The Autobiography Of Henry VIII

by Margaret George

  Gabriel de Grammont, Bishop of Tarbes, came to England to negotiate such a match. Grammont was a great, swelling toad of a man. He began by reading a long proposal to Wolsey and myself, seated as we were outdoors before the fountain in the inner courtyard at Hampton Court. The early-spring sun was making a feeble attempt to warm us, and was doing well, as the encircling courtyards cut off the prevailing winds. I noticed that the grass was green all around the fountain.

  “—however, we need to be satisfied as to the Princess Mary’s legitimacy,” he concluded.

  Wolsey a-hemmed and demurred. “I pray you, explain your scruples.” He made a face at me, as if to say, “Ah! These legalists!”

  “It is this.” The toad drew himself up to his full height, swelling out his chest. “Pope Julius issued a dispensation for the marriage of Prince Henry and his brother’s widow, the Princess Katherine, who had been legally wed to Prince Arthur. Now we have the case of a brother marrying his brother’s widow—expressly forbidden in Scripture! Leviticus, Chapter eighteen, verse sixteen: ‘Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother’s wife; it is thy brother’s nakedness.’ Leviticus, Chapter twenty, verse twenty-one: ‘And if a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing: he hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall be childless.’ ”

  He exhaled through his fat lips. “The question is, did the Pope have the right to issue a dispensation? There is only one other instance of such a dispensation being granted, in all Church history. It raises doubts. Is the Princess Mary legitimate? Or is the marriage of her parents—honest and pious—no marriage at all? My master would have these questions resolved, ere he unites himself to such a house.”

  The dispensation . . . yes, long ago, in that pretend “protestation” I was forced to make . . . the dispensation had been the basis of it. But what exactly were the objections to it? I could not remember.

  “Only one other instance of such a marriage taking place?” I asked, with surprise. I had always assumed it was not uncommon.

  “Indeed,” croaked the toad.

  “But the Pope did issue the proper dispensation,” Wolsey put in smoothly. “So that is a closed issue.”

  “No, no! There are certain situations, Biblical strictures, which cannot be dispensed with,” insisted de Grammont.

  “Ah, but Christ said, ‘Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.’ Christ gave Peter—the first Pope—all that power! The Old Testament is not binding for Christians.”

  “You err! It is—”

  It amused me to listen to a Cardinal and a Bishop locking theological horns. Amused, yes . . . but like a black hand seizing me by the throat, the words choked me: And if a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing: he hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall be childless. And suddenly it was not amusing, suddenly I knew what God had been trying to tell me all these years.

  I had complained that I could not read the handwriting of His message, when all the while it was there in Leviticus, written by Moses, waiting for me to see.

  I felt ill. Even in the clear, open air I felt closed in, unable to get my breath. I stood up abruptly, pushing back from the table. The plump prelates stared.

  “Continue, continue,” I muttered. “Finish the debate. I myself want some air—I shall stroll by the riverbank—nay, do not accompany me!”

  “Your Majesty,” called Wolsey, “there are the new gardens being laid out. Two thousand acres of them. Perhaps you would care to see the work there?”

  “Nay, nay.” I waved my hand. I was possessed, and could not fasten my attention on anything so mundane as garden plans.

  Katherine . . . the marriage . . . it was an incestuous abomination in God’s sight. That was why child after child had perished. Eight children, and none had lived but a frail girl.

  I passed over the bridge and took the footpath running beside the river.

  Living in sin . . . an abomination to God . . .

  I know not how long I walked, obsessed with these thoughts. But I found myself in the Thames-side village of Sunbury, with no recollection of how I had gotten there. The cottages were dozing in the late-afternoon sun, under the protection (so they supposed) of their King. Their King who had sinned a great sin and was being punished.

  I turned round. But at least now I knew what the matter was; I could correct it and set things right.

  Only on the return walk, with the setting sun on my back, did the rest of the matter come to me.

  My marriage to Katherine was no marriage. I was not married to her, and never had been. It was impossible to be married to her; it was divinely forbidden.

  I was, therefore, a bachelor.

  We sent the good Bishop of Tarbes back to France, enjoining him to consult further with theologians there. But it was a sham, for I knew that there was nothing he could find out which would enable me to return to the state of ignorance and naïveté in which he had found me. I was troubled, yet I would share my thoughts with no one, not even Wolsey. And certainly not Katherine! I must avoid Katherine, especially her bed. I could not defile myself that way again.

  Now I began to be tormented by thoughts of Anne. I longed to see her, with a fervour that approached madness. The year’s absence from her had abated nothing of this yearning.

  At night I could not sleep. My mind was filled with her. I wanted to possess her; I must possess her, conquer her. And knowing that I had no wife, that I was a bachelor, changed all my fantasies, made me feel very young.

  But this possession! This madness! I must somehow master this strange torture in my mind and heart.

  WILL:

  Henry was, indeed, behaving like a madman. He alternated between elation and absentmindedness. He spent much time making out lists and consulting with theologians. He chuckled and said “Aha!” to thin air. He did not listen to anything I said, but liked to have me about him. He doggedly hid from Katherine.

