The Taming of the Queen

We have finished the business for the morning and the councillors have bowed to me and are gathering up their papers and leaving the room, each with a task to perform, when Elizabeth touches my sleeve and looks up at me.

‘What is it?’ I ask.

‘I want to know how you learned to do this,’ she says shyly.

‘How I learned to do what?’

‘How you learned what you should do. You were not born a princess and yet you know when you should listen, and when you should command, how to make sure that they understand you, how to make sure that they do as they are told. I didn’t know that a woman could do it. I didn’t know that a woman could rule.’

I hesitate before I answer. This is the daughter of a woman who turned England upside down by letting a young king pet her breasts, parlaying lust into influence until she commanded the country. ‘A woman can rule,’ I say quietly. ‘But she has to do it with the guidance of God and using all her sense and wisdom. It’s not enough for a woman to want power, to seek power for its own sake. She has to take the responsibility that comes with it. She has to prepare herself for power and judge wisely. If your father marries you to a king then you may be a queen one day, and you may find that you have to rule. When you do, I hope that you will remember me telling you this – the victory is not to get a woman on the throne, the victory is to get a woman to think like a king, for her to aspire to more than her own greatness, for her to humble herself to serve. Getting a woman into power is not the point – it’s getting a good woman into power who thinks and cares about what she does.’

Gravely, the little girl nods. ‘But you’ll be there,’ she says. ‘You will advise me.’

I smile. ‘Oh, I hope so! I shall be an irritating old lady at your court, who always knows better than everyone else. I shall sit in a corner and complain about your extravagance!’

She laughs at the thought of it and I send her to my ladies to tell them I will come in a moment and we can go hunting.

I don’t tell Elizabeth how much I relish the work of ruling the kingdom. The king’s manner of command is one of sudden ideas, dramatic favours and reversals, sudden countermands. He likes to surprise and keep his Privy Council unsteady with fear of change. He likes to set one man against another, encourage reform and then hint at a return to papacy. He likes to divide the church and the council, to disrupt the parliament.

Without his turbulence, the wheels of the trade of the country, the laws of the country, the laws of the church, go on steadily and well. Even the accusations of heresy among ordinary people – against both papists and Lutherans – are fewer. It is generally known that I am not interested in twisting justice to serve one side or the other. Without the sudden issuing of repressive laws or the banning of books there are no protests, and the preachers who come from London to talk to my ladies while the children listen every morning are moderate and thoughtful. All the talk is about the careful definition of words, not the great passion of loyalty torn between Rome and the king.

I make sure that I write to the king almost daily: bright and cheerful letters in which I praise his valour and courage and ask him for reports of the siege of Boulogne, and tell him that I am certain it must fall soon. I tell him that the children are well and that they miss him, as I do. I write to him as if I were a loving wife, a little heart-sore to be without him, but proud of the courage of her husband, as a great general’s wife should be. It is easy for me to write convincingly. I have discovered that I have a talent for writing, a love of writing.

My book of psalms, beautifully bound, is tucked deep in my locked box of books. I think of it as my treasure, my greatest treasure, one that I have to keep secret. But seeing those words that were first written, and scratched out, and rewritten again in print and bound into a book, I know that I love the process of writing and publishing. To take a thought and work on it, to render it into the clearest form possible, and then to send it out into the world – this is work so precious and so joyful that I am not surprised that men have kept it to themselves.