The Taming of the Queen (52 page)

‘Your Majesty must rest,’ I say quickly, getting up from the chair and kissing his forehead, which is damp with sweat. ‘Will you sleep now?’

‘I will,’ he says. ‘You can all go.’ He retains my cool fingers in his hot grip. ‘Come back later,’ he says to me.

I make sure I don’t shoot a triumphant glance at Stephen Gardiner. I have won this round, at least.

It is no victory, my whorish triumph. The king is feverish and sleepless, impotent and irritated at his failing. Though I do everything he asks of me, let down my hair, take off my robe, even stand, burning with humiliation, while he passes his hands all over me, nothing can stir him. He sends me away so that he can sleep alone and I sit up all night by the fire in my room and wonder where Anne Askew is in the palace, sleepless as I am sleepless, afraid as I am afraid, and if she even has a bed tonight.

The next round is played out before the Privy Council and I cannot be there. The doors to the Privy Council room are closed and two yeomen of the guard stand before them at attention, their pikes raised.

‘She’s in there,’ Catherine Brandon mutters to me in an undertone, as we walk past the wood-panelled door on our way to the garden. ‘They took her in this morning.’

‘Alone?’

‘She was arrested with her former husband but she said he was nothing to her and they dismissed him. She’s alone.’

‘They know that she has preached before me?’

‘Of course, and they know it was your instruction to Bishop Bonner that she should be freed last time.’

‘But they don’t fear my influence? He did, then.’

‘It seems your influence has diminished,’ she says flatly.

‘How has my influence diminished?’ I demand. ‘The king still sees me, he still speaks tenderly to me. He commanded me to his bed last night. He promised me gifts. All the signs say that he still loves me.’

She nods. ‘I know he does, but he can do all that and disagree with your faith. Now he agrees with Stephen Gardiner and the Duke of Norfolk and all of the rest of them, Paget and Bonner, Rich and Wriothesley.’

‘But all his other lords are for reform,’ I protest.

‘But they’re not at court,’ she counters. ‘Edward Seymour is either in Scotland or Boulogne. He’s such a reliable commander that he is always away. His success is our disadvantage. Thomas Cranmer is studying at his home. You’re not admitted when the king is ill, and he has been ill for weeks. Doctor Wendy is not an advocate for reform like Doctor Butts was. To keep something before the king, to maintain his interest in it, you have to be in his company, all the time. My husband, Charles, said he always kept at the king’s side because a rival was always ready to take his place. You have to make sure you are beside him, Your Majesty. You have to get into his presence and be there all the time, to put our side of the argument.’

‘I understand. I try. But how can we defend Anne Askew before the Privy Council?’

She offers me her hand as we go down the stairs to the garden.

‘God will defend her,’ she says. ‘If they find her guilty then we will beg the king for a pardon for her. You can take all your ladies in to him, he’ll like that, and we can go on our knees. But we can do nothing for her now, as she faces the Privy Council; only God will have her in His keeping there.’

The Privy Council sits wrangling with the young woman from Lincolnshire all day, as if she, slightly educated and not yet thirty, should take more than a moment of their time to challenge and discredit. Stephen Gardiner Bishop of Winchester, and Edmund Bonner Bishop of London, argue theology with the young woman who has never been inside a university hall; but they cannot demonstrate her mistake.

‘Why would they spend so much time on her?’ I demand. ‘Why not just order her back to her husband, if they want to silence her?’

I am pacing up and down in my room. I can’t sit still to reading or study, but I cannot go and demand that they open those forbidding doors. I cannot leave Anne in there alone with her enemies, my enemies, but equally I cannot rescue her. I dare not go to the king without invitation. I hope to see him before dinner, I hope that he is well enough to come to dinner, and I cannot bear to wait.

There is a noise outside and the guards open the door to my brother and three companions. I whirl round.

‘Brother?’

‘Your Majesty.’ He bows. ‘Sister.’

He hesitates, he can’t speak. Out of the corner of my eye I see my sister, Nan, rise to her feet, as Catherine stretches out a hand to her. Anne Seymour’s eyes widen, her jaw drops, she crosses herself.

The silence seems to stretch for hours. I realise that everyone is looking at me. Slowly I take in my brother’s aghast face, the guards beside him. Slowly, I realise that they all think that he has come to arrest me. I can feel my hands tremble and I clasp them together. If Anne has incriminated me then the Privy Council will have ordered my arrest. It would be like them to send my own brother to take me to the Tower as a way of testing his loyalty, and confirming my fall.

‘What do you want, William? You look very strange! Dear brother, what have you come for?’

As if my words have released a mechanism, the clock on my table strikes three with a silvery chime, William steps inside the room and the guards swing the doors closed behind him.

