Now that it has happened, now that the worse thing possible has happened, I do not scream and cry. I am completely still. “The king has ordered my arrest?”

“I regret to say so,” he says formally.

I hold out my hand and he gives me the paper. We move slowly, as if we are in a dream. I think of Anne Askew, stretched on the rack. I think of Anne Boleyn taking off her pearl necklace for the French swordsman. I think of Kitty Howard asking them to bring the block to her room so that she could practice laying her head down. I think that I too will have to find the courage to die with dignity. I don’t know that I am going to be able to do it. I think I am too passionate for life, I think I am too young, I think I want too much to live. I think I want Thomas Seymour. I want a life with him. I want tomorrow.

Blindly, I unfold the paper. I can see Henry’s scrawled signature as I have seen it a dozen times. Without doubt it is my husband’s hand. Above it in a clerk’s script is the warrant for my arrest. It is so. It is here. It is here at last. My own husband has ordered my arrest on a charge of heresy. My own husband has signed it.

The enormity of this almost overcomes me. He does not want to send me back to widowed obscurity—though he could do that, he has the power to do that. Or he could exile me from court and I could do nothing but obey. He could treat me as he did Anne of Cleves and order me to live elsewhere and I would have to go. He could do that, he is head of the church, he can rule which marriages are valid and which should be dissolved. He did that to Katherine of Aragon though she was a princess of Spain and the pope himself said it could not be done; but Henry did it.

But he does not want me out of his sight or out of his palaces; he does not want me to hand back the jewels and return the gowns of the other queens; he does not want me to leave his children and be forgotten by them. It is not enough for me to surrender the regency and lose my power. That is not enough for him. He wants me dead. The only reason to charge me with a crime that carries a sentence of death is to kill me. Henry, who has executed two wives and waited for news of the deaths of two others, now wants me dead like them.

I can’t understand it, I can’t think why. I can’t see why he should not send me into exile if he has come to hate me, after loving me so much. But it is not so. He wants me dead.