To get these updates in your inbox, subscribe to Footnotes and Tangents and turn on notifications for the Cromwell Trilogy.
Welcome to week 20 of Wolf Crawl
This week, we are reading the second part of the chapter, “Crows, London and Kimbolton, Autumn 1535.” Cromwell visits Katherine at Kimbolton, and Anne is pregnant again.
You will find everything you need for this read-along on the main Cromwell trilogy page of my website, including:
Weekly updates, like this one
Online resources about Mantel’s writing and Thomas Cromwell
These posts are free for all, thanks to the generosity of paying subscribers who support my writing and this slow book group. Supporters can read my series of posts on The Haunting of Wolf Hall, and start their own discussion threads in the chat area. Thank you so much for all your support.
This is a long post and may get clipped by your email provider. It is best viewed online here.
Last week’s post:
This week’s story
Cromwell remembers the day he turned up at the Frescobaldi house in Florence. He boasted like an Italian and called himself Hercules. He started by sweeping the floor and worked his way up.
Back in 1535, he is writing in his head The Book Called Henry. He asks his little Welsh boy whether he prays in his own tongue. When his agent, John Ap Rice, comes in with a box of relics, he says, ‘John, you must sit down and write. Your compatriots must have prayers.’
Stephen Gardiner has been down in Putney. He says, ‘I know things about your life you don’t know yourself.’ He says Cromwell doesn’t just look like a murderer. He is one. And his father, Walter, bought off the bereaved family.
Anne summons him. Once he gets past a superfluous Mark Smeaton, he faces a discontented queen. She suspects Katherine of conspiring with Chapuys to urge the emperor to invade. She sends Cromwell to Kimbolton to root out any treason.
Cromwell takes Christophe. On the road, they stop at an inn where he, Cromwell, sleeps with the landlord’s wife. At Kimbolton, he enters the church and asks a priest to pray for Thomas Wolsey.
Katherine asks about Anne and requests visits from Chapuys and her daughter Mary. She remembers her first son, who lived fifty-two days. He tells her to make Mary reconcile with the king. But while Anne is queen, Katherine will have no mercy.
Anne is pregnant again, says a reliably informed Lady Rochford. So now is Jane Seymour’s chance to become the king’s mistress and her brothers prepare her for the task. Meanwhile, Anne shrinks in her clothes, holding within herself her future, the future of England, and the future of Master Secretary Thomas Cromwell.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_2400,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F94b8e98c-6a83-4d5b-8a85-e8735d2fd797_6819x4853.jpeg)
This week’s characters
Click on each link for more details and plot summaries for each character:
Thomas Cromwell • John ap Rice - Stephen Gardiner • Anne Boleyn • Mark Smeaton • Henry VIII • Jane Seymour • Lady Worcester • Christophe • Edmund Bedingfield • Grace Bedingfield • Katherine • Jane Rochford • Edward Seymour • Tom Seymour • John Seymour
This week’s theme: Teeter-totter
He doesn’t believe the dead need our prayers, nor can they use them. But anyone who knows the Bible as he does, knows that our God is a capricious God, and there’s no harm in hedging your bets.
This week is all about hedging your bets. As Thomas Wriothesley reminded everyone, “All our labours… can be defeated by a woman’s body.” Right now, Cromwell’s survival depends on three women: Katherine, Anne and Jane. “God should have made their bellies transparent,” complains Call-Me, “and saved us the hope and fear. But perhaps what grows in there has to grow in the dark.”
He thinks, already perhaps the secret king of England has fingers, has a face. But I thought that before, he reminds himself. At her coronation, when Anne carried her belly so proudly; and after all, it was only a girl.
Only a girl. Cromwell still has Grace’s peacock wings in a store room at his house at Stepney. He has forgotten “what pleases little girls,” but he has not forgotten the image of her walking away from him, “furled in her feathers, fading into dusk.”
Still, Anne hopes for a boy. We all must, if we value our own skin. This week, we live our lives in the conditional tense and the subjunctive mood. If Katherine dies, if Anne carries a prince, if Jane goes to the king’s bed.
In this uncertain world, we must hedge our bets and prepare for every eventuality.
‘Forgive me, but we do not all see as many paths as you.’
In one future, the king dies with no male heir. Parliament be damned, Mary still has the strongest claim. So, he, Cromwell, must do what he can for Katherine and her daughter, against the day he may need them still:
He can see the day, next spring and if Katherine is still alive, when the Emperor’s army is riding up-country, and it is necessary to snatch her out of their path and hold her hostage.
