The Autobiography Of Henry VIII

by Margaret George

  “Clearly it depends as much on the status of the prophet as on his revelation. I amend my earlier statement.”

  He coughed—not a polite cough, but a true cough. Why did he refuse to heat his rooms adequately?

  “I pray you excuse me,” he said, making for the alcove off his work closet. Another innovation at Richmond Palace: he had had a privy closet built to house a magnificent structure where he could relieve himself. It was a great, throne-like chair, all padded in velvet. Beside it was a huge pewter pot, a royal version of the jordans kept in all bedchambers, that must be emptied every morning. (In the French term, a vase de nuit.) He turned to this and proceeded to void into the jordan for what seemed an interminable time, all the while conversing in regal tones.

  WILL:

  When Henry became King, he tried to outdo his father in everything, and particularly in this area. He had a truly celestial “privy stool” (as he named it) constructed for his own use. It was so decorated, so studded with gems and padded with goose-down, that using it must have been a dazzling experience. How Harry restricted himself to retiring to it only once a day (unless he had some digestive upset, of course) is just one of the many puzzles about him. I would have arranged to spend half my day upon it.

  In spite of this—now that I think of it—Harry was abnormally fastidious about this subject. He never allowed me to make any references to those functions (a crippling injunction for a jester), nor even to use the good old words “piss” or “fart,” or—as he used to say—“the word that rhymes with hit.”

  HENRY VIII:

  “I did not summon you here to talk about crow-nets or mad Henry VI, but about marriage,” the King said. I could hardly hear him above the furious sound of his body function.

  He turned and I stepped back, making sure my eyes were turned respectfully away. “Marriage!” he repeated, rearranging his robes. “It is much on my mind these days.”

  He smiled that thin-lipped, smug smile he affected when he thought himself clever. “Margaret will do for me what armies cannot.”

  He had just arranged the marriage of my sister Margaret to King James IV of Scotland. She would wed the middle-aged but lusty Stuart, and go to live in that barbarous, cold country, whether or not she fancied it (or him). A union of sorts between England and Scotland would result.

  He went to his desk and picked up a letter. “I have received . . . an interesting proposal. From Ferdinand and Isabella. That you marry Katherine, their daughter.”

  I try now to remember my first honest thought. And it was horror, a shrinking. Then, quickly—pleasure. “Arthur’s widow?”

  “Is there any other Katherine, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella? The same.”

  “But she is—she was—”

  “The Pope can give a dispensation. That is no obstacle. Would it please you? Would it please you, boy?”

  “Yes,” I breathed. I did not dare to think how much.

  “It pleases me as well. To keep the alliance with Spain. To keep the dowry.” He shot a look at me. “A woman warms your bed, but money eases your mind. And can buy the woman for the bed to boot.”

  He disgusted me. And dishonoured my mother, whom he had certainly never bought. “Perhaps,” was all I could trust myself to say.

  “I will arrange the betrothal, then. And now you had best leave me to the plaintive cries of other crow-net men.” He turned back to his work table in exasperation, and indicated to his guard that he was ready to receive the next plaintiff.

  I was glad to be gone. I was hungry and knew Father never ate until late afternoon. Once I was back in my own chamber, I asked for some bread and cheese and ale to be brought. While I waited, I walked about restlessly, thinking about Father’s proposal. I picked up my lute, but could bring no good music from it. I looked out the window, onto the snowy palace orchard. The trees were writhing black lines against the flat white snow.

  A soft sound turned me round to see a server with a tray laden with food. I took it and sat at my small work table and ate. The cheese was exceptionally good, golden and mellow, and not hard as the cheese had been recently. The ale was dark and cold. I finished it all. No matter how much I ate, I never seemed to grow wider, only taller. I was hungry all the time, and at night sometimes my bones seemed to hurt. Linacre, one of the King’s physicians, said it was caused by my rapid growth. He said the bones were aching from being stretched. In the past year I had grown almost five inches. I was now taller than the King; I lacked only a little of the six-foot mark.

  My favourite time of day approached: the late afternoon, when the boys and young men at court gathered in the enclosed exercise area (yet another innovation) or in the Great Hall for martial exercises. Since it was not dangerous, the King grudgingly allowed me to participate.

  From November until March the boys at court were confined indoors. Their only release came during these exercises, which were rowdy, loud, and undisciplined. I was the youngest; most of the others were between fourteen and nineteen. Because of my size and natural ability I was by no means at a disadvantage by age, but because of who I was. At first they had been wary of me, inhibited, but, as always among young people, that wore off as we came to know one another. I was their future King; but I think that was overlooked as we (I can think of no better word) played. I certainly never felt anything except the usual striving the youngest feels to prove himself to his older companions.

  WILL:

  Perhaps you did not, Harry, but I can assure you the others did. Reading this part of the journal saddened me. I never realized how naïve Harry had been, or how desperately a king can seek to convince himself that others are unaware of his position. Or how early the self-deception must, perforce, begin. Certainly the others were well aware that they wrestled and had mock swordplay with the next King. God’s blood, they spent the next twenty years using those childhood winter afternoons as the basis for their advancement!

