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‘We’re here to be seen, not to see.’
Then, I thought we had won a great victory for reform and for Anne. Now, I see that it was just as Machiavelli describes – as one power rises, another falls, and as soon as a power falls, it will try to rise again. Nothing ever changes: there is rise and fall, flood tide and ebb, but it is the same river.
Neither George nor Anne, nor my uncle the duke, nor anyone in the queen’s rooms, nor anyone in the whole court, loves me for my true self. And then I think: nobody knows my true self. Not even me.
They bound themselves to a Church founded by a pope chosen by God, and confirmed by his cardinals, based on the rock of St Peter – how can they suddenly say that the papal crown can be picked up by a Tudor from a hawthorn hedge?
‘This is no season for a man to have a conscience.
‘I’m not riding up to London in the heat of summer to find them not guilty,’
‘Seven better scholars than I answered that question, and they are dead for it. A wise man or woman does not ask it. A good courtier does not think it. Prepare yourself to return to court, Jane, and don’t think of things where the king has been advised, parliament has enacted, and the executioner has confirmed – most finally as only he can do.’
‘But Father, is this not to make a tyrant? To do his will before he’s asked it? If the king is first among equals, should he not speak his wishes and his peers debate it in parliament? And now, as Head of the Church – should he not put his ideas to the bishops and scholars for them to test against the Bible and the philosophers? Otherwise, he is the only power in England? Is that not tyranny instead of monarchy? Wasn’t that the dilemma of Rome?’
Machiavelli says that all kings have to become tyrants or be overthrown. This is the rise of the Tudors to tyranny; this is the rise of Anne to tyranny. Make sure you rise with them.’
He can fine every religious house that he says is failing, he can close them down and take everything if they refuse to pay. Heaven grant that he never works out what power I have given him!
‘If I birth a son, I rule the king, and the king rules everything,’ she says grimly. ‘See? Everything I have done, everything I have planned, and in the end it all comes down to a labour, like a peasant woman under a hedge. If I can get a boy, then I’ll have made a godly country with a tyrant king who is in my thrall. No woman in the world will have held more power.’
Of the many moves I made against Katherine, it was the most brilliant: I said that she could never give him a son because she was no wife. It turned him against her more than anything else could have done. And – voila! The lesson comes back to haunt me. Who will the king blame if I lose this baby? Or if it’s another useless girl?’
‘No courtier can have beautiful hair at the court of a balding king.’
