I also learn how he plays one party against another. Stephen Gardiner is his preferred advisor, always pointing out that there should be more and more restrictions on the English Bible, that it must be strictly limited to the nobility and the learned, locked-up in their private chapels, that the poor must be prosecuted if they try to read it. He never misses an opportunity to complain that men everywhere are debating the sacred Word of God as if they could understand it, as if they are equal to educated men. But just as Stephen Gardiner thinks he has won and that the Bible will never be restored to the churches, stolen forever from the very people that need it most, the king tells Anthony Denny to send for Thomas Cranmer.

“You’ll never guess what task I am going to give him,” he says, slyly smiling at me as he lies back on his great heap of pillows and I sit beside his enormous bed, his fat damp hand in mine. “You’ll never guess!”

“I am sure I never will,” I say. I like Thomas Cranmer, a constant believer in the reform of the church, whose sermon was published at the front of the Great Bible in English, and who has always urged that the king should rule the English Church and that the sermons, psalms, and prayers should be in English. The quiet courage that he showed when he faced the plot against him has confirmed my liking for him, and he often comes to my rooms as an honored friend, to see what I am writing and to join our discussion.

“This is the way to play them,” Henry confides in me. “This is the way to rule a kingdom, Kateryn. Watch and learn. First you appoint one man, then you appoint another, his rival. You give one a task—you praise him to the skies, then you give an opposite task, a complete contradiction, to his greatest enemy. While they fight one against the other, they can’t conspire to plot against you. When they are divided to death, they are yours to command. D’you see?”

What I see is a zigzag confusion of policy so that no one knows what the king believes or truly wants, a muddle in which the loudest voice or the most pleasing person can triumph. “I am sure Your Majesty is wise,” I say carefully. “And cunning. But Thomas Cranmer would serve you in anything; surely you don’t have to trap him into obedience?”

“He is my balance,” the king says. “I balance him against Gardiner.”

“Then he will have to drag us to Germany,” Will Somers suddenly intervenes. I had not realized he was listening. He has been sitting so quietly on the floor, his back against the great pillars of the bed, throwing a little golden ball from one hand to the other.