‘Have we met before?’ She seems oddly familiar, and I am sure that I recognise her dazzling smile.
‘I did not dare to hope that Your Majesty would remember me,’ she says politely. I hear the rolling Lincolnshire accent. ‘My father, Sir William, served your father-in-law, Lord Brough, at Gainsborough and I used to be invited to the hall when you held a feast and dancing. I always came to the hall for the Twelve Days of Christmas, and at Easter, too, and at Maytime. But I was a little girl. I didn’t expect you to recognise me now.’
‘I thought I knew you.’
‘You were the most learned young lady I’d ever seen,’ she confesses. ‘We talked together once, and you told me that you were reading Latin with your brother. I understood then that a woman can study, a woman can learn. It set me on my path to learn and memorise the Bible. You were my inspiration.’
‘I’m glad that I talked to you, if this is the result. Your reputation as a gospeller goes before you. Do you think you can teach us?’
She bows her head. ‘I can only tell you what I have read and what I know,’ she replies.
‘Have you read more than me and these learned ladies?’
She gives me a sweet respectful smile. ‘I doubt it, Your Majesty, for I had to learn from my Bible when I was blessed with it, and I had it snatched from my hands many a time. I had to fight for my understanding. But I expect that you all have been given a Bible and taught by the finest scholars.’
‘Her Majesty is writing her own book,’ Nan interrupts boastfully. ‘The king has asked her to translate prayers from the Latin to give to the people. She works with the king himself. She studies with the great scholar Thomas Cranmer. Together, they are working on an English missal.’
‘It is true then?’ she demands of me. ‘We will hear the prayers in English in the churches? We will be allowed to know what the priest has been saying for all these years?’
‘Yes.’
‘God be praised,’ she says simply. ‘You are blessed to be doing such work.’
‘It is the king who gives the liturgy to his people,’ I say. ‘And Thomas Cranmer who translates it. I have just helped.’
‘I shall be so glad to read the prayers,’ she says fervently. ‘And God will be glad to hear them, as He must hear the prayers of all of the people, in whatever language they speak, even when they are silent.’
I cannot help but be intrigued. ‘Do you think that God, who gave us the Word, understands without words? Beyond words?’
‘He must do,’ she says. ‘He understands my thoughts, even when they are in my mind before I have put words to them. He understands my prayers when they are nothing more than a wordless calling to Him, like a hen clucking back to a poultry woman.’ She corrects herself. ‘A sparrow does not fall but He knows it; He must understand what a sparrow feels. He must know what I mean when I go chuck chuck chuck. He must understand parables and simple stories since His own Son spoke in parables and simple stories, in whatever language they had in Bethlehem.’
I smile but I am impressed. I had not thought of the language of God as the language before words, as the language spoken in the heart, and I like the thought of God understanding our prayers as if we were clucking hens, pecking at His feet. ‘And did you come to this understanding through private study?’ I ask. ‘Were you taught at home?’
Anne Askew takes her stand, one hand resting gently on my table, her head raised. I realise that this is her sermon, speaking from the heart, speaking of her own personal experience and of the presence of the Word of God in her life. ‘I was taught with my brothers until they went to university,’ she begins. ‘It was an educated home but not a learned one. My father attended your husband the king, when he was a young man. When I was sixteen years old he married me to a neighbour, Thomas Kyme, and we had two children together before he called me a heretic and threw me out of the house because I read the Bible that King Henry, in his wisdom, gave to all the people of England.’
‘It is only for noblemen and ladies now,’ Nan cautions her, with a glance at the closed door. ‘Not for women like you.’
‘It was put into our church, at the back of the church, where the poorest man and the humblest woman could go in and read, if they could read,’ the surprising young woman corrects her. ‘They told us that it was for the people to read, that the king had given it to his people. They may have taken it away again, but we remember that the king gave it to the people of England – all the people of England – for us to read. The lords took it back, the princes of the church who think themselves so great took it away from us; but the king gave it to us, God bless him.’
‘Where did you go?’ I ask. ‘When your husband threw you out of your home?’
‘I went to Lincoln,’ she says with a smile. ‘I sat at the back of the great cathedral and I took a Bible in my hands and I read it in the sight of the congregation and in the sight of the benighted pilgrims who come through the doors, kissing the floor and creeping on their knees. Poor souls, they chinked with the pilgrim badges they had pinned on their clothes but they thought it was a heresy that a woman should read God’s Word in a church. Imagine that! To think it is a heresy for a believer to read a Bible in church!
‘I read it aloud to everyone who came and went in that great building, buying and selling favours, trading pilgrim badges and relics, all the fools and hucksters. I read the Bible to teach them that the only way to God is not through chips of stone and bits of bone, flasks of holy water and prayers written backwards on scraps of paper and pinned to a coat. It is not through sacred rings and kissing the foot of a statue. I showed them that the only way to God is through His Holy Word, in His own holy words.’
‘You’re a brave woman,’ I remark.
She smiles at me. ‘No, I am a simple woman,’ she corrects me. ‘When I understand something true, it goes to my heart. I have understood this: that we have to read and know the Word of God. This, and nothing else, will bring us to heaven. All the rest of it: the threat of purgatory, the promise of forgiveness in return for payment, the statues that bleed and the pictures that leak milk, all these things are the invention of a church that has gone far from the Word of God. It is for me, and for those who care about truth, to cling to the Word of God and turn our face from the masquing. The church does not put on mystery plays once a year any more, it plays them every day all the year. It is all costume and show and pretence. But the Bible is the truth and there is nothing but the Bible.’
I nod. She speaks simply, but she is absolutely right.
‘So I came in the end to London, and spoke before the great men of this city. My brother helped me, and my sister is Mrs Jane St Paul, whose husband serves the duchess.’ She curtseys to Catherine Brandon, who nods her head in reply. ‘I found a safe house with honest kinsmen who think as I do, and I listened to preachers and spoke with many learned men, far more learned than me. And a good man, a preacher that you know, I think, Your Majesty, John Lascelles, took me to meet other good men and speak with them.’
An almost imperceptible breath from Nan tells me that she knows the name. I glance at her.
‘He bore witness against Queen Katherine,’ she says.
‘I have met a few people of your court,’ Anne goes on, looking around and smiling. ‘Lady Denny and Lady Hertford. And others listen to gospellers and believe in the reform of the church.’ She takes a breath. ‘And then I went to the church for a divorce,’ she says.
Nan gives a little scream of shock. ‘How? How could you?’
‘I went to the church and I said that since my husband was a believer in the old ways and I am for the new, we never made vows that meant the same thing. We did not join hands in the same church, the true God can have nothing to do with the vows that they made me swear, in a language that I didn’t understand, and so our marriage should be dissolved.’