‘He is Henry of England; but not even he can turn back the clock!’ I cry out and I push myself up from my chair and stride across the room. ‘I won’t do it. I daren’t do it. He will have me killed within a year. He is a wife-killer. He takes a woman and destroys her. It has become his habit. This will be my death!’

‘If he were to deal with you honourably . . .’

‘Dr Harst, I have escaped him once, I am the only wife of his to come out from the marriage alive! I can’t go back to put my head on the block.’

‘I am advised that he would offer you guarantees . . .’

‘This is Henry of England!’ I round on the ambassador. ‘This is a man who has been the death of three wives and is now building the scaffold for his fourth! There are no guarantees. He is a murderer. If you put me in his bed I am a dead woman.’

‘He will divorce Queen Katherine, I am certain of it. He has laid it before parliament. They know that she was no virgin when she married him. The news of her scandalous behaviour has been released to the ambassadors at the European courts for them to announce. She is publicly named as a whore. He will put her aside. He will not kill her.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘There is no reason for him to kill her,’ he says gently. ‘You are overwrought, you are not thinking clearly. She married him under false pretences, that is a sin and she is wrong. He has announced that. But since they were not married, she has not cuckolded him, he has no reason to do anything other than let her go.’

‘Then why is he seeking more evidence against her?’ I ask. ‘Since he has enough against her to name her as a whore, since he has enough against her to bring her into shame and divorce her? Why does he need more evidence?’

‘To punish the men,’ he replies.

Our eyes meet, neither of us knows what we dare to believe.

‘I fear him,’ I say miserably.

‘And so you should, he is a fearsome king. But he divorced you, and he kept his word to you. He made a fair settlement on you and he has kept you in peace and prosperity. Perhaps he will divorce her and make a settlement on her, perhaps this is his way now. Then he may want to marry you again.’

‘I cannot,’ I say quietly. ‘Believe me, Dr Harst, even if you are right and he treats Katherine with forgiveness, even with generosity, I would not dare to marry him. I cannot bear to be married to him again. I still thank God on my knees every morning for my good fortune in escaping last time. When the councillors ask you, or my brother asks you, or the French ambassador asks you, then you must tell them that I am settled to the single state, I believe myself to be pre-contracted as the king himself said. Just as he said: I am not free to marry. Persuade them that it cannot be done. I swear I cannot do it. I will not put my head back on the block and wait to hear the whistle of the falling axe.’