The Taming of the Queen (41 page)

I don’t know how I stand, how I smile and remark on what a beautiful picture it is, how well Elizabeth looks, on the left of the woman who supplanted her mother, a stepmother that she cannot even remember: her mother’s lady-in-waiting, the woman who danced the day that her mother was beheaded. I laugh at the portrait of Will Somers in the right-hand doorway, his monkey on his shoulder, the Whitehall gardens behind him. I hear my tinkling laugh and the way that people eagerly join with me, as if to obscure my humiliation. Nan comes to one side of me as if she would hold me up, and Catherine Brandon comes to the other, and they admire the picture and make a babble of noise. Anne Seymour, my lady-in-waiting, stays at a distance and remarks on the beauty of her dearest tragic sister-in-law.

I keep staring at the portrait. I think it is an altarpiece, an icon like those the reformers have rightly thrown out of the old corrupt church. It is like a triptych with three panels: the two princesses on either side, and the Holy Family, the Father and the Son and the transfigured mother, in the central panel. The two Fools are the worldly fools outside, while the inside world of the royal family glows like gold. Jane Seymour, overcoming death, shines like Our Lady.

Elizabeth comes and takes my hand and whispers: ‘Who is that? Who is it in your place?’

And I say, ‘Hush, it is Queen Jane, Edward’s mother,’ and at once her clever little face closes up as if I have told her a secret of shameful doings, something foul and wrong. And at once – and this is how I know she has been corrupted beyond saving – she turns a smiling face to her father and tells him what a beautiful portrait he has commissioned.

Princess Mary throws me a brief glance and says nothing, and then the court falls silent as we wait for the king to speak. We wait, and we wait, Nicholas de Vent turning his cap in his hand, sweating with nerves to see what the great patron of art, Holbein’s patron, has to say about this production, this painted lie, this masterpiece of self-aggrandisement, this grave-robbing.

‘I like it,’ Henry says firmly, and there is a sort of breeze as the court releases its indrawn breath. ‘Very fair. Very well done.’ He glances at me and I see he looks just a little embarrassed. ‘You will be glad to see the children painted all together, and the honour that I have done to Edward’s mother.’

He looks at the pale painted face of his dead wife. ‘She might have sat beside me, just like that, had she had been spared,’ he says. ‘She might have seen Edward grow to be a man. Who knows? She might have given me more sons.’

There is nothing I can say while my husband publicly mourns a previous wife, gazing into her bleached stupid face as if to find some wit now that escaped everyone during her life. I find that my teeth are gritted to hold a fixed smile as if this is not an insult to me, as if I am not publicly denied, as if the king is not telling the world that all of us who came after Jane – Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard, me – are ghost queens of less substance than her, the dead wife.

Of course, it is Anne Seymour, the dead queen’s sister-in-law, who steps forward and addresses the king as a kinswoman and fellow-mourner, taking advantage of his tears as she always does: ‘It is her to the life.’

Except she is dead.

‘Just as she was,’ he says.

I doubt that, for she is in my best gold-heeled shoes.

‘She must be looking down from heaven and blessing you and her boy,’ she says.

‘She must be,’ he agrees eagerly.

I note, drily, that the sainted Jane seems to have skipped purgatory, though there is a preacher imprisoned in the Tower of London right now facing a charge of heresy for suggesting that purgatory does not exist.

‘She was cruelly taken from me,’ he says, his little eyes blinking out easy tears. ‘And we had been married little more than a year.’

He’s not quite right. I could tell him exactly. They were married for a year and four months, a shorter marriage even than Kitty Howard, who lasted only a year and six months before he beheaded her; but far longer than his marriage to Anne of Cleves, now so well-regarded, who was pushed out inside half a year.

‘She loved you so much,’ Anne Seymour says mournfully. ‘But thank God that she left such a wonderful son as her living memorial.’

The mention of Prince Edward cheers Henry. ‘She did,’ he says. ‘At least I have one son, and he is handsome, isn’t he?’

‘The very image of his father,’ Anne smiles. ‘See how he stands in the portrait. He is the very image of you!’

I lead my ladies back to my rooms. I am smiling and they are all smiling. We are all trying to show that we are untroubled, that we have seen nothing that disturbs our position, our sense of entitlement. I am the queen and these are my ladies. Nothing is wrong.

When we get to my rooms I wait for them to settle to their sewing with a reader opening a book approved by the Bishop of London. Then I say that I have a little flux, something I ate, no doubt. I will go to my room alone. Nan comes with me because hell’s own horses would not keep Nan out of my hair right now, and she shuts the door behind us and looks at me.

‘Bitch,’ I say shortly.

‘Me?’

‘Her.’

‘Anne Seymour?’

‘No, Jane Seymour. The dead one.’

This is so unreasonable that not even Nan tries to correct me. ‘You’re upset.’

‘I am publicly humiliated, I am supplanted before everyone by a ghost. My rival is not some pretty girl like Catherine Brandon or Mary Howard but a cadaver who was not even very lively when she breathed. And yet now she is the wife that he will not forget.’

‘She is dead, poor lady. She cannot irritate him now. He can think of her at her best.’

‘Her death is her best! She was never as charming as she is now!’

