The Taming of the Queen

by Philippa Gregory

  Silently she reads it, she tries to speak but her mouth opens and closes and she says nothing. Catherine takes it out of her powerless hands and reads it in silence, and then raises her eyes and looks at me.

  ‘This is Gardiner’s work,’ Catherine says after a long while.

  Doctor Wendy nods. ‘He named you as a treasonous heretic,’ he says. ‘He said you were a serpent in the king’s bosom.’

  ‘It’s not enough that I am Eve, the mother of all sin; now I have to be the serpent as well?’ I demand fiercely.

  Doctor Wendy nods.

  ‘He has no evidence!’ I say.

  ‘They don’t need evidence.’ Doctor Wendy states the obvious. ‘Bishop Gardiner says that the religion you speak for denies lords, denies kings, says that all men are equal. Your faith is the same as sedition, he says.’

  ‘I have done nothing to deserve death,’ I say. I can hear my voice shake and I press my lips together.

  ‘Neither did any of the others,’ says Catherine.

  ‘The bishop said that anyone who spoke as you do, with justice, by law, would deserve death. Those were his very words.’

  ‘When are they coming?’ Nan interrupts.

  ‘Coming?’ I don’t understand her.

  ‘To arrest her?’ she asks the doctor. ‘What’s the plan? When are they coming? And where will they take her?’

  Practical as always, she goes to the cupboard and takes out my purse, and looks for a box to pack my things. Her hands are shaking so much that she cannot turn the key in the lock. I put both hands on her shoulders, as if to stop Nan preparing for my arrest will prevent the yeomen coming for me.

  ‘The Lord Chancellor is ordered to come for her. He’ll take her to the Tower. I don’t know when. I don’t know when she’ll be tried.’

  At the words ‘the Tower’ I find that my knees give way beneath me, and Nan guides me into a chair. I bend over till my head stops swimming and Catherine gives me a glass of small ale. It tastes old and stale. I think of Thomas Wriothesley spending all night racking Anne Askew in the Tower, and then coming to my rooms to take me there.

  ‘I have to go,’ Catherine says shortly. ‘I have two fatherless boys. I have to leave you.’

  ‘Don’t go!’

  ‘I have to,’ she says.

  Silently, Nan tips her head towards the door to tell her to leave. Catherine curtseys very low. ‘God bless you,’ she says. ‘God keep you. Goodbye.’

  The door closes behind her and I realise that she has said farewell to a dying woman.

  ‘How did you come by this?’ Nan asks Doctor Wendy.

  ‘I was there when they were deciding, making his sleeping draught in the back of the room, and then when I dressed his leg, the king himself told me that it was no life for a man in his old age to be lectured by a young wife.’

  I raise my head. ‘He said that?’

  He nods.

  ‘Nothing more than that? He has nothing more against me than that?’

  ‘Nothing more. What more could he have? And then I found the warrant dropped on the floor in the corridor between his bedroom and his privy chamber. Just on the floor by the door. As soon as I saw it I brought it to you.’

  ‘You found the warrant?’ Nan asks suspiciously.

  ‘I did . . .’ His voice trails off. ‘Ah, I suppose someone must have left it for me to find.’

  ‘Nobody drops a warrant for the arrest of a queen by accident,’ Nan says. ‘Someone wanted us to know.’ She strides across the room, thinking furiously. ‘You had better go to the king,’ she advises me. ‘Go to Henry now, and go down on your knees, creep along the floor like a penitent, beg pardon for your mistakes. Ask his forgiveness for speaking out.’

  ‘It won’t work,’ Doctor Wendy disagrees. ‘He has ordered his doors locked. He won’t see her.’

  ‘It’s her only chance. If she can get in to see him and be humble . . . more humble than any woman in the world has ever been. Kat, you’ll have to crawl. You’ll have to put your hands beneath his boot.’

  ‘I’ll crawl,’ I swear.

  ‘He has said he will not receive her,’ the doctor says awkwardly. ‘The guards are ordered not to let her in.’

  ‘He shut himself away from Kitty Howard,’ Nan remembers. ‘And Queen Anne.’

