The Taming of the Queen Read online

  ‘Are his physicians with him?’

  ‘Doctor Butts and Doctor Owen, and his apothecary is making up a draught to ease the pain. But it is very bad this time. I don’t think I have seen him worse.’

  ‘Did he knock it? Has it broken open?’

  She shakes her head. ‘It’s just the same as it always is,’ she says. ‘He has to keep the wound open or the poison will mount to his head and kill him, but often when they pull the wound apart with wires, or grind gold chips into it, it seems worse than before. Now it was healing up and so they have torn it open and the poison is oozing out as it should, but this time it has gone very red inside. It’s swollen up very hot and puffy, and the ulcer seems to be deepening into his leg. Charles told me it is eating its way to the bone. It’s causing him terrible pain, and nothing eases it.’

  I can’t help but be apprehensive. The king in pain is as dangerous as a wounded boar. His temper is as inflamed as his pulsing wound.

  She gives me a gentle touch on my back as she steps aside for me to go first through the adjoining double doors. ‘Go on,’ she says very quietly. ‘You can manage him when no-one else can.’

  Henry is in his privy chamber. He looks up as the private door opens and I come into the room. ‘Ah, thank God, and here is the queen,’ he says. ‘The rest of you can hold your tongues and step back and let me speak privately with her.’

  He is surrounded by men. I see Edward Seymour looking flushed and angry and Bishop Gardiner looking smug. I guess they have been bickering, jostling for a place before the king, even as the doctors put a drain into his leg to draw off poison from the wound, thrusting a sharp metal spoon deep into the raw flesh. No wonder my husband is red as a Lancaster rose, his eyes squeezed into tear-stained slits in the ferocious grimace of his face. Charles Brandon, Catherine’s husband, keeps a cautious distance.

  ‘I am sure that Her Majesty the queen herself will agree . . .’ Bishop Gardiner starts smoothly, and I see Wriothesley nod and come a little closer as if to reinforce a viewpoint.

  ‘The queen will say nothing,’ Henry spits out. ‘She will stand by me and hold my hand and hold her tongue as a good wife should. You will not suggest that she does other. And you will all leave.’

  Promptly, Charles Brandon bows to the king, bows hand on heart to me, nods farewell to his wife and melts away from the king’s brooding presence.

  ‘Of course,’ Edward Seymour says quickly. He looks at me. ‘I am glad that Her Majesty is here to bring comfort and peace. His Majesty should not be troubled at such a time. Especially when matters are perfectly well as they are.’

  ‘Nothing will bring peace to the king but when matters are made perfectly well,’ Bishop Gardiner cannot resist saying. ‘How can His Majesty be at peace when he knows that his Privy Council is constantly disturbed by new men coming and bringing in even newer men with them? When there are constant inquiries into heresy because people keep redefining what heresy is? Because they are allowed to wrangle and dispute without check?’

  ‘I’ll take them out.’ Thomas Howard speaks over the other councillors, directly to the king as if he is his only friend. ‘God knows they will never fall silent – even when they are ordered to be quiet. They will plague you for ever.’ He gives him a wolfish grin. ‘You should behead them all.’

  The king laughs shortly and nods his assent, so Thomas Howard wins the upper hand, ushering the others from the room. He even turns in the doorway and gives the king a friendly wink, as if to assure him that only a Howard can manage such troublesome upstarts. As the door shuts behind them there is a sudden silence. Catherine Brandon curtseys to the king and goes to sit in the window seat, her pretty head turned towards the gardens. Anthony Denny lounges over to stand beside her. There are still half a dozen people in the room but they are quiet and talking amongst themselves or playing a game of cards. By the standards of the overcrowded court, we are alone.

  ‘Dear husband, are you in great pain?’ I ask him.

  He nods. ‘They can do nothing,’ he says furiously. ‘They know nothing.’

  Doctor Butts looks up from a worried consultation with the apothecary as if he knows he will have to take the blame.

  ‘Is it the same trouble? The old wound?’ I ask cautiously.

  The king nods. ‘They say they may have to cauterise it.’ He looks at me as if I can save him. ‘I pray to be spared that.’

