Henry tucks my hand under his elbow and leans on his page on the other side as we walk to his privy chamber. Behind us come the rest of the court, the king’s noblemen and my ladies. Somewhere among them is Thomas Seymour; I don’t glance round. I think that God will hold me to my resolution. I will not glance round.
We walk through the presence chamber and most of the court wait there, only a few of us going inwards to the privy chamber, where a great table has been pulled into the centre of the room, spread with charts weighted down with little astrological symbols made of gold. Nicholas Kratzer, his blue eyes twinkling, is waiting for us, holding a long pointer in one hand and rolling a couple of the little gold figures in the other. He bows low when he sees us and then waits for the king to command him.
‘Good, I see you are prepared. I am come to listen to you. Tell me what you think.’ The king approaches the table and leans heavily on it.
‘Am I right in thinking that you are in alliance with Spain for this war against France?’ the astronomer asks.
Henry nods.
‘Even I know that!’ Will Somers interrupts from under the table. ‘If that’s a prediction I could have done it myself. And I could have found it in the bottom of a mug of ale in any taproom outside the Tower. I don’t need to look at stars. Just give me the price of a jug of ale and I’ll make another prediction.’
The astronomer smiles at the king, not at all disturbed by the Fool. Behind us I see that a few of the courtiers have come in. Thomas is not among them. The door shuts. Perhaps he is waiting outside in the presence chamber, perhaps he has gone to his own rooms or to the stables to see his horses. I suppose that he is avoiding me for our safety. I wish I could be sure of that. I cannot help but fear that he has lost his desire for me, and that he is keeping out of my way to spare us both the embarrassment of a love that is dead and gone.
‘So I shall show you first the chart of the Emperor of Spain, your ally,’ Nicholas Kratzer says. He draws one chart forward and shows how the emperor’s fortune is coming into the ascendancy this autumn.
‘And here is the chart for the French king.’
There is a murmur of interest as the chart shows clearly that Francis of France is moving into a time of weakness and disorganisation.
‘This is promising,’ Henry says, pleased. He glances at me. ‘Don’t you think so?’
I was not listening, but now I look alert and interested. ‘Oh, yes.’
‘And this is a chart for Your Majesty.’ Nicholas Kratzer points to the most complex chart of them all. The signs for Mars: the dogs of war, the spear, the arrow, the tower, are all drawn and beautifully coloured around the king’s chart.
‘See that?’ The king nudges me. ‘Warlike, isn’t it?’
‘Mars is rising in your house,’ the astronomer says. ‘I have seldom seen more puissance in any man.’
‘Yes, yes.’ The king approves. ‘I knew it. You see it in the stars?’
‘Absolutely. But therein lies the danger—’
‘What danger?’
‘The symbol for Mars is also the symbol for pain, for heat in the blood, pain in the legs. I fear for Your Majesty’s health.’
There is a muted murmur of agreement. We all fear for the king’s health. He thinks he can ride to war like a boy when he cannot even walk to dinner without support on either side.
‘I’m better,’ the king says flatly.
The astronomer nods. ‘Certainly the auguries are good for you,’ he says. ‘If the physicians can keep the heat from your old wound. But, Your Majesty, remember it was a weapon’s wound, and like a war wound it waxes and wanes with Mars.’
‘Then it is bound to trouble me a little when I go to war,’ the king says stoutly. ‘By your own reading, Astronomer. By your own signs.’
I give him a little smile. The king’s stubborn courage is one of the finest things about him.
The astronomer bows. ‘That would certainly be my reading of the chart.’
‘And shall we get as far as Paris?’
This is a dangerous question. The court, the whole country, is anxious that the king shall not attempt to go too deep into France. But nobody dares to tell him so.
‘You shall go as far as you wish,’ the astronomer says cleverly. ‘A general such as yourself, who has fought over this very ground before, shall be the best one to judge what should be attempted when you see the opposition, the ground, the weather, the temper of your men. I would advise that you don’t overreach what your army can do. But what might a king such as you do with them? Not even the stars can answer that.’
