‘Might the king not say the word? Will he not grant him mercy? He made him earl only weeks ago to show his favour.’

‘A feint, it was nothing but a feint. The king showed his favour only so that his spite falls more heavily now. Cromwell will beg for mercy, sure of forgiveness, he will find none. He is certain to die a traitor’s death.’

‘Did the king say farewell to him?’ I ask, as if it is an idle question.

‘No,’ the ambassador says. ‘There was nothing to warn the man. They parted as on any ordinary day, with no special words. Cromwell came into the meeting of the council as if nothing was out of the ordinary. He thought that he had come to command the meeting as Secretary of State, in his pomp and his power, and then, in moments, he found himself under arrest and his old enemies laughing at him.’

‘The king did not say goodbye,’ I say in a sort of quiet horror. ‘It is as they say. The king never says goodbye.’

JANE BOLEYN, WESTMINSTER PALACE,

24 JUNE, 1540

We are seated in the queen’s room in silence, sewing shirts for the poor. Katherine Howard is missing from her place, she has been staying with her grandmother at Norfolk House, Lambeth all this week. The king visits her almost every evening, he takes his dinner with them as if he were a private man, not king at all. He is rowed across the river in the royal barge, he goes openly, he takes no trouble to conceal his identity.

The whole of the city is buzzing with the belief that only six months into the marriage the king has taken a mistress in the Howard girl. The spectacularly ignorant claim that since the king has a lover, therefore the queen must be pregnant, and everything is well in this most blessed world: a Tudor son and heir in the queen’s belly and the king taking his own amusement elsewhere as he always does. Those of us who know better do not even take the pleasure of correcting those who know nothing. We know that Katherine Howard is guarded like a vestal virgin now, against the king’s feeble seductive powers. We know that the queen is still untouched. What we don’t know, what we cannot know, is what is going to happen.

In the absence of the king, the court has become unruly and when Queen Anne and we ladies go to our dinner, the throne is empty at the head of the room and there is no rule. The hall is avid, like a buzzing hive, seething with gossip and rumour. Everyone wants to be on the winning side, but no-one knows which that will turn out to be. There are gaps at the great tables where some of the families have left court altogether, either from fear, or from distaste at the new terror. Anyone who is known for Papist sympathies is in danger, and has gone to his country estates. Anyone who is in favour of reform fears that the king has turned against it with a Howard girl favourite again and Stephen Gardiner composing the prayers, which are just as they were when they came from Rome, and the reforming Archbishop Cranmer is quite out of fashion. Left behind at court are the opportunist and the reckless. It is as if the whole world is becoming unravelled with the unravelling of order. The queen pushes her food around her plate with her golden fork, her head bowed low so as to avoid the bright, curious stares of the people who have come to see a queen abandoned on her throne, deserted in her palace, who come in their hundreds to see her, avid to see a queen on her last night at court, perhaps her last night on earth.