  Usually he burnt up his lists, but this one he carelessly left on his desk.

  Virtues

  Faults

  Dances expertly

  Merchant background

  Dresses exquisitely

  A harlot’s sister

  Is reputed learned on the lute

  Uneducated in either scholastics or the New Learning

  Magnificent hair

  Sharp tongue

  Regal Bearing

  (Perhaps) yet loves another man

  Then I knew: he was consumed with the love-malady, that makes normal men look preposterous, and Kings like asses. But at least it was always temporary.

  HENRY VIII:

  I must see her! I must have her! She possessed me. Her witch’s spells were more efficacious than my practical antidotes.

  I would write her a letter, declaring myself. I composed the words during the pre-dawn hours one sleepless night. Upon arising and copying them, I found they did not convey exactly what I wished. (Why are unwritten words so different from written ones?) I must start again. But what tone did I wish to strike, what to say? My own confusion rendered my efforts useless.

  Then, one night, I, who had so carefully monitored my letters, rehearsing them in my head, then writing them down, then editing them, and finally discarding them—I retired to my inner chamber after a banquet at which I had partaken of too much wine. In short, I was slightly drunk. I went directly to my writing table and wrote this without thinking:

  My mistress and friend,

  I and my heart put ourselves in your hands, assuring you that for myself the pang of absence is already too great; and being uncertain either of failure or of finding a place in your heart and affection, which point has certainly kept me for some time from naming you my mistress.

  But if it pleases you to do the duty of a true, loyal mistress and friend, and to give yourself body and heart to me, who have been, and will be, your very loyal servant (if your rigour does n
ot forbid me), I promise you that not only the name will be due to you, but also to take you as my sole mistress, casting off all others than yourself out of mind and affection, and to serve you only.

  If it does not please you to reply in writing, let me know of some place where I can have it by word of mouth, the which place I will seek out with all my heart. No more for fear of wearying you.

  Written by the hand of him who would willingly remain your

  H.R.

  I had written exactly my feelings, and had great relief upon doing so, after all my agonizing and subterfuge. With a strange impetuousness I sealed it up and, without even reading it over, called a sleepy boy-messenger and sent it off at once. Then I fell upon my bed in exhausted sleep.

  In vain I waited for a reply—at first eagerly, bashfully. Then impatiently. Then, after a fortnight, when it became clear she did not deign to even reply, in rage.

  So she thought she could ignore a royal letter? As she had ignored our meeting?

  The bitch! I was King; I could order her to do whatever I wished! Did she not comprehend that? The time for gentleness was past. I would show her just how powerless she truly was.

  I sent a curt order, demanding her presence at court for an immediate audience with the King.

  Now I stood ready to meet her in my chambers.

  XXXVII

  It was late April, and unseasonably warm. I had all the casements wide open (even though the bees were swarming) to admit the faint, late-afternoon breeze. Unfortunately, my apartments faced west and so the windows let in not only air but hot, slanting bars of sunlight as well. It was stifling. Was that why I sweated so?

  Before her arrival I had appraised myself critically in the wavering beaten-metal mirror in my inner chamber. I was now almost thirty-six—the age when most men began to run to fat, or, worse yet, died. Yet I was the same shape and size I had been twelve years earlier—my tailor had verified it. Waist, thirty-five inches, chest, forty-two. Not a change in near a generation! I had drawn myself up proudly and approached the mirror, sidling up to it like a pickpocket approaching a bulging purse. I meant to wink at it, holding myself in trim. But as my face came clearer in the wavering reflection and gradually straightened, I saw that although my body had remained unchanged, my face had not, particularly the eyes. They stared back at me, and they were hard, with lines radiating out.

  I was not young.

  To write that is elementary; to feel it for the first time is devastating.

  I was not young.

  But I had always been young! I had been Arthur’s younger brother; I had been the youngest king in Christendom; I had been Katherine’s young husband.

  The old-young eyes stared back at me. The lighting from behind accentuated the lines in my face.

  Arthur is dead, they said. Francis and Charles are both younger than you. And you are not Katherine’s husband, but wish to be that of a girl twenty years younger than she.

  You are old. Nay, not old—but no longer young.

  Not young? But I had based my entire life on being young!

  The hard eyes gazed at me. The age is in the eyes, Will had always said. I can tell any man’s age by his eyes. These were not the eyes of a young man.

  When did it go? I cried to myself—the ancient lament. No, I am not ready—no, I have so much left to do—I cannot have aged!

  Perhaps it was some trick in the lighting! I turned myself another way. That was worse. I rushed to draw the shutters. Any fool knew that light coming from behind was unflattering. (Why, then, did I not consider that in studying my body?)

  It did no good. True, the lines were softened. But the look in the eyes—cynical, wary—remained. No twenty-year-old had such eyes.

  In such a state was I to meet Mistress Anne.

  And what was I to say to Anne? All the things I wished to say, I could not. Why had I summoned her?

  For a quarter of an hour I paced. Up and down, up and down. The chamber grew hotter and hotter. A curious thing, as the sun was sinking. Inanely, a common saying played through my mind, When the days begin to lengthen, then the heat begins to strengthen.

