Chapter 4
Henry was not the only king who took notice of me after widowhood, though not every proposal that season carried real danger.
Sigismund of Poland sent word through intermediaries that same year.
He’d been previously refused by Henry’s daughter, the Lady Mary, some years before.
He was apparently unwilling to let a wealthy, well-connected widow go unconsidered simply because she lived on the wrong side of Europe.
I did not take the proposal seriously, and I do not think he expected me to.
Kings test a hundred doors before one of them opens.
I suspect I was simply one door among many he tried out of habit rather than genuine hope.
I thought little of it at the time beyond the strangeness of being wanted by a man I had never met.
I knew that the proposal had nothing to do with me.
It was only about my fortune and my bloodline.
What I did not know was that I would one day owe that same rejected king my life.
At least Sigismund wanted only what any king wants from a wealthy match. The king who came next allegedly wanted considerably more.
The rumors about King Henry and me grew louder before Brandon was cold in his grave.
A widow of my fortune, they said, would not stay unmarried for long.
That much I expected. What I did not expect was the direction the gossip took once it reached its full, ugly conclusion: that King Henry was weary of the wife he had, and he might set her aside to have me instead.
The wife he had was Katherine Parr.
She was my friend before she was ever his queen. And I was happy to serve as her lady in waiting. She was a brilliant woman who read scripture in original tongues and argued theology the way other women discussed embroidery. I loved her without reservation.
When the whispers started suggesting that Henry might tire of her, I understood with cold certainty exactly what was being proposed. Not simply that Henry might want me. That he might discard her to get me.
And I knew exactly what discarding a wife meant in King Henry’s history.
I had grown up hearing my own mother speak of the first Queen Catherine, cast off and exiled to die alone.
I had watched two more queens lose their heads for offenses that, in the end, amounted to displeasing a king who owned the only court in England that mattered.
Katherine Parr was clever enough to know all of this better than I did, and I have often wondered whether she ever looked at me across a room and wondered if I might become the reason for her end.
At first, I did not understand why the rumor took the form it did. Court gossip is rarely precise about its own cruelty, and it took me longer than it should have to see what was actually being weighed in the balance.
It was not Queen Katherine’s reformed faith.
Whatever the whispers said about Katherine Parr’s outspoken theology making her difficult to manage, that was never truly the ledger Henry kept.
Nor was her near arrest for alleged heresy.
I had my own convictions, as fierce as hers, or arguably fiercer.
I had clashed with Bishop Gardiner before Katherine ever sat on the throne. I was not the safer choice on doctrine.
What made me a name worth whispering had nothing to do with what I believed and everything to do with what my body had already proven it could do.
I had given Brandon two living sons. Henry and Charles were walking, breathing proof that I was a woman capable of delivering exactly what the king wanted most. Katherine had been married twice before King Henry, to two different men.
And she had borne neither of them a child.
The court did its arithmetic without asking either of us to consent.
A duchess with proven sons. A queen with none.
It did not matter that Katherine’s barrenness may never have been her failing at all.
It only mattered that the aging King Henry had spent his entire life blaming his wives’ bodies for what his own body may have simply stopped being able to finish.
I thought of my own sons, sleeping safe in Lincolnshire, and felt disgust that their existence was being used against a woman I loved. I hated that the very thing I was proudest of - my healthy, living boys - had become the argument for why I might be sent to take her place.
We never spoke of the king’s interest in me openly, Catherine and I.
Neither of us had the courage for that treasonous conversation while it was actively circling us both.
I did not need her to tell me everything, in any case.
I had served in her household long enough by then to see for myself how a room changed when the King entered it.
I saw how carefully every woman in it learned to arrange her face before he had even finished crossing the threshold.
I lived close enough to her danger that spring and summer to need no one’s account of it afterward.
***
I knew Anne Askew before the rest of England learned her name, though not because I sought her out. She was a Lincolnshire woman, like me, and her sister was married to a lawyer named George St Poll who had served my own household for years.
It was through that connection, thin as it was, that Anne first came within reach of the reforming circle in Queen Katherine’s court.
She had left a husband who found her reading of scripture too blatant for his comfort.
