sit at the head of the table and William Petre, the king’s Secretary, reads whatever dispatches have arrived from our armies, and whatever letters or appeals from other parts of the kingdom. As the king is at war with the French there is trouble in most of the towns where Frenchmen have settled, and I have to write to the local lords or even the justices of the peace and command them to be sure that their districts are quiet. A country at war is as nervous as one of my little birds. We have constant reports of spies and invasions, which I judge to be false, and I send the proclamations out to the whole kingdom.

Next to me, on my right hand, sits Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, a steady and patient advisor and a calm voice, while Lord Thomas Wriothesley tends to be more dramatic and loud. He has good reason for worry. It was Wriothesley who was ordered by the king to declare what funds would be needed for an invasion of France and a march on Paris. After much calculation and many sheets of close-written estimates, he thought it would be about a quarter of a million pounds: a fortune. We have raised that through loans and taxes and by scraping every last gold coin from the royal treasuries, but now we are burning through these funds and it is clear that Wriothesley has underestimated.

William Petre is a newly-made man, risen on his abilities, the sort that old families like the Howards hate, the son of Devon cattle-farmers. His quiet good sense keeps the meeting steady when some of the other councillors argue for their own causes, or for taxes to be lifted from their home towns. It is Petre who suggests that we make up the shortfall of funds by stripping the lead from all the roofs of the monasteries and selling it. This will make them leak when it rains, and it will complete the ruination of the Roman Catholic church in England. I see that this is good for reform as well as for raising money for the king, but a part of me mourns the loss of the beautiful buildings and the charity and the scholarship that they extended to their communities.