Nan makes a little gesture with her hand, as if to say ‘stop’. ‘She did the best that she could, and my God, Kat, you would not be so hard on her if you had seen her die in such a fever, crying out for God and for her husband. She may have been a ninny; but she died a woman in lonely terror.’

‘What is that to me, who will now have to walk past her image every time I go to dinner? Who is not allowed to wear her pearls? But who has to raise her son? Bed her husband?’

‘You are angry,’ Nan says.

‘Indeed,’ I spit. ‘I see that your studies have not been wasted on you. I am angry. Excellent. Now what?’

‘You’re going to have to get over it,’ she says, as steady as our mother used to be when I raged against some nursery injustice. ‘Because you’re going to have to go to dinner with your head up, smiling, showing everyone that you are happy with the portrait, and happy with your marriage, and happy with your stepchildren and their three dead mothers, and happy with the king.’

‘Why do I have to do this?’ I pant. ‘Why do I have to pretend that I am not publicly insulted?’

Nan’s face is very pale and her voice is flat. ‘Because if you see a dead wife as your rival, you will be a dead wife,’ she predicts. ‘People are already saying that he will remarry. People are already saying that he does not like your religion, that you are too much for reform. You have to face them down. You have to please him. You have to walk in to dinner tonight like a woman whose position cannot be questioned.’

‘Who questions me?’ I yell at her. ‘Who dares to question me?’

‘I am afraid that you are widely questioned,’ she says quietly. ‘Already, the gossip has started. Almost everyone questions your fitness to be queen.’

In the quiet days before the start of the Christmas feast the king is troubled and openly irritated that neither his traditional advisors nor his new thinkers can get a truce with France. Charles of Spain is now urging that a truce be made so that he is free to turn on his own subjects. He is determined to stamp out the reformers in Flanders and the lands of the Holy Roman Empire. He says that he and Henry must forget their enmity against France to confront a greater danger. They must all three join together to make war against the Lutherans. He says that this must be the new crusade, that they must make war against people who are such sinners, they think that the Bible is the best guide to life.

I pray for the safety of the men and women of God in England, in Germany, in every corner of Christendom, who have done nothing wrong but have read the Word of God and study it in their hearts. Then they speak. Why should they not? Why should the scholars of the church and the priests of the church and – yes – the bullies and soldiers of the church be the only ones who can announce the truth as they see it?

Stephen Gardiner, still in Bruges, still desperately trying to gain a peace treaty with France, is passionately for peace with France and Spain, arguing in favour of a bloodstained crusade against Lutherans everywhere, especially in Germany, to start at once.

‘God only knows what he is offering, what he is promising on my behalf,’ Henry grumbles to me as we sit quietly playing cards together one evening.

Around us the court is dancing and flirting, someone is singing, and there is a small group standing around us, watching the play and betting on the outcome. Catherine Brandon is at the king’s elbow. He shows her his cards and asks for her advice, and she smiles and swears she will signal to me so that I have the advantage. Most people bet on the king. He does not like to lose. He does not even like someone betting against him. I see a weak card that he plays and I do not trump it. He roars at my mistake and scoops up the trick.

‘Shall you summon Bishop Gardiner home?’ I ask as calmly as I can. ‘Do you agree with him that the emperor should make a war against his own people?’

‘For certain they go too far in Germany,’ Henry says. ‘And these German princes have been no help to me at all. I won’t defend them. Why should I? They don’t understand the ways of man, why should they grasp the ways of God?’

I glance up and see Edward Seymour, Thomas’s brother, watching me. I know that he hopes that I will use my influence to persuade the king that the Lutherans in Germany should be spared, and that the new thinking in England should be allowed. But I walk a very careful course with the king. I have heard Nan’s warnings and I am wary of making enemies. I know by now that when the king complains of one side he is often, at the very same time, working against the other. People overestimate my influence when they blame me for reform. I use my influence lightly, and there is a portrait hanging on the wall that denies I even exist.

‘Surely it cannot be wrong to think that we should live by the Bible, and that we will go to heaven by faith and the forgiveness of our sins,’ I remark.

Henry glances up from his hand of cards. ‘I see you are no better a theologian than you are a card player,’ he says. His twinkle of a smile takes the sting from his words.

‘I don’t expect to understand more about religion than you, my lord husband,’ I say. ‘And I certainly never expect to beat you at cards.’

‘And what about my girls?’ he asks, turning to Princess Mary, who stands at his elbow, while Elizabeth leans against my chair.

‘Cards or scholarship?’ Elizabeth asks pertly.

Her father laughs. ‘Which do you prefer?’

‘Scholarship,’ she says. ‘Because it is a privilege to be allowed to study, especially with a scholar like the queen; but cards are a pastime for anyone.’

‘Quite right,’ he says. ‘And only the learned and the thoughtful should study and discourse. Holy things should be considered in quiet and holy places, and only by those fit to understand them under the guidance of the church. Cards are for the taproom; the Bible is only for those who can read and understand it.’

Princess Mary nods, and he smiles at her. ‘I take it that you are not one for the wayside sermon, bawled out by any fool perched on a milestone, my Mary?’

She curtseys before she speaks to him. ‘I think the church must teach the people,’ she says. ‘They cannot teach themselves.’

‘That’s what I think,’ Henry says. ‘That’s just what I think.’