The Autobiography Of Henry VIII

by Margaret George

  It was Wolsey who (I must admit it, must credit his statesmanship here, for it was as a statesman that he found his greatness) proposed that England sponsor a Treaty of Universal Peace, in which all Christians would unite as brothers to fight the Infidel and bar Europe to Turkish military designs.

  This treaty, of course, would be signed in London, under my auspices, with Wolsey himself acting as Papal legate.

  The proposal was eagerly accepted by Pope Leo, and, using the bait of Tournai, we enticed the French into coming to England to sign the treaty. Not only would we unite in peace, but we would plan and execute a mighty Crusade against the Turk.

  The world stood still while the legates, ambassadors, lords, and prelates of all Christendom—England, France, the Empire, the Papacy, Spain, Denmark, Scotland, Portugal, Hungary, the Italian states, the Swiss Confederation, and the Hanseatic towns—gathered in London and signed the treaty. Before the High Altar of St. Paul’s, a Pontifical Mass was celebrated by Wolsey, and a general peace within Christendom was proclaimed. Cardinal Wolsey, Lord Chancellor of England, Papal legate, was recognized as “the Architect of Universal Peace.” His face shone with triumphant glory.

  There were a few private matters to be worked out between England and France. One concerned Tournai. My plans to retain it as a part of England had not fared well. It had proved a dreadful expense, and the attempts to convert its inhabitants from their French perverseness had met with utter failure. I agreed to sell Tournai back to France for six hundred thousand crowns—less than it had taken me to capture and garrison it, but I never begrudge money spent on an idea that seems promising at the time.

  The other concerned Francis and myself. Evidently the French King had as burning a curiosity to behold me as I had to behold him. It was a curiosity that we agreed to satisfy. We would meet, with our full courts in attendance, at a place called the Valley of Gold, near Calais, the following summer.

  As the last of the diplomats took leave and the ships plied their way across the Channel in the strengthening autumn gales, I was faced with a personal dilemma of a most delicate nature.

  Bessie was pregnant.

  She had waited until after the treaties were concluded to tell me. I had not seen her throughout the festivities; I had decorously kept Katherine by my side, as good taste, protocol, and respect demanded. There had been no lying with Katherine, however, as she had just begun another pregnancy.

  I had looked forward to enjoying Bessie and her incomparable favours again; had found myself thinking on them during the long and tedious banquet that Wolsey gave at York Place, described by flattering chroniclers as “surpassing anything given by either Cleopatra or Caligula,” when in truth the spirit of those two lusty goats was to be found within my head, not at Wolsey’s table. How Bessie and I used one another, in fantasy, while the Venetian ambassador droned on in my ear about Adriatic trade routes!

  And now, as I was in the very act of reaching for her, my pre-formed desire in the ascendant—

  “Your Majesty, I am with child.” How calmly those four shattering words came from her lips.

  I dropped her arm.

  “Yes,” she said. “It will be in June.”

  Seven months. She waited expectantly (in both senses of the word), waited to hear my happy words. How wonderful. I will make you Duchess of X. What joy. Ask for anything, it shall be yours. You must have your own estates, honours, be recognized as Maitresse en Titre, my love, my desire, my pretty one.

  “You must leave court,” I said.

  “Yes.” And?

  “I will—I will find you a place to go. Nearby, so I can watch over you until the child is born. Perhaps a priory in Essex.”

  Her face changed. “But—”

  “You must leave the Queen’s service immediately. It would be a scandal for you to continue as her maid of honour. It would dishonour all three of us.”

  “And my father?” she cried. “Surely he should leave your service as well? Does it not dishonour him to continue to minister to a—a man who has seduced his daughter?”

  “So now you turn sanctimonious? This was not your tune in the beginning. Oh, no, then you dismissed my qualms as overscrupulous, old-fashioned.”

