Princess Mary is a most determined Papist; and I have been raised in a country that rejects the abuses of Papists and calls for a purer church. We might be enemies over doctrine and yet become friends. More than anything, I want to be a good queen for England, and a good friend to her, and surely, she should understand that. Of all the things that people say of Katherine of Aragon, everyone knows that she was a good queen and a good mother. All I want to do is follow her example; her daughter might even welcome that.

KATHERINE, WHITEHALL PALACE,

JANUARY 1540

I am summoned to practise a masque, a tableau to open the tournament. The king is going to come in disguised as a knight from the sea, and we are to be waves or fish or something like that in his train and dance for the queen and the court. His composer has the score of the music and there are to be six of us. I think we represent the muses, but I am not sure. Now I come to think of it, I don’t even know what a muse is. But I hope that it is the sort of thing that has a costume made from very fine silks.

Anne Bassett is another dancer, and Alison, and Jane, Mary, Catherine Carey and me. Of the six of us probably Anne is the prettiest girl, she has the fairest blonde hair and big blue eyes and she has this trick, which I must learn, of looking down and looking up again as if she had heard something most interesting and indecent. If you tell her the price of a yard of buckram she will look down and back up, as if you have whispered that you love her. Only if someone else is watching, of course. If we are just on our own she doesn’t bother with it. It does make her most engaging when she is trying hard. After her, I am certain that I am the prettiest girl. She is the daughter of Lord and Lady Lisle and a great favourite of the king’s, who is very much taken with this up and down look and has promised to give her a horse, which I think a pretty good fee for doing nothing more than fluttering eyelashes. Truly, there is a fortune to be made at court if you know how.

I enter the room at a run because I am late and there is the king himself, with two or three of his greatest friends, Charles Brandon, Sir Thomas Wyatt and young Thomas Culpepper, standing with the musicians with the score in his hand.

I curtsey very low at once, and I see that Anne Bassett is there, in the forefront, looking very demure and with her are the four others, preening themselves like a nest of cygnets and hoping to catch the royal eye.

But it is me that the king smiles to see. He really does. He turns and says, ‘Ah! My little friend from Rochester.’