  They are silent. I look from one to the other and I cannot think what to do. I can only think that the yeomen are coming and that they will take me to the Tower and Anne Askew and I will be prisoners in the same cold keep. I may walk to the window in the night and hear her crying in pain. We may wait in adjoining cells for the sentence of death. I may hear them carry her out to be burned. She will hear them building my scaffold on the green.

  ‘What if he could be persuaded to come to you?’ Doctor Wendy suddenly suggests. ‘If he thought you were ill?’

  Nan gasps. ‘If you were to tell him that she had fallen into terrible grief, that she might die of her grief – if you were to tell him that she is asking for him, all but on her deathbed . . .’

  ‘Like Jane in childbirth,’ I say.

  ‘Like Queen Katherine, when her last words were that she wanted to see him,’ Nan prompts.

  ‘A helpless woman in despair, near to death for grief . . .’

  ‘He might,’ the doctor agrees.

  ‘Can you do it?’ I ask him intently. ‘Can you convince him that I am desperate to see him, and that my heart is broken?’

  ‘And that he would look wonderful if he came, merciful.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ he promises me. ‘I’ll try now.’

  I remember Thomas telling me never to cry in front of the king because he likes women’s tears. ‘Tell him I am beside myself with grief,’ I say. ‘Tell him I cannot stop crying.’

  ‘Hurry,’ Nan says. ‘When is Wriothesley coming to arrest her?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Go now then.’

  He goes to the door and I get to my feet and put a hand on his arm. ‘Don’t endanger yourself,’ I say, though I long to order him to do anything, say anything that will save me. ‘Don’t put yourself in danger. Don’t say that you warned me.’

  ‘I will say that I heard you were sick with grief,’ he says. He looks at my strained face and my stunned eyes. ‘I will tell him he has broken your heart.’

  He bows and goes out of my bedchamber into my privy rooms where already the ladies of the court are silently gathering, and wondering if they will be called to give evidence against another of Henry’s queens in another death trial.

  ‘Hair down,’ Nan says briskly. She leaves a maid to unplait my hair and brush it over my shoulders and she opens the door to order another to fetch my best silk night robe with the black slashed sleeves.

  She comes back into the room as two maids arrive and straighten the sheets on the bed, and heap up the pillows. ‘Perfume,’ she says shortly, and they get a jar of oil of roses and a feather to flick the scent all over the sheets.

  Nan turns back to me. ‘Rouge on your lips,’ she says. ‘Just a little. Belladonna in your eyes.’

  ‘I have some,’ one of the ladies says. She sends her own maid flying to her rooms as my maid comes in with my nightgown.

  I take off my ordinary gown and put on the silk one. It is cold against my naked skin. Nan ties the black ribbons at the throat and all the way down, but she leaves the top one loose, so there is a glimpse of my pale skin against the dark silk, and he will be able to see the round shape of my breasts. She smooths my hair over my shoulders and the auburn ringlets glint against the darkness of the gown. She closes the shutters just a little so the room is shadowy and intimate.

  ‘Princess Elizabeth is to sit outside in the privy chamber reading the king’s writings,’ she throws over her shoulder, and someone runs to invite the princess to her place.

  ‘We’ll leave you alone,’ she says quietly to me. ‘I’ll be here when he comes in and then I’ll go out. I’ll try and take his pages out with me. You know what you have to do?’
>
  I nod. I am cold inside the silk nightgown and I am afraid that I will have goose bumps and shiver.

  ‘Start in the bed,’ Nan advises. ‘I doubt you can stand, anyway.’

  She helps me into the great bed. The scent of roses is almost overwhelming. She pulls the gown down to my feet and parts it at the front, so that the king will be able to see my slender ankles, the enticing curve of my calf.

  ‘Don’t be too tempting,’ she says. ‘It has to be all his own idea.’

  I lean back against the pillows, and she pulls a lock of hair over my shoulder to fall against the whiteness of my skin.

  ‘This is disgusting,’ I remark. ‘I am a scholar, and a queen. I am not a whore.’

  She nods, as matter-of-fact as a swineherd bringing the sow to the boar. ‘Yes.’

  We can hear the rumble of the king’s chair across the wooden floor of the presence chamber, and then the doors open to my privy chamber. We hear the ladies rise to greet him and his embarrassed ‘good morning’ to them all and his greeting to Princess Elizabeth, who knows well enough to keep her head down and look devout.