  If they cauterise the wound they will put a red-hot brand against it to burn out infection. It is an agony worse than branding a criminal with a ‘T’ for ‘thief ’. It is a merciless cruelty to an innocent man.

  ‘Surely that won’t be necessary?’ I demand of Doctor Butts.

  He shakes his head; he does not know. ‘If we can drain the wound and make sure that it does not close up, then the king may be well again,’ he says. ‘We have always managed before to cleanse it without cauterising. I would not undertake it lightly. His heart . . .’ His voice trails away. I imagine he is terrified at the thought of giving such a shock to Henry’s massive poisoned bulk.

  I take Henry’s hand, and feel his grip tighten. ‘I am afraid of nothing,’ he says defiantly.

  ‘I know,’ I say reassuringly. ‘You are naturally courageous.’

  ‘And this is not caused by age or infirmity. It’s not sickness.’

  ‘It was a wound from jousting, wasn’t it? Years ago?’

  ‘Yes, yes, it was. An injury from sport. A young man’s wound. Reckless, I was reckless. Fearless.’

  ‘And I don’t doubt that you’ll be riding again within a month – still reckless and fearless,’ I say with a smile.

  He draws me closer. ‘You know I have to be able to ride. I have to lead my men to France. I have to get well. I have to get up.’

  ‘I am sure you will,’ I say, the easy lie quickly in my mouth. I am not at all sure that he will. I can see the drain from the wound dripping the vile pus into a bowl on the floor, the stink of it worse than carrion. I can see a great glass jar with black hungry leeches crawling up the sides. I can see the table spread with flagons and bottles and pestles and mortars, and the apothecary desperately stirring draughts, and the worried faces of the two greatest doctors in England. I have nursed a dying husband before, and his bedroom looked like this, but God knows I have never smelled a stink like this before. It is a fog of rotting flesh, like a charnel house.

  ‘Sit,’ the king commands me. ‘Sit beside me.’

  I swallow down disgust as a page brings a chair to me. The king is on his great strengthened seat, his wounded leg supported on a footstool, draped in sheets to try to contain the smell, to try to hide that the King of England is slowly rotting away.

  ‘I am going to name my heirs,’ he says quietly. ‘Before I go to France.’

  Now I understand what the councillors were arguing about. It is essential that I betray neither hope nor fear for Lady Mary and Lady Elizabeth. It is essential that I do not show my own interest. I don’t doubt that the courtiers who just left the room were advocating their own candidates – Edward Seymour reminding everyone of the primacy of his nephew the prince, Thomas Howard advocating for the inheritance of Lady Elizabeth, Bishop Gardiner and Thomas Wriothesley pushing for the elevation of Lady Mary to be heir after Edward.

  They don’t know how moderate she is in her religion, how interested in open and thoughtful discussion. They don’t know that she is a scholar and that we are talking about a new translation of the gospels. They don’t know that Lady Elizabeth has now read every single one of Bishop Fisher’s psalms and even translated lines under my supervision. They don’t think of either young woman as anything but an empty figurehead for their supporters. They don’t realise that we are all women with minds of our own. Bishop Gardiner thinks that if Lady Mary ever comes to the throne she will take the country back to Rome at his bidding. Thomas Howard thinks that a Howard girl will deliver the ruling of the country to his family. None of them believes I am a serious power at court. They don’t consider me to b
e a thinking woman. Yet I may be regent, and then it will be I who will rule whether the country will hear Mass in English or Latin, and I shall determine what the priests say in their sermons.

  ‘My lord? What is your wish?’

  ‘What d’you think would be right?’ he asks me.

  ‘I think that there is no need for a king as strong and as young as you to trouble himself at all,’ I flatter him.

  He gestures to his leg. ‘I am half a man,’ he says bitterly.

  ‘You will get better. You will be riding again. You have the health and strength of a man half your age. You always recover. You have this terrible wound and you live with it, you defeat it. I see you conquer it like an enemy, day after day.’

  He is pleased. ‘They don’t think that.’ He nods irritably towards the door. ‘They are thinking of my death.’

  ‘They think only of themselves,’ I say, condemning them generally in order to maintain my own position. ‘What do they want?’