  “I have honour, too! It is not only you and the Queen who are entitled to it! I have honour, and my father has honour, and now to be treated so lightly—”

  How tedious this was, how unpleasant. Why did all pleasure have this rancid aftertaste?

  “Come now, Bessie. It was sport, we agreed it was, we’ve enjoyed one another, but now it is time to observe the proprieties, lest we cause a scandal, and thereby harm ourselves. And the child.”

  “I loved you! I loved you, and now you treat me as a burden, a problem to be solved.”

  There it was, the dreaded word: love. I did not want to be loved; that was the burden. Unwanted love was the greatest burden of all.

  “It is not you that is the burden . . .” I began, but it was too difficult and complicated to explain, and in the end I could not say the only words she truly wished to hear, anyway.

  “And after the child comes, what then?”

  “Wolsey will find you a husband. Never fear, you will be well married.”

  “Wolsey!”

  “So you see, you will not have been ‘dishonoured.’ You will be as marriageable as if you had remained chaste the entire time at court.”

  “You let Wolsey attend to even this . . . personal thing?”

  “It is not personal, Bessie.”

  That was the tragedy of it for her, and the embarrassment of it for me.

  There could be no resistance on her part. I would give orders, and in the morning she would be gone.

  That night, as I lay alone in bed, I wondered, in horror and fear of what lay within me, why I felt nothing for her. For three years we had joined our bodies, laughed, sung, and exchanged affectionate words. Yet her actions had been real, and mine, evidently, had not.

  Toward midnight I fell into a restless sleep. I dreamed that I was passing through a field of poppies in which each flower, if one looked deep within its red center, had a woman’s face. The faces were different, yet all the flowers were alike. If I gathered them to make a bouquet, they soon drooped in the silver vases into which I put them, and always withered up during the night. Their scent was beguiling but not addicting. This puzzled me because Arabs used poppy seeds for medicine, which was said to be strongly addicting.

  The morning sun dispelled the shreds of this strange dream, but the coming day felt stale already.

  XXVII

  Katherine wished for our child to be born at Greenwich. Mary had been born there, and Katherine wanted the same chamber, the same attendants, the same everything. A good Christian is not supposed to be superstitious, but I overlooked Katherine’s “failing,” if it can be called that, because I shared it. I would propitiate anything, because I knew not from which quarter the hostility came.

  “I was born here,” I told little Mary, as we passed a late April morning walking about the palace gardens. She and I were in front of Katherine, who needed the pathway entirely to herself, so bulky was she. And not just because of the infant. She herself had become very bulky.

  Mary looked up at me. She loved hearing my voice; I could tell. “Yes, I was born here, and you were born here. Your mother and I were married here! It is a special place.”

  Overhead the skies were piercingly blue, and I could smell the coming spring in the air: a peculiar sort of blending of sweetness and death. We walked near the water-wall, where the Thames caressed the stones.

  Mary pointed up at the gulls. “Birds!”

  How well she spoke! How alert she was!

  “Yes, sea birds,” I said. “You find them wherever there is great water.” I looked out at the boats bobbing all about, and especially at the royal wharf where my long-awaited flagship was tied up. “The water is England’s greatness,” I said. “It surrounds us on all sides and protects us from enemies, but at
the same time it allows us to master it and make it our servant. With ships to ride it, as people ride horses, we shall go far.”

  Mary pointed at Henri, Grace à Dieu. “Go see.”

  “No.” Katherine shook her head.

  “Let the child indulge herself,” I said.

  “You mean, let yourself.” Yet she was amenable.

  I showed our daughter about the great ship, nicknamed Great Harry. Every odour of her planks, every creak of the ropes made something within me sing. I longed to be away, gone, upon open seas. . . .

  Mary began fingering the captain’s knot-cords. “Those are to measure how fast a ship is moving,” I said, opening her fat little fists and making her drop the rope. “But we mustn’t mess them.”

  She began to whine, then to cry. Katherine, waiting upon the docks, looked up. Through a mother’s ears, she had heard Mary’s faraway cries.

