The Taming of the Queen

He just looks at me. We both know what will happen then.

‘What will happen to us?’ he asks miserably.

To my surprise, the king comes to my rooms with the gentlemen of his household and some of the Privy Council to escort us in to dinner. It has been a long time since the king was well enough to lead me in to dine. They come in noisily as if celebrating his return to court. He cannot walk, he cannot even stand on his ulcerated leg, but comes in his wheeled chair with his thickly bandaged leg extended before him. He is laughing at this, as if it were a temporary injury from jousting or hunting, and the court takes its cue from him, and laughs too, as if we expect to see him dancing tomorrow or the day after. Catherine Brandon says she will commission a rival chair and there can be a chair joust with the king in the lists, and he swears it must be done and we shall have chair jousting tomorrow. Will Somers dances before him as he is wheeled into the room, pretends to fall and be run over by the inexorable progress of the huge chair and the massive man half reclining inside it.

‘Moloch! I have been run over by Moloch!’ Will mourns.

‘Will, if I had run you over, you wouldn’t be here to shout about it,’ the king warns him. ‘Keep away from the wheels, Fool.’

Will responds with a somersaulting dive that throws him out of the way just in time. My ladies shriek a warning and laugh as if it is extraordinarily funny. We are all on edge, all anxious to keep the king in his sunny mood.

‘I swear I will mow you down in my chariot,’ Henry shouts.

‘Can’t catch me,’ Will replies cheekily, and at once Henry bellows at the two pages, sweating behind the handles of the chair, that they must pursue Will around my presence chamber as he dances and leaps, balancing on benches, springing up to the window seat, darting round my ladies, snatching them by the waist and spinning them round so the king charges at them and not him, sending them screaming and giggling out of the way. It is a romp with everyone running in one direction or another and Henry at the centre of it all, red-faced, bellowing with laughter and shouting, ‘Faster! Faster!’ At the end, Will collapses in a heap and snatches up a piece of white embroidery above his head, waving it in a sign of surrender.

‘You are Helios,’ he tells Henry. ‘And I am just a little cloud.’

‘You are a great Fool,’ Henry says affectionately, ‘and you have disrupted my wife’s rooms, frightened her ladies and caused endless confusion with your folly.’

‘We are a pair of young fools,’ Will says, smiling up at his master. ‘As foolish as we were when we were twenty. But at least Your Majesty is wiser than you were then.’

‘How so?’

‘You are more wise and more kingly. You are more handsome and more brave.’

Henry smiles, anticipating the joke. ‘I am indeed.’

‘Your Majesty, there is more of you altogether,’ Will crows. ‘Much more. The queen has more of a husband than most women.’

Henry bellows his deep-throated laugh and loses his breath in coughing. ‘You are a varlet; go and get your dinner with the hounds in the kitchen.’

Will bows gracefully and retires out of the way. As he passes me I catch a quick smile from him, almost as if he was acknowledging to me that he has done his best; all I have to do is to get through dinner. Not for the first time, I wonder how much of a fool Will Somers can be: a long-term survivor of this knife-edge court.

‘Shall we go in to dinner?’ the king asks me.

I smile and curtsey, and we proceed, a strange awkward procession, headed by the king in his chair and the panting pages, with me walking beside my husband, my hand on his, resting on the arm of his chair, while he wheezes, sweat pouring from his huge body, staining the armpits of his gold silk jacket and soaking his collar, and I wonder how long this can go on.

‘Did you have a sermon this afternoon?’ he asks courteously as the server pours water from a golden jug over his hands and another pats his fingers dry with a white linen napkin.

‘Yes,’ I say holding out my hands for fresh scented water. ‘We had Your Majesty’s chaplain talk to us about grace. It was very interesting, very thought-provoking.’

‘Nothing too wild,’ the king says with an indulgent smile. ‘Nothing that would make young Tom Howard argumentative, I hope. He is released from the Tower but I can’t have him upsetting his father again.’

I smile as if it means nothing to me but an afternoon’s entertainment. ‘Nothing wild at all, Your Majesty. Just the Word of God and a churchman’s understanding of it.’

‘It’s all well and good in your rooms,’ he says, suddenly irritable. ‘But they can’t go on discussing it in the streets and the taprooms. It’s one thing for scholars to debate, it’s quite another when it’s some girl from a farm and some fool of an apprentice trying to read and wrestle with ideas.’