The Taming of the Queen (69 page)

He gets to his feet. ‘Your Majesty, I regret to tell you, His Majesty the king is dead.’

So, I am free, I am free and I am alive. When I embarked on this marriage nearly four years ago I did not think that this day would come when I would be free and a widow again. When I saw the warrant for my arrest in the hand of the king’s doctor I did not think that I would survive a week. But I have survived. I have outlived the king who abandoned two wives, left one to die in childbirth, and murdered two others. By betraying my love, my faith and my friend, I have survived. By surrendering my will and my pride and my scholarship, I have survived. I feel like someone in a town terribly besieged for years, coming out of my house and looking wonderingly around at the breached walls and the broken gate, at the destruction in the marketplace and the torn-down church and yet being alive and safe, though others have died and the danger has passed over me. I have saved myself but I have seen the destruction of everything that I loved.

I sit in the window of my bedroom and wait for the dawn to come. Behind me the fire glows in the grate but I don’t allow them to come in and stir it up, bring hot water, or dress me for the day. I am going to watch out the rest of the night and think of them in Whitehall, like the dogs that he said they were, tearing the kingdom apart so that one pack gets one favour and one gets another. They have a will, or at any rate they have something that they are going to declare is the king’s will, or at the least they are cobbling together something that they can take as his will, and it honours those who were first at the corpse, as if it is the result of a running race, not the testament of a dying man.

Prince Edward is his heir, of course, but in this will I am not named as regent. There is to be a Privy Council that will guide Prince Edward until he is eighteen years old. Edward Seymour has been too quick for me, too quick for us all. He has named himself as Great Chamberlain of England and will guide the Privy Council with fifteen others. Stephen Gardiner is not among them, but neither am I.

Thomas, late to the division of the spoils, will have to wrest from his brother whatever he can. He will have to hurry. The court is like a pack of hounds, tearing a fallen stag to gory pieces. There are more than eighty outstanding claims that the courtiers swear were promised them, besides the division of the king’s estates. He leaves a good dowry to both his daughters, he leaves a fortune to me. But he excludes me from the Privy Council to govern Edward; his last act is to silence me.

Though he was my husband, he is to be buried beside Jane Seymour in Saint George’s Chapel at Windsor, and he leaves a fortune for people to sing Masses for him and he establishes a chantry chapel with two priests to save him from the purgatory that he did not believe in. When they tell me this I have to grip the wooden arm of my chair to prevent myself from laughing out loud.

They tell me that he made his confession. He sent for Thomas Cranmer right at the end, and the archbishop gave him extreme unction, so he died a faithful son of the Catholic church. Apparently he told Cranmer that he had little to confess, for everything that he had done had been for the best. I smile as I think of him dying, without fear of the darkness, secure as ever in his own good opinion, dabbled with holy oil. But what was the purpose of his life if not to save his country from these rituals and superstitions? What, at the end, was he thinking?

I have lost my husband and I have survived my gaoler. I will mourn a man who loved me, in his way, and celebrate my escape from a man who would have killed me. When I undertook this marriage, against my will, I knew that it would end only in death: his or mine. There were times when I thought that he would have me killed, that I would never be able to survive him. There were times when I thought that his passion to be the one to say the last word would persuade him to silence me for ever. But I have survived his abuse, and I have survived his threats. This marriage cost me my happiness, my love, and my pride. The worst price was betraying Anne and letting her go to her death. But this, too, I shall endure; this, too, I shall forgive.

I will publish my translations of the New Testament. I will finish my book of new writing on my faith. I will write my own opinions, without fear, under my own name. This book will be the first I have written for myself, published with my name on the frontispiece, owning my authorship of all of it. I will not send it out into the world without acknowledgement. I will stand up and speak in my own voice and no man will ever silence me again.

I will raise my stepchildren in the reformed faith, and I will pray to God in English. I will see Thomas Seymour walk across the room and kiss my hand without being fearful that someone notices the gladness in my face and the desire in his eyes. I will kiss his smiling mouth, I will lie in his bed. I will live like a passionate intelligent woman and I will bring my passion and my intelligence to everything that I do.

I believe that to be a free woman is to be both passionate and intelligent; and I am a free woman at last.

It is extraordinary to me that Kateryn the Quene KP (as she signed herself) is not better known. As the last of Henry’s queens she survived a wife-killer who saw four of her five predecessors into the grave, which must make her one of the most tenacious survivor-wives in history. She faced and defeated a series of plots from supporters of the papist side of the English Church who were determined to restore their faith to England, she raised the king’s two younger children in the Protestant faith that would be the core of their own reigns, and yet she befriended the king’s papist oldest daughter, Lady Mary, and supported her return to royal status. She served the country as regent – the most important person in England – and kept the peace in the absence of the king.

