“Certainly you can hire tutors,” she says. “They’re as easy to get as parakeets. And you could have an afternoon sermon preached every day, Katherine of Aragon did. You have a range of opinion in your rooms already. Catherine Brandon is a reformer, while Lady Mary is probably secretly faithful to Rome. Of course she would never deny that her father is Supreme Head of the Church.” Nan lifts a warning finger to me. “Everyone has to be very, very careful what they say. But now that the king is restoring the rituals that he banned, and taking away the English Bible that he gave to his people, Lady Mary hopes that he will go further and reconcile with the pope.”

“I have to understand this,” I say. “We lived so far from London, we heard almost nothing, and I couldn’t get hold of books. And anyway, my husband Lord Latimer believed in the old ways.”

“There are many who still do,” Nan warns me. “A frightening number still do, and they are rising in favor. But we have to fight them and win this argument. We have to get the Bible back into the churches for the people. We cannot let the bishops take the Word of God from the people. It is to condemn people to ignorance. Even you will have to study discreetly, with an eye on the law of heresy. We don’t want Stephen Gardiner sticking his ugly nose into your rooms, like he does everywhere else.”

The king comes to me almost every night, but often wants nothing more from me than conversation, or to share a glass of wine before he goes to his own bed. We sit together like an old loving couple, he in a glorious embroidered nightgown strained across his massive chest and belly, with his sore leg propped on a footstool, me in my black satin with my hair in a plait.

His physician comes with him to give him his evening doses: drugs to ease the pain of his leg, for his headaches as his eyes are failing, to make his bowels move, to clear his urine, which is dangerously dark and sticky. Henry winks when he tells me that his physician has given him something to help with vigor. “Perhaps we will make a son,” he suggests. “What about a little Duke of York to follow my prince?”

“In that case I’ll have some of that physic?” Will Somers takes the liberties allowed to an official Fool. “I could do with a bit of vigor at nighttime. I would be a bull, but I am a little lamb; truly, I am a little lamb.”

“Do you skip and prance?” the king smiles as the physician hands him another draft.