  HENRY VIII:

  There were a dozen or so of us. The oldest was Charles Brandon, the youth I had first met at Sheen. He was nineteen, but our age difference did not loom so large now. Unlike the others, he had not come to court with his father. His father was dead—killed in the same battle on Bosworth Field where Father had won his crown, singled out by Richard himself because he had held the Tudor dragon standard. Because he could not reward the dead man, the new King honoured his son instead, and brought him to live at court. Thus we were bound to one another by family ties as well as personal affinity.

  Nicholas Carew was sixteen. He was very handsome and took a great interest in fashion, saying it was very important to be au courant in the French mode. He was betrothed to the sister of Francis Bryan, his best friend and companion, an equally avid follower of French fashions. They were always discussing their wardrobes and what sort of feathers might eventually replace fur on caps. Their hearts were more in the banquet hall than on the playing field, and perhaps that is why Francis Bryan was later to lose an eye in a joust. He simply ran right into a lance. Afterwards he commissioned a jewelled eye patch to be made.

  Edward Neville, also sixteen, was a member of one of the most powerful families of the north country and had a more robust appetite for the outdoors than Bryan or Carew. There was an extraordinary physical resemblance between Neville and myself, so that from a middling distance it was difficult to tell us apart. This gave rise, in later years, to an absurd rumour that he was my illegitimate son. Quite an interesting thought, considering that he was about five years older than I.

  Henry Guildford, William Compton—they were fifteen, and cared for nothing but reading battle stories and dreaming of invading France. And Thomas Wyatt, son of one of the King’s councillors, was even younger than I, and was there only to watch. He was from Kent and, like me, had spent his earliest years in the country. Even at that age he liked to write poetry, although he never showed any of it to me.

  WILL:

  For which you should have been thankful. One of Wyatt’s later pastor
al pursuits in Kent was being his neighbour Anne Boleyn’s lover . . . perhaps the first? A signal honour, that. Later he wrote a number of indiscreet poems about her, which he wisely refrained from showing to Harry.

  HENRY VIII:

  When I descended the steps into the Hall that afternoon, most of my friends were already there and trying on their padded doublets. So they intended to use the swords this afternoon, and perhaps do a bit of hand-to-hand combat as well.

  Bryan and Carew came in behind me, carrying a large black object, which they set down on the floor with a loud clang. “Look!” they called. “It’s the new Italian armour!”

  Quickly everyone rushed over to see it. Everyone except Brandon. He just stood, his large arms crossed. “Where did you get this?” he asked.

  “We stole it,” said Carew.

  “No,” amended Bryan. “We borrowed it. From a knight who came to petition the King. He left it in the guard room when he went in for his audience.”

  “Return it,” said Brandon.

  “We will,” they chorused. “But we only wanted you to see it. Look, the decorations—”

  “I said return it!” bellowed Brandon.

  Carew raised his eyes in appeal to me, as I had feared he would. Yet it was bound to happen, sooner or later. . . .

  “Yes. Return it,” I muttered. I hated being put in this position.

  “Only if you promise to establish an armoury of your own when you become King. There should be one in England, after all.”

  “Oh, go!” I said, embarrassed. They picked up the half-suit of armour and reluctantly took it back up the stairs.

  Afterward, as we watched Compton and Bryan facing each other in hand-to-hand combat across the rush-padded mat, I leaned over to Brandon. “Thank you,” I said, “for telling them. I dared not.”

  He shrugged. “Yet it was to you they turned. Best get used to that, Your Grace.”

  A thud. Compton had been thrown, and Bryan was bending over him. Neville and another boy took their places. The air was rank now from the sweat and exertion, which mingled with the odours of last night’s dinner in the Hall.

  Night was falling already. Someone had just come in to light the torches. Soon this must end, and I would have to go back to my solitary room.

  I looked at the others around me. They were well-favoured and healthy and—young men. Some were betrothed, one was already married, and most had had women. They talked about it sometimes, casually, which meant it was not even new to them. Like the first time one takes the Sacrament, one anticipates it and thinks much about it afterwards. But as it becomes part of one’s life, one says easily: “I have received my Maker.” Just so did Bryan and Compton and Carew talk of women.

  WILL:

  How like Harry to find a religious simile for the sexual act! The Sacrament, indeed!

  HENRY VIII:

  So I would think about Katherine alone. I was to be betrothed. I would not tell anyone yet. And I wondered: when was I to be married?

  We were betrothed, formally, three months later, with the provision that the marriage would take place on my fourteenth birthday.

  The ceremony of betrothal took place at the Bishop of Salisbury’s residence in Fleet Street. It was June then, an exceptionally cool and rainy June. It had been good for the flowers, the gardeners claimed, and certainly the plants continued to bloom an extraordinarily long time.

  Father and I and the lawyers were to meet Katherine and her Spanish lawyers directly at the Bishop’s. So we rode through London, but took separate routes, lest it appear that we were too familiar already.

