The Taming of the Queen

‘Your clocks,’ Nan says with a small smile at me. ‘You’re the first queen to love clocks. All the goldsmiths and clockmakers in London are in heaven.’

The court is to go on progress, as it does every summer. I cannot imagine how we are to pack up everything and move, every week, sometimes after only a few days, from one house to another, where all our servants will be expected to unload furniture, tapestries and silverware and make a court in a new house. How am I to know what clothes to pack? How am I to know what jewels I should take? I don’t even know how they take enough linen for the beds.

‘It’s nothing for you to trouble yourself about,’ Nan says. ‘Really, nothing. All the servants have moved the queen’s household a score of times, a hundred times. All you have to do is to ride beside the king and look happy.’

‘But all the bedding! And all the clothes!’ I exclaim.

‘Everyone knows their part,’ she repeats. ‘You need do nothing but go where you are sent.’

‘My birds?’

‘The falconers will take care of them. They’ll go in their own cart behind the falcons and hawks.’

‘My jewels?’ I ask.

‘I take care of them,’ she says. ‘I’ve done this for years, Kat, honestly. All you have to do is to ride beside the king if he wants you there, and look beautiful.’

‘And if he doesn’t want me?’

‘Then you ride with your companions and your master of horse.’

‘I don’t even have a master of horse yet, I haven’t filled all my household posts.’

‘We’ll appoint them as we travel. It’s not for lack of applicants! All the clerks will travel with us, and most of the court. The Privy Council meets wherever the king happens to be, it’s not like we are leaving court, we take everything with us.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘Oatlands first,’ she says with satisfaction. ‘I think it is one of the best palaces, on the river, newly built, as beautiful as any of them. You’ll love it there, and the bedrooms aren’t haunted!’

OATLANDS PALACE, SURREY, SUMMER 1543

Nan is completely right: the court breaks itself up and reforms with practised ease, and I love my rooms in Oatlands Palace. It was built on the river near Weybridge to be a honeymoon palace for Anne of Cleves, so Nan cannot truly claim that it is not haunted. Anne of Cleves’ sorrow and disappointment are in every courtyard. Her maid-in-waiting Katherine Howard was triumphantly married to the king, here in the chapel; I imagine he chased her, panting endearments, limping as fast as he could go through the beautiful gardens.

The palace was built with the stone of the abbey at Chertsey, every beautiful sandstone block pulled down from where it was dedicated to God to stand forever. The tears of the faithful must have fallen in the mortar; but nobody thinks of that now. It is a huge sunny palace, near to the river, designed like a castle with a tower at each corner and a huge courtyard inside. My rooms look towards the south and they are sunny and light. The king’s rooms adjoin them, and he warns me that he can walk in at any time to see what I am doing.

Over the next few days Nan and I draw up the list of posts in my household and start to fill them with the king’s choices, with our friends and family and then, when we have satisfied everyone who has a claim on me, with those whose careers we want to advance. I look at the list prepared by Nan and her friends who support the religious reforms. Giving them a place as my household officials at court and in my rooms as my companions strengthens their numbers at the very moment that they are losing the king’s support.

He has approved the publication of a statement of doctrine called The King’s Book, which tells people that they have to make confession and believe in the miracle of the Mass. The wine becomes blood, the bread becomes flesh – the king says it is so, and everyone must believe. He has taken away the great English Bible from every church in every parish and only the rich and the noble are allowed to read the Bible in English, and they can only do so at home. The poor and the uneducated are as far from the Word of God as if they were in Ethiop.

‘I want some scholarly ladies,’ I say to Nan, almost shyly. ‘I always felt that I should have read more and studied more. I want to improve my French and Latin. I want to have companions who will study with me.’

‘Certainly you can hire tutors,’ she says. ‘They’re as easy to get as parakeets. And you could have an afternoon sermon preached every day, Katherine of Aragon did. You have a range of opinion in your rooms already. Catherine Brandon is a reformer, while Lady Mary is probably secretly faithful to Rome. Of course she would never deny that her father is Supreme Head of the church,’ Nan lifts a warning finger to me, ‘everyone has to be very, very careful what they say. But now that the king is restoring the rituals that he banned, and taking away the English Bible that he gave to his people, Lady Mary hopes that he will go further and reconcile with the pope.’