‘Where did you go?’ I ask. ‘When your husband threw you out of your home?’
‘I went to Lincoln,’ she says with a smile. ‘I sat at the back of the great cathedral and I took a Bible in my hands and I read it in the sight of the congregation and in the sight of the benighted pilgrims who come through the doors, kissing the floor and creeping on their knees. Poor souls, they chinked with the pilgrim badges they had pinned on their clothes but they thought it was a heresy that a woman should read God’s Word in a church. Imagine that! To think it is a heresy for a believer to read a Bible in church!
‘I read it aloud to everyone who came and went in that great building, buying and selling favours, trading pilgrim badges and relics, all the fools and hucksters. I read the Bible to teach them that the only way to God is not through chips of stone and bits of bone, flasks of holy water and prayers written backwards on scraps of paper and pinned to a coat. It is not through sacred rings and kissing the foot of a statue. I showed them that the only way to God is through His Holy Word, in His own holy words.’
‘You’re a brave woman,’ I remark.
She smiles at me. ‘No, I am a simple woman,’ she corrects me. ‘When I understand something true, it goes to my heart. I have understood this: that we have to read and know the Word of God. This, and nothing else, will bring us to heaven. All the rest of it: the threat of purgatory, the promise of forgiveness in return for payment, the statues that bleed and the pictures that leak milk, all these things are the invention of a church that has gone far from the Word of God. It is for me, and for those who care about truth, to cling to the Word of God and turn our face from the masquing. The church does not put on mystery plays once a year any more, it plays them every day all the year. It is all costume and show and pretence. But the Bible is the truth and there is nothing but the Bible.’
I nod. She speaks simply, but she is absolutely right.
‘So I came in the end to London, and spoke before the great men of this city. My brother helped me, and my sister is Mrs Jane St Paul, whose husband serves the duchess.’ She curtseys to Catherine Brandon, who nods her head in reply. ‘I found a safe house with honest kinsmen who think as I do, and I listened to preachers and spoke with many learned men, far more learned than me. And a good man, a preacher that you know, I think, Your Majesty, John Lascelles, took me to meet other good men and speak with them.’
An almost imperceptible breath from Nan tells me that she knows the name. I glance at her.
‘He bore witness against Queen Katherine,’ she says.
‘I have met a few people of your court,’ Anne goes on, looking around and smiling. ‘Lady Denny and Lady Hertford. And others listen to gospellers and believe in the reform of the church.’ She takes a breath. ‘And then I went to the church for a divorce,’ she says.
Nan gives a little scream of shock. ‘How? How could you?’
‘I went to the church and I said that since my husband was a believer in the old ways and I am for the new, we never made vows that meant the same thing. We did not join hands in the same church, the true God can have nothing to do with the vows that they made me swear, in a language that I didn’t understand, and so our marriage should be dissolved.’
‘Mistress Anne, a woman can’t get her marriage dissolved at will,’ Catherine protests.
Nan and I exchange glances. Our own brother’s wife ran away from him and he was awarded a divorce as a gift from the king. The king is head of the church, marriage and divorce are in his gift, they are not for a woman to take.
‘Why should not a woman leave a marriage? If she can make it, surely she can unmake it,’ Anne Askew replies. ‘What was sworn can be unsworn. The king himself—’
‘We don’t speak of the king,’ Nan says swiftly.
‘The law does not recognise a woman except when she is alone in the world,’ Anne Askew says authoritatively. ‘Only a woman without father or husband has any legal rights in this world. That, in itself, is unjust. But think of this: I am a woman alone, a feme sole. My father is dead and I deny my husband. The law must deal with me as an adult equal person as I am before God. I will go to heaven because I have read and accepted the Word of God. I demand justice because I have read and accepted the word of the law.’
Nan exchanges a quick worried look with me. ‘I don’t know the rights and the wrongs of this,’ she says. ‘But I know it is not a fit discourse for a queen’s household.’ She glances at Princess Elizabeth, who is listening carefully. ‘Not for young ears.’
