The Taming of the Queen (64 page)

I take great care not to say one word that sounds like a challenge to the king. I ask him to explain his thinking on the significance of purgatory, and I am interested when he tells me that there is no evidence for such a state in the Bible and that the theory of purgatory was created by the church solely to finance chantries and Masses. I listen with the air of an eager disciple as he propounds things that I have thought ever since I began my studies. Now he is glancing into books that I have read and hidden for my own safety, and he tells me the things that strike him as if they are a great novelty and I should learn them from him. Little Lady Jane Grey knows these opinions, Princess Elizabeth has read them; I taught them both myself. But now I sit beside the king and exclaim when he describes the blindingly obvious, I admire his discovery of the widely known and I remark on his perception.

‘I shall release the men held on charges of heresy,’ he says to me. ‘A man should not be imprisoned for his conscience, not if he is questioning reverently and thoughtfully.’

Silently, I nod as if I am overwhelmed by the king’s vision.

‘You will be glad to know that a preacher like Hugh Latimer can be free to speak again?’ Henry prompts me. ‘He used to preach in your rooms, didn’t he? You can have your afternoon sermons again.’

I speak with meticulous care. ‘I should be glad to know that innocent men are free. Your Majesty is merciful, and a careful judge of what is right.’

‘Will you have your afternoon sermons again?’

I don’t know what he wants to hear, and I am determined to say only what he wants to hear. ‘If it is your wish. I like to listen to the preachers so that I may understand Your Majesty’s thoughts. It helps me to follow your intricate thinking if I study the fathers of the church.’

‘D’you know what Jane Seymour’s motto was?’ he suddenly demands.

I flush. ‘Yes, Your Majesty.’

‘What was it?’

‘I believe it was
Bound to Obey and Serve
.’

He bellows suddenly: a roar of shocking laughter, opening his mouth wide, showing his yellow teeth and his furred tongue. ‘Say it again! You say it!’

‘
Bound to Obey and Serve
.’

He laughs but there is no humour in his voice at all. I make sure that I am smiling, as if I am willing to be amused but too slow to understand the joke, as if I, as a dull woman, can have no sense of humour, but I am happy to admire his wit.

The admiral of France, Claude d’Annebault, who negotiated the peace with Edward Seymour, comes to Hampton Court for a great reception. The royal children, especially Prince Edward, are to welcome him. The king says that he is tired and asks me to watch that Edward does all that he should, and maintains the dignity of the Tudor throne. Edward is only eight, and torn between excitement and apprehension at the part he has to play. He comes to my rooms before the Frenchman arrives and asks me what exactly is to happen and what exactly he is to do. He is so precise, so anxious to be accurate, like a little astronomer, that I call my master of horse and my principal steward and we draw out, on a great sheet of paper, a plan of the gardens. Then, with his old tin soldiers from the nursery, we represent the arrival of the French delegation, and use little dolls to represent us, going out to meet them.

There are to be two hundred French gentlemen and the whole of the Privy Council and the court will come to meet them. We will house them in tents of cloth of gold in the gardens and we will build temporary banqueting houses for the feasts. We draw this little village on our plan, and we take another piece of paper and list the ten days and every reception, hunt, masque, sport and feast.

Princess Elizabeth is there too, and Lady Jane, and we laugh and call for bonnets and headgear and soon we are play-acting the arrival of the French. Edward plays himself but all the rest of us are Frenchmen and courtiers in great hats, sweeping exaggerated bows and making long speeches until we fail the masque with our laughter and have to be ourselves again.

‘But it will be like this?’ Edward asks earnestly. ‘And I will stand just here?’ He points at the platform that we have marked on the plan.

‘Why worry? Elizabeth demands of him. ‘You’re the prince and our Lady Mother is regent – whatever the two of you choose to do must be how it is to be done. You’re Prince of Wales, you cannot do anything wrong.’

Edward gives me his sweetest smile. ‘I shall follow you, Lady Mother.’

‘You are the prince,’ I say. ‘And Elizabeth is correct. Whatever you do is the right thing.’

The visit goes off just as we planned it. Prince Edward rides out with an escort of gentlemen and yeomen of the guard, all dressed in cloth of gold. He looks very small with the great yeomen towering over him, but he handles his little horse well and he greets the visitors with dignity in perfect French. I am so proud of his scholarship that I hug him on his return and dance him around my private chamber.

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.’

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.