The Taming of the Queen (63 page)

‘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.

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.’