I shake my head. I am married to a man who declares his own annulments. He is divorced when he says it is so. Anne Askew suggests that a woman might claim as much power as the king.
‘You had better speak of your faith,’ I command her. ‘I have translated Psalm 145: All things be under Thy dominion and rule. Speak of that to us.’
She bows her head as if to gather her thoughts for a moment, and then she speaks simply and eloquently, and in her voice I hear the ring of complete conviction, and in her face I see the shine of innocence.
She stays all the morning and I send her home with a purse of coins and an invitation to come again. I am fascinated by her, inspired by this woman who says that she can choose where she lives, choose or reject a husband, this woman who knows that God forgives her sins, because she confesses them to Him – not to a priest – she speaks to Him directly. I think this is the first woman I have ever met who strikes me as being one who makes her own life, who walks her own path, who is responsible for herself. This is a woman who has not been tamed to be as others want; she has not been cut down to fit her circumstances.
The portrait painter comes to finish his sketches of the two princesses. I think that Princess Mary stands straighter and taller than usual, as if she knows that this may be the last taking of her likeness as an English princess, as if it is her last portrait before she is sent away. Perhaps she thinks that this portrait will be copied and sent to her proposed husbands.
I go to her side to pull her train a little straighter, to show off the beautiful brocade, and I whisper in her ear: ‘You’re not posing as an icon, you know. You can smile,’ and am rewarded by her swift fugitive giggle.
‘I do know,’ she says. ‘It’s just that people will see this portrait years from now, perhaps hundreds of years from now.’
Princess Elizabeth, blooming under the attention of the painter, is as pink as the inside of a little shell. She spent so long hidden from sight that she loves the male gaze.
I sit and watch the two girls as they stand at a distance but half-facing each other. The painter has his sketches of their faces, and a careful note of the colours of their gowns. All of this will be transferred to the great work like a tisserand weaving flowers on a tapestry on the loom from pictures that she has sketched in the garden.
Then the painter turns to me. ‘Your Majesty?’
‘I am not in my gown,’ I protest.
‘For today, I just want to capture your likeness,’ he says. ‘The way that you hold yourself. Will you be so good as to sit as you will be seated? Perhaps you can imagine that the king is on your right. Would you tilt your head towards him? But I need you to look straight at me.’
I sit as he directs, but I cannot lean towards the space where the king would be. The painter, de Vent, is very exact. Gently he moves the angle of my head this way and that until Mary laughingly takes the place where her father will be positioned, and I sit beside her and tip my head just slightly, as if I am listening.
‘Exquisite, yes,’ de Vent says. ‘But it is too flat. The new fashions . . . Your Majesty, would you allow me?’
He come closer and turns my chair a little towards where the king will sit. ‘And will you let your eyes go this way?’ He points to the window. ‘So.’
He steps back to gaze at me. I look where he directs, and in my line of sight, outside the window, a blackbird lands on a branch of a tree and opens its yellow beak in a trill of song. At once I am transported to th
at spring when I ran through the palace to Thomas’s rooms and heard a blackbird, drunk with joy and confused by torches, singing at night like a nightingale.
‘Mon Dieu!’ I hear de Vent whisper, and I am recalled to the present.
‘What is it?’
‘Your Majesty, if I could capture that light in your eyes and that beauty in your face I would be the greatest painter in the world. You are illuminated.’
I shake my head. ‘I was daydreaming. It was nothing.’
‘I wish I could capture that radiance. You have shown me what I should do. Now I shall make some sketches.’
I raise my head, and look out of the window, and watch the blackbird as it ruffles its wings in a little scud of rain and then flies away.
WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1545
The king summons me, and Nan and Catherine Brandon follow me along the privy gallery to his rooms. All the windows are open to the spring sunshine and the birds are singing in the trees in the gardens below. We can hear the gulls crying over the River Thames and see the bright flicker of sunlight on their white wings. Henry is in good humour, his thickly bandaged leg resting on a stool, a pile of papers before him, each dense with type.
‘See this!’ he says joyfully to me. ‘You who think you’re such a great scholar. See this!’
I curtsey and step forward to kiss him. He takes my face in both his big hands and pulls me closer so that I kiss him on his mouth. He smells of some sort of spirits and sweets.
‘I never call myself a scholar,’ I say at once. ‘I know I am an ignorant woman compared to you, my lord. But I am glad for the chance to study. What is this?’
‘It is our pages back from the printer!’ he exclaims. ‘The liturgy at last. Cranmer says that we will put a copy into every church in England and end their mumbling away in Latin that neither the congregation nor the priest can understand. That’s not the Word of God; that’s not what I want for my church.’
‘You’re right.’
‘I know! And look, you can see the prayers that you have translated, and Cranmer’s work is in here, too, and I have polished it and in some parts set it into better language, and translated some parts myself. And here it is! My book.’
I take up the sheets and read the first few pages. It is beautiful, just as I hoped it would be. It is simple and clear, with a rhythm and a cadence like poetry, but there is nothing forced or overly worked about it. I look at a line that took me half a day to translate, changing one word for another, scratching it out and starting again. Now, in print, it looks as if it could never have been other, it reads as if it has been the prayer of the English forever. I feel that deep joy of a writer seeing her work in print for the first time. The absorbing private work has become public, it has stepped out into the world. It will be judged and I am full of confidence that it is good work.
‘My liturgy, in my church.’ For the king, it is ownership that gives him joy. ‘My church, in my kingdom. I have to be both king and pope in England. I have to guard the people from enemies outside and lead them to God within.’
Nan and Catherine give a little impressed murmur of awe. They know every phrase and passage, having passed it from one hand to another, improving and polishing the phrasing, reading Thomas Cranmer’s changes aloud for him, checking my words with me.
‘You can take this,’ the king says grandly. ‘You can read these pages and check them for foolish mistakes by the printer’s boys. And you can tell me what you think of this, my greatest work.’
One of his pages steps forward and gathers up the pile of papers. ‘Mind,’ the king says, wagging a finger at me, ‘I want your real opinion, nothing designed to please me. All I ever want from you is the truth, Kateryn.’
I curtsey as the guards hold the doors open for us. ‘I will read with attention and give you my true opinion,’ I promise. ‘This will be the hundredth time I have read these words and I hope to read them a thousand times. Indeed, all of England will read them a thousand times, they will be read every day in church.’
‘You must always speak honestly to me,’ he says warmly. ‘You are my helpmeet and my partner. You are my queen. We will go forward together, Kateryn, leading the people from darkness into light.’
Nan, Catherine and I say not a word until we are back in the safety of my rooms and the door is shut.
‘How wonderful!’ Catherine exclaims. ‘That the king should put his own name to the work. Stephen Gardiner can say nothing against it if it is under the king’s own seal of approval. How you are leading him, Your Majesty! How far we are going towards true grace!’
Nan spreads the pages out on the table and I take up a pen to mark any errors when a sudden quiet tap on the little door that leads directly from the stable stairs makes us look up. The preachers who wish to enter discreetly use this door by appointment; perhaps a bookseller with a book that one of Gardiner’s spies would name as heretical. All other visitors, great and small, visitors of state and petitioners, come up the broad public stairs and are announced at my presence chamber, as the huge double doors swing open.
‘See who it is,’ I say quietly, and Nan goes to the door and opens it. The guard who stands below, at the bottom of the stair, watches as a young man comes in and bows to me and to Joan Denny.
‘Oh, this is Christopher, who serves my husband,’ Joan says, surprised. ‘What are you doing here, Christopher? You should have come in the main door. You gave us a fright.’