  I poured myself out a cup of watered wine and bolted it. There was no connection between the inordinate heat in the chamber and that saying. What was happening to my mind? Distracted, disjointed. I could not think. Best to concentrate on little things. The gleam of gold on the rounded surface of the flower bowl. And the flowers within: early-blooming apple blossoms, which would wither overnight.

  “Your Majesty, Mistress Boleyn is here.” The apple blossoms were exiled from my mind. Mistress Boleyn was here.

  It took several minutes for her to traverse all the chambers separating us.

  She appeared in the doorway of my inner chamber, blocked by a guard. I saw her there, a small yellow figure—yes, yellow again—looking childlike. I motioned to the guard to let her pass.

  She was smaller than I had remembered. And more beautiful. As I approached, she smiled—that strange, beguiling smile. Brushing past the guard, she came up to me and curtseyed. Then she rose.

  “You sent for me?” Her voice was genuinely puzzled—or managed to sound so.

  “Yes.” I turned and motioned for her to follow me out of earshot of the chamber guard. He stood, irritatingly staring at us, his legs unnaturally far apart. Evidently he thought it conveyed some standard of soldiery to stand in such a strained pose.

  I seemed determined to concentrate on such irrelevant details, to analyze and comment on them—in my own head, at least. Why, now that Mistress Anne was here in my presence at last, after months of imagining her, was I perversely concerned with how a nameless guard placed his feet?

  I turned to her. She stared up at me. A mere girl, was my fleeting thought. Face unlined, eyes blank and . . . empty? Then, a goddess. Beautiful beyond all thought. Eyes not empty, but hiding nameless pleasures and depths.

  “Sire?” She dipped her head again, displaying the smooth part in the raven’s-wing black hair. Upon arising, she still affected that uninformed, puzzled look.

  Enough of this! was the first thought coursing through my brain. Careful, was the second. Consequently, my statement was a muddled merger of the two.

  “We are pleased that you should have returned to court. We need your presence.”

  “Is that the royal ‘we’ or a simple plural?”

  She was bold beyond all stomaching! I stared for a second. Then I answered honestly. Why not? “The royal. I need your presence. Does that suit you better?”

  She chose to disregard the direct question, as the one who loves less is always privileged to do. “What could you need me for, Your Grace?”

  The girl—nay, she was no girl, I sensed now, but something else, something I knew not—regarded me not as a King, but as a man. Someone to answer back to, rebuke, as long ago others had done. It felt familiar—and hurtful.

  “I want you to be my wife,” I heard myself saying to this stranger. Yet I had meant to say it all along.

  Then came the laughter—high-pitched, ugly. And the turned back: yellow velvet covering the narrow shoulders and waist.

  The posturing guard stared balefully at us and clicked his spear manfully upon the floor, as if to remind us that he still existed and was protecting us from harm. The fool!

  “Get out!” I yelled. He scurried away.

  I turned to Anne and saw that she had now turned to face me, an odd smirk still on her face.

  “Your wife?” she said. “You have a wife already. Queen Katherine.”

  “She is not my wife! Not lawfully! We sinned. . . .” I found myself pouring out the entire process of my growing guilt, laying myself and my thoughts bare to this peculiar girl who seemed at once both the most sympathetic and derisive of persons.

  “. . . and so,” I finished, “the Pope erred in granting us a dispensation to marry. Therefore we are not married, have never been married in the eyes of God. And the present Pope will acknowledge that.”

  She s
eemed not to have heard. Or, rather, not to believe. Her long face stared back at me, as if I were reciting some obscure law from the time of Henry I, of no relevance or concern to her.

  Finally her lips moved, and she spoke. “When?” A simple, devastating word.

  “Immediately,” I said. “Within the year, at most. The case is clear. I have simply hesitated because of—because of not knowing your mind.”

  “My mind?”

  “Yes, mistress! Your mind! You have one, I know!” I heard myself exploding and yet was powerless to stop. “Do not play the simpleton with me!” Suddenly I was so angry I was shaking—at her coyness, her elusiveness, her pretended naïveté, her calculating behaviour. I was the King! “All these months”—now it tumbled out, all the things I had vowed not to say, had scarce dared admit even to myself—“I have loved you, have wanted to lie with you. Instead you toyed with me, tortured me, made stupid answers to my requests.” My voice had risen dangerously (could the attendants in the next chamber hear it?), and she was looking at me in that infuriatingly concerned way. “Well, now I ask you, for the first and last time: Will you be my wife? Will you be Queen?”

  There. The thing was said. It seemed to have come of its own accord.

  “Your Grace,” she answered slowly, “your wife I cannot be, because you have a Queen already. And your mistress I will not be.”

  “I have no wife!” I yelled. “I tell you, I have no wife!”

  She made no reply.

  “Clearly, you do not believe me! So you think I lie.” I stepped closer to her. I noticed that she not only did not shrink from me, but leaned toward me, as if she wanted my touch. I grabbed her arm, crushing the raised velvet sleeves in order to feel the long, slim arm underneath. “In any case, that is no answer to my question. When the Pope declares me a bachelor—as I am, and as he will—will you or will you not marry me?”