The Taming of the Queen (56 page)

‘You don’t like it,’ he observes.

I shake my head, swallowing down bile. ‘I can’t like it, but I don’t speak against it. I see that you must, Thomas. It would be a great advancement for you. It would secure the Seymours their place with the royal family.’

‘I shan’t do it if you say “no”.’

Again I shake my head. We go through the doorway into the shade of the entrance hall. The Seymour servants come to greet their masters. They bow and we turn towards the king’s presence chamber. It is not possible to speak, and everyone is looking at Thomas and commenting on the admiral’s return to court.

‘I am yours,’ Thomas says in a passionate undertone. ‘Forever. You know that.’

I release his hand and he bows and steps back.

‘Very well,’ I say. I know that he has to make his way. I know that Elizabeth is a great match for him. I know that she will adore him and he will be kind to her. ‘Very well.’

Thomas leaves the next morning before chapel and I don’t see him again.

‘Are you ill?’ Nan asks me. ‘You look . . .’

‘Look what?’

She scrutinises my pale face. ‘Queechy,’ she says, using a childhood word with a little smile.

‘I’m unhappy,’ I reply in a moment of honesty. I won’t say more but I feel a little eased just by speaking one word of truth. I miss Thomas as a physical pain. I don’t know how I am going to bear his marriage to someone else. The thought of him with Elizabeth makes my stomach churn as if I am poisoned with jealousy.

Nan does not even ask me why I am unhappy. I am not the first royal wife she has seen blanched by the strain of being queen.

I am invited to the king’s rooms most evenings before dinner to listen to debates. Often I say what I think, and always I remind the king that the cause of reform is his cause, a process that he started in his wisdom, that his people revere him for bringing reform to England. But I can tell from the frosty silence that greets my words that the king is far from agreeing with me. He is planning something; but he does not discuss it with me. I know nothing until the first week of July, when the Privy Council announce a law that makes it a criminal offence to own a Bible in English translated either by William Tyndale or by Miles Coverdale.

This is madness. There is no understanding it. Miles Coverdale translated and improved the Tyndale Bible under the instruction of the king and it was published as the Great Bible, the king’s Bible, his gift to believers. This is the Bible that the king gave to his people only seven years ago. Everyone who can afford one has a copy. It would have been disloyal not to have a family copy. Every parish church was given one and ordered to display it. It is the best version in English; every bookcase in England has it. Now, overnight, ownership is a crime. It is a reversal so great that everything is turned around, and upside down. I think of Will Somers standing on his head as I hurry back to my private rooms and find Nan wrapping my precious, beautifully bound and illustrated volumes in rough cloth and cording up a trunk.

‘We can’t just throw them out!’

‘They have to be sent away.’

‘Where are you going to send them?’ I ask.

‘To Kendal,’ she says, naming our family home. ‘As far away as possible.’

‘It’s barely standing!’

‘Then they won’t look there.’

‘You’ve got my copy?’

‘And your notes, and Catherine Brandon’s copy, and Anne Seymour’s and Joan Denny’s and Lady Dudley’s. This new law has caught us all out without warning. The king has made us all criminals overnight.’

‘But why?’ I demand. I am near to crying with anger. ‘Why make his own Bible illegal? The king’s Bible! How can it be illegal to own a Bible? God gave the Word to his people, how can the king take it back?’

‘Exactly,’ she says. ‘You think. Why would the king make a criminal of his wife?’

I take her hands, pulling her away from tying the knots on the trunk, and I kneel beside her. ‘Nan, you have been at court all your life; I am a Parr of Kendal raised in Lincoln. I’m a straightforward Northern woman. Don’t speak in riddles to me.’

‘That’s no riddle,’ she says with bitter humour. ‘Your husband has passed a law which makes you a criminal fit for burning. Why would he do that?’

I am slow to say it. ‘He wants to get rid of me?’

She is silent.

‘Are you saying that this new law is directed against me, since they cannot catch me with anything else? Are you suggesting that they have outlawed the Bible just to make me and my ladies into criminals? So that they can come against us and charge us with heresy? Because this is ridiculous.’

I cannot read the expression on her face – she does not look like herself – and then I realise that she is afraid. Her mouth is working as if she cannot speak, her forehead is damp with sweat. ‘He’s coming for you,’ is all she says. ‘This is how he always does it. He’s coming for you, Kat, and I don’t know how to save you. I’m packing Bibles and I’m burning papers but they know you have been reading and writing, and they are changing the law ahead of me. I can’t make sure you obey the law because they are changing it faster than we can obey. I don’t know how to save you. I swore to you that you would outlive him, and now his health is failing, but he is coming for you just like . . .’

I release her hands and sit back on my heels.

‘Just like what?’

‘Just like he came for the other two.’

She knots the cords around the box and goes to the door and shouts for her manservant, a man who has been with us all our lives. She gestures to the boxes and commands him to take them at once, show them to no-one, and ride for home, for Kendal in Westmorland. As I watch him lift the first box, I realise I am longing to go with him into those wild hills.

