I take my seat at the great table in the presence chamber every day and have the Privy Council report to me that the kingdom is at peace and that we are taking in taxes and fines, and we are making enough weapons and armor to keep the king’s army supplied in France. I make it a priority to supply our forces, to make sure that wages, weapons, ammunition, armor, food, even arrowheads, are shipped in the amounts that are needed. I have been compared, to my detriment, to the saintly Jane Seymour ever since I was married; I don’t want to suffer from a comparison to Thomas Wolsey too. I don’t want anyone to say that Katherine of Aragon was a better regent than Kateryn Parr.

Every morning, after breakfast and before I take the children out hunting, I have a brief meeting of my council to read any dispatches that have come in overnight, either from the king in France or from the troubled northern lands. If there is work to do, or something that I want to make sure of, I will call them to meet with me again before dinner.

We gather in one of the grand rooms at Hampton Court, and I have had a table set in the middle, chairs around for the councillors, and a great map of France and the sea roads pinned on the wall. On the opposite wall there is as much of a map of the border lands of the North and of Scotland as can be drawn from the little knowledge that we have of the countryside. I sit at the head of the table and William Petre, the king’s Secretary, reads whatever dispatches have arrived from our armies, and whatever letters or appeals from other parts of the kingdom. As the king is at war with the French there is trouble in most of the towns where Frenchmen have settled, and I have to write to the local lords or even the justices of the peace and command them to be sure that their districts are quiet. A country at war is as nervous as one of my little birds. We have constant reports of spies and invasions, which I judge to be false, and I send the proclamations out to the whole kingdom.