  She took the child in hand as we alighted off the gangplank, and forced her to walk obediently along the water-wall separating the palace grounds from the marshy area surrounding it and from the river itself—for Greenwich was a sea-palace, but protected from the ravages of water.

  Katherine went to her lying-in chamber in early May, and Mary and I accompanied her with great excitement. I had never imagined how the presence of a child altered all events. What had been a state matter, a public ceremony in the past, now became a part of our family history.

  As Katherine took her leave, and the great doors were closed behind her, Mary insisted on giving them a final pat with her hands. Then she put out her hand to me.

  “Go pray,” she said.

  Had Katherine whispered that right before she went in? Or did it arise from Mary’s own heart?

  “Very well. We shall pray in the best possible place.”

  I took her to the Church of the Observant Friars, the little chapel of that order where Katherine and I had been married, right next to Greenwich Palace.

  I had never been there unceremoniously, and there is a vast difference. This time I came as a private man, with no retinue. The darkness was the first thing I noticed. Without a ceremony of high importance, the interior of the chapel was not lit, and even at midday it was swathed in gloom, except for the glowing windows.

  Mary stopped her babbling and stood stock-still in the middle aisle. The magical light had caught her and rendered her silent and awed, as it was meant to.

  I took her hand and found not resistance, but ease and cooperation. We knelt side by side facing the reserved Host and the altar. I expected Mary to wiggle, complain, wish to run away. Instead she was rigid with delight and obedience. We prayed together for Katherine’s safe deliverance and the gift of an heir. Then Mary slipped away, and I continued my private prayers, begging for a son. The fragmented red and blue light, created from coloured glass but reassembled to form a transcendent whole, seemed to pulsate within the chapel. I had not seen this sort of light even on my wedding day; the artificial brightness of torches and candles had obscured it.

  I expected to find Mary fast asleep under a prie-dieu, or playing alone quietly. Instead I found her on her knees, on the worn stones before St. Anne’s statue, staring straight ahead with a wide-eyed, fixed stare.

  Katherine stayed in her lying-in chamber for the full length of days. This was to be a full-term pregnancy, then. That in itself was a good sign. Of her eight pregnancies, only three others had reached full term. And these past months had been happy ones for her. There had been no health problems, no dropsy, no racing heart, no swollen hands and feet. There had been no discord between us. Ferdinand’s death had rendered her mine entirely, and in her heart of hearts, she was glad of it. Or so I believed.

  Her labour began exactly on the day predicted. It was a fair, sunny June day, much like the one (so they said) when I was born. All proceeded as it should, and the regular reports issued by the physicians were encouraging. The Queen is bearing her pains well. . . . The Queen is entering her hard time. . . . The Queen feels that delivery is near. . . .

  Then silence. No physician came to the doors of the chamber. No cries, either of mother or infant. Only an elapse of time, as the long summer day drew to its close. The sun set; twilight began, with its blue-grey haze settling over the river and the palace grounds.

  Then, a piercing cry that penetrated all the doors. Katherine’s cry.

  Still, no announcement, no opening of the outer doors to the chamber. I must enter, even though it was forbidden. I took the door handle in my hand, only to find it being opened from the other side. I shot into the room.

  Linacre awaited me. His face told me nothing. It was as bland as old snow in February.

  I was relieved. It meant Katherine lived; for if she did not, he would hardly have looked so blank.

  “Your Majesty.” He gestured. “The Queen wishes you to be with her.”

  I followed him down the connecting suite of rooms (all muffled with hangings, to keep toxic airs out, and therefore black and stuffy) to the last, darkest one of all: the birth chamber.

  Katherine lay in the great bed, her attendants sponging her and combing out her sweat-soaked hair. Physicians were still scurrying about, clicking instruments and gathering bowls and blood-drenched linens. It was as busy as a banquet in there.