‘They’ll pick him up at Islington village if they want to,’ I say, as the man shoulders the trunk and goes. ‘He won’t get more than a day’s ride out of the City.’

‘I know that,’ she says flatly. ‘But I don’t know what else to do.’

I look at my sister, who has served six of Henry’s queens and buried four. ‘You really think he is doing this to entrap me? That he has completely turned against me?’

She doesn’t answer. She turns the same closed face to me that I imagine she showed to little Kitty Howard when she cried that she had done nothing wrong; to Anne Boleyn when she swore that she could talk her way out of danger. ‘I don’t know. God help us all, Kateryn, because I don’t know.’

The king gets worse and it makes him miserable. He agrees that the court shall move to Hampton Court, away from the unbearable heat of the city and the danger of illness, but he does not come out to the garden, or to boat on the river, or even to Mass in the beautiful palace chapel. They tell me that he wants to rest quietly in his rooms, to talk with his advisors. He will not come for dinner, he does not want to visit me in my rooms, I need not come to his. He has shut himself away, excluding me just as he excluded Kitty Howard, when they assured her that he was ill; but in fact he was locked inside his rooms, here, in this very palace, at Hampton Court, brooding on her failings, on the trial he would rig, and the execution that he would order.

But, just like Anne Boleyn, who attended jousts and dinners and May Day celebrations while knowing that something was wrong, I have to appear before the court. I cannot withdraw like him. I am in my aviary rooms, feeding my birds, watching their thoughtless chatter and their little busyness as they tidy their feathers, when my clerk, William Harper, taps on the door.

‘You can come in,’ I say. ‘Come in and shut the door. I have two of them flying free and I don’t want them to get out.’

He ducks as a canary swoops over his head and comes to my outstretched hand.

‘What is it, William?’ I ask absently, breaking off seed cake and giving it to the pretty little bird. ‘Speak up. I have to leave this little beauty and go and dress for dinner.’

He glances towards Nan and Anne Seymour, who are sitting in the window seat, side by side, both of them unmoved by my lovely little birds. ‘May I speak to you alone?’

‘What for?’ Nan says flatly. ‘Her Majesty has to go to dinner. You can tell me what it is.’

He shakes his head; he looks imploringly at me.

‘Oh, go on, and pick out my jewels and a hood,’ I say impatiently. ‘I’ll come in a moment.’

My clerk and I wait for the door to close behind them, and I turn to him. He is a thoughtful man, monastery trained and with a great love for the old ways. He must have regarded half of the books in my closet with pious horror; he has no admiration for the new learning. I employ him because he is a great scholar, he can translate beautifully and he has a fine hand in writing. When I want to send out a letter in Latin he can translate and transcribe in one draft with a beautiful flowing copperplate script. He has never disagreed with anything the preachers have said in my rooms but I have once or twice seen him bend his head and whisper a silent prayer, like a shocked monk in a worldly school.

‘There! No-one to hear but me and the birds, and they say nothing – except the parrot, who is a terrible blasphemer, but only in Spanish. What is it, William?’

‘I have to warn you, Your Majesty,’ he says gravely. ‘I fear that your enemies are speaking against you.’

‘I know that,’ I say shortly. ‘Thank you for your concern, William, but this, I know already.’

‘Bishop Gardiner’s man came to me and asked me to search your closet for papers,’ he says in a whispered rush. ‘He said I would be rewarded if I would secretly copy anything and bring it to him. Your Majesty, I think he is assembling a case against you.’ The little bird tickles my palm as it shifts its feet and pecks at the crumbs. I did not expect this warning from William. I did not think that they would dare to go this far. I see my shocked expression is mirrored in his troubled face.

‘Are you sure it was the bishop’s man?’

‘Yes. He told me it was to take to the bishop. I could not be mistaken.’

I turn away from him and go to the window, the yellow-winged canary clinging to my outstretched finger. It is a beautiful summer day, the sun just dipping below the high red-brick chimneys, the swifts and swallows swirling around. If Bishop Gardiner is prepared to take such a risk in approaching one of my servants to steal my papers then he must be very confident that he can make a case against me to the king. He must be very sure that a complaint from me to the king will not bring down a storm on his head. He must be certain that he will find something to prove my guilt. Or, even worse, perhaps he has already made a case against me and this is the last stage of a secret enquiry, finding the paperwork to back up the lies.

‘It was to take to the bishop? You are sure of that? Not to the king?’

His face is pale with fear. ‘That he didn’t tell me, Your Majesty. But he was bold as brass: that I was to go through all your papers and bring him whatever I could find. He said to copy down the titles of books also, and to search for a New Testament. He said that he knew you had several.’

‘There’s nothing here,’ I say shortly.

‘I know. I know that you have sent everything away, your beautiful library and all your papers. I told him there was nothing, but he said to look anyway. He knew that you had a library for your studies. He said that they guessed you wouldn’t have been able to part with your books and that they would be hidden in your rooms somewhere.’