  ‘They want their own kin to have preference,’ he says shortly. ‘Or their candidate. And they all hope to rule the kingdom by ruling Edward.’

  Slowly I nod, as if the naked ambition of the courtiers is a sad revelation to me. ‘And what do you think, my lord? Nothing matters more than what you think is right.’

  He shifts his seat and winces with the pain. He leans a little closer. ‘I have been watching you,’ he says.

  His words ring in my head like a warning bell. He has been watching me. What has he seen? The rolled manuscript of psalms going to the copyist? The mornings of study with the two princesses? My recurring nightmare of closed doors at the top of a damp stair? My erotic daydreams of Thomas? Can I have spoken in my sleep? Can I have said his name? Have I been such a fool as to lie beside the king and breathe the name of another man?

  I swallow on a dry throat. ‘Have you, my lord?’

  He nods. ‘I have been watching how you spend time with Lady Elizabeth, how you are always a good friend to Lady Mary. I see how they enjoy each other’s company, how you have brought them both into your rooms and how they are blooming under your care.’

  I nod, but I don’t dare to speak. I don’t yet know what he is thinking.

  ‘I have seen you with my son, Edward. I am told that you send each other notes in Latin in which he says he is your schoolmaster.’

  ‘It is a jest,’ I say, still smiling. ‘Nothing more.’ I cannot tell from his grim expression whether he is pleased with this intimacy or whether he suspects me of deploying his children to further my own ends, like the courtiers. I don’t know what to say.

  ‘You have made a family out of three children with three very different mothers,’ he says. Still, I cannot be sure if this is a good or a bad thing to have done. ‘You have taken the son of an angel and the daughter of a whore and the daughter of a Spanish princess and brought them together.’

  ‘They are all the children of one great father,’ I remind him faintly.

  His hand shoots out as if he is slapping a fly and grabs my wrist too quickly for me to flinch. ‘You are certain?’ he asks. ‘You are certain of Elizabeth?’

  I can almost smell my fear over the stink of the wound. I think of her mother, Anne Boleyn, sweating at the May Day joust, knowing her danger but not knowing what form it would take. ‘Certain?’

  ‘You don’t think I was cuckolded?’ he demands. ‘You don’t think she is another man’s child? Do you deny her mother’s guilt? I had her mother beheaded for that guilt.’

  She is the spit of him. Her brassy hair, her white skin, her stubborn little pout of a mouth. But if I deny her mother’s guilt I accuse him of being a wife-killer, a jealous fool who put an innocent woman to death on the gossip of old midwives. ‘Whatever Anne Boleyn did in later years, I believe that Elizabeth is yours,’ I say carefully. ‘She is a little copy of you. She is Tudor through and through.’

  He nods, greedy for reassurance.

  ‘Whatever her dam, nobody could deny her sire,’ I continue.

  ‘You see me in her?’

  ‘Her scholarship alone,’ I say, denying Anne Boleyn’s powerful intelligence and commitment to reform, in order to secure the safety of her daughter. ‘Her love of books and languages – that’s all you.’

  ‘And you say that, who see my children altogether, as no-one else has ever done?’

  ‘Lord husband, I brought them together as I thought it would be your wish.’

  ‘It is,’ he says finally. His stomach churns – I can hear it gurgle – and then he belches noisily. ‘It is.’

  I can smell the sourness of his breath. ‘I am glad to have done the right thing for love of you and for love of your children,’ I say cautiously. ‘I wanted the whole country to see the beautiful royal family that you have made.’

  He nods. ‘I am going to restore the girls to their place,’ he announces. ‘I am going to name them both as princesses. Mary will follow Prince Edward to the throne if she should survive him and he has no heir – God forbid it. After her: Elizabeth, and after her: my niece, Lady Margaret Douglas, and my Scots sister’s line.’

  It is against the will of God and against tradition that the king shall name who comes after him. It is God who chooses kings, just as he chose this one – a second son – by taking all other heirs to Himself. God calls a king to his throne, God creates the order of birth and the survival of his chosen. But since the king rules the church in England and he holds the throne in England, who is going to stop him naming his heirs? Certainly not those men that he bundled from the room for arguing with him. Certainly not I.