  The guards open my bedroom door to him and the king is wheeled in, his bandaged leg sticking stiffly out before him. A waft of stinking flesh breezes in with him.

  I flutter a little, as if I am trying to rise but I fall back, too weak and overcome at the sight of him. I turn a tear-stained face to him as Nan gets hold of the pages and draws them backwards through the doors then nods to the guard to close the doors on the two of us. In a moment the king finds himself alone with me.

  ‘The doctor said you were very ill?’ he asks sulkily.

  ‘They should not have troubled you . . .’ My voice dies away into a little sob. ‘I am so honoured that you should come . . .’

  ‘Of course I would come to see my wife,’ the king says, cheered at the thought of his own uxoriousness, his eyes on my legs.

  ‘You’re so good to me,’ I whisper. ‘That’s why I was so . . .’

  ‘So what, Kate? What’s the matter?’

  I stammer. I genuinely can’t think of what to say most likely to stimulate his pity. I plunge in: ‘If I displease you, I want to die,’ I say.

  The sudden flush in his face is like the expression he has in sexual pleasure. By luck I have stumbled upon the one thing that delights him above all other, and I did not know it till now. I have fallen, in my desperation, on the very heart of his desire for a woman.

  ‘Die, Kate? Don’t talk about dying. You needn’t talk about dying. You are young and healthy.’ His gaze lingers on my arched instep, my ankle, the smooth curve of my leg. ‘Now, why would a pretty young woman like you talk about dying?’

  Because you are Bluebeard, the Bluebeard of my nightmares, I want to say. You are Barbe-Bleue and your wife Tryphine opened the locked doors of your castle and found dead wives laid out in their beds. Because I know you now for a wife-killer, I know you are merciless. Because your fat glory in yourself is so great that you cannot imagine anyone thinking for themselves, or being themselves, or caring for anything but you. You are the sole sun in your own heavens. You are a natural enemy of anyone who is not you, not your very self. You are a murderer in your soul, and all you want of a wife is her submission to you or submission to the death you prescribe for her. There is no choice of anything else. You will be master, complete master. You can hardly bear anyone to be other than you. Your men friends have to be your mimics, the only survivor at your court is your Fool, who declares himself witless. You cannot bear anything that is not in your image. You are a natural killer of wives.

  ‘If you don’t love me, I want to die,’ I say, my voice a trembling thread of sound. ‘There is nothing left for me. If you don’t love me there is nothing left for me but the grave.’

  He is aroused. He shifts his huge bulk around in the creaking chair so that he can see me. I writhe a little in my grief and my robe parts. I push back the mass of my tumbled hair and the robe slips from my shoulder; but apparently I don’t notice that he can see my white skin, the curve of my breast, in my panting distress.

  ‘My wife,’ he says. ‘My beloved wife.’

  ‘Say that I am your beloved,’ I insist. ‘I will die if I am not your beloved.’

  ‘You are,’ he says, his voice congested. ‘You are.’

  He cannot get out of his chair to reach me. I scramble over to the edge of the bed, where his chair is jammed, and he stretches his arms out to me. I go towards him, expecting him to embrace me, to wrap his arms around me, but instead he grasps me like a clumsy boy, his hands fumble at the ties of my gown, tear one ribbon, and then I feel his fat hands grasp my cold breasts, as if he were a market trader weighing apples. He does not want to embrace me, he wants to handle me. Awkwardly, I kneel before him as he grasps at me, kneading me, as if he would milk me like a cow. He smiles.

  ‘You may come to my room tonight,’ he says thickly. ‘I forgive you.’

  I lead my ladies in and out of dinner in near silence. Even the most junior, even the most ill-informed, knows that something terrible happened and that I took to my bed in a state of collapse and the king himself deigned to visit me. Whether this indicates that all is well or whether disaster has fallen upon us, nobody knows for sure. Not even me.

  I leave them in my rooms, whispering and spreading gossip, and I change out of my gown and into my embroidered silk night-robe to go to the king’s rooms with only my sister Nan and my cousin Maud Lane in attendance.

