I dare not look up in case this is a trap set for me, but I feel myself tremble with the strength of my feeling. If the king is coming to this realization, if the king is coming to this clarity, then Anne did not die in vain and I did not throw down my scholarship and take a beating like a slave in vain, for God has brought the king enlightenment through her ashes and my shame.

“Is Your Majesty saying that we should understand that the words are symbolic?”

“Isn’t it what you think?”

I will not be tempted into declaring my opinion. “Your Majesty, you will find me a very stupid woman, but I hardly know what to think. I was brought up to believe one thing, and then taught to consider another. Now, as a married woman, I have to know what my husband believes for he is there to guide me.”

He smiles. This is exactly right; this is what he wants to hear. This is what a tamed wife parrots to her husband. “Kate, I will tell you—I think we need to create a sincere religion in which the communion is the center of the liturgy but its power is symbolic,” he pronounces. The rounded phrase and the sonorous delivery tells me that he has prepared this. He may even have written it down and learned it by heart. Someone may even have coached him—Anthony Denny? Thomas Cranmer?

“Thank you,” I say sweetly. “Thank you for guiding me.”

“And I am going to suggest to the French ambassador that wework together, France and England, to drive out the superstition and heresy of the old church and create a new church, in France and in England, based on the Bible, based on the new learning, and that we spread it throughout all our lands, and then throughout the world.”

This is incredible. “You will?”

“Kate, I want a learned, thoughtful people walking in the ways of God, not a pack of fearful fools plagued by witches and priests. All of Europe but the papal states are persuaded that this is the way to understand God. I want to be part of this. I want to advise them, I want England to lead them. And if the day ever comes, I want to leave you as a regent and my son as a king to reign over people who say prayers that they understand and take part in a Mass—in a Communion that makes sense to them, as Our Lord described—not some kind of mumpsimus-sumpsimus invented in Rome.”

“I think it too, I think it too!” I can no longer contain my enthusiasm.

He smiles at me. “We’ll bring the new learning, the new religion into England,” he says. “You will see this, even if I do not.”

WINDSOR CASTLE,

AUTUMN 1546