‘It isn’t right,’ she says mutinously.

I take her wrists and I hold her as I would a maid that I was about to beat for stupidity. ‘Learn this,’ I say harshly. ‘It is the will of the king. And there is no man strong enough to stand against him. Not even your uncle, not the archbishop, not the Pope himself. The king will do what he wants to do. Your job is to make sure that he never turns his face from you, from us.’

ANNE, RICHMOND PALACE,

NOVEMBER 1540

So: I am to go to court for the Christmas feast. He holds true to his word that I shall be second only to little Kitty Howard (I must learn to say Queen Katherine before I get there). I have a letter from the Lord Chamberlain today, bidding my attendance and telling me I will be housed in the queen’s rooms. No doubt I shall have one of the best bedrooms and the Princess Mary another, and I shall learn to see Kitty Howard (Queen Katherine) go to bed in my bed, and change her clothes in my rooms and receive my visitors in my chair.

If I am to do this at all, it has to be done gracefully. And I have no choice but to do this.

I can be sure that Kitty Howard will play her part. She will be rehearsing now, if I know her. She likes to practise her moves and her smiles. I imagine she will have a new, gracious smile prepared for my reception, and I must be gracious too.

I must buy gifts. The king loves gifts and of course little Kitty Howard (Queen Katherine) is an utter magpie. If I take some very fine things I will be able to attend with some confidence. I so need confidence. I have been a duchess and the Queen of England and now I am some sort of princess. I must learn courage to be myself, Anne of Cleves, and enter the court, and my new position in it, with grace. It will be Christmas. My first Christmas in England. I could laugh to think that I had thought that I would be merry, with a merry court, at the Christmas feast. I had thought I would be queen of that court; but, as it turns out, I shall only be a favoured guest. So it goes. So it goes in a woman’s life. I am quite without fault and yet I am not in the position that I was called to. I am quite without fault and yet I am thrown down. What I must see if I can do, is to be a good Princess of England where once I planned to be a good queen.

JANE BOLEYN, HAMPTON COURT,

CHRISTMAS 1540

The king has turned against his wife’s family, against his own niece, and everyone stays quiet, keeps their heads low and hopes that his disfavour will not turn on them. Charles Howard, warned in advance by someone braver than the rest of us, has skipped downriver in a little fishing boat, begged a place on a coaster, and sailed for France. He will join the growing number of exiles who cannot live in Henry’s England: Papists, reformers, men and women caught in the new treason laws, and men and women whose crime is nothing more than to be kin to someone the king has named as a traitor. The greater their numbers grow, the more suspicious and fearful is this king. His own father took England with a handful of disaffected men, in exile from King Richard. He knows, none better, that tyranny is hated, and that enough exiles, enough pretenders, can overthrow the throne.