‘Mistress Anne, a woman can’t get her marriage dissolved at will,’ Catherine protests.
Nan and I exchange glances. Our own brother’s wife ran away from him and he was awarded a divorce as a gift from the king. The king is head of the church, marriage and divorce are in his gift, they are not for a woman to take.
‘Why should not a woman leave a marriage? If she can make it, surely she can unmake it,’ Anne Askew replies. ‘What was sworn can be unsworn. The king himself—’
‘We don’t speak of the king,’ Nan says swiftly.
‘The law does not recognise a woman except when she is alone in the world,’ Anne Askew says authoritatively. ‘Only a woman without father or husband has any legal rights in this world. That, in itself, is unjust. But think of this: I am a woman alone, a feme sole. My father is dead and I deny my husband. The law must deal with me as an adult equal person as I am before God. I will go to heaven because I have read and accepted the Word of God. I demand justice because I have read and accepted the word of the law.’
Nan exchanges a quick worried look with me. ‘I don’t know the rights and the wrongs of this,’ she says. ‘But I know it is not a fit discourse for a queen’s household.’ She glances at Princess Elizabeth, who is listening carefully. ‘Not for young ears.’
I shake my head. I am married to a man who declares his own annulments. He is divorced when he says it is so. Anne Askew suggests that a woman might claim as much power as the king.
‘You had better speak of your faith,’ I command her. ‘I have translated Psalm 145: All things be under Thy dominion and rule. Speak of that to us.’
She bows her head as if to gather her thoughts for a moment, and then she speaks simply and eloquently, and in her voice I hear the ring of complete conviction, and in her face I see the shine of innocence.
She stays all the morning and I send her home with a purse of coins and an invitation to come again. I am fascinated by her, inspired by this woman who says that she can choose where she lives, choose or reject a husband, this woman who knows that God forgives her sins, because she confesses them to Him – not to a priest – she speaks to Him directly. I think this is the first woman I have ever met who strikes me as being one who makes her own life, who walks her own path, who is responsible for herself. This is a woman who has not been tamed to be as others want; she has not been cut down to fit her circumstances.
The portrait painter comes to finish his sketches of the two princesses. I think that Princess Mary stands straighter and taller than usual, as if she knows that this may be the last taking of her likeness as an English princess, as if it is her last portrait before she is sent away. Perhaps she thinks that this portrait will be copied and sent to her proposed husbands.
I go to her side to pull her train a little straighter, to show off the beautiful brocade, and I whisper in her ear: ‘You’re not posing as an icon, you know. You can smile,’ and am rewarded by her swift fugitive giggle.
‘I do know,’ she says. ‘It’s just that people will see this portrait years from now, perhaps hundreds of years from now.’
Princess Elizabeth, blooming under the attention of the painter, is as pink as the inside of a little shell. She spent so long hidden from sight that she loves the male gaze.
I sit and watch the two girls as they stand at a distance but half-facing each other. The painter has his sketches of their faces, and a careful note of the colours of their gowns. All of this will be transferred to the great work like a tisserand weaving flowers on a tapestry on the loom from pictures that she has sketched in the garden.
Then the painter turns to me. ‘Your Majesty?’
‘I am not in my gown,’ I protest.
‘For today, I just want to capture your likeness,’ he says. ‘The way that you hold yourself. Will you be so good as to sit as you will be seated? Perhaps you can imagine that the king is on your right. Would you tilt your head towards him? But I need you to look straight at me.’
I sit as he directs, but I cannot lean towards the space where the king would be. The painter, de Vent, is very exact. Gently he moves the angle of my head this way and that until Mary laughingly takes the place where her father will be positioned, and I sit beside her and tip my head just slightly, as if I am listening.
‘Exquisite, yes,’ de Vent says. ‘But it is too flat. The new fashions . . . Your Majesty, would you allow me?’
He come closer and turns my chair a little towards where the king will sit. ‘And will you let your eyes go this way?’ He points to the window. ‘So.’
He steps back to gaze at me. I look where he directs, and in my line of sight, outside the window, a blackbird lands on a branch of a tree and opens its yellow beak in a trill of song. At once I am transported to that spring when I ran through the palace to Thomas’s rooms and heard a blackbird, drunk with joy and confused by torches, singing at night like a nightingale.
‘Mon Dieu!’ I hear de Vent whisper, and I am recalled to the present.
‘What is it?’
‘Your Majesty, if I could capture that light in your eyes and that beauty in your face I would be the greatest painter in the world. You are illuminated.’
I shake my head. ‘I was daydreaming. It was nothing.’
‘I wish I could capture that radiance. You have shown me what I should do. Now I shall make some sketches.’
I raise my head, and look out of the window, and watch the blackbird as it ruffles its wings in a little scud of rain and then flies away.
WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1545
The king summons me, and Nan and Catherine Brandon follow me along the privy gallery to his rooms. All the windows are open to the spring sunshine and the birds are singing in the trees in the gardens below. We can hear the gulls crying over the River Thames and see the bright flicker of sunlight on their white wings. Henry is in good humour, his thickly bandaged leg resting on a stool, a pile of papers before him, each dense with type.
‘See this!’ he says joyfully to me. ‘You who think you’re such a great scholar. See this!’
I curtsey and step forward to kiss him. He takes my face in both his big hands and pulls me closer so that I kiss him on his mouth. He smells of some sort of spirits and sweets.
‘I never call myself a scholar,’ I say at once. ‘I know I am an ignorant woman compared to you, my lord. But I am glad for the chance to study. What is this?’
‘It is our pages back from the printer!’ he exclaims. ‘The liturgy at last. Cranmer says that we will put a copy into every church in England and end their mumbling away in Latin that neither the congregation nor the priest can understand. That’s not the Word of God; that’s not what I want for my church.’
‘You’re right.’
‘I know! And look, you can see the prayers that you have translated, and Cranmer’s work is in here, too, and I have polished it and in some parts set it into better language, and translated some parts myself. And here it is! My book.’
I take up the sheets and read the first few pages. It is beautiful, just as I hoped it would be. It is simple and clear, with a rhythm and a cadence like poetry, but there is nothing forced or overly worked about it. I look at a line that took me half a day to translate, changing one word for another, scratching it out and starting again. Now, in print, it looks as if it could never have been other, it reads as if it has been the prayer of the English forever. I feel that deep joy of a writer seeing her work in print for the first time. The absorbing private work has become public, it has stepped out into the world. It will be judged and I am full of confidence that it is good work.