The next round is played out before the Privy Council and I cannot be there. The doors to the Privy Council room are closed and two yeomen of the guard stand before them at attention, their pikes raised.
‘She’s in there,’ Catherine Brandon mutters to me in an undertone, as we walk past the wood-panelled door on our way to the garden. ‘They took her in this morning.’
‘Alone?’
‘She was arrested with her former husband but she said he was nothing to her and they dismissed him. She’s alone.’
‘They know that she has preached before me?’
‘Of course, and they know it was your instruction to Bishop Bonner that she should be freed last time.’
‘But they don’t fear my influence? He did, then.’
‘It seems your influence has diminished,’ she says flatly.
‘How has my influence diminished?’ I demand. ‘The king still sees me, he still speaks tenderly to me. He commanded me to his bed last night. He promised me gifts. All the signs say that he still loves me.’
She nods. ‘I know he does, but he can do all that and disagree with your faith. Now he agrees with Stephen Gardiner and the Duke of Norfolk and all of the rest of them, Paget and Bonner, Rich and Wriothesley.’
‘But all his other lords are for reform,’ I protest.
‘But they’re not at court,’ she counters. ‘Edward Seymour is either in Scotland or Boulogne. He’s such a reliable commander that he is always away. His success is our disadvantage. Thomas Cranmer is studying at his home. You’re not admitted when the king is ill, and he has been ill for weeks. Doctor Wendy is not an advocate for reform like Doctor Butts was. To keep something before the king, to maintain his interest in it, you have to be in his company, all the time. My husband, Charles, said he always kept at the king’s side because a rival was always ready to take his place. You have to make sure you are beside him, Your Majesty. You have to get into his presence and be there all the time, to put our side of the argument.’
‘I understand. I try. But how can we defend Anne Askew before the Privy Council?’
She offers me her hand as we go down the stairs to the garden.
‘God will defend her,’ she says. ‘If they find her guilty then we will beg the king for a pardon for her. You can take all your ladies in to him, he’ll like that, and we can go on our knees. But we can do nothing for her now, as she faces the Privy Council; only God will have her in His keeping there.’
The Privy Council sits wrangling with the young woman from Lincolnshire all day, as if she, slightly educated and not yet thirty, should take more than a moment of their time to challenge and discredit. Stephen Gardiner Bishop of Winchester, and Edmund Bonner Bishop of London, argue theology with the young woman who has never been inside a university hall; but they cannot demonstrate her mistake.
‘Why would they spend so much time on her?’ I demand. ‘Why not just order her back to her husband, if they want to silence her?’
I am pacing up and down in my room. I can’t sit still to reading or study, but I cannot go and demand that they open those forbidding doors. I cannot leave Anne in there alone with her enemies, my enemies, but equally I cannot rescue her. I dare not go to the king without invitation. I hope to see him before dinner, I hope that he is well enough to come to dinner, and I cannot bear to wait.
There is a noise outside and the guards open the door to my brother and three companions. I whirl round.
‘Brother?’
‘Your Majesty.’ He bows. ‘Sister.’
He hesitates, he can’t speak. Out of the corner of my eye I see my sister, Nan, rise to her feet, as Catherine stretches out a hand to her. Anne Seymour’s eyes widen, her jaw drops, she crosses herself.
The silence seems to stretch for hours. I realise that everyone is looking at me. Slowly I take in my brother’s aghast face, the guards beside him. Slowly, I realise that they all think that he has come to arrest me. I can feel my hands tremble and I clasp them together. If Anne has incriminated me then the Privy Council will have ordered my arrest. It would be like them to send my own brother to take me to the Tower as a way of testing his loyalty, and confirming my fall.
‘What do you want, William? You look very strange! Dear brother, what have you come for?’
As if my words have released a mechanism, the clock on my table strikes three with a silvery chime, William steps inside the room and the guards swing the doors closed behind him.
