The Taming of the Queen

  At the stern of the barge, standing behind the steersman, I see Thomas Seymour. He, too, is going to war, and, I know, into far greater danger. As the drum starts to beat and they cast off the ropes, as the oars dip in the water and the barge yields to the pull and glides away from the quayside, the man that I adore exchanges one dark glance with me and then he turns away. I don’t even mouth ‘God bless you’ or ‘Keep safe’. I hold up my hand to wave to the king and then I turn away too.

  HAMPTON COURT PALACE, SUMMER 1544

  It is the most beautiful weather, sunny and bright and hot every day, and I wake alone in my own bed every morning in my rebuilt rooms on the south-east corner of the base court, overlooking the pond gardens facing south, far from ghosts, revelling in the satisfaction of my own company.

  I have the three royal children with me, and every morning I wake to such pleasure in knowing that they are all three under the same roof, that we will pray in the same chapel, that we will eat breakfast in the great hall and spend the day together in study and in play. Edward is living with his sisters for the first time in his lonely little life. I have gathered all three of them around me as no queen has been allowed to do before. I have everything that could make a woman happy, and I am Regent General of England. Everything shall be as I decide, nobody can even argue with me. The children are with me because I say that it shall be so. There is nobody who can take Edward away from this: his family; from me: his stepmother. We will stay here, in the most beautiful of all the English palaces, because it is my choice, and later – when I choose and not before – we will go on a progress of pleasure, hunting and sailing and riding up the Thames valley, myself and the children and those of the court that I want with me.

  I take my seat at the great table in the presence chamber every day and have the Privy Council report to me that the kingdom is at peace and that we are taking in taxes and fines, and we are making enough weapons and armour to keep the king’s army supplied in France. I make it a priority to supply our forces, to make sure that wages, weapons, ammunition, armour, food, even arrowheads, are shipped in the amounts that are needed. I have been compared, to my detriment, to the saintly Jane Seymour ever since I was married; I don’t want to suffer from a comparison to Thomas Wolsey too. I don’t want anyone to say that Katherine of Aragon was a better regent than Kateryn Parr.

  Every morning, after breakfast and before I take the children out hunting, I have a brief meeting of my council to read any dispatches that have come in overnight, either from the king in France or from the troubled Northern lands. If there is work to do, or something that I want to make sure of, I will call them to meet with me again before dinner.

  We gather in one of the grand rooms at Hampton Court, and I have had a table set in the middle, chairs around for the councillors, and a great map of France and the sea roads pinned on the wall. On the opposite wall there is as much of a map of the border lands of the North and of Scotland as can be drawn from the little knowledge that we have of the countryside. I sit at the head of the table and William Petre, the king’s Secretary, reads whatever dispatches have arrived from our armies, and whatever letters or appeals from other parts of the kingdom. As the king is at war with the French there is trouble in most of the towns where Frenchmen have settled, and I have to write to the local lords or even the justices of the peace and command them to be sure that their districts are quiet. A country at war is as nervous as one of my little birds. We have constant reports of spies and invasions, which I judge to be false, and I send the proclamations out to the whole kingdom.

  Next to me, on my right hand, sits Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, a steady and patient advisor and a calm voice, while Lord Thomas Wriothesley tends to be more dramatic and loud. He has good reason for worry. It was Wriothesley who was ordered by the king to declare what funds would be needed for an invasion of France and a march on Paris. After much calculation and many sheets of close-written estimates, he thought it would be about a quarter of a million pounds: a fortune. We have raised that through loans and taxes and by scraping every last gold coin from the royal treasuries, but now we are burning through these funds and it is clear that Wriothesley has underestimated.

  William Petre is a newly-made man, risen on his abilities, the sort that old families like the Howards hate, the son of Devon cattle-farmers. His quiet good sense keeps the meeting steady when some of the other councillors argue for their own causes, or for taxes to be lifted from their home towns. It is Petre who suggests that we make up the shortfall of funds by stripping the lead from all the roofs of the monasteries and selling it. This will make them leak when it rains, and it will complete the ruination of the Roman Catholic church in England. I see that this is good for reform as well as for raising money for the king, but a part of me mourns the loss of the beautiful buildings and the charity and the scholarship that they extended to their communities.