And she had gone to London to preach the gospel as she understood it.
I liked her enormously. She never softened a truth to make it easier to swallow, and I had spent years cultivating the same failing in myself.
I did not arrange her acquaintance with the Queen, whatever the gossip later assumed.
I did not need to. A household as small and as interconnected as ours made such a meeting almost inevitable.
She was a woman drawn toward exactly the same reforming conversations the Queen’s rooms were known for.
Even still, I have never been able to decide whether that distinction would have mattered at all to the men who came looking for names afterward.
A connection is a connection, whether a woman built it deliberately or simply failed to prevent it from forming under her own roof.
In those early days, I did not think that I was watching anything more dangerous than an afternoon’s conversation. I was wrong.
When the charge came, Anne was accused of denying that the bread and wine of the sacrament truly became Christ’s body and blood once a priest had spoken the words over them.
It was a single, narrow point of doctrine that the King’s own law had made a burning matter, with no path back to safety once a person was condemned for it.
It was the one heresy in England that could not be recanted away.
Gardiner’s men wanted to know whether that same denial had spread into the Queen’s own rooms, and whether the Queen herself believed it.
They arrested Anne Askew in May. By June, they had condemned her. But Anne was never truly the target. She was the door that Bishop Gardiner’s faction meant to force open, and behind that door stood Queen Katherine. I did not let myself finish the thought of who might stand behind her.
They took Anne to the Tower and put her on a rack built for men. They hoped the pain would loosen names that questioning alone had not. She gave them nothing. Not Queen Katherine’s name. Not mine. Not any name at all, though her body was broken past standing by the time they finished with her.
I did not know whether my own name was being asked for in that room. I only knew that I could not sleep until word came that Anne had said nothing. And even then, I tossed and turned, because saying nothing had cost her everything she had left to give.
It was in those same weeks that Bishop Gardiner’s faction moved against Queen Katherine directly. He caught her arguing scripture with King Henry - a habit she had never quite been able to break. Gardiner told Henry afterward that he was harboring a serpent in his own bed.
A warrant for the queen’s arrest was drawn.
Her allies caught wind of it before it could be carried out.
And she did the only thing available to a woman in her position.
She went to Henry and wept. She told him she had only ever argued to be instructed by a mind greater than her own.
She let him believe he had won, when, in truth, he had only frightened her out of finishing.
It worked. It always worked, with Henry, if a woman was clever enough to know how small to make herself.
Anne Askew was burned at Smithfield on the sixteenth of July.
She was carried to her own execution in a chair because the rack had left her unable to walk.
Queen Katherine lived, folded safely back into the marriage that had nearly ended her.
I have never been able to separate those two outcomes in my mind, though I know they were not truly the same event.
One woman paid with her body and her life, and the other paid with her pride and her voice.
I told myself that I had not caused any of it. I had only known two women who wanted to discuss scripture together. But I have never fully believed my own defense. I do not think I want to. Guilt, at least, meant I had understood what was at stake.
I carried that summer with me for months afterward. Every time the whispers about Henry and me resurfaced, I heard them through what I’d just watched happen to the bravest women I knew. I could think of nothing worse than being Henry’s next queen.
I did not want him. I want to make that as clear as I can manage.
But wanting had never been the currency King Henry’s court traded in.
I had watched enough women lose everything to know that a king’s interest was not a compliment.
It was a verdict, and the woman it fell on rarely got to plead her case before it was carried out.
I watched Katherine navigate those final years with Henry with a steadiness that still humbles me to remember.
She was careful, devout, and endlessly patient with a man whose moods could turn a room to ice in a moment.
In the end, I watched her survive him when so many others had not.
And I understood that a woman’s value at that court was never fixed.
It rose and fell with the king’s appetite.
It could turn friend against friend without either woman ever choosing the turning.
King Henry died in January of 1547, still married to Katherine.
I did not grieve him. I do not think anyone did, beneath the performance required.
But I understood, watching that court reorganize itself around a new boy king, that the danger I had lived beside for two years had not ended with King Henry’s last breath.
It had simply lost its face. And I had learned by then to watch every new face at that court with the same suspicion I had once reserved for the old one.