The king’s leg swells up again and the wound opens up farther. He cannot bear to put weight on it at all and instead has wheels put under his strengthened chair and has himself wheeled around the palace. Unusually, his spirits stay high and he continues to be the dog master, as he boasted to me. He is going to send Stephen Gardiner to meet the emperor at Bruges to negotiate a treaty with the French that will bring an end to war between the three great kings of Europe; but at the same time, and in complete contradiction, he invites delegates from the German Lutheran princes to mediate between England and France for a secret peace to betray the Spanish emperor. At this rate, we will end up with two peace treaties, one brokered by papists and one brokered by Lutherans, and unable to sign either.

“No, this is a great chance for our faith,” Catherine Brandon disagrees, as we sit down behind my long table, assemble our pens and papers, and prepare to listen to the sermon of the day. “If the Lutheran lords from Saxony can bring peace to Christendom, then the reformed faith will be seen as the moral leader, as a light to the world. And they will work for the king, as they want him to save them from the emperor. That papist monster is calling for a crusade against them, his own people, for nothing more than their religion—God save and keep them.”

“But Bishop Gardiner will beat the Lutheran lords to it,” I predict. “He’ll bring home a peace with France before they can.”

“Not him!” she says disdainfully. “He’s a spent force. The king doesn’t listen to him anymore. He’s sending him on a fool’s errand to Bruges. He wants Gardiner out of the way so that he can talk freely to the Germans. He told me so himself.”

“Oh, did he?” I say levelly, and Nan, coming in, notes the edge in my voice and glances across at me.

“Don’t think that I have said anything to betray us,” Catherine says quickly. “I would never reveal what we study and what we read. But I swear that the king knows, and that he sympathizes. He speaks of your learning with such praise, Your Majesty.”

“It was the king who gave the English their Bible,” I agree. “That’s what the Lutherans want.”

“And it was Stephen Gardiner who took it away again. And now the king is meeting with Lutherans and Stephen Gardiner is far away. He can stay away from court forever, for all I care. While he is gone, and while the king supports Henry Howard’s captaincy of Boulogne against his father the duke, our greatest enemies are ignored and we grow stronger every day.”