Meanwhile, he has that other plan. The Wolf Hall plan. The path opened up by a sleepless king at Elvetham. It is a future that recalls a past and summons the scarlet ghost:
Think of Wolsey. To his inner ear, the cardinal speaks. He says, I saw you, Crumb, when you were at Elvetham: scratching your balls in the dawn and wondering at the violence of the king’s whims. If he wants a new wife, fix him one. I didn’t, and I am dead.
As he rides into middle England to visit the queen that was, he has the “feeling of venturing into a watery place, where soil and marsh are the same colour and nothing is solid under your feet.” This is where he must plot his path. One mistake and the country will swallow you up. You’re not as quick as you once were, so you’ve got to “rely on cunning rather than speed.” Like tennis at Austin Friars. The game is tactics, “his foot drags,” but he can read his opponent, and when the ball returns, it finds Master Secretary waiting.
There are clues as to how to proceed. Edward Seymour began to say something about George Boleyn, but then thought better of it. The musician Mark Smeaton without his instrument. Francis Weston everywhere. And Henry Norris, carrying the king’s love letters by hand to the queen.
He is moving too fast to make much of her last sentence; though, as he will admit later, the detail will affix itself and adhere to certain sentences of his own, not yet formed. Phrases only. Elliptic. Conditional. As everything is conditional now. Anne blossoming as Katherine fails. He pictures them, their faces intent and skirts bunched, two little girls in a muddy track, playing teeter-totter with a plank balanced on a stone.
It is early December 1535.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_2400,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc95f20fd-c080-4b09-a4e8-dd12f841025d_3142x1544.jpeg)
Footnotes
1. Tennis
He wants tender things to live, young men to thrive. So he has built a tennis court, a gift to Richard and Gregory and all the young men of his house.
The medieval game of tennis is today known as real tennis, to distinguish it from modern lawn tennis. And there are only 45 active real tennis courts left in the world. One of those is at Hampton Court, built by Thomas Wolsey in the last years of his life. By installing his own tennis court at Austin Friars and hoping the king may one day come and play there, Cromwell follows the lead set by his former master.
You can learn more about real tennis and its royal history in this video:
There are many stories relating to the fates of kings and queens on the tennis court. According to Shakespeare and folk history, the French sent the young Henry V a gift of tennis balls, taunting him to play ball instead of war. The game is responsible for the deaths of two French kings, as well as James I of Scotland, who was trapped by his assassins when his escape route was blocked to prevent the loss of tennis balls.
Anne Boleyn will be watching tennis the day she is arrested. Traditionally, balls were made from a mix of putty and human hair. In the novel Sudden Death by Mexican novelist Álvaro Enrigue, Anne’s executioner sells her hair to be made into tennis balls, and she lives out a phantom afterlife on the tennis courts of Renaissance Europe.
Further reading:
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_2400,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffd6a0744-7f41-4a64-a35c-ff5b8a40b3b2_3595x2161.jpeg)
2. Hercules
'Tell me what you want done. I can do it.' (Already he boasts like an Italian.) 'We want a labourer. What is your name?' 'Hercules,' he says.
He has had many names. “He Thomas, also Tomos, Tommaso and Thomaes Cromwell.” But why Hercules? It’s a good gag. The Frescobaldi want a labourer, so what better man than the ancient hero known for his great strength and twelve labours? The baby Hercules strangled serpents sent to kill him, an echo of Cromwell’s own childhood brush with death and his later run-in with a snake in Italy.
Hercules slew the Nemean lion, a monster with an impenetrable golden fleece. A lion must make us think of Henry. He also killed the Hydra, a many-headed serpent that grew two heads for every one cut away. The hydra is a helpful metaphor for multifarious conspiracies and rebellions without one clear leader. To Cromwell in 1535, Old England is a hydra yet unslain.
In medieval and Rennaisance Europe, Hercules was a powerful symbol of the kingly virtues of valour and wisdom. His story is included in the Historyes of Troye, the first book printed in English in 1464.
Further reading:
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_5760,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F83587eaf-8157-4e85-9b49-dc0c2e5e4726_4651x817.jpeg)
3. A license to crenellate
Thurston’s cake must have failed because it doesn’t appear that evening at supper, but there is a very good jelly in the shape of a castle. ‘Thurston has a license to crenellate,’ Richard Cromwell says, and immediately throws himself into a dispute with an Italian across the table: which is the best shape for a fort, circular or star-shaped?
