The Taming of the Queen

‘As easy as sin,’ she says cheerfully. ‘But it is not sin, I promise you. My husband knows nothing of me, nor of my faith. I am as strange to him as a deer in the sheep pen. There is no way that we could marry in the sight of God and no way that such vows could be binding. He thinks as I do, though he has not the courage to say it to the bishop. He does not want me in his home, any more than I can tolerate being there. We cannot be yoked together – a deer and a sheep.’

Nan gets to her feet, alert as a yeoman of the guard. ‘But should you be here?’ she asks. ‘You cannot bring heresy to the queen’s rooms. You cannot come here if you have been ordered to stay with your husband, whether he is a sheep and you a deer or both of you a pair of fools.’

Anne puts out her hand to halt Nan’s anxious torrent of words. ‘I would never bring danger to Her Majesty’s door,’ she says calmly. ‘I know who I have to thank for my release. I owe you a debt for life,’ she adds with a little curtsey to me. Then she turns back to Nan. ‘They were satisfied with my answers. They questioned me over and over but I did not say a word that was not in the Bible and they had no handle to hold me, nor rope to hang me.’

Nan hides an involuntary shudder at the mention of the hangman and glances towards me. ‘Bishop Bonner has no complaint against you?’ she repeats incredulously.

Anne lets out a ringing, confident laugh. ‘That’s a man who would always be complaining about something. But there was nothing he could fix on me. The Lord Mayor asked me did I think the Host was holy, and I did not answer, because I know that it is illegal to speak of the bread of the Mass. He asked me if a mouse ate the Host would the mouse be holy? I just said, “Alack, poor mouse.” That was the best of his questions: trying to trap me with a holy mouse!’

Despite myself I cannot help but laugh, and Catherine Brandon catches my eye and she giggles.

‘Anyway, thank God that they released you, and obeyed the queen,’ Catherine says, recovering. ‘We are winning the argument, almost everyone is persuaded by the queen’s thinking. The king listens to her, and the whole court thinks as we do.’

‘And the queen has translated a book of prayers that have come out under her own name,’ Nan says proudly.

Anne turns her brown gaze to me. ‘Your Majesty, this is to use your education and your position for the good of all true believers, and especially for the good of women. To be a woman and to write! To be a woman and to publish!’

‘She is the first,’ Nan boasts. ‘The first woman to publish in the new printed books in England, the very first woman to publish in the English language. The first to write her own prayers and not merely translate.’

‘Hush,’ I say. ‘There are many scholars like me, and many better read. There have been women writers before me. But I am blessed with a husband who allows me to study and write, and we are all blessed with a king who allows the prayers of the church to be understood by his people.’

‘Thank God for him,’ Anne Askew says fervently. ‘Do you think he will allow the Bible back into the churches again for everyone to read?’

‘I am certain of it,’ I say. ‘For since he has commissioned a translation of the Mass, he is bound to want the Bible to be read to the people in English, and the Bible will be restored to the churches once more.’

‘Amen,’ Anne Askew says. ‘And my work will be done. For all I ever do is recite the words of the Bible that I have memorised, and explain what the words mean. Half the gospellers in London are nothing more than speaking Bibles. If the Bible were allowed back into the churches we would all be at peace. If the people can read it for themselves again it will be like the feeding of the multitude. It will be a miracle of our age.’

WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON, AUTUMN 1545

We come to Whitehall as the weather turns cold and the frost in the garden makes the yew trees in the allées silvery white on the tips of their branches and green and dark in their shades. The bowls of the fountains are skinned with ice, and I order all the furs to be brought from the wardrobe rooms at my house, Baynard’s Castle. Once again they drape Kitty Howard’s sables around my neck, but this year I find that they are scented with my perfume and the ghost of the girl queen is gone into the cold twilight.

Nicholas de Vent has completed his great portrait of the five of us and it is waiting for its formal unveiling, fixed in its place, just as we specified that it should be, shrouded in a cloth of gold. Nobody has seen it since it left his studio; we are waiting for the king to announce that he wants to see it.

‘Will Your Majesty come and unveil the portrait?’ Anne Seymour asks me. ‘His Majesty asked my lord husband to escort you.’