The Taming of the Queen

The king takes this careless talk at the card table and uses it as the basis for his speech to parliament. He goes to them on Christmas Eve, as the members are thinking about calling for their horses and going to their homes for the season. He makes a grand entrance, as the nation’s father, coming to address his people on the very night before the birth of Christ, like a fat lame herald angel, to tell them how Christ is to be served by them, here on earth. Everyone knows that this is to be a great statement of the king’s belief, perhaps the last that he ever makes, and that whether they agree or not, they had better be there. The kingdom knows what I believe – they have read the liturgy that I translated with Thomas Cranmer. They see me as temperate, traditional, but with a focus on personal belief, personal prayer. Some may suspect me of leaning towards reform but everything I have publicly authored has been approved by the king and cannot be heretical. They have seen Stephen Gardiner’s beliefs in the uncompromising King’s Book, which defines hundreds of true believers as heretics, so they feel the tide is against reform. But always, until now, they have had to guess at the king’s beliefs. He has written books and banned them, he has given people the Bible and taken it away again, he has told them that he is the Supreme Head of the church, but never before has he told them what he believes. Never before has the king gone to his parliament in person, and told them directly what they are to think about God.

Men are moved to tears. The crowds outside, gathered to see the great procession led by the huge king, stand with their heads uncovered as some climb up to peer in through the open windows of Westminster Hall and then shout down what the king, seated like a mountain on his throne under the golden cloth of estate, has pronounced. People are desperate to know if he will be like a German prince and pronounce for reform of the church, or whether he will be like the French king and the Spanish emperor and defend the old ways of the old church and ally with the pope.

‘It’s bad,’ Anne Seymour says to me shortly. ‘We’ve lost.’ She is first into my rooms with the news. Her husband, Edward, stood beside the king, his face impassive as the king complained bitterly to his commons that they mangled the Word of God in taverns and took His name in vain. As soon as they got back from parliament Edward came straight to his wife and muttered his report to her.

‘It’s very bad for those who think as we do. The king is moving back to the old ways. It will be the Catholic church as it was, everything is to be restored, and there are some who say that he will join in communion with the Greek Church.’

‘Greek?’ I say blankly. ‘What has the Greek Church to do with England?

She looks at me as if my husband is as ineffable as God himself. ‘Anyone but Protestants,’ she says bitterly. ‘That’s what he means. Anyone but reformers. He told parliament that he is tired of the constant debate and the questioning of the Bible. He is tired of the gospellers. He is tired of all the thinking and writing and publishing. Of course, he fears that people will question him next. He told them that he had given them the Bible only for men to read to their own families. They are not to discuss it.’

‘The Bible is only for men?’

She nods. ‘He says that it is for him to judge between truth and error. They are not to think, they are merely to read aloud to their household and children.’

I bow my head under this insult to God-given intelligence.

‘But then – just when you think that he is going back to papistry – he says that he is going to pull down all the chantries, and take their lands.’

This makes no sense. ‘Destroy the chantries and abolish Masses for the dead?’

‘He says it is nothing but a hollow superstition. He says that there is no purgatory and so no need for Masses for the dead and so no need for chantries.’

‘He says that there is no purgatory?’

‘He says it has been a way for the old church to make money from the innocent people.’

‘He’s right!’

‘But at the same time the service of the Mass is to be unchanged, with all the bobbing and bowing and ducking. And the bread and wine is to be regarded as the true body and blood. And it is heresy to question this.’

I look at her with a sort of despair. ‘What does your husband think that the king actually believes? In his heart?’

She shrugs. ‘Nobody knows. It is half Lutheranism and half Catholic, it is papist with the king as pope, it is Lutheranism with the king as Luther. It has become a religion quite of his own making. That’s why he has to keep explaining it to us. And so heresy, too, is what he says it is. We are all of us – papists and Protestants, Lutherans and gospellers alike – in danger.’

‘But what does he believe? Anne, we have to know. What does the king believe?’

‘All sorts of things, all at once.’