Other days I wake cheerfully, certain that the king is doing what he himself told me is the best way to rule: favor one side and then the other, keep your thoughts a secret from everyone, be the master in the dogfight and let the curs fight it out before you. I assure myself that he is just tormenting me, as he torments everyone. He will get better and send for me, praise my beauty and remind me that I am no scholar, give me diamonds reset from a broken pectoral cross, tell me that I am the sweetest wife a man ever had, and dress me in someone else’s gown.

“George Blagge has been arrested,” Nan tells me quietly as we walk to chapel one morning. She grips my hand as I stumble. “They came for him last night.”

George Blagge is a fat plain adventurer, a favorite of the king because of his round ugly face and his terrible habit of snorting with laughter at a bawdy joke. People compose jokes just to hear Blagge snuffling with laughter, blushing rosy red, and then finally unable to contain his great snorting bellow. The king calls him “his beloved pig,” and Will Somers does a fine impression of Blagge hearing a joke that is almost as funny as the real thing. But he will not be doing that trick again.

“What has he done?” I ask.

George Blagge is no fool, for all that he has a laugh like a farrowing sow. In serious mood he has come to my rooms and listened to the sermons. He says little, and thinks a lot. I cannot believe that he would ever have said anything that might offend the king; to the king he is a playmate, not a philosopher.

“They say he spoke disrespectfully about the Mass, and then he snorted with laughter,” Nan whispers.

“Snorted with laughter?” I look blankly at her. “But that’s what he does; that amuses the king.”

“Now it’s disrespect,” she says. “And now he’s charged with heresy.”

“For snorting?”

She nods.

* * *

John Dudley Lord Lisle, the rising man and a believer in religious reform, now comes home from France with a peace treaty in his pocket. All the while that Stephen Gardiner was treating with the emperor, aiming for a peace with Spain, selling the reformers to their death in exchange for a renewed loving alliance with the pope, John Dudley was secretly meeting with the French admiral and hammering out an agreement where we keep Boulogne for decades to come and the French pay us a handsome fee. This should be the moment of triumph for John Dudley, for the Seymours, and for all of us who share the reform faith. We have won the race to peace; we have made peace with the French and not with the papist Spanish.