The Sixth Wife. Suzannah Dunn

had seen her generation of women run the estates while the men fought the Wars of the Roses; the other had witnessed her mother reign superbly in her own right.

      It’s what Kate and I were saying a generation later – Everything’s different now for women - and we considered ourselves onto something new. But, then, women had had a setback, we’d come through difficult times and so we were, in a way, having to start all over again. What I recalled of Kate’s mother Maud was an expression that implied she’d seen it all and was expecting worse, but I doubt she could have imagined just how bad the Anne Boleyn years would be. The locking away of one queen and then the execution of the next. No matter that Catherine was queen, the highest of all women in the land, or, moreover, that she was a good queen, then a fierce queen, fighting for her principles and the rights of her daughter. In the end, she was just a woman, meaning just a burden on a man, no longer pretty and not up to bearing a son. And then, in Anne Boleyn’s world, at Anne Boleyn’s court, there was room for only one woman, and no prizes for guessing whom. That was when most of us – women – slunk away into quiet lives, family lives. Then came Anne’s arrest, and suddenly the woman who was above all other women was – officially – fickle, malicious, bewitching. No doubt about it: Kate and I became women at a time when women were seen as trouble.

      Maud belonged, despite that heavy-weather expression of hers, to more optimistic times. It was my mother, the optimist, who lived on to face what was, for her, the end of the world: the Reformation. My mother was a foreigner. She’d come here with the Spanish queen-to-be, Catherine of Aragon, as chief hand-holder. She was Maria de Salinas in those days. Mary Salts to you. Married, Anglicised, she turned into Mary Willoughby. Maria de Salinas, the funny, clever Spaniard, was before my time, but nor did I ever really know the Mary Willoughby who had one of the king’s ships named in her honour. Because that Mary was, by all accounts, carefree, a lover of life. Back in those days, the king had done more than name a ship after his favoured Spaniard: he found her a husband, a good one. And then she had me. And then everything went wrong: England went mad, in my mother’s view, and she followed Catherine into exile, to various tumbledown, far-flung castles. She could have seen it as her duty, even if the hand-holding days had officially long passed, but it was so much more than that, and I’m not sure I have a word for it.‘Friendship’ hardly does it justice: hardly explains leaving one’s family, one’s little girl, for ever, for a banished, tormented queen. Catherine died in my mother’s arms and now my mother is buried alongside her. It was what she wanted, Catherine’s tomb prised open for her when the time came. Two Spanish girls, Maria and Catalina, side by side in Peterborough.

      Ten

      

      It was summer when I next saw Kate. A couple of months had slipped by and suddenly it was June or July, I don’t remember which. Strawberry season. She would have been married for six months or so and she looked better than I’d ever seen her – luminous – but there was desperation in her hug when she greeted me.

      ‘What is it?’ I was worried. ‘What’s the matter?’ ‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ the agitated tone making clear it was anything but. ‘Really nothing.’

      Thomas: that was my first thought. Here we go, honeymoon over. He’s done something, shown his true colours. I tingled at the prospect of vindication. We were in the hall, surrounded by my boxes. The featherbed drivers were at work that morning, in the bedrooms, beating the mattresses, driving fresh air through all those feathers. So, I was temporarily displaced even before I’d properly arrived. One of my leather-covered wooden trunks doubled as a bench for us; we perched side by side. We were alone, Bella having been sent to pick flowers and herbs for my room.

      ‘It’s just…’ Kate closed her eyes, hard, then opened them and stared at me, indignant. ‘Anne Stanhope.’ Ed Seymour’s wife. ‘Has Ed said anything to you?’

      ‘Oh, he knows better than to mention her to me.’ Not Thomas, then. Not this time. Oh, well.

      She despaired, ‘What is it with her?’

      ‘What isn’t it?’Loathsome woman. Snide.‘What’s she done now?’

      ‘She has my jewels, the queen’s jewels. Not only is she keeping them from me – that would be bad enough – but she’s actually going to wear them. She’s claiming she’s first lady of the realm.’

      ‘Anne Stanhope?’ I couldn’t help but laugh. ‘How’s that?’

      ‘Wife of the Lord Protector.’

      ‘Oh, really,’ was all I managed; it wasn’t worth discussing. Kate was first lady of the realm, with the two princesses behind her, and then, if we were going to get down to detail, me: the Duchesses of Suffolk and of Norfolk, traditionally next behind royalty. Anne Stanhope was nobody.

      Kate bit her lip. ‘Well, he is first man of the realm, isn’t he.’

      ‘Well, he shouldn’t be. Much as I like Ed, and much as I think it’s no bad thing he’s in control, it’s not how Henry left it, is it.’ Henry – dying – had stipulated a council of sixteen men, all equal, to oversee little Eddie in these years before he’s old enough to rule alone. But they then agreed amongst themselves to promote Ed to Lord Protector. Not a bad choice, originally, those sixteen men. They’re forward- looking enough, I’ve no complaints in that respect. But Kate should have been on that list with them. Everyone knew it. Even Henry himself knew it. She had run the country so well in his absence, and she was central to his children’s lives. It was a surprise to Kate as well as to everyone else when Henry’s order was made known. Nothing more than dowager queen: but what, quite, was that? No one seemed to know; there hadn’t been one for generations. No doubt it was an unpleasant surprise for Thomas, who’d already proposed to her, who’d assumed he’d be getting a wife on the ruling council. I can guess, though, why Henry showered Kate with wealth in his will but no power. An extremely wealthy widow would be a prize. A dead Henry wouldn’t be able to stop her falling prey personally to unscrupulous interests, but he could ensure England wouldn’t fall with her.

      ‘I’m dowager queen,’ Kate was saying, ‘I’m the only queen England has, for now. I was due to visit court a week or so ago and I asked Ed to make the jewels available for when I got there.’

      I understood what that was about; she didn’t need to spell it out. It would have been hard to go back to court as mere dowager queen: still the queen, but pensioned off. Especially hard, though, as one who was in disgrace for this hasty remarriage to a man-about-town. Those jewels would have helped; they would have reminded people who she was, who she’d been and who, officially, she still was. Reminded people what respect, officially, was due to her.

      ‘Back comes this nonsense about Anne. And I know it’s not him talking…’

      ‘No,’ I agreed. Ed famously doesn’t stand up to his wife.

      ‘…but my problem is that there’s nowhere else to go with this. He’s the ultimate authority, isn’t he.’

      ‘Yes and no. You could go to the king.’

      She recoiled. ‘He’s just a child. I don’t want to involve him.’

      ‘He’s a very grown-up child,’ which was a polite way of putting it. Her view of Henry’s son was one that I’ve never been able to share; I find him stiff, rather repulsive.

      ‘But that’s it. He takes everything very seriously; he’ll take this so seriously. But because he is still a little boy, he’ll be trying so hard to please everyone – Thomas and me because he loves us, and Ed because he’s supposed to do as Ed says. He’ll tie himself in knots.’ She looked pained. She said, ‘I can’t bear to see him do that.’

      Thomas would have no such scruples, was my bet. How much did Kate know of how Thomas behaved with the king? What I knew, I knew from Ed Seymour. I learned that Thomas was paying the boy to keep him on his side. Ed had complained to me that he was