‘You have asked after me,’ he says delightedly.

‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ I say crushingly.

‘Tell me that I may at least dance with you later, at the wedding feast.’

‘Perhaps,’ I say.

‘I shall take that as a promise,’ he whispers, and then the door opens and the king comes out with Lady Anne and we all curtsey very low because she is queen now, and a married woman, and I can’t help but think that though that is very nice for her, it would have been much better if she had worn a gown with a long train.

ANNE, GREENWICH PALACE,

6 JANUARY 1540

So it is done. I am Queen of England. I am a wife. I sit on the right hand of my husband the king at the wedding feast and I smile down the hall so that everyone, my ladies, the lords at their tables, the common people in the gallery, everyone can see that I am happy to be their queen and that I will be a good queen and a merry wife.

Archbishop Cranmer performed the service according to the rites of the Holy Catholic Church in England, so I feel a little uneasy in my conscience. This is not bringing the country closer to the reformed religion as I promised my brother and my mother that I would do. My advisor, the Count Overstein, stands beside me and when there is a break in the dinner I remark quietly to him that I hope he and the lords of Cleves are not disappointed at my failure to lead the king to reform.

He says that I will be allowed to practise my faith as I wish, in private, but the king does not want to be troubled with matters of theology on his wedding day. He says that the king seems firm in keeping the church that he has made, which is Catholic but denies the leadership of the Pope. The king is as opposed to reformers as he is to fervent Papists.

‘But surely we could have found a form of words that could have suited both of us?’ I remark. ‘My brother was anxious that I should support the reform of the church in England.’

He makes a grimace. ‘The reform of the church is not as we understood it,’ he says, and from the closed line of his mouth I take it that he wants to say no more.

‘Certainly, it seems to have been a profitable process,’ I remark tentatively, thinking of the great houses that we stayed in on the way from Deal which were clearly former monasteries, or abbeys, and the medicine gardens around them being dug over for flowers, and the farms which fed the poor but are now being converted into parkland for hunting.

‘When we were at home we thought it was a godly process,’ he says shortly. ‘We did not realise it was drenched in blood.’

‘I cannot believe that to tear down the shrines where simple people liked to say their prayers can lead them closer to God,’ I say. ‘And what is the profit in forbidding them from lighting candles to remember their loved ones?’