Crenellations refer to those stereotypical castle battlements from behind which archers lurk. Between 1194 and 1589, the crown issued 550 ‘licenses to crenellate’ private houses across England. In the far north, fortifications were necessary against Scottish raiding parties, and there you can still find bastles, or fortified farmhouses. But in peaceful southern England, licensing and building crenellations was more about social status and showing off to your guests:
The king and his companions sleep sound in new houses of rosy brick, in old houses whose fortifications have crumbled away or been pulled down, and in fantasy castles like toys, castles never capable of fortification, with walls a cannonball would punch in as if they were paper.
Further reading:
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9bbe78cd-e152-47d0-95fc-d1346c747abc_3384x4254.jpeg)
4. Andrew Boorde’s book of beards
His friend Andrew Boorde, the physician, is writing a book on beards; he is against them.
I mentioned Andrew Boorde briefly back in Week 17. He was the “maverick polymath” that Cromwell freed from the Carthusian prison at the London Charterhouse. He wrote the first travel guide to Europe and this tract against beards. His beard book is sadly lost, which I think is why Mantel decided to mention it here. We only know about it because we have a robust rebuttal of his anti-beard rhetoric from a certain Milton Barnes.
There is a persistent urban myth that the hirsute monarch Henry VIII introduced a beard tax in this year 1535. Sadly, there’s no historical evidence for this, otherwise I expect Mantel’s Cromwell would have mentioned it.
Further reading:
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0a76c71b-4e62-4304-a275-77601d580a03_1750x2048.jpeg)
5. The Book Called Henry
He thinks of what Gardiner said: you should write a book yourself, that would be something to see. If he did, it would be The Book Called Henry: how to read him, how to serve him, how best to preserve him.
Cromwell’s Book Called Henry will be a recurring theme in the pages to come. After Cromwell’s arrest in 1540, much of his personal papers were destroyed by his household. If the real Thomas Cromwell had written such a book, it has gone to the fire.
The Book Called Henry is a Cromwellian ‘mirror for princes.’ He, Cromwell, has several of these medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in his library: ‘Books that advise you how to be a good prince, or a bad one.’ We have already encountered three writers of this genre: Erasmus (Education of a Christian Prince), Castiglione (The Book of the Courtier), and Machiavelli (The Prince).
Cromwell calls Machiavelli’s book ‘almost trite… nothing in it but abstractions – virtue, terror.’ In Wolf Hall, he notes that Richard Riche is an avid reader of Machiavelli.
Of course, The Book of Henry is not for the prince but for his servant. It is a guide to serve, and it is the secret book of Thomas Cromwell. Like Borde’s big book of beards, we cannot read it. But then again, thanks to Mantel’s imagination, we can.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F480468f0-01f0-48e5-bf86-e0e21c74a13f_1450x2253.jpeg)
6. Prayers in Welsh
'Can you say the Pater Noster?' he asks. 'Pater Noster,' says the boy. 'Or, Our Father.' 'In Welsh?' 'No sir. There are no prayers in Welsh.'
I love how Cromwell always notices when someone is made to stand: Mary Tudor without a stool, himself before a pompous George Boleyn. ‘Why is it always little legs that have to save big legs?’ He remembers the days of Putney and the Frescobaldi house, when he was always on the run. ‘Now it pleases him to say to a boy, take your ease.’
The Welsh boy is followed by Cromwell’s Welsh agent, John ap Rice, or ap Rhys, or Prise. Rice married Cromwell’s niece Jo in 1534 and is now one of his inspectors of monasteries. Here he is with ‘St Edmund’s nail parings.’
‘Ah. Tip them in with the rest. The man must have had five hundred fingers.’
Rice will indeed follow Cromwell’s urging to “sit down and write.” In 1546, he will write the first book printed in the Welsh language, and it will include the first printed prayers in Welsh.
Further reading:
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_5760,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F510fe756-9ac0-495b-80cb-60b68069ede7_3189x1288.jpeg)
7. Anne Boleyn’s fool
The lights are low; her silver head bobs, glittering and small; the dwarf fusses and chuckles, muttering to herself out of sight.
We know that Anne had a fool from her ‘reckoning’ of debts after her death, which includes ‘25 yds. of cadace fringe, morrey colour, delivered to Skutte, her tailor, for a gown for her Grace’s woman fool, and a green satin cap for her.’ This may have been Jane Foole, who entered Mary’s household after Anne’s execution. Jane was also in Catherine Parr’s household and is considered the woman in the 1545 royal family portrait. Mary employed her again when she became queen in 1553.