In many ways one can see her similarities to the other wives: she was made regent like the Spanish royal, Katherine of Aragon, she was English born and bred like Katherine Howard, an educated and highly intelligent reformer in religion like Anne Boleyn, and – as a Northerner – an outsider like Anne of Cleves. She raised Jane Seymour’s son and loved her brother; perhaps, if Jane had lived, she would have been Jane’s sister-in-law.

But the most interesting thing about her was her scholarship. We don’t know the extent of her education when she first came to Henry’s court as the young widow of the Northern Lord Latimer. It is likely that she had studied Latin and French with her brother’s tutor but probably her lessons finished when he left home. So when she came to a court which was alive with debate about the Bible: English or Latin, about the Mass: bread or flesh, about the church: reformist or papist, she set about educating herself.

Her studies in Latin are demonstrated in the letters that she exchanged with her stepson, the little Prince of Wales. Her studies in theology underpin her publications. She was the first woman to publish original work under her own name in English – an extraordinary act, a breakthrough act. Earlier women writers had written in Middle English – more like Chaucer than the recognisable language of Shakespeare that Parr used. A very few published anonymously, mostly they made translations of men’s texts. No woman before Kateryn Parr had dared to write original material in English for publication and put her own name on the title page, as Parr did with her last book:
The Lamentation of a Sinner
.

Every one of her three books has survived and can be read in a new edition edited by Janel Mueller, listed in the following bibliography. We can even see original copies at Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire. Down the centuries, remarkably, a woman of the 1500s still speaks to us.

Of course every historian must wish that Parr had chosen to write a chronicle of her times rather than prayers – think what that would have told us about the last days of the Henrician court! But for Parr as for other spiritual women, it may be that her relationship with God was more important to her than her life in this world.

That day-to-day life was filled with incident, danger and adventure. We don’t know, even now, how close she was to the martyr Anne Askew. It looks as if Anne died to keep their connection secret. We know that Anne preached before the queen, and that they may have met when they were girls in Lincolnshire. We know that the queen used her influence to get Anne freed from her first arrest but could not liberate her a second time. We know that Nicholas Throckmorton from the queen’s rooms attended the burning and that someone paid for a purse of gunpowder so that Anne’s sufferings could be cut short. It looks very much as if the torture of Anne Askew was done to force her to name the queen as a co-religionist, a heretic and a traitor, to expose her to arrest and death.

The plot against the queen, her quick-witted response, and her humiliation before the court is from the near-contemporary account of Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs,
and some of the dialogue is drawn from that account. But the private humiliation that I describe is fiction – we are rarely told what went on behind the closed bedroom doors of the past. I wanted to write a scene in which the legally-permitted beating of a wife, and the symbolism of Henry’s codpiece, came together to show how men dominate women with their legal powers, with their violence, with their sexuality and with the myth of their power, then – and now.

We also don’t know how intimate Kateryn was with Thomas Seymour while she was queen. Certainly they look as if they were promised to each other – they were writing love letters and making assignations to spend the night together only weeks after the death of the king, and they were married, despite their initial decision to wait, within four months of Henry’s death. It may be that their marriage was loving and happy. It is well known that Princess Elizabeth left her stepmother’s house after sexualised play with her new stepfather Thomas Seymour. There were spiteful quarrels with his family about the dowager queen’s dower and the royal jewels; Thomas was a jealous and possessive husband. Kateryn and Thomas were to be married for less than a year and a half before she died in childbirth. There were reports of her reproaching him for not loving her, but he was at her deathbed and he seems to have been stunned by her loss, giving up their house and leaving their child to be cared for in the household of Edward Seymour and his wife.

Writing a fictional version of a medieval woman’s life has been, as it always is, strangely moving and relevant to my own times. Although she lived so long ago, when I think of the fear she faced and the courage she must have drawn on, I cannot help but admire her. Her careful, mostly self-taught scholarship must resonate with any woman who has tried to enter the exclusive circles of male power: industry, politics, churches, learning. Anyone who loves words will admire Kateryn Parr, thinking of her poring over manuscripts in Latin and Greek trying to find the perfect English word for translation, and anyone who likes women must warm to her: in love with one man and forced to marry another, a tyrant, but – hurrah – surviving him.

This novel, about a scholarly woman, is dedicated to two great scholars who taught me: Maurice Hutt at the University of Sussex and Geoffrey Carnall at the University of Edinburgh. To me, they exemplify those many teachers throughout the centuries who have knowledge and the grace to share it, who occupy the bastions of male learning and open the gates.

No words can express my gratitude to them – which they would immediately remark is both a cliché and a paradox. Heavens! I miss them both so much.

Here is a list of the most helpful books and journals I consulted for this fiction. With special thanks to Susan James for her biography and Janel Mueller for her scholarly edition of Kateryn’s writing.

Alexander, Michael Van Cleave,
The First of the Tudors: A Study of Henry VII and His Reign
(London, Croom Helm, 1981, first published 1937)

Askew, Anne, and Beilin, Elaine V., editor,
The Examinations of Anne Askew
(Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996)

Bacon, Francis,
The History of the Reign of King Henry VII and selected works
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998)