‘Has the meeting ended?’ My voice is choked.

‘Yes,’ he says shortly.

I see that his face is grave and I put my hand on the back of a chair for support. ‘You look very serious, William.’

‘I don’t have good news.’

‘Tell me quickly.’

‘Anne Askew has been sent to Newgate Prison. They could not persuade her to recant. She will have to stand trial as a heretic.’

The room goes silent and everything seems to melt and swirl before my eyes. I grip the chair back to help me stand, and blink furiously. ‘She would not recant?’

‘They sent for Prince Edward’s tutor to persuade her. But she quoted them verse after verse from the Bible and proved them wrong.’

‘Could you not save her?’ I burst out. ‘William, could you say nothing to save her?’

‘She confounded me,’ he says miserably. ‘She looked me in the face and said that it was a great shame on me that I should advise her, against my own knowledge.’

I gasp. ‘She accused you of thinking as she does? She’s going to name the people who believe as she does?’

He shakes his head. ‘No! No! She was very careful in what she said: meticulous. She named nobody. Not me, not a word against you or your ladies. She accused me of advising her against my own knowledge; but she did not say what my knowledge might be.’

I am ashamed of my next question. ‘Did anyone mention me at all?’

‘They put it to her that she preached in your rooms, and she said so do many preachers of many different beliefs. They tried to get her to name her friends in your rooms.’ Carefully he looks at the floor so no-one can say he exchanged a glance with anyone. ‘She would not. She was stubborn. She would not give any names.

‘It was clear, sister, very clear, that the only thing they wanted from her was proof of your meetings, heretical meetings. They would have released her, then and there, if she had named you as a heretic.’

‘You’re saying that it’s me they want, not her,’ I say quietly through stiff lips.

He nods. ‘It was obvious. Obvious to everyone. She knows.’

I am silent for a moment, trying to push down my fear into my churning belly. I try to be brave, as Anne Boleyn was brave. She protested the innocence of her brother, of her friends. ‘Is there any way we can get her released?’ I ask. ‘Does she have to go to trial? Should I go to the king and tell him that they have wrongly imprisoned her?’

William looks at me as if I have lost my wits. ‘Kat – he knows already. Don’t be stupid. This is not Gardiner running ahead of the king, this is Gardiner doing only what the king wants. The king himself signed the warrant for her arrest, approved her being sent for trial, ordered that she be held at Newgate until she is tried. He will have prepared an instruction for the jury. He will have decided already.’

‘A jury should be independent!’

‘But it is not. He’ll tell them what verdict to bring in. But she’ll have to stand trial. Her only safety would be to recant at her trial.’

‘I don’t think she’ll do that.’

‘Neither do I.’

‘What will happen then?’

He just looks at me. We both know what will happen then.

‘What will happen to us?’ he asks miserably.

To my surprise, the king comes to my rooms with the gentlemen of his household and some of the Privy Council to escort us in to dinner. It has been a long time since the king was well enough to lead me in to dine. They come in noisily as if celebrating his return to court. He cannot walk, he cannot even stand on his ulcerated leg, but comes in his wheeled chair with his thickly bandaged leg extended before him. He is laughing at this, as if it were a temporary injury from jousting or hunting, and the court takes its cue from him, and laughs too, as if we expect to see him dancing tomorrow or the day after. Catherine Brandon says she will commission a rival chair and there can be a chair joust with the king in the lists, and he swears it must be done and we shall have chair jousting tomorrow. Will Somers dances before him as he is wheeled into the room, pretends to fall and be run over by the inexorable progress of the huge chair and the massive man half reclining inside it.

‘Moloch! I have been run over by Moloch!’ Will mourns.

‘Will, if I had run you over, you wouldn’t be here to shout about it,’ the king warns him. ‘Keep away from the wheels, Fool.’

Will responds with a somersaulting dive that throws him out of the way just in time. My ladies shriek a warning and laugh as if it is extraordinarily funny. We are all on edge, all anxious to keep the king in his sunny mood.

‘I swear I will mow you down in my chariot,’ Henry shouts.

‘Can’t catch me,’ Will replies cheekily, and at once Henry bellows at the two pages, sweating behind the handles of the chair, that they must pursue Will around my presence chamber as he dances and leaps, balancing on benches, springing up to the window seat, darting round my ladies, snatching them by the waist and spinning them round so the king charges at them and not him, sending them screaming and giggling out of the way. It is a romp with everyone running in one direction or another and Henry at the centre of it all, red-faced, bellowing with laughter and shouting, ‘Faster! Faster!’ At the end, Will collapses in a heap and snatches up a piece of white embroidery above his head, waving it in a sign of surrender.