  In truth, I had not seen Katherine since she and Arthur had left court to go to Ludlow. She had been ill herself of the same fever that had killed Arthur, and had not even attended the funeral or been able to return to London for some time. When she did come, she had been settled in a riverside house on the great open Strand between the city and Westminster. It was called Durham House. There she lived, surrounded by her Spanish household, speaking Spanish, wearing only Spanish clothes, eating Spanish food. For a time everyone had waited to see if she might be carrying Arthur’s child, but that soon proved to be merely wishful thinking on the King’s part. Arthur was dead indeed.

  And now I was to have his leavings. That rainy June day a little over a year since his death, I went to claim the first of them.

  We took the royal barge to the water steps of Blackfriars monastery. Horses awaited us there, and we rode up a muddy lane that led away from the river and up to Fleet Street, itself a muddy little path connecting the Strand to the streets of London. We saw few people, as we were outside the main part of London the entire time. It was not a pretty journey, and on the way it began to drizzle, just to complete our discomfort.

  At the Bishop’s house on that dismal little street, we were ushered into a small room where Katherine and her party awaited us. It stank of wet wool and too many bodies packed into a tight space. It seemed that the number of lawyers required as experts and witnesses had emptied the nearby Inns of Court. And they were all chattering away at once, like a great company of monkeys.

  Katherine was somewhere in the midst of them, but it took a moment to see her. When the noise of learned talking and the scratching of pens on parchment was done, they led her out and bade us stand together.

  She is so small, was my first thought. She had not grown, whereas I had.

  She is so beautiful, was my second.

  Katherine was now seventeen, and at her peak of beauty. She was seen by so few people in those days that there remains no legend, no popular memory of that beauty. She spent her young years almost cloistered, and by the time she emerged, some of it had already gone. But then . . . O, then!

  We stood side by side, stiff and awkward. The King’s lawyer thrust a paper into the Bishop’s hand on one side, and that of the Spanish lawyer on the other. Then we repeated vows without once looking at each other, long vows in Latin. And signed our names on several pieces of paper.

  That being done, we were immediately forced apart by our respective lawyers. We were not to speak to one another, apparently, until we found ourselves in bed together in two years’ time. We left the Bishop’s residence by separate doors, just as we had come in.

  Father said nothing to me until we were safely on the big, clumsy royal barge, crossing the Thames on our way back to Greenwich. The water was a flat, ugly grey-brown, reflecting the overcast sky. Here and there a piece of garbage floated by. People along the banks seemed to consider the river their own private sewer, in spite of an ordinance against “casting any corrupt thing appoisoning the water in and about London.” I saw a dead dog turn slowly over and sink from sight in the water. When I was King, I would see that something was done about the misuse of the river.

  “You understand,” Father suddenly said in a low voice, so that the boatmen could not overhear, “that you must not see or communicate with the Princess in any way. Leave her to her Spaniards in her Spanish house.”

  “But surely I should send her tokens, write—”

  “You fool!” He set his mouth in anger. “Do you see yourself as a suitor? Tokens!” He spat out the word. “You will do nothing. Nothing. Leave her be.”

  “But—why?”

  “Because this betrothal is on paper only. I doubt that a wedding will ever take place.”

  “Then why the ceremony? Why the arrangements?”

  “It means nothing. What one ceremony does, another can undo. Surely you know that! It is nearly the first rule of kingship. The ceremony was merely to buy us some time with the Spaniards, to make a show of our good intentions.”

  “Which are neither good nor honest nor kind.” Another dead animal swept past, churning in the foam. It stank. Everything seemed corrupted to me: the river, Father, myself. Everything except the Princess.

  “The Spanish are deceiving us about the dowry. There has been much lying and misrepresentation in the matter. I do not think it will be satisfactorily settled. Therefore
I feel that a marriage between you and the Princess will not be feasible.”

  “Does the Princess . . . participate . . . in these deceptions?”

  “She knows nothing. She does as she is told. As you must.”

  I gripped the carved railing so hard I hurt my hands.

  I did not want to do as I was told.

  IX

  In the end, I had no recourse but to do precisely that. I could get no message to Katherine unless someone would agree to carry it, and no royal servant would go against the King’s express wishes. I must say, that loyalty impressed me. Father was well served.

  My fourteenth birthday approached, but no preparations were made for my wedding. Instead, I was to have a meagre celebration in honour of my newly attained manhood. (In diplomatic and official parlance, one was considered a man at fourteen, able to sign papers and take a wife and own property in one’s own right.)

  But I would not be a “man” until the exact date of my birthday, June twenty-eighth. On June twenty-seventh I was still a child, and could be treated as a child.

  That evening Father summoned me and peremptorily ordered me to dress myself and prepare to ride into London. He refused to divulge where we were going and why we must go at night.

  It was still twilight when we set out, for June twilights linger, and it would not be full dark until almost ten. We rode across the Bridge and found it busier than at noon. There were two-storey houses on both sides, and as dusk fell the people converted the main thoroughfare in between into their own private playground. They sat on benches, and the children played games and fished off the Bridge. They all seemed to know one another. That was the oddest thing to me. Here there were so many of them, such a great gathering of families, yet all so familiar.