The Taming of the Queen

He opens his eyes. Now he is completely wide awake, as if he was never drowsy. ‘It never took time for me before,’ he says. ‘I have three children, as you see, from three different mothers. And there were others, of course. They all conceived at once, within the first months. I am potent, royally potent.’

‘Indeed.’ I can feel my anxiety rising. This sounds like a trap, but I cannot see how to avoid it. ‘I see it.’

‘So it must be some fault in you,’ he says pleasantly enough. ‘What do you think?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Lord Latimer was not capable, so I never expected a child from him, and when I married my first husband I was too young, and we were hardly ever together.’ Pointless to say that you, my third husband, the king, are an old man, sick as a fat dog, rarely potent, probably sterile, and that the wives that you now remember as so readily fertile were the wives of your youth, the first three, and now they are all dead: one was beheaded by you, two died of your neglect. They miscarried time after time, except the third, the one who died in her first childbed.

‘Do you think that God does not smile on our marriage? Since he gives you no child, you must think that.’

The king’s God sent him one dead baby after another in his first marriage until the king realised that God was not smiling A tiny squirm of protest turns in my mind. It is such blasphemy to call in God when the truth is something that we simply don’t understand. I cannot have God in this conversation as a witness against me. God should not bear witness against yet another of Henry’s wives. I think God Himself would be unwilling to argue that Kateryn Parr should be put aside. I feel my temper silently rise.

‘Who can doubt His blessing?’ I assert boldly, gripping my hands on the arms of the chair, nerving myself to go on. ‘Since you are so well and so strong and so potent, and we have had so many happy months together? Two and a half years of success? Your capture of Boulogne and the defeat of the Scots? Our happiness with your children? Who can doubt that God smiles on you, a king like you? He must smile on your marriage too? A marriage of your own choice when you honoured me with your favour. Who can doubt that God smiled on me when you chose me, and when you persuaded me, against my own humility, that I might become your wife? We cannot doubt that God loves you and inspires you. We cannot doubt that you have His favour.’

I have saved myself. I see the pleased smile spread across his face as he relaxes into sleep. ‘You are right,’ he says. ‘Of course. And a child born to you must follow. God’s blessing is on me. He knows that I have only ever done the right thing.’

The doctor, Sir William Butts, does not come back to court as he promised. He died of his fever, far away from the court, and we don’t even hear of it until after Christmas. The king says that no-one else understands his constitution, no-one else can keep him well as Doctor Butts could do. He feels that it was wrong and selfish of the doctor to leave court so abruptly and die in such inconsiderate haste. He takes the draughts that Doctor Wendy prepares for him, he keeps him at his bedside night and day, but he complains that he will never be well now that Doctor Butts is not there to soothe his temper and diminish his fever.

‘And we have lost a good friend and an advisor,’ Anne Seymour remarks to me and to Catherine Brandon. ‘Doctor Butts would often ask the king to ignore a piece of gossip against a Lutheran, or to release a preacher. He never declared his own opinions, but he often asked the king to be merciful. He was a good man to have at the king’s side.’

‘Especially when the king was in pain and angry,’ Catherine agrees. ‘My husband used to say that Doctor Butts could soothe the king when no-one else could do it. And he was a most honest believer in reform.’ She smooths out her skirt and admires the shine on the satin. ‘But still we make progress, Anne. The king has asked Thomas Cranmer to make a list of old superstitions in the church that should be banned.’

‘How do you know? What has he told you?’ Anne asks. I hear the hostility in her voice and remember that she is always anxious about someone who might rise in prestige and diminish her, or her husband.

Catherine is trying to manage a difficult relationship with the king: constantly at his side, his favourite flirt, ignored as a councillor but relished as a partner at cards. This is a path that many have trod before her: four ladies-in-waiting have become queen – I am only the most recent. Now Catherine is the most favoured lady at court, and Anne Seymour, who never ceases to measure her husband’s prestige as the uncle of the prince, is painfully jealous. Surely, the danger is to me, but Anne thinks only of herself.