great pilgrim road for the faithful going to the shrine of St Thomas à Becket at the cathedral. I can see the spire of the church long before I can see even the walls of the town, it is built so high and so beautiful, and the light catches it through dark clouds as if God was touching the holy place. The road is paved here and every other house alongside was built to accommodate pilgrims, who used to come from all over Europe to pray at this most beautiful shrine. This was once one of the great holy sites of the world – just a few short years ago.
It’s all changed now. Changed as much as if they had thrown the church down. My mother has warned me not to remark on what we had heard of the king’s great changes, nor on what I see – however shocking. The king’s own commissioners went to the shrine of the great saint and took the treasure that had been offered at the shrine. They went into the vaults and raided the very coffin that held the saint’s body. It is said that they took his martyred body and threw it on the midden outside the city walls, they were so determined to destroy this sacred place.
My brother would say it is a good thing that the English have turned their backs on superstition and Popish practices, but my brother does not see that the houses for pilgrims have been taken over by bawdy houses and inns and there are beggars without anywhere to go all along the roads into Canterbury. My brother does not know that half the houses in Canterbury were hospitals for the poor and sick and that the church paid for poor pilgrims to stay and be nursed back to health and that the nuns and monks spent their lives serving the poor. Now our soldiers have to push their way through a murmuring crowd of people who are looking for the holy refuge that they were promised; but it has all gone. I take care to say nothing when our cavalcade turns through great gates and the archbishop dismounts from his horse to welcome me into a beautiful house that was clearly an abbey, perhaps only months ago. I look around as we go into a beautiful hall where travellers would have been freely entertained, and where the monks would have dined. I know that my brother wants me to lead this country still further away from superstition and papacy, but he has not seen what has been spoiled in this country in the name of reform.
The windows, which were once made of coloured glass to show beautiful stories, have been smashed so carelessly that the stone is broken and the tracery of stonework is all crushed. If a naughty boy did such a thing to windows he would be whipped. High in the vaulting roof were little angels and, I think, a frieze of saints, which has been knocked out by some fool with a hammer who cared for nothing. It is foolish, I know, to grieve for things of stone; but the men who did this godly work did not do it in a godly way. They could have taken the statues down and made good the walls after. But instead, they just knocked off the heads, and left the little angel bodies headless. How this serves the will of God, I cannot know.
I am a daughter of Cleves and we have turned against papacy and rightly; but I have not seen this sort of stupidity before. I can’t think why men would believe that it is a better world where something beautiful is destroyed and something broken left in its place. Then they take me to my rooms, which clearly once belonged to the prior. They have been replastered and repainted and still smell of new limewash. And here I start to realise the real reason for religious reform in this country. This beautiful building, and the lands on which it stands, the great farms which pay it rent and the flocks of sheep which bear its wool, once all belonged to the church and to the Pope. The church was the greatest landowner in England. Now all that wealth belongs to the king. For the first time I realise that this is not just a matter of the worship of God. Perhaps it is nothing to do with God. There is the greed of man here too.
There is vanity as well, perhaps. For Thomas à Becket was a saint who defied a tyrant King of England. His body lay in the crypt of this most lavish cathedral, encased in gold and jewels, and the king himself – who ordered the throwing down of this shrine – used to come here to pray for help. But now the king needs no help, and rebels are hanged in this country, and the wealth and beauty must all belong to the king. My brother would say that this is a good thing and that a country cannot have two masters.
I am wearily changing my gown for dinner when I hear another roar of guns and although it is pitch black and nearly midnight Jane Boleyn comes smiling to tell me that there are hundreds of people in the great hall come to welcome me to Canterbury.
‘Many gentlemen?’ I ask her in my stilted English.
She smiles at once, she knows that I am dreading a long line of introductions.
‘They just want to see you,’ she says clearly, pointing to her eyes. ‘You just have to wave.’ She shows me a wave and I giggle at the masque that we play to each other while I learn her language.
I point to the window. ‘Good land,’ I say.
She nods. ‘Abbey land, God’s land.’
‘Now the king’s?’
She has a wry smile. ‘The king is now head of the church, you understand? All the wealth –’ she hesitates ‘– the spiritual wealth of the church is now his.’
‘And the people are glad?’ I ask. I am so frustrated by being unable to speak fluently. ‘The bad priests are gone?’
She glances towards the door as if she would be sure that we cannot be overheard. ‘The people are not glad,’ she says. ‘The people loved the shrines and the saints, they don’t know why the candles are being taken away. They don’t know why they cannot pray for help. But you should not speak of this to anyone but me. It is the king’s will that the church should be destroyed.’
I nod. ‘He is a Protestant?’ I ask.
Her quick smile makes her eyes sparkle. ‘Oh, no!’ she says. ‘He is whatever he wishes to be. He destroyed the church so that he could marry my sister-in-law; she believed in a reformed church and the king believed with her. Then he destroyed her. He has turned the church almost back to being Catholic, the Mass is almost completely restored – but he will never give back the wealth. Who knows what he will do next? What will he believe next?’
I understand only a little of this so I turn away from her and look out of the window at the driving rain and the pitch darkness. The thought of a king who can determine not only what life his people lead but even the nature of the God they worship makes me shiver. This is a king who has thrown down the shrine of one of the greatest saints in Christendom, this is a king who has turned the great monasteries of his country into private houses. My brother was quite wrong to command me to lead this king into right-thinking. This is a king who will have his own way, and I daresay nobody can stop or turn him.
‘We should go to dinner,’ Jane Boleyn says gently to me. ‘Do not speak of these things to anyone.’
‘Yes,’ I say, and with her just one pace behind me I open my privy chamber door to the crowds of people waiting for me in my presence chamber and I face the sea of unknown smiling faces once more.
I am so delighted to be out of the rain and out of the darkness that I take a large glass of wine and eat heartily at dinner, even though I sit alone under a canopy and I am served by men who kneel to offer dishes to me. There are hundreds of people dining in the hall and hundreds more who peer in at the windows and doorways to see me as if I were some strange animal.
I will grow accustomed to this, I know that I have to; and I will. There is no point being a Queen of England and being embarrassed by servants. This stolen abbey is not even one of the great palaces of the land and yet I have never seen a place so wealthy with gildings and paintings and tapestries. I ask the archbishop if this is his own palace and he smiles and says his own house is nearby. This is a country of such great riches that it is almost unimaginable.
I do not get to my bed till the early hours of the morning and then we rise again, early, to