‘Has the meeting ended?’ My voice is choked.
‘Yes,’ he says shortly.
I see that his face is grave and I put my hand on the back of a chair for support. ‘You look very serious, William.’
‘I don’t have good news.’
‘Tell me quickly.’
‘Anne Askew has been sent to Newgate Prison. They could not persuade her to recant. She will have to stand trial as a heretic.’
The room goes silent and everything seems to melt and swirl before my eyes. I grip the chair back to help me stand, and blink furiously. ‘She would not recant?’
‘They sent for Prince Edward’s tutor to persuade her. But she quoted them verse after verse from the Bible and proved them wrong.’
‘Could you not save her?’ I burst out. ‘William, could you say nothing to save her?’
‘She confounded me,’ he says miserably. ‘She looked me in the face and said that it was a great shame on me that I should advise her, against my own knowledge.’
I gasp. ‘She accused you of thinking as she does? She’s going to name the people who believe as she does?’
He shakes his head. ‘No! No! She was very careful in what she said: meticulous. She named nobody. Not me, not a word against you or your ladies. She accused me of advising her against my own knowledge; but she did not say what my knowledge might be.’
I am ashamed of my next question. ‘Did anyone mention me at all?’
‘They put it to her that she preached in your rooms, and she said so do many preachers of many different beliefs. They tried to get her to name her friends in your rooms.’ Carefully he looks at the floor so no-one can say he exchanged a glance with anyone. ‘She would not. She was stubborn. She would not give any names.
‘It was clear, sister, very clear, that the only thing they wanted from her was proof of your meetings, heretical meetings. They would have released her, then and there, if she had named you as a heretic.’
‘You’re saying that it’s me they want, not her,’ I say quietly through stiff lips.
He nods. ‘It was obvious. Obvious to everyone. She knows.’
I am silent for a moment, trying to push down my fear into my churning belly. I try to be brave, as Anne Boleyn was brave. She protested the innocence of her brother, of her friends. ‘Is there any way we can get her released?’ I ask. ‘Does she have to go to trial? Should I go to the king and tell him that they have wrongly imprisoned her?’
William looks at me as if I have lost my wits. ‘Kat – he knows already. Don’t be stupid. This is not Gardiner running ahead of the king, this is Gardiner doing only what the king wants. The king himself signed the warrant for her arrest, approved her being sent for trial, ordered that she be held at Newgate until she is tried. He will have prepared an instruction for the jury. He will have decided already.’
‘A jury should be independent!’
‘But it is not. He’ll tell them what verdict to bring in. But she’ll have to stand trial. Her only safety would be to recant at her trial.’
‘I don’t think she’ll do that.’
‘Neither do I.’
‘What will happen then?’
He just looks at me. We both know what will happen then.
‘What will happen to us?’ he asks miserably.
To my surprise, the king comes to my rooms with the gentlemen of his household and some of the Privy Council to escort us in to dinner. It has been a long time since the king was well enough to lead me in to dine. They come in noisily as if
celebrating his return to court. He cannot walk, he cannot even stand on his ulcerated leg, but comes in his wheeled chair with his thickly bandaged leg extended before him. He is laughing at this, as if it were a temporary injury from jousting or hunting, and the court takes its cue from him, and laughs too, as if we expect to see him dancing tomorrow or the day after. Catherine Brandon says she will commission a rival chair and there can be a chair joust with the king in the lists, and he swears it must be done and we shall have chair jousting tomorrow. Will Somers dances before him as he is wheeled into the room, pretends to fall and be run over by the inexorable progress of the huge chair and the massive man half reclining inside it.
‘Moloch! I have been run over by Moloch!’ Will mourns.
‘Will, if I had run you over, you wouldn’t be here to shout about it,’ the king warns him. ‘Keep away from the wheels, Fool.’
Will responds with a somersaulting dive that throws him out of the way just in time. My ladies shriek a warning and laugh as if it is extraordinarily funny. We are all on edge, all anxious to keep the king in his sunny mood.
