Chapter 50 Greenwich Palace, Easter Saturday 1541
Greenwich Palace, Easter Saturday
ON SATURDAY, WE all go to chapel again to make our individual confessions to the priest in preparation for Easter Sunday.
The king is at the altar again, in black velvet, a dark shapeless hulk in the dark chapel, blessing gold and silver rings at the altar, each one dipped in holy water from the font.
Each ring goes on the tip of a fat finger and then into a tray as gifts for favourites as cramp rings: blessed by the king, they will ward off falling sickness and fits.
Katheryn is to make her confession first; even God listens in order of precedence. I kneel beside her as she buries her face in her hands to pray, preparing to sit beside the priest and whisper her sins into his ear.
‘No need to say anything about Culpeper,’ I say quietly.
She turns a pale face towards me. ‘Isn’t he a venial sin?’
‘No need to mention him at all,’ I tell her. ‘Just say the sin of vanity.’
I see her lips tremble. ‘It isn’t vanity,’ she whispers. ‘It’s not, Jane. It’s not a little sin. It’s a pain. I can’t forget it.’
‘It’s not queenly,’ I whisper urgently. ‘Don’t tell the priest that you’re not a true queen. Don’t tell God that. Not now!’
‘God will forgive me,’ she says certainly.
‘You don’t want the king to hear of it.’
This shakes her. She raises up her missal before her face, so we can whisper in the shelter of the prayer book. ‘How would he know? If I say it in confession, only the priest and God hear?’
The priest will be in the pay of someone. Bishop Gardiner, a hard-bitten churchman, would give much to know that the new queen, a Howard queen, has met a young courtier in secret. Archbishop Cranmer, a reformer and friend of the Howards, would take an interest.
‘The king’s Head of the Church, isn’t he?’ I demand. ‘So the priest works for him, doesn’t he?’
She blanches white. ‘I’ll never confess another sin!’ she swears. ‘Not until I am on my deathbed and by the time anybody knows what I said I’d be dead.’
‘You’ve got nothing serious to confess,’ I assure her. ‘Stick to vanity and gossip.’
She looks as if she might cry. ‘I don’t love my husband.’ Her voice is a thread of sound, almost inaudible. ‘Jane, I don’t love my husband as I should.’
‘That’s all right,’ I tell her. ‘You obey him, don’t you?’
‘Oh yes!’
All childish rebellion was beaten out of her long ago.
‘That’s all that matters,’ I tell her. ‘Love isn’t for queens.’