However, there is no evidence that Jane Foole had dwarfism. It is thought she had a learning disability and may have had Down's syndrome. You can watch an interesting documentary on disabilities in the Tudor era here:
It seems to me that by making Anne’s fool a dwarf in Bring Up The Bodies, she has deliberately signalled that this is not Jane Foole. But I would love to know other people’s thoughts. People with dwarfism were employed at the Tudor court: Queen Mary had a page called John Jarvis, her brother Edward VI had a dwarf called Xit, and a French woman known as Thomazina was a lady-in-waiting to Elizabeth I.
Further reading:
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1c3a7863-10d6-45e5-9793-eb5d5f68b685_2559x3583.jpeg)
8. Church mermaids
‘Hold up the lights,’ he says. ‘Is that a mermaid?’ 'Yes, my Lord.' A shadow of anxiety crosses the priest's face. 'Must she come down? Is she forbidden?' He smiles. 'I just thought she's a long way from the sea.' 'She's stinking fish.' Christophe yells with laughter. 'Forgive the boy. He's no poet.'
I love the Kimbolton priest trying to work out Cromwell’s identity. ‘I could be Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. I could be Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk.’ It is a reminder of an age when people rarely saw someone’s likeness. And he, Cromwell, enjoys keeping the other man in the dark.
Thank you
for doing the digging here: There is indeed a mermaid at St Andrew’s Church, Kimbolton. There is also one just down the road at Stow Longa. Both are a long way from the sea. The more you look, the more church mermaids you will find. The oldest is probably in the Norman chapel at Durham Castle. The most famous is the Mermaid of Zennor in Cornwall.We have already met one mermaid: Melusine, the serpent woman. With their link to the ancient Sirens, mermaids were symbolically associated with temptation and prostitution. Later in the century, Mary Queen of Scots is depicted as a mermaid after her marriage to the Earl of Bothwell. Sexual morality will play a major role in the story to come.
Further reading:
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3014c846-1a62-42c4-add3-79d0e879bcc3_2500x1757.jpeg)
9. Almonds for the queen
‘Remember,’ he says to his party, ‘do not make the priest’s mistake. When you talk to her household she is the Dowager Princess of Wales.’ 'What?' Christophe says. 'She is not the king's wife. She never was the king's wife. She is the wife of the king's deceased brother, Arthur, Prince of Wales.'
Did anyone else notice this little slip by Master Secretary? Further down the page, he kisses Lady Bedingfield and says: ‘I have venison for your table, and some almonds for the queen, and a sweet wine that Chapuys says she favours.’
Blink and you’ll miss it. Katherine is not the queen of England, but she is the queen to Cromwell. The architect of Katherine’s annulment was never really that convinced by the argument. The difference between him and Stephen Gardiner is that his convictions are molten: they fit the shape of the king’s design, and then they ‘Put-an-edge-on-it.’
Cromwell’s duplicity is often hard to see because he hides it from himself, and we only ever see his vision of the world. He loves the king. He hates the king. We must read these ellipses and lacunae in the Book of Cromwell so that we, the readers, can know Thomas Cromwell better.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa8dcdc90-22ed-48e9-981b-c865711f6824_1007x1006.jpeg)
10. Forbidden fruit
When he sleeps he dreams of the fruit of the Garden of Eden, outstretched in Eve's plump hand. He wakes momentarily: if the fruit is ripe, when did those boughs blossom? In what possible month, in what possible spring?
What is going on here? When Cromwell meets Katherine, she is sitting in a room painted with the ‘fading figures of a scene from paradise: Adam and Eve, hand in hand.’ He imagines her dreaming that she is in the gardens of the Alhambra, Granada. ‘I could have brought her a lemon in my saddlebag, he thinks.’
Gardens and their fruit punctuate our story this week. He rode out into middle England, ‘the holly berries burning in their bushes.’ And we began in his gardens at Austin Friars. There, ‘he wants better fruit,’ so ambassadors send him rootballs, ‘still pulsing with life.’ His garden is his pride, and we must remember that he asked Hans Holbein whether he could paint him here. ‘Hans said, the very notion makes me sweat. Can we keep it simple, yes?’
Here is Cromwell’s hinterland. But it belongs to the future, whereas Katherine’s gardens belong to the past. Eden and the Alhambra: the faded paradise. But it is also the beginning of everything. Adam and Eve begat all humanity, but Henry and Katherine could manage only a girl. Only a girl. A girl and a right royal mess. The mess we’re in. The mess we’ve been living in these past twenty years.
The other fruit mentioned in this chapter is the pomegranate, the fruit of Granada, of Aragon, of Katherine, Dowager Princess, the queen that was:
When he closes his eyes that night a vault rises above him, the carved roof of Kimbolton’s church. A man ringing hand-bells. A swan, a lamb, a cripple with a stick, two lovers’ hearts entwined. And a pomegranate tree. Katherine’s emblem. That might have to go. He yawns. Chisel them into apples, that’ll fix it. I’m too tired for unnecessary effort.
