“I will try,” I promise. “But the conversation in his rooms is not easy as it used to be. Sometimes when I speak I feel that he is impatient with me, and sometimes he is clearly not listening.”

“You have to keep reform in his mind,” he says anxiously. “You are the only one at court now. Doctor Butts is dead, God keep him. Edward Seymour is away, Thomas, his brother, at sea, Cranmer at his palace. You are the only one left at court who can remind the king of what he passionately believed only a few months ago. I know he is changeable; but our view is his, and you are the only one who can keep him constant. It is a burden, but you are the only one at court who will defend reform. We are all looking to you.”

WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON,

SUMMER 1546

It is midsummer, too hot for being in London. We should be on progress, going down the long green valley of the Thames, staying in the beautiful riverside palaces, or heading to the south coast, perhaps going to Portsmouth, where I might see Thomas. But this year the king does not fear the plague, does not fear the heat in the city. This year he fears that death is stalking him by another route, coming closer and closer like a constant companion.

He is too tired to go far, even in flight from disease. Poor old man, he can no longer ride, he can no longer walk. He is ashamed to be seen by the people who used to line the roadsides and doff their caps and cheer as he went by. He used to be the most handsome prince in Christendom. Now he knows that nobody can look at him without feeling pity for the wreck that he has made of his bloated body, and for the moonlike face.

So, because the king is self-pitying and filled with dread, we all have to stay in the heat of the city, where the narrow streets stink with filth from the central gutters and the pigs and cows nose through the rubbish that is heaped in the streets. I remark that the Lord Mayor should be more active, should get the streets cleaned and fine the offenders; but the king looks at me coldly, and says, “Would you be the Lord Mayor of London as well as queen?”

Everyone is irritable at being detained in town. The courtiers usually go to their homes for the summer months and the northern lords and the western lords are missing their wives and their families and their castles set in the cool green hills of their homelands. The king’s bad temper sets the tone for the court: nobody wants to be here, nobody is allowed to leave, everyone is unhappy.