“He’s handsome, isn’t he? As randy as a dog? He’s a terrible man for the ladies.”

“No more than many others,” I say. I have to take care. I cannot think what I should say to keep myself safe and promote Thomas’s hopes.

“D’you like him?”

“I hardly know him,” I say. “I know his brother far better, because his wife is in my rooms. When I speak with Sir Thomas, he is always interesting, and he has served you most loyally, hasn’t he?”

“He has,” the king concedes.

“He has been a great help in the safety of England, the fleet and the ports?”

“Yes; but to give him a daughter would be an exceptional reward. And it would make the Seymours greater still.”

“But an English marriage would keep her in England,” I say. “And that would be a comfort to us both.”

He looks as if he is considering it, as if the thought of keeping her at home moves him. “I know Elizabeth,” he says. “She would have him if I let her. She is a slut, just like her mother.”

* * *

Although our stay at Windsor is in fine weather, suddenly, for no apparent reason, the king withdraws from court. I do not think he is ill, but he takes to his rooms with a small circle of gentlemen and will see no one. The court, accustomed to sunny days of informal sports and pastimes, continues without him as if they hardly care that the lynchpin and the source of all power and wealth is absent. They have become accustomed to his going and then his reappearing. They do not see this as a sign of decline; they think he will come and go forever. But the men who advise him, the men who are watchful of him every day, and hopeful for the future, gather closely around him, almost as if they dare not trust him with each other, dare not trust him alone.

From behind the closed doors the word seeps out, the men in his rooms tell their wives who attend me: he is ill again, and this time he seems deeply tired by the pain of the old wound and the fever. He sleeps for much of the day, waking up to order enormous meals but having no appetite when the servers bring the heaped platters to his bedside.

The old court—the papists like Thomas Howard, Paget and Wriothesley—are slowly, irresistibly excluded. It is the reformers who are in the ascendant now. Sir Thomas Heneage is dismissed from his intimate post of groom of the stool after years of faithful service, without warning and with no reason given. We are quietly triumphant, for the new groom is to be Joan’s husband, Sir Anthony Denny, and he joins Nan’s husband, Sir William Herbert, to stand beside the king when he labors on his closestool and blows out constipated wind.