  “Henry.” Katherine gestured to me. I came and took her hand. It was so limp, damp, and hot it felt like a wadded washcloth.

  “What has happened?” I had to know. Whatever it was, I had to know. Katherine lived; at least I could be sure of that.

  “Dead.” There was no need for more than that. The one word said everything.

  “A son?”

  She shook her head. “A daughter.”

  Then that was not quite so bad, not an unequivocal sign.

  “I am grieved.” But relieved. The heavens were yet ambiguous. A clear sign was what I dreaded above all. “May I see her?”

  Katherine tried to stop me, but I did not heed her feebly gesturing hands as I turned to the little bundle lying at the foot of the bed, its face covered, denoting death.

  Gently I pulled the blanket aside, just to see her face once, to make her mine, before consigning her to the earth forever.

  It was no human face that I uncovered, but that of a monster. It had but a single eye; no nose, just a gaping great hole; and mushroomlike, puffy lips, over a mouth with teeth.

  “Jesu!” I recoiled.

  Katherine reached out for me, clutching. So that was why she had screamed upon first beholding it.

  “What have you brought forth?” I am ashamed that those were my words to her, as if the monster were her handiwork.

  She closed her eyes. “It is not I. I knew not what I harboured.”

  “I know. Forgive me.” When I remembered all the times we had looked fondly at the swelling of her belly . . . while inside, this horror had been taking shape. “I spoke in sorrow, and stupidly.” I looked at the lump. “Thank God it is out of you, and born dead.” It must be buried somewhere away from consecrated ground. Deep in the earth, where it could decay and never rise.

  I motioned to William Butts, Linacre’s young assistant physician. “Call for a priest.” I wanted only a priest to handle the thing. Butts nodded, then started to pick up the bundle.

  “Stop!” I cried. “Do not touch it!” Let it lie there on the bedcovers, which afterward must be burnt. And instead of a churching ceremony, Katherine and I must be ritually cleansed and blessed.

  The priest came and, after muttering a few words, gingerly picked up the dead deformity and put it in a sack. He would know what to do with it. I did not presume to tell him; nor did I want to know where it would lie.

  I insisted that a second priest come in to bless and purify Katherine and myself immediately. He did so, whilst the bed was being stripped of its contaminated coverings, and I had to hold Katherine in my arms. But I dared not issue forth from the chamber until it was done. I was trembling with fear—revulsion—premonition.

  I carried the limp K
atherine all the way through the long wing of the palace to her own apartments, where fresh bleached linens would be laid upon her own bed, where windows were open and healthy summer air could enter. Out of that fetid chamber of contagion and death, and into the daylight of normalcy. She did not protest, merely let me carry her, like a sleepy child past its bedtime.

  As I was leaving her quarters, one of the novices from the Priory of St. Lawrence was waiting for me in the guard room. His gentle eyes above his black-hooded robe searched mine.

  “The Prior sent me to tell you . . . Mistress Blount is brought to bed. Her delivery is imminent.” He waited, not knowing how I would receive the news.

  “Then I must come.” Like a man in a dream, I heard myself speaking. It had all taken on the features of a dream now. I was being tested, and I no longer knew what God required of me. But I knew that I must see all that was ordained for me to see. I must be at Bessie’s side, even if something worse awaited me there. The human requirement was that I bear it with Bessie.

  “Lead me,” I said.

  The young novice—his name was Richard, he told me—and I crossed the Thames directly from Greenwich to the Tower. There I got us fresh horses from the royal stables, and from thence we would ride through the night to the Priory, which lay some thirty miles outside London.

  First we had to make our way through the city, sleeping now in the bluish midsummer darkness. Did anyone now follow those ancient midsummer rituals used for foretelling the future? Make a cake, scatter certain flowers about the bed, then walk backwards in silence. . . . The houses seemed quiet. The people therein—my charges—rested secure. O God, if only I could provide them with the one security they needed above all—an undisputed heir to the Throne.