‘I swear I will mow you down in my chariot,’ Henry shouts.
‘Can’t catch me,’ Will replies cheekily, and at once Henry bellows at the two pages, sweating behind the handles of the chair, that they must pursue Will around my presence chamber as he dances and leaps, balancing on benches, springing up to the window seat, darting round my ladies, snatching them by the waist and spinning them round so the king charges at them and not him, sending them screaming and giggling out of the way. It is a romp with everyone running in one direction or another and Henry at the centre of it all, red-faced, bellowing with laughter and shouting, ‘Faster! Faster!’ At the end, Will collapses in a heap and snatches up a piece of white embroidery above his head, waving it in a sign of surrender.
‘You are Helios,’ he tells Henry. ‘And I am just a little cloud.’
‘You are a great Fool,’ Henry says affectionately, ‘and you have disrupted my wife’s rooms, frightened her ladies and caused endless confusion with your folly.’
‘We are a pair of young fools,’ Will says, smiling up at his master. ‘As foolish as we were when we were twenty. But at least Your Majesty is wiser than you were then.’
‘How so?’
‘You are more wise and more kingly. You are more handsome and more brave.’
Henry smiles, anticipating the joke. ‘I am indeed.’
‘Your Majesty, there is more of you altogether,’ Will crows. ‘Much more. The queen has more of a husband than most women.’
Henry bellows his deep-throated laugh and loses his breath in coughing. ‘You are a varlet; go and get your dinner with the hounds in the kitchen.’
Will bows gracefully and retires out of the way. As he passes me I catch a quick smile from him, almost as if he was acknowledging to me that he has done his best; all I have to do is to get through dinner. Not for the first time, I wonder how much of a fool Will Somers can be: a long-term survivor of this knife-edge court.
‘Shall we go in to dinner?’ the king asks me.
I smile and curtsey, and we proceed, a strange awkward procession, headed by the king in his chair and the panting pages, with me walking beside my husband, my hand on his, resting on the arm of his chair, while he wheezes, sweat pouring from his huge body, staining the armpits of his gold silk jacket and soaking his collar, and I wonder how long this can go on.
‘Did you have a sermon this afternoon?’ he asks courteously as the server pours water from a golden jug over his hands and another pats his fingers dry with a white linen napkin.
‘Yes,’ I say holding out my hands for fresh scented water. ‘We had Your Majesty’s chaplain talk to us about grace. It was very interesting, very thought-provoking.’
‘Nothing too wild,’ the king says with an indulgent smile. ‘Nothing that would make young Tom Howard argumentative, I hope. He is released from the Tower but I can’t have him upsetting his father again.’
I smile as if it means nothing to me but an afternoon’s entertainment. ‘Nothing wild at all, Your Majesty. Just the Word of God and a churchman’s understanding of it.’
‘It’s all well and good in your rooms,’ he says, suddenly irritable. ‘But they can’t go on discussing it in the streets and the taprooms. It’s one thing for scholars to debate, it’s quite another when it’s some girl from a farm and some fool of an apprentice trying to read and wrestle with ideas.’
‘I quite agree,’ I say. ‘That is why Your Majesty was so gracious when you gave them a Bible in English, and they so wish they could have it back again. Then they can quietly read and learn. Then they have a chance of understanding. They don’t have to gather to have one recite and another explain.’
He turns his big face towards me. His neck is so thick and his cheeks are so fat that his face is quite square from the white embroidered collar at the neck of his jacket to the sparse fringe of his hair at the top of his forehead. It is like being glared at by a block of stone. ‘No. You misunderstand me,’ he says coldly. ‘I didn’t give them the Bible for that. I don’t think that a farm girl from Lincoln should be reading and learning. I don’t think she should be studying and thinking. I have no desire to advance her understanding. And I am very sure she should not be preaching.’
