The Taming of the Queen

‘Sit,’ the king commands me. ‘Sit beside me.’

I swallow down disgust as a page brings a chair to me. The king is on his great strengthened seat, his wounded leg supported on a footstool, draped in sheets to try to contain the smell, to try to hide that the King of England is slowly rotting away.

‘I am going to name my heirs,’ he says quietly. ‘Before I go to France.’

Now I understand what the councillors were arguing about. It is essential that I betray neither hope nor fear for Lady Mary and Lady Elizabeth. It is essential that I do not show my own interest. I don’t doubt that the courtiers who just left the room were advocating their own candidates – Edward Seymour reminding everyone of the primacy of his nephew the prince, Thomas Howard advocating for the inheritance of Lady Elizabeth, Bishop Gardiner and Thomas Wriothesley pushing for the elevation of Lady Mary to be heir after Edward.

They don’t know how moderate she is in her religion, how interested in open and thoughtful discussion. They don’t know that she is a scholar and that we are talking about a new translation of the gospels. They don’t know that Lady Elizabeth has now read every single one of Bishop Fisher’s psalms and even translated lines under my supervision. They don’t think of either young woman as anything but an empty figurehead for their supporters. They don’t realise that we are all women with minds of our own. Bishop Gardiner thinks that if Lady Mary ever comes to the throne she will take the country back to Rome at his bidding. Thomas Howard thinks that a Howard girl will deliver the ruling of the country to his family. None of them believes I am a serious power at court. They don’t consider me to be a thinking woman. Yet I may be regent, and then it will be I who will rule whether the country will hear Mass in English or Latin, and I shall determine what the priests say in their sermons.

‘My lord? What is your wish?’

‘What d’you think would be right?’ he asks me.

‘I think that there is no need for a king as strong and as young as you to trouble himself at all,’ I flatter him.

He gestures to his leg. ‘I am half a man,’ he says bitterly.

‘You will get better. You will be riding again. You have the health and strength of a man half your age. You always recover. You have this terrible wound and you live with it, you defeat it. I see you conquer it like an enemy, day after day.’

He is pleased. ‘They don’t think that.’ He nods irritably towards the door. ‘They are thinking of my death.’

‘They think only of themselves,’ I say, condemning them generally in order to maintain my own position. ‘What do they want?’

‘They want their own kin to have preference,’ he says shortly. ‘Or their candidate. And they all hope to rule the kingdom by ruling Edward.’

Slowly I nod, as if the naked ambition of the courtiers is a sad revelation to me. ‘And what do you think, my lord? Nothing matters more than what you think is right.’

He shifts his seat and winces with the pain. He leans a little closer. ‘I have been watching you,’ he says.

His words ring in my head like a warning bell. He has been watching me. What has he seen? The rolled manuscript of psalms going to the copyist? The mornings of study with the two princesses? My recurring nightmare of closed doors at the top of a damp stair? My erotic daydreams of Thomas? Can I have spoken in my sleep? Can I have said his name? Have I been such a fool as to lie beside the king and breathe the name of another man?

I swallow on a dry throat. ‘Have you, my lord?’

He nods. ‘I have been watching how you spend time with Lady Elizabeth, how you are always a good friend to Lady Mary. I see how they enjoy each other’s company, how you have brought them both into your rooms and how they are blooming under your care.’

I nod, but I don’t dare to speak. I don’t yet know what he is thinking.

‘I have seen you with my son, Edward. I am told that you send each other notes in Latin in which he says he is your schoolmaster.’

‘It is a jest,’ I say, still smiling. ‘Nothing more.’ I cannot tell from his grim expression whether he is pleased with this intimacy or whether he suspects me of deploying his children to further my own ends, like the courtiers. I don’t know what to say.

‘You have made a family out of three children with three very different mothers,’ he says. Still, I cannot be sure if this is a good or a bad thing to have done. ‘You have taken the son of an angel and the daughter of a whore and the daughter of a Spanish princess and brought them together.’

‘They are all the children of one great father,’ I remind him faintly.

His hand shoots out as if he is slapping a fly and grabs my wrist too quickly for me to flinch. ‘You are certain?’ he asks. ‘You are certain of Elizabeth?’

I can almost smell my fear over the stink of the wound. I think of her mother, Anne Boleyn, sweating at the May Day joust, knowing her danger but not knowing what form it would take. ‘Certain?’