I was interested to read that some Jewish scholars believe the fruit in the Garden of Eden was, in fact, the pomegranate. Across many cultures and religious traditions, the fruit has come to symbolise fertility – a painful irony for Katherine of Aragon.
In The Book of Difficult Fruit, Kate Lebo writes:
In The Unicorn in Captivity, a medieval European tapestry one can inspect before touring the quince grove at the Met Cloisters in Manhattan, a unicorn sits within a low-fenced pasture beneath a pomegranate tree. He looks content in captivity, a symbol of fertility and marriage and the fertility of a soul’s marriage with Christ. The unicorn appears to be bleeding from wounds of the hunt that chained him to this tree. On closer inspection, the wounds don’t bleed—they weep seeds. The blood is pomegranate juice.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff505037a-3690-45b6-8358-a099f74a40ae_1445x2048.jpeg)
In Cromwell’s dreams, there are fruits that are barren and bitter. There are the seeds of trees he will not live to see. And there are plans for gardens and heavy harvests, sweet with revenge and revolution. But he is living in the season before his Eden. The spring before time, when the boughs blossom, and an idea unfurls, thorny and fresh, across a cold and muddy ditch.
‘Teeter-totter.’
Further reading:
Quote of the week: ‘It’s raining,’
I feel I have neglected Lady Rochford this week. So let’s give her the last word:
Outside waiting for him, George Boleyn’s wife: her confiding hand, drawing him aside, her whisper. If someone said to Lady Rochford, ‘It’s raining,’ she would turn it into a conspiracy; as she passed the news on, she would make it sound somehow indecent, unlikely, but sadly true.
The Haunting of Wolf Hall
Paying subscribers can read the next instalment of my series on Cromwell’s ghosts. This one is called…
Next week
Thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of the Cromwell trilogy. Next week, we will read ‘Angels, Stepney and Greenwich, Christmas 1535 – New Year 1536.’
Before I go, a quick reminder that this book group is entirely funded by its readers. So, if you have enjoyed this post and found it helpful, please consider a paid subscription to access the bonus posts on The Haunting of Wolf Hall and start your own discussion threads in the chat area. You can also donate to my tip jar on Stripe. Thank you so much for all your support.
Until next week, I am your guide,
Master Simon Haisell
And with this, I’m finally caught up! I’ve read Wolf Hall in a little over a month and I’m currently dreading having to wait a week for next chapter. Some notes I wrote down:
We have three of Cromwell’s father figures in quick succession, Frescobaldi followed by Wolsey followed by Walter who, we find out, looked after Thomas after all and paid off the family of the boy he killed. Cromwell spends so much time reflecting on these men and on his own boys, Gregory and Richard and Rafe and all the others he cultivates in his house. His whole life revolves around Henry and his possible son. After losing his wife and daughters he’s dismissing more and more the crucial importance women have on his own lonely life and career.
Funnily enough his relationship with Henry is coded as feminine, because it’s so similar, almost parallel to Anne’s. I highlight every time Mantel uses romantic language to describe it, this week for example he was jealous of Henry talking to Gardiner behind his back. And I’m not saying in any way that Cromwell has romantic feelings for the King btw, these specific kinds of language and mirroring show how Cromwell is not as much in control as he tells himself, his relationship to Henry goes well beyond logic and has turned deeply personal. I started noticing it when the King gave him a ring at the same time as the wedding with Anne, that is such deliberate mirroring. Like Anne, he admires and looks down on the King, loves and hates him, uses him for his own ambition and chooses to ignore how little in control he actually is. Both relatonships are based on power imbalance. Henry always wins in the end.
I also enjoyed Anne and Catherine talking about each other, because no matter the hate, there is no one in the world that can understand each other better, they’ve been on that same roller coaster, with Cromwell as their third. I just watched the other day this video reconstructing Catherine’s face, computer recreations are usually hit and miss but I was impressed at how life-like she looks here, it’s so easy to imagine a young Henry falling in love with her. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHNzHGv_jQE
I never noticed Cromwell's slip of the tongue, calling Katherine the queen, before you pointed it out! That puts a rather different light on their subsequent conversation, doesn't it? He says and hints all the right things, twists all the right words, tells all the right lies; he's word-perfect and almost thought-perfect. But not quite. He lacks the edge of someone who believes all his claims. Some part of him still knows her as the queen.