‘You see?’ Lady Rochford is behind them. ‘Even your own people do not trust Mary. But she will come with all speed. I hear she pines for you, Lord Cromwell.’
He takes her arm and steers her away. She is his ally, like it or not. She snaps, ‘I have deserved gentler treatment at your hands. And at the queen’s, I may say.’
He lets go. She rubs her arm, as if he had injured her. He thinks, if wishes were death, I would be superfluous to the state. Henry hated both his wives at divers times, but they spitefully lived on, until God put an end to one, the French executioner to the other. Henry could not wish them away, for all his power. Only I could do that. It is I who tell him who he can marry and unmarry and who he can marry next, and who and how to kill.
But perhaps it will not matter, he thinks. Perhaps the Yorkshiremen will come and slay us all.
The queen makes her request before Henry in sight of the court. Note his alert face, the modest inclination of her head. ‘Sir,’ she begins, ‘out of my unworthiness, you have been – what? – liberal. I am in a sphere. Please to bring the Lady Mary to court. I may have comfort in her society, and share a confidence.’
Henry looks at her in tender bewilderment. ‘Are you lonely, sweetheart? Of course we will have her, if it will make you merry.’
‘Merry. That was the word I forgot.’ Jane does not smile. She sinks low to the ground, collapsed inside a stiff tent of brocade and satin. ‘Will you hear me?’
What now? He tries to catch Rochford’s eye, but the whole assembly is staring at the queen. ‘My heart is moved, sir, by the divisions that arise between your subjects and your most sacred self.’
There is a rustle of consternation. This is not Jane’s own language, surely?
Henry gazes at her. ‘I take these words as they are meant. A queen has a double duty. As a wife, she feels for her husband when he is troubled. As a queen, she feels as a subject to her lord.’
‘I am only a woman,’ Jane says. ‘I do not presume to be wiser than your Grace. But my heart misgives when honourable and devout customs are left off, sanctified by usage since the world began. We must cherish them, as a son or daughter will cherish an aged father.’
Henry frowns. ‘What customs?’
‘Nan!’ he says to Edward’s wife. ‘Nan, quick.’
Lady Seymour steps forward, ‘Madam –’
Jane says, ‘Your people want the Pope of Rome. They want the statues they have known all their lives, and blessed candles, and holy days.’
Nan Seymour is urgent: ‘Madam –’
‘Let her be,’ Henry says. ‘She should be instructed, and who but I should do it? How is it, that for all the preachers who set forth the king’s supremacy, for all that has been said and written, there are still those who do not grasp that the Bishop of Rome is merely a foreign prince, out to conquer if he can? Madam, I will have no alien interfere with my rule, and I will allow no traitor to shelter behind the cross of Christ.’
Jane says, ‘They think you will take their silver crosses and turn them into coin.’
Henry says, ‘The simple people may believe it, but who leads them to do so? What manner of pastors are they, the priests and abbots who break their oath to me, and are first in the fray, swords in their hands?’
‘They would still pray for the king,’ Jane says, as if bargaining, ‘if they could pray for the Pope too.’
He thinks, I must end this if the king will not. ‘Madam, there can be no double jurisdiction. Either the king rules, or Rome.’
‘And it is not a question,’ Wriothesley warns.
Henry says, ‘Her Grace will withdraw.’
Jane is shaking. ‘They are too much burdened with taxes.’
The king leans forward. ‘The burdens of tax do not rest on the shoulders of labourers, or small husbandmen. Dives, the rich man, knows and has always known how to pass off his interests as the interests of Lazarus, the beggar.’
Jane stares at him. ‘Yes. Possibly. I do not understand the subsidy or the revenue. But my lord – take care of your thoughts as well as your deeds. What you say by night haunts you by day, and what you refuse by day will return by night.’
Nan Seymour takes one arm, Jane Rochford takes the other; they lift her to her feet. The king says, ‘Jane, understand this – I dispose for my subjects, body and soul. A prince answers before the strait court of Heaven for his proceedings, and when he dies will be judged by standards of which ordinary men are quit. God gives him graces: God gives him wisdom, policy and prudence, and these virtues are his to exercise, by methods of which he is the only arbiter. I am the earthly shepherd of God’s sheep. It is a prince’s part to provide not only for noble families but for obscure ones, and not only for scholars and magistrates but for the untutored and the poor, for the whole commonwealth of his people – both for their corporeal welfare, and their spiritual good.’ He adds, benign, ‘The duty is laid on me, and the world shall see me discharge it.’
