The Taming of the Queen

‘I want you to frighten them with my wealth,’ Henry says. He is smiling now but completely serious. ‘Everything that you do, every chain that you wear will be noted and reported back to Spain. I want them to know that we are rich beyond anything they could imagine, quite rich enough to make war with France, rich enough to bend Scotland to our will.’

‘And are we?’ I ask so quietly that not even Denny at the table, bent over the scratching of his quill, can hear me.

‘No,’ Henry says. ‘But we have to be like masquers, like troubadours. We have to have dazzling rags. Kingship and warfare are mostly appearance.’

I put on a great show. ‘Magpie queen,’ Nan remarks as I let them load chain after chain on my waist and put diamonds and rubies on my fingers and at my neck.

‘Too rory?’ I ask, looking in the mirror and smiling at her horrified face.

‘Speak English!’ she commands me. ‘Not your rough country tongue! No, it’s not too much. Not if he told you to load on the jewels. He’ll want an alliance with Spain so that he can go to war with France. Your task is to make it look as if England can afford a war with France. You’ve got an army’s pay on your fingers alone.’

She steps back and scans me from head to foot. ‘Beautiful,’ she says. ‘The most beautiful of all the queens.’

My stepdaughter Margaret Latimer comes towards me with the little box in her hands. ‘The crown,’ she says, awed.

I nerve myself to be unmoved as Nan opens it up, takes out the Boleyn crown and turns to me. I straighten up to take the weight of it and look at myself in the mirror. The beaten silver looking-glass shows me a grey-eyed beauty with bronze hair and a long neck, with diamonds at her ears and rubies at her throat, and this ugly heavy sparkling little crown making her taller still. I think I look like a ghost queen, a queen in darkness, a queen at the top of a dark tower. I could be any one of my predecessors, favoured like one of them, doomed like them all.

‘You could wear your golden hood,’ Nan offers.

I stand, my head poised. ‘Of course I’ll wear the crown,’ I say flatly. ‘I’m queen. At any rate, I’m today’s queen.’

I wear it all evening. I take it off only when the dazzled duke begs us to dance and then Nan fetches my hood. It is a successful evening; everything goes just as the king commanded. The young men are charming and loud and cheerful, the ladies are reserved and beautiful. Lady Mary speaks Spanish to the duke and to her ambassador but is every inch an English princess, and I feel that I have taken another step closer to being the wife that the king needs – one that can deputise for him, one that can rule.

The king requires that I move my bed to be nearer to him while he is sleepless with pain at night, and my household transfers my beautiful bed with the four great posts and the embroidered canopy to a withdrawing room off the king’s own bedroom. With it go my table and chair, and my prie-dieu. With a silent gesture I command that my box of books and my writing box with my manuscripts, my studies, and my translation of the Fisher psalms stay in the queen’s apartments. Although I read nothing but what is approved by the king and his Privy Council, I don’t really want to draw attention to my growing library of theological books or have everyone know that my principal interest is the teachings of the early church, and the call for reform of the abuses of recent years. This seems to me the one thing that a scholar of our time should study; it is the central question of our days. All the great men are reviewing how the church has strayed from its early simplicity and piety, all the discussions and writings are about finding the true way, the authentic way to Christ, whether that is inside the Church of Rome or alongside it. They are translating the documents that tell us how the earliest church was organised, and they keep finding histories and gospels that suggest ways that a holy life can be lived in the world, that show how earthly powers should sit alongside the church. I believe that the king was completely right when he transferred the leadership of the church in England to himself. It must be right that a king rules his lands, church buildings and all. There cannot be one law for the people and one for the clergy. Surely, the church must command the spiritual realm, the holy things of God; the king must command the earthly things. Who could argue against that?