I swallow a sip of wine. I see that my hand is steady on the glass. On the other side of the king I notice the small downturned face of Stephen Gardiner, ibbling at his dinner and straining his ears to listen.
‘You gave the people the Bible,’I persist. ‘Whether you wish them to keep it in the churches for everyone to read, or whether you want it to be read only reverently and quietly in the better sort of houses, must be your decision. It is your gift, you shall decide where it goes. But there are preachers who have read the words and learned them and understand them better than some of the greatest men in the church. And why is that? For they did not go to college to chop logic, and invent ritual, and pride themselves on their learning; they went to the Bible, to nowhere else and nothing else. It is beautiful. Your Majesty, the piety of simple people is beautiful. And their loyalty to you and their love of you is beautiful as well.’
He is a little mollified. ‘They are loyal? They don’t question me along with the teachings of the church?’
‘They know their father,’ I say firmly. ‘They were brought up in your England, they know that you make the laws that keep them safe, they know that you lead the armies that protect their country, that you plan and direct the ships that keep the seas for them. Of course they love you as their holy father.’
He snorts with laughter. ‘A Holy Father? Like a pope?’
‘Like a pope,’ I say steadily. ‘The pope is nothing more than the Bishop of Rome. He leads the church in Italy. What are you but the greatest of the churchmen in England? You are the Supreme Head of the church, are you not? You sit above every other churchman, do you not? You lead the church in England.’
Henry turns to Gardiner the bishop. ‘Her Majesty has a point,’ he says. ‘Don’t you think?’
Gardiner finds a thin smile. ‘Your Majesty is blessed in a wife who loves scholarly discussion,’ he says. ‘Who would have thought that a woman could reason so? And to a husband who was such a lion of learning? Surely she has tamed you!’
The king commands that I sit with him after dinner and I take this as a mark of his favour. Doctor Wendy prepares a sleeping draught for him as the court stands around him, his great bandaged leg sticking out into the concerned circle. Stephen Gardiner and old Thomas Howard stand on one side, and my ladies and I are opposite, as if we would forcibly drag his chair from one side to the other. For a moment I look at the faces around my husband, the set smiles of the courtiers, the self-conscious charm of everyone, and I realise that everyone is anxious as I, everyone is weary as I am. We are all waiting for the king to put an end to this evening, to release us all for the night. In truth, some of us are waiting for a more lasting peace. Some a
re waiting for him to die.
Whoever wins the battle for the king’s wavering attention now, will win the next reign. Whoever he favours now, will inherit a prime place when Edward comes to the throne. My husband has described these people to me as dogs waiting for his favour, but for the first time I see it for myself, and know that I am one of them. My future depends on his favour just as theirs does, and tonight I cannot be sure that I have it.
‘Is the pain very bad?’ Doctor Wendy asks him quietly.
‘It is unbearable!’ the king snaps. ‘Doctor Butts would never have let it get this bad.’
‘This should help,’ Doctor Wendy says humbly, and proffers a glass.
Sulkily, the king takes it and drinks it down. He turns to a page. ‘Sweetmeats,’ he says abruptly. The lad dashes to the cupboard and brings out a tray of candied fruits, sugared plums, toffee apples, marchpane and pastries. The king takes a handful and crushes them against his rotting teeth.
‘God knows it was merrier in England before every village had a preacher,’ Thomas Howard says, continuing one of his slow thoughts.
‘But every village had a priest,’ I counter. ‘And every priest a tithe, and every church a chantry, and every town a monastery. There was more preaching then, than there is now; but it was done in a language that nobody could understand, at a terrible price for the poor.’
Thomas Howard, slow of wit and bad-tempered, scowls his disagreement. ‘I don’t see what they need to understand,’ he says stubbornly. He looks down at the king and sees the great moon face turn one way then the other. ‘I don’t hold with fools and women setting themselves up as learned,’ the duke says. ‘Like that stupid girl today.’