The cover drops a little and the court gasps to see Prince Edward, square as his father, standing stocky and bold in a bulky jacket and red stockings, a red hat crammed on his little head, his sleeves ridiculously stuffed. A few people applaud. This could be the Holbein portrait of the king cut down to three feet tall. The painted prince leans with a confident elbow on his father’s knee, as Edward would never dare to lean in real life, and Henry’s hand is on his shoulder, holding him close, as he has never done. The boy is presented to the eye as if Henry had just given birth to him from between his wide-straddled legs: this is his son and heir, the pose insists. This is the boy of the king’s own making, in his image, his little red egg.
Behind them both, as a backdrop and extending over their heads, is the cloth of estate showing the royal crest, above that a gold seal like a holy halo that the old idolatrous church painters used to enamel over the heads of painted saints. In the middle of the picture, still half-concealed by the drape, which the pages are desperately tugging, is the king himself. The painter has made him the heart of the picture, plumb centre in the blazing colours of a golden sun. His huge puffed sleeves, fat as a pair of bolsters, are in cloth of gold, slashed with white silk, the skirts of his short robe are red and gold, his parted sturdy legs are blazing silver in ivory stockings, the strong calves gleaming, the round knees like two little moons. His gown is trimmed with sable, thrown off the huge padded shoulders, his face is big, pale and unlined, and his codpiece – ‘My God,’ I murmur at the very sight of it. The huge ivory codpiece is boldly erect at the very centre of his body, at the heart of the picture. Enormous and gleaming palely, among all the red and the gold, it does everything but announce to the viewer: here is the king’s cock. Admire!
I bite the inside of my lips so that I do not allow even the whisper of a giggle to escape me, I don’t dare look at Catherine Brandon. The painter must have lost his wits to be so brash; even the king’s monstrous vanity cannot think that this is anything but ridiculous. But then the page finally frees the curtain that has concealed the rest of the portrait, the fabric drops to the floor and at last I see my own likeness.
I am seated at the king’s left hand, in the gown that the painter and I chose together, the red underskirt and sleeves complementing the red of Prince Edward’s robe, my gold bodice and overskirt matching the king’s puffy sleeves, and the white ermine lining and sleeves marking my royalty. The English hood that Nicholas de Vent chose from the royal wardrobe is perfectly rendered, the girdle at my waist done in fine detail, my skin as pearly and as pale as the king’s magnificent legs. But my face . . .
But my face . . .
My face . . .
There is a murmur of comment in the court like the whisper of wind through the trees of an autumn wood. I hear people remark, ‘Oh, I didn’t expect . . .’ and, ‘But that isn’t . . .’ and, ‘Surely that’s . . .’ and then everyone bites off the end of their sentences as if nobody wants to observe what is painfully, terribly obvious, and grows more and more obvious, as a silence falls, and someone clears their throat, and someone else turns away, and slowly, though they don’t want to stare, no-one can resist it any longer: and everyone turns to look at me.
They look at me. And I am looking at Her.
It is not my portrait. It is not my face. I sat for it indeed, and I wore these clothes, the clothes from the royal wardrobe, the clothes that signify a Queen of England. The painter put my hands in that position, tilted my face to the light, but it is not my features under her golden hood. The king has commissioned a portrait of his third wife, Edward’s mother, and had me sit in for her, like a doll, so that the painter could get the size and the shape of a wife, any wife. But the face is not mine. The painter did not have to try to capture what he called my luminous beauty. Instead he shows the sharp outline of Jane Seymour’s hood and beneath it the bovine blankness of Jane Seymour, the dead queen, who sits at the king’s left hand, admiring him and her son, from the grave; and I might as well never have been.
I don’t know how I stand, how I smile and remark on what a beautiful picture it is, how well Elizabeth looks, on the left of the woman who supplanted her mother, a stepmother that she cannot even remember: her mother’s lady-in-waiting, the woman who danced the day that her mother was beheaded. I laugh at the portrait of Will Somers in the right-hand doorway, his monkey on his shoulder, the Whitehall gardens behind him. I hear my tinkling laugh and the way that people eagerly join with me, as if to obscure my humiliation. Nan comes to one side of me as if she would hold me up, and Catherine Brandon comes to the other, and they admire the picture and make a babble of noise. Anne Seymour, my lady-in-waiting, stays at a distance and remarks on the beauty of her dearest tragic sister-in-law.
I keep staring at the portrait. I think it is an altarpiece, an icon like those the reformers have rightly thrown out of the old corrupt church. It is like a triptych with three panels: the two princesses on either side, and the Holy Family, the Father and the Son and the transfigured mother, in the central panel. The two Fools are the worldly fools outside, while the inside world of the royal family glows like gold. Jane Seymour, overcoming death, shines like Our Lady.
Elizabeth comes and takes my hand and whispers: ‘Who is that? Who is it in your place?’
And I say, ‘Hush, it is Queen Jane, Edward’s mother,’ and at once her clever little face closes up as if I have told her a secret of shameful doings, something foul and wrong. And at once – and this is how I know she has been corrupted beyond saving – she turns a smiling face to her father and tells him what a beautiful portrait he has commissioned.
Princess Mary throws me a brief glance and says nothing, and then the court falls silent as we wait for the king to speak. We wait, and we wait, Nicholas de Vent turning his cap in his hand, sweating with nerves to see what the great patron of art, Holbein’s patron, has to say about this production, this painted lie, this masterpiece of self-aggrandisement, this grave-robbing.
‘I like it,’ Henry says firmly, and there is a sort of breeze as the court releases its indrawn breath. ‘Very fair. Very well done.’ He glances at me and I see he looks just a little embarrassed. ‘You will be glad to see the children painted all together, and the honour that I have done to Edward’s mother.’
He looks at the pale painted face of his dead wife. ‘She might have sat beside me, just like that, had she had been spared,’ he says. ‘She might have seen Edward grow to be a man. Who knows? She might have given me more sons.’
There is nothing I can say while my husband publicly mourns a previous wife, gazing into her bleached stupid face as if to find some wit now that escaped everyone during her life. I find that my teeth are gritted to hold a fixed smile as if this is not an insult to me, as if I am not publicly denied, as if the king is not telling the world that all of us who came after Jane – Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard, me – are ghost queens of less substance than her, the dead wife.
Of course, it is Anne Seymour, the dead queen’s sister-in-law, who steps forward and addresses the king as a kinswoman and fellow-mourner, taking advantage of his tears as she always does: ‘It is her to the life.’