The king is pleased. He nods to his page, who gives Master Kratzer a heavy purse. Everyone tries not to look at it and estimate its worth.
‘And what of Venus?’ the king asks with heavy humour. ‘What of my love for the queen?’
I am so glad that Thomas is not in the room, hearing this. Whatever he thinks of me now I would not have him see the king rest his heavy hand on my shoulder, and stroke my neck as if I am his mare, his hound. I would not want Thomas Seymour to see the king lick his little lips and my tolerant smile.
‘The queen was born for happiness,’ Kratzer states.
I turn to him in surprise. I’ve never thought such a thing. I was raised to assist my family to greatness, perhaps God has called me to help England stay true to the reformed faith, but I never thought I was born for happiness. My life was never planned with my happiness as its goal. ‘D’you think so?’
He nods. ‘I looked at the stars at the time of your birth,’ he says. ‘And it was clear to me that you would marry several times and find happiness at the end.’
‘You saw that?’
‘He saw true happiness in your third marriage,’ the king explains.
I show him my prettiest smile. ‘Anyone can see happiness in it.’
‘Again,’ Will intones wearily from under the table, ‘I could have predicted all of this, and then I could have had that heavy purse. Are we now to observe that the divine Katerina is happy?’
‘Kick him,’ Henry advises me, and the court laughs when I pretend to swing a foot and Will bounds out, howling like a dog and holding his buttocks.
‘The queen was destined to marry for love,’ Kratzer says as Will limps to the side of the room. ‘In spirit, and in person, she is formed and destined to love deeply and well.’ He looks solemn. ‘And alas, I think she will pay a great price for her love.’
‘You mean that she has had to take great office, she has to undertake great duties for her love?’ the king asks gently.
The astronomer frowns slightly. ‘I am afraid that love may lead her into grave danger.’
‘She is Queen of England for love of her husband,’ Henry says. ‘That is the greatest and the most dangerous place for any woman in the country. Everyone envies her, and our enemies would see her humbled. But my love for her, and my power, will defend her.’
There is a silence as many people are genuinely moved by the king’s words of devotion. He takes my hand to his mouth and kisses it and I too am deeply touched that he should love me, and declare it so publicly. Then some sycophantic courtier exclaims, ‘Hurrah!’ and the moment is broken. The king opens his arms to me and I step into his warm embrace, and as his big fat head comes down I press my lips to his damp cheek. He lets me go and I turn away from the table and the astronomer. Nan is at my side.
‘Ask the king’s astronomer to draw my chart and bring it when I send for him,’ I say to her. ‘Tell him to keep it private and discuss it with no-one but me.’
‘Are you interested in the love or the danger?’ she asks sharply.
I look at her blandly. ‘Oh, in both, I suppose.’
WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON, SUMMER 1544
The astronomer’s predictions convince the king that he should start for France while Mars is high in his chart. The physicians strap up his wound and give him drugs that ease the pain and keep him as elated as a young man drunk at his first joust. The Privy Counci
l surrenders to the king’s enthusiasm and comes to Whitehall Palace to see him set sail in the royal barge to go down-river to Gravesend, and from there to ride to Dover. He will cross the Narrow Seas to meet the Spanish emperor and decide on the pincer attack of their two armies on Paris.
The king’s rooms at Whitehall are filled with maps and lists of equipment that need to be assembled and the goods that must be sent out after him. Already, the army in France is complaining that they have not enough powder and shot; already we are robbing the Scots border forces to supply the invasion of France. Once a day, every day without fail, the king remarks that the only man who could organise a war was Cardinal Wolsey and that the people who tormented that great almoner should go down to hell themselves for robbing England of such a treasure. Sometimes he stumbles on the name and curses everyone for robbing him of Thomas Cromwell. It makes us all oddly uneasy, as if the red-robed cardinal might be summoned from the grave by his old master’s need, the fur-robed councillor come quietly behind him; as if the king can recall the beheaded and press them into service once again.
