Despite this promise he continues to be feverish and his leg gives him terrible pain for a long dark month. He is no better in spring—which comes slowly to the gardens of Greenwich Palace and makes the trees bud with life and shiver into leaf on the riverside walks, and the birds sing so loudly that they wake me at dawn every morning, which comes earlier and earlier and is warmer every day.

The lenten lilies swell and then flower beside the paths, their bright trumpet blooms like a shout of joy and hope, but the king keeps to his rooms with a table crowded with drafts and tinctures and herbs and jars of leeches, the shutters tightly closed against the dangerous fresh air. Doctor Wendy composes one physic after another, trying to keep the fever down, trying to cleanse out the suppurating wound on Henry’s leg, which gapes still wider, like a bloody mouth, as it eats into the flesh towards the bone. Two pages are dismissed, one for fainting at the sight of it, and one for saying in chapel that we should pray for the king as he is being eaten alive. Henry’s friends and courtiers gather around him, as if they are all under siege from disease, and each one tries to improve his position with the king in case this is not just another flaring up of fever and pain, but the beginning of a final illness.

It falls to me to dine before the court, to order the entertainments, and to make sure that the royal household runs as smoothly reporting to me as it does when it is reporting to the king. I even confer with the rivals Edward Seymour and Thomas Howard to see that there is nothing troubling, difficult, or dangerous in the Privy Council reports to the king before they take them in to him. When the Spanish envoys visit with a new plan for a treaty against France so that the emperor can move against the Lutherans and Protestants in his land, they call on me in my rooms before they attend the king.

They do this in the morning, in order to avoid the embarrassment of arriving at my rooms when the preachers of reform are there. They would be horrified to bump into Anne Askew: a reformer and an intelligent woman. It is bitter for me to have to smile and greet them, knowing that they are seeking the friendship of England only to be strong enough to hunt down and murder men and women in Germany who believe as we do. But they come and speak of their plans, trusting that I will serve the interests of my country before anything, and I do my duty and greet them with politeness and assure them of our friendship.