  Often Princess Mary attends a meeting with me, and sometimes I think that it is well that she does, for one day – who knows? – she might have a kingdom of her own to rule. Princess Elizabeth never misses one. She sits a little behind me, her sharp chin on her clenched fists, her dark eyes going from one man to another, observing everything, her cousin Jane Grey beside her.

  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.

  So now I practise my letter writing to my husband. I compose it as I would translate a psalm, by imagining the state of mind of the author that I want to be. When I am writing a translation of a prayer, I always imagine the first author – a man miserably conscious of his own sin. I think myself into his mind and then I write the most beautiful sonorous version of what I think might come from his mouth. Then I bring myself into the work, powerfully aware that I am a woman, not a man. The sins that grieve a man are often those of pride, or greed, or a lust for power for its own sake. But these are not the sins of a woman, I think. These are not my first sins. My worst sin is a failure of obedience: I find it so hard to bend my will. My other great fault is a passion: an adoration as if I were setting up an idol, a false God.

  So writing a love letter to the king is the same as writing a prayer. I create a character to say the words. I pull the page towards me and I think how I would be if I were deeply in love with a man who is setting siege to the town of Boulogne in France. I think, what would his wife say? How would she tell him that she loves him and misses him and that she is glad that he is doing his duty? I think, how would I write to a man that I cannot see, who is so very far from me, who is so careful of my safety that he will not even breathe a kiss to me in farewell, so proud and independent and yet loves me, and wishes he had not left me, would never leave me?

  In my mind, as bright as if it were real, I see Thomas Seymour before the walls of Boulogne and his dark smile as he faces danger and feels no fear. And so I take that sense of love and longing and I write to the king, tenderly and obediently, asking sincerely for his health, promising him truly that I am thinking of him. But running in my mind, at the same time, there is another letter – a shadow letter of words that are never written on paper. I never even scribble his name to clean the nib of ink; I never sketch his crest. I never say the words aloud. I only allow myself, last thing at night before I go to sleep in my empty bed, to think of the letter that I would write to him if I could.

  I would tell him that I love him with a passion that leaves me sleepless. I would tell him that some nights I cannot bear the touch of the sheet on my shoulders, on my breasts, because the cool linen makes me yearn for his skilled warm hand. I would write that I put my palm against my mouth and imagine that I am kissing him. I would write that I lay the flat of my hand against my most private parts and press down, and that the leaping sensation of joy is all his. I would write that without him I am a shell, a hollow crown, that all my true life is stolen away. I would write that my life is like a beautifully carved tomb, an empty space, that I have everything a woman could desire – I am Queen of England – but a beggar woman with her legs and arms wrapped around her husband, and his mouth pressing down on hers, is richer than me.

  I will never write this. I am an author and a queen. I can write only words that everyone can read, that the king’s clerks can read aloud to him before all his courtiers. I write words that can go to London and be published even if no-one knows who wrote them. I will never write, like poor little Queen Kitty: when I think that you shall depart from me again it makes my heart die. The king beheaded her for that silly little love letter. She wrote her own death warrant. I shall never write such a thing.

  The king replies to me, telling me of their progress. He is by turns boastful and wistful, missing his home. The plan to march on Paris was abandoned as soon as he arrived in Calais and was discouraged by the Spanish emperor. They decided that first they should lay siege to the nearby towns. Charles Brandon and Henry take on Boulogne. Thomas Howard Duke of Norfolk continues in his dogged siege of nearby Montreuil. They all demand more powder, more cannon, more shot, and I am to send some miners from Cornwall to dig under the walls of the French towns. I send to the magistrates in Cornwall and demand volunteers, I order cannon to be cast, I have them make powder, I press more and more masons into carving stones for round shot. I summon the Lord Treasurer and ensure that we have enough money coming in to keep the army supplied, and caution him that he may have to go back to parliament to demand another grant. He warns me that the price of lead is falling as we put more and more on the market, and nobody will buy. I receive petitions from everyone who would normally apply to me, and then I meet with everyone who would normally apply to the king. I sit in the king’s presence chamber every day and the steward of my household indicates who may come forward and speak to me. I answer every letter the day that I receive it, I allow no neglected business to overwhelm my household, I draft in clerks from the Privy Council to work alongside my own people, and, without fail, I report every single thing that I do to the king.