My ladies and I are all sewing standards and rolling strips of linen for bandages. I am embroidering the king’s thick jacket with Tudor roses and gold fleurs-de-lys when the door opens and half a dozen noblemen walk in with Thomas Seymour at their head, his handsome face quite impassive.
I realise that I am staring at him completely aghast, my needle suspended. He has not looked at me since we parted as lovers, at dawn more than a year ago, and we swore then that we would never again speak to each other, nor seek each other out. My sense of being called by God has failed to dilute my passion for him though I prayed that it would. I never enter a room without searching for his face. I never see him dance with one of my ladies without hating her for his hand on her waist, for the attentive tilt of his head, for her sluttish flushed face. I never look for him at dinner but somehow he is always at the corner of my eye. Outwardly I am pale and grave; inside, I burn up for him. I wait to see him every day, at Mass, at breakfast, at the hunt. I make sure that no-one ever sees me notice him. No-one can ever tell that I am acutely, passionately aware when he is in the room, bowing to me, or walking across the chamber, or that he has thrown himself casually onto a bench at the window and is talking quietly with Mary Howard. Morning and evening, breakfast and dinner, I keep my face completely impassive as my eyes glide over his dark head and then I look away as if I have not seen him at all.
And now, suddenly, he is here, walking into my rooms as if he could ever be an invited guest, bowing to me, and to the princesses, his hand on his heart, his dark eyes veiled and secretive, as if I have summoned him with the passionate thudding of my pulses, as if he can feel the heat of my skin burning his own, as if I had shouted aloud that he must come to me, that I will die if he does not come to me.
‘I have come, Your Majesty, at the command of the king, who asked me to bring you to him, through the privy garden, on your own.’
I am already on my feet, the precious royal jacket fallen to the floor, the thread whipping out of the needle’s eye as I walk away from it, the needle still in my hand.
‘I’ll bring the princesses,’ I say. I can hardly speak. I cannot breathe.
‘His Majesty said you were to come alone,’ he replies. The tone is courteous, his mouth smiles, but his eyes are cold. ‘I think he has a surprise for you.’
‘I’ll come at once then,’ I say.
I can hardly see the smiling faces of my ladies as Nan silently takes the needle from my hand, Thomas Seymour presents his arm to me, and I put my hand on his and let him draw me from the room and down the broad stone stairs to where the doors to the sunlit gardens stand open.
‘It must be a trap,’ I say in a hushed monotone. ‘Is this a trap?’
He shakes his head at my question, then nods to the guards, who raise their pikes and let us out into the sunshine. ‘No. Just walk.’
‘He means to trap me by sending you to me. He will see . . . I shouldn’t go with you.’
‘The only thing to do is to behave as if nothing is out of the ordinary. You should come, and we should go without delay, taking exactly the time that it always takes to walk through the gardens. Your ladies are watching from your windows, the noblemen will be watching from the king’s windows. We are going to walk along together without pausing, and without looking at each other.’
‘But you never look at me!’ I burst out.
A sharp pinch of my fingers reminds me to keep steadily walking. I think this is like some sort of purgatory. I have to walk beside the man that I adore, match my steps to his, and take no pleasure in it, while my heart hammers against my ribs with all the things that I want to say.
‘Of course I don’t,’ he says.
‘Because you have stopped loving me.’ My voice is very low, strained with pain as I accuse him.
‘Oh, no,’ he says lightly, and turns to me with a smile. He glances up to the king’s rooms and nods to an acquaintance at the oriel window. ‘Because I love you desperately. Because I can’t sleep for thinking of you. Because I burn up with desire for you. Because I dare not look at you, because if I did, every man and woman at court would see all that in my eyes.’
I almost stumble as my knees go weak and I feel a pulse deep in my belly at his words.