‘Sir Anthony said to come to you unobserved,’ he replies, and he turns to me. ‘Sir Anthony said to tell Your Majesty at once that Mistress Anne Askew has been arrested and questioned.’
‘No!’
He nods. ‘She was arrested and questioned by an inquisitor and then by the Lord Mayor of London himself. Now she is in the keeping of Bishop Bonner.’
‘She is charged?’
‘Not yet. He is questioning her.’
‘On the very day that the king gives you the prayers in English?’ Nan whispers to me incredulously. ‘On the very day that he promises that England will be freed from superstition? He has her arrested and questioned?’
‘God help us and keep us; this is his dogfight,’ I say, my voice shaky with dread. ‘Set up one cur and then another. Let the two of them fight it out.’
‘What d’you mean?’ Nan asks, frightened by my tone. ‘What are you saying?’
‘What shall we do?’ Catherine Brandon demands. ‘What can we do to help Anne?’
I turn to Christopher. ‘Go back,’ I say. ‘Take this purse.’ Nan goes to a drawer in my table and brings out a small purse of gold that I keep for my charitable giving. ‘See if there are men around Bishop Bonner that will take a bribe. Find out what the bishop requires of Mistress Askew, whether he needs an oath, or a recantation or an apology. Find out what it is that he wants. And be sure that the bishop knows that I have heard Anne preach, that she is a kinswoman to George St Paul, who works for the Brandons, that I have never heard a word from her that is anything but devout, holy, and within the law, that this very day the king has his liturgy in English back from the printers. And that I expect her to be released.’
He bows as Nan makes a little fearful noise. ‘Is it wise to confess acquaintance with her? To let yourself be identified with her?’
‘Anyone can discover that she has preached here,’ I say. ‘Everyone knows that her sister works at court. What the bishop needs to know is that we, her friends, will stand by her. He needs to be aware that when he questions her, he is questioning one of my preachers, a friend to the Suffolk household. He must be told that she has important allies and we know where she is.’
Christopher nods that he understands, and swiftly turns and goes out of the door.
‘And send a message back as soon as she is released,’ I call after him. ‘And if they proceed against her, come back at once.’
We have to wait. We wait all the day, and we try to pray for Anne Askew. I dine with the king and my ladies dance for him, and we
smile until our cheeks ache. I glance at him sideways as he is listening to the music and beating time with his hand, and I think: do you know that a woman who thinks as I do, who has preached before me, who loved me when she was a little girl and whose gifts I admire, is being questioned for the offence of heresy, which might take her to the stake? Do you know this and are you waiting to see what I will do? Is it a test, to see if I will act for her? Or do you know nothing? Is this nothing more than the clockwork movements of the old church, set in motion like automata, the ambition of the Bishop of London, the bigotry of Stephen Gardiner, the endless conspiracy of the old churchmen grinding on and on and resisting change? Should I tell you of this and ask for your help? Am I sitting beside the man who would save Anne, or beside the king who is playing her as a piece in one of his games?
Henry turns and smiles at me. ‘I shall come to your rooms tonight, sweetheart,’ he says.
And I think: that proves it. He must know nothing. Not even a king as old and as duplicitous as this King of England could possibly smile and bed his wife while her friend was being interrogated on his orders.
I do not speak of Anne to my husband, though as he strives to reach his pleasure he groans: ‘You please me, ah, Kateryn, you do please me. You can have anything . . .’
When he is quiet and falling asleep he repeats: ‘You please me, Kateryn. You can have any favour.’
‘I want nothing,’ I say. I would feel like a whore if I named a favour now. Anne Askew prides herself on being a free woman; she defied her husband and her father. I should not buy her freedom with the sexual pleasure of a man old enough to be our father.
He understands this. He has a sly smile as he lies back on the heaped pillows, his eyes half-closed, drowsy. ‘Ask me later then,’ he says, ‘if you would detach payment from the deed.’
The Taming of the Queen Page 22