  He must know that I am Regent General in every way, neglecting nothing, but I make it clear that he rules through me. He must never think that I have taken power and am ruling for myself. I have to rule like a king and report like a wife. I have to walk this careful line in every word I put on paper, in everything I say that will be reported to him, in every meeting I have with the Privy Council, who are partly men of my household and affinity and partly there in their own interests. None of them can be wholly trusted not to sneak a report that I am greedy for power and doing too much, that I am the worst thing in the world: a woman with the heart and stomach of a man.

  The king writes that he is in good health. They have built a platform for him to survey the siege of Boulogne, and he can climb the steps unaided and walk around without support. His leg has dried up, and the surgeons are keeping the wound safely open, and so he has less pain. He rides out every day on his great horse, with a massive musket laid over the pommel of the saddle, ready to fire on any Frenchman he sees. He goes all around the town and the siege camp to show himself to the men and assure them that he is leading them to victory. He is living the life that he loves, the imaginary life of his fairytale youth – his company are all handsome young men, invoking the chivalric dream of the Knights of the Round Table. He is reliving the campaign that he won as a young man at the Battle of the Spurs, the tents of his household are as beautiful as those that were raised on the Field of the Cloth of Gold. It is as if in his old age he has been given the chance to enjoy the delights of his youth once more: comradeship, token danger, victory.

  They give great dinners every night in which they report skirmishes during the day, drink celebratory toasts, and plan the advance on Paris. Henry is at the heart of the campaign, arm in arm with his reckless friends, and he swears that he will be King of France in name and in deed.

  The king and his minions do not put themselves at risk – the viewing stage is well out of range of Boulogne’s guns. Of course, there is the hazard of illness in the army; but at the first sign of disease Henry will run away and his
court will leave with him. While he is strong enough to ride and walk and dine as he is doing I don’t fear for his health or safety. And every single man in his train knows that he must lay down his life rather than let the king be in danger while his son and heir is a boy of only six in the nursery. The last boy king to take the throne lost our lands in France and his own throne in England. The kingdom cannot be abandoned to a boy with a woman regent.

  So I don’t fear for Henry, nor do I fear for my brother, who is safely at the king’s side. The only one of them, the only man in the whole army who makes me drop my head in desperate prayer, is Thomas Seymour. Now the king has appointed him to the navy and he is commanding the ships that supply the army, constantly at sea in the treacherous Narrow Seas while the French ships mount a blockade, and the Scottish ships harry our fleet, and pirates of every nation cruise under black flags, hopeful of easy pickings. Thomas is on these stormy waters, in these dangerous seas, with the ships of two nations against him, and nobody thinks to tell me – for why would they? – if he is safe, if he is in harbour, or if his ship is at sea. Once a week I insist that the Privy Council are shown on the great map exactly where our army is in France, where the king is camped, where Howard is established, and where our ships are. It’s the only way I can learn if he is safe. But the map is muddled, the king’s army never moves anywhere, nobody is very interested in the ships and the news is old. I have to pretend that I am interested in Boulogne when I am so fearful of the sea.

  The king commands me to consult the royal astronomer as to when the stars are best aligned for his march on Paris. Nicholas Kratzer attends me in my new privy chamber with only my stepdaughter Margaret and Princess Mary and Princess Elizabeth at my side. He bows low to the three of us, and I wonder what he thinks when he sees me, little Kateryn Parr as Regent General of England flanked by two royal princesses.