  We walk through the great presence chamber, through the privy chamber and then to the inner room. His bedroom is beyond. The king is with his friends, but neither Lord Wriothesley nor Bishop Gardiner is there. Will Somers sits before the king’s footstool in an odd position, like a dog sitting on its haunches, in complete silence. When he sees me, he stretches out his hands on the floor and lowers himself down, like a dog at rest. His head on his paws is almost under the footrest that supports the king’s bad leg. Down there, the stench must be unbearable. I look at Will, all but prone on the floor, and he turns his head and raises his eyebrows to look up, unsmiling at me.

  ‘You’re lying very low, Will,’ I remark.

  ‘I am,’ he says. ‘I think it best.’

  His gaze turns towards the king and I see that Henry, seated above him, is glaring at us both. His gentlemen are seated on either side and Anthony Denny stands up to give me a chair at the fireside so that they can all see the candlelight shining on my face. Obviously, I have to make a public apology. Nan and Maud sink silently onto a bench at the wall as if they are kneeling.

  ‘We were discussing the reform of the church,’ Henry says suddenly. ‘And whether the women gospellers who speak so loudly at Saint Paul’s cross are making sermons as holy as the clerks who have spent years at the universities.’

  I shake my head. ‘I wouldn’t know. I have never heard them.’

  ‘Never, Kate?’ he asks. ‘Has none of them come to your rooms to sermonise and sing for you?’

  I shake my head. ‘Perhaps one or two came to preach. I don’t remember.’

  ‘But what do you think of the things they say?’

  ‘Oh, my lord, how could I judge? I would have to ask you for guidance.’

  ‘You don’t judge for yourself?’

  ‘Ah, my lord husband, how can I judge when I have nothing but the simple education of a lady and the mind of a weak woman? Men are in the shape and likeness of God. I am only a woman, so much inferior in all respects. I consult you in everything, who are my only anchor, Supreme Head and governor next unto God. ’

  ‘Not so, by Saint Mary, you have become a doctor, Kate, to instruct us,’ he says irritably. ‘You dispute with me!’

  ‘No, no,’ I say hastily. ‘I wanted only to distract you from your pain. I spoke only ever to divert you. I think it is very unseemly, I think it is preposterous, for a woman to take the office of teacher to he who must be her lord and husband.’

  Anthony Denny nods judicially: this is true. Will rai
ses himself slowly on his forepaws as if to confirm that he too has seen this. The king is ready to be placated. He looks around to see that everyone is attending.

  ‘Is it so, sweetheart?’ he demands.

  ‘Oh, yes, yes,’ I say.

  ‘And you had no worse end?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Then come and kiss me, Kate, for we are perfect friends as ever before.’

  I step towards him and he drags me onto his good leg so I am practically sitting in his lap and he nuzzles my neck. My smile never wavers, as Will bounds to his feet.

  ‘You can all leave us,’ Henry says quietly, and his lords bow and take their leave as the pages come in to prepare the room for the night. The candles are new in the candlesticks, spaced around his bedroom so they show a soft and flickering light, the fire is banked up for the night, there is a pleasing smell of cinnamon and ginger.

  Nan comes close as if to tidy my hair. ‘Do what you have to,’ she remarks. ‘I’ll wait.’ She curtseys and leaves me.

  Behind me the pages have prepared the king’s bed with the usual ritual of plunging a sword into the mattress and rolling on it to detect any hidden murderer, sliding a warming pan over the fresh sheets, and then finally positioning themselves either side of the king to heave him in. They leave a tray of pastries within his reach and a decanter of wine for me to pour.

  I straighten my beautifully embroidered night robe of dark silk, and take a seat at the fireside until he invites me to approach his enormous bed. I think, nervously, that it is like my wedding night when I was so dreading his touch. Now I have become accustomed, he can do nothing that would shock me. I will have to accept his damp caresses; I know I will have to kiss him and not flinch from his fetid saliva. I think that he is in too much pain from his leg and too drugged to expect me to mount him so I will have to do nothing worse than smile and seem ardent. I can do that. I can do that for my own safety and for the safety of all who depend on this tyrant for their freedom. I can rack my pride. I can dislocate my shame.

  ‘So we are friends,’ he says, putting his head on one side to admire my dark blue silk robe and the glimmer of white linen beneath it. ‘But I think you have been a naughty girl. I think that you have been reading books that were banned and listening to sermons that were not allowed.’