‘Walk on!’ he raps out.
‘I thought—’
‘I know what you thought. You thought wrong,’ he says abruptly. ‘Keep walking. Here is His Majesty.’
The king is seated on a great chair they have brought out to the sunny garden, his foot propped on a stool.
‘I can’t tell you . . .’ I whisper.
‘I know,’ he says. ‘We can’t speak.’
‘Can we meet?’
He presents me to the king and bows low. ‘No,’ he says as he steps backwards.
I am to be honoured. The king’s beaming smile tells me that I am to be trusted with a greater post than any queen has held before, except for the greatest: Katherine of Aragon. The king tells me privately in the garden, and then announces to the country, that I am to serve as Regent General. Half of the council are to go with him to France, the other half to stay with me as advisors. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer is to be my principal councillor, and I see how the king balances the advice I shall hear: the next greatest man in my service will be the Lord Chancellor, Thomas Wriothesley, Cranmer’s natural enemy and an increasingly doubtful friend of mine. When he returns from laying waste to Scotland to teach them to welcome our proposals, Edward Seymour will advise me, and Sir William Petre, the quiet soft-spoken king’s Secretary, will serve me too.
This is an extraordinary step to greatness for me. I feel the eyes of the two princesses on me when they learn the news. They will see a woman rule a country, they will see that it is possible. It is one thing to tell them that a woman is capable of judgement and holding power, it is another for them to see their stepmother, a woman of thirty-two years, actually running the kingdom. I fear that I cannot do it, and yet I know that I can. I have watched the king day after day and deplored his changeable opinions and whimsical commands. Even without advisors from both sides of the religious argument, I would choose a moderate middle course. The kingdom must be held to reform but I will have no persecutions. Never will I do as Henry does: suddenly investigate one man, let him tremble with fear and put him under arrest, secretly knowing all the time that he will not be tried. I think there is a sort of madness in the way that my husband exercises power and – though I would never criticise him – I can at least rule in a way that I think has more sense and humanity.
Half of the court are going to war with the king. They all have posts and titles and duties. They are all equipped. The king has a new suit of armour. He has barely worn so much as a breastplate since he fell and injured his leg, but for this campaign his old suit was brought out and hammered into his new broader shape. They had to rivet in extra pieces, they had to strengthen it all round; then he swore it did n
ot suit him and he commissioned an entirely new suit from the armoury at the Tower, where the blacksmiths and armourers are hammering out metal from dawn till midnight, the forges blazing long into the night. As soon as the new suit is completed, in the new huge dimensions necessary to get a breastplate around his massive frame, with widened cuisses to fit his gross thighs, he wants another set. His final choice is Italian designed, trimmed with gilt, etched in black, an enormous amount of beautifully worked metal, a clanking shout of power and wealth.
The grooms have been exercising his horse with great weights strapped to its saddle for weeks so that it can bear up beneath him and carry him safely. It is a horse new to royal service, a heavy courser, with hooves like trenchers and legs like tree trunks. It too has massive armour plates strapped to its neck, head and body. It does not seem possible that this massive king can ride, or that his overloaded horse can bear him, but its great broad hooves make the gangplank shiver as it stamps up the ramp to his barge and Henry kisses my hand on the quayside.
‘Goodbye,’ he says. ‘Just for a little while, beloved. I shall come back to you. Don’t fear for me.’
‘I will fear for you,’ I insist. ‘Promise that you will write to me often to tell me how you are and how you are doing?’
‘I promise,’ he says. ‘I know that I leave the country in safe hands with you as regent.’
It is a great responsibility, the greatest that an Englishman could accept. And to give it to an Englishwoman is greater still. ‘I won’t fail you,’ I say.
He bows his head for my blessing and then, leaning on a page for support and hauling himself upward, he goes up the gangplank. He turns into the royal cabin, I see the door closed on his bulky silhouette, and the guards take up their posts.