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Popular they were. Just the previous week the villagers at Buckden had surrounded the little palace and cried out to Katherine, “God save the Queen! We are ready to die for you. How can we serve you? Confusion to your enemies!” Whenever Mary was glimpsed, people shouted similar things to her. It was quite clear where the populace stood.

The next week I had an edict printed and proclaquickly. sherbet (Crum had presented her with the recipe), with which she was planning to surprise her guests. It was cherry-flavoured, and she had spent hours perfecting the taste. I myself had helped with it; now I must give an offhanded excuse and hurry away. Anne was disturbed, and was not fooled; she sensed that something important had happened.

It took four hours to reach Crowley, a rudely furnished hunting lodge used by my grandfather Edward as a favourite place to relax after a day’s excursion with his brothers, Clarence and Richard. I had always liked it, in spite of its unsettling associations from the wars. It was comfortable there; it was the sort of place where a man could take off his boots and snore by the fire. And it was here, too, that Anne and I had passed those heated days during the progress of 1531, when she almost let me into her chamber time and again, but always barred me at the last moment. Was that truly only two years ago?

Now I came to meet a different challenge, in the person of Clement’s representative. I strode into the lodge, happy to have arrived first, as that gave me a subtle advantage. I looked round. How different it looked by day, when I had no fire in my blood, no desires I sought to have satisfied. Those who compare victories in war with victories in love are fools, and probably have experienced neither.

I had time enough to become bored before a glint of sun on a helmet far down the road to the east signalled the approach of Clement’s proxy.

A foreign power on English soil, trudging along to exert its jurisdiction—this was the last time such an anachronism would be seen, I thought. Never again. I had banished such pretensions from Continental minds and made them unacceptable for any patriotic Englishman.

Even in my own boyhood, things foreign were seen as “better” than things English. Arthur must have a foreign bride; the Tudor dynasty would not be confirmed as “royal” until a European royal family condescended to marry into it. And so Katherine had come, and yokels had cheered the Spaniards and stood in awe of them as they passed along muddy paths. And because of that curious journey more than thirty years ago, another band of foreigners was snaking along another muddy path in another attempt to meddle in English affairs.

I grinned. I could hear the rapid Italian in the distance. This was 1533, not 1501. Their time had passed. I was an English king and my wife was pure English as well, and we ruled a nation proud to be counted “mere English.”

The tittering Popish popinjays drew up to the lodge’s entrance and sat, brown and slight and sly, waiting to be received.

As they were shown in to stand before me, I appraised them. What had begun with antagonism on my part ended in bafflement. Was it these men of whom I had, for so long, stood in awe? What a fool I had been!

Their leader, travel-soiled and tired beyond the point of nervousness, merely handed me the Papal scroll, as unceremoniously as a farmer passing on a sausage. Doubtless he had been instructed otherwise, but the lulling informality of the lodge and the lack of court witnesses made it too easy to skip the ceremonial.

I took it just as carelessly, and made a show of unrolling it and reading it without emotion.

It should not have disturbed me. I knew-or, rather, decreed that I knew—that Clement (born Giulio de’ Medici) was not the Vicar of Christ, but just a misguided bishop. He had no power to pronounce spiritual judgment on me. Npower ... I had staked my kingdom, my soul, on that belief. Why, then, did I stagger, even for a moment, under it?

Wherefore