  ‘Prince Edward will be king,’ I confirm. ‘And his children as yet unborn, who come after him.’

  ‘God bless them,’ he says mistily. He pauses. ‘I have always feared for him,’ he continues very quietly. ‘The child of a sainted mother, you know.’

  ‘I know,’ I say. Jane again. ‘God bless her.’

  ‘I think of her all the time. I think of her sweet nature and her early death. She died to give me an heir, she died in my service.’

  I nod as if I am overwhelmed at the thought of her sacrifice.

  ‘When I am ill, when I fear I may never get well, I think that at least I will be with her.’

  ‘Don’t say it,’ I murmur, and I really mean it.

  ‘And people say terrible things. They say there is a curse, they speak of a curse, they say such things – a curse on Tudor boys, on our line.’

  ‘I’ve never heard it,’ I say stoutly. Of course I have. The rebels in the North were certain that the Tudor line would die out for its sins against the church and against the Plantagenets. They called him the Mouldwarp – a beast who was undermining his own kingdom.

  ‘You haven’t?’ he says hopefully.

  I shake my head. Everyone said that the Tudors were cursed for killing the York princes in the Tower. How should a prince-killer be blessed? But if the king thought this, how could he dare to plan a future, he who killed the Plantagenet heirs: Lady Margaret Pole, and her innocent son and grandson? He, who beheaded two wives on suspicion?

  ‘I have heard nothing like that.’

  ‘Good. Good. But it’s why I keep him so safe. I guard him against murderers, against disease, against ill fortune. I guard him as my only treasure.’

  ‘I will guard him too,’ I promise.

  ‘So we will trust to God for Edward, pray that he gets strong sons, and in the meantime I shall put an act through parliament to name the girls as coming after him.’

  England has never had a reigning queen, but I am not going to point this out either. I don’t know how to raise the question of who will be Lord Protector during Edward’s minority. That is to suggest the king might die within the next eleven years, and he won’t want to hear that.

  I smile. ‘This is generous of you, my lord. The girls will be glad to know that they have your favour. That will mean more to them than being listed to succeed. To know that their father loves and acknowledges them is all that your gi
rls want. They are blessed with such a father.’

  ‘I know,’ he says. ‘You have shown me that. I have been surprised.’

  ‘Surprised?’ I repeat.

  He looks awkward. It makes him, for a moment, endearingly vulnerable, a weak father: not a cursed tyrant. ‘I have had to think of them always as heirs or usurpers,’ he says, fumbling for the words. ‘D’you see? I’ve had always to consider whether I accept them as my daughters or put them aside. I have had to think of their mothers, and my terrible wars with their mothers, and not think of them. I have had to suspect them as if they were my enemies. I’ve never before had them at court, together, with their brother, and just seen them, all three, as my children. Just seen them as themselves.’

  I am enormously, absurdly touched. ‘Each one of them is a child to be proud of,’ I tell him. ‘You can love each one as your own.’

  ‘You have shown me that,’ he says. ‘Because you deal with Edward like a little boy, and Elizabeth as a little girl, and Mary as a young woman. I see them through your eyes. I see the girls without thinking of their poisonous dams, almost for the first time.’

  He takes my hand and kisses it. ‘I thank you for this,’ he says very quietly. ‘Truly, I do, Kateryn.’

  ‘My dear,’ comes easily from my lips.

  ‘I love you,’ he says.

  And I reply easily, without thought, ‘I love you, too.’

  We are hand-clasped for a moment, united in tenderness, and then I see his eyes narrow as a pulse of pain grips his whole body. He grits his teeth, determined not to cry out.

  ‘Should I leave you to rest now?’ I ask.

  He nods. Anthony Denny is on his feet at once, to show me from the room and I see in the way that he glances at the king without curiosity that he knew all of this, before it was explained to me. Denny is the king’s confidant and friend, one of the closest of the circle. His quiet confidence reminds me that I should remember that just as I hint that the Howards and Wriothesley and Gardiner are self-serving fools, there are those, close to the king, who could do just the same to me. And that Denny is one of several men whose fortunes have been made in royal service, who have the king’s ear in his most private moments, and whisper to him alone, just as I do.