The Autobiography Of Henry VIII

by Margaret George

  Three o’clock—the Hour of Death, the Hour of Satan. The Temple veil is rent in half, and we are given over to the power of darkness.

  And then I felt it—felt its cold hand gripping me. And what had been pretence, form, play-acting, became real. I felt the power of the Devil, felt him in my very bowels. And God was far away, and the ceremonies did nothing to recall Him. Powerless, powerless . . .

  All in the Abbey again, huddled together, a flock of black crows. Now Cranmer unveiled the great crucifix in three stages, chanting sorrowfully, “Behold the wood of the Cross, on which hung the Salvation of the World.”

  We knelt and answered, “Come, let us adore!”

  The cross was placed reverently upon a cushion on the altar steps. Cranmer crept toward it on his knees, then kissed it and prostrated himself on the flagstones before it.

  Now I must follow. I was frightened, frightened at my presumption and arrogance. I had meant to use this ceremony for political show, to reassure people of my innocence of any wrongdoing in appointing Cranmer Archbishop. Now I trembled at the implications of approaching the altar of God for such reasons. Would He strike me down, as He had done other rulers who had mocked Him in His very house?

  I began the crawl up the cold stones to the altar steps. My hands were shaking.

  “Mercy,” I heard my voice whispering. “Mercy, O God! Forgive me.” Closer and closer I came. My heart was pounding so rapidly I felt myself go dizzy. He would wait until I presumed to touch the sacred cross itself before He struck me.

  Now! I reached out and grasped the wood, clinging to it like a rock. I felt strength, power surge through it to me, fill me with peace, dazzling peace.

  I breathed out. Peace. I had always thought peace was the absence of fear, the absence of pain or sorrow. Now I knew peace was a thing in itself, a presence that had its own shape, that displaced all other feelings.

  I laid my forehead on the holy wood, pressing it hard as if that would bring a gush of the beautiful Presence into my body. I wanted to be totally filled with it, to be pure peace.

  Then it was gone; the sacred Presence had flown, leaving a human King hunched over an ordinary piece of wood. Cranmer was waiting for me to rise and make room for the next penitent. Stiffly I arose and passed out of the Abbey.

  Saturday morning, Easter Eve. The hard, clear light burst into the room, in its own way crueller and more frightening than the dark of the night before. I could see all the radiating lines on my face as I held the hand-glass up. On the backs of my hands were fine diamonds, little divisions in the skin, repeated over and over—like a lizard’s skin. These would deepen, grow ever more pronounced with the years.

  Jesus had never reached my age. He never had to wrestle with aging and natural mortality. So how could He actually have shared all human experiences?

  I splashed cold water on my face, well aware that my thoughts bordered on blasphemy.

  The mocking day eventually drew to a close, and I was able to come back to the present and leave future death and dissolution alone. There was a great stirring about court as the dreary Lent and the fast of the past two days passed away into rejoicing. No Jew had ever waited as eagerly for sundown to begin a Sabbath as Anne and I did that sundown. Together we exclaimed like children as the evening stars popped out in the eastern sky.

  “It is here! Easter is here! And they all have their orders!” she crowed.

  “Yes, my love,” I smiled. “Every priest in the land, when celebrating the Easter Mass, will pray for you as Queen. Thus the announcement will be made, and the people must say your name aloud in repetition. Three million Englishmen will all murmur, ‘And so rule the heart of Thy chosen servant Anne, our Queen.’ Will you hear each one, do you think? Will that content you, at last?”

  She laughed lightly. “Only if I hear a sort of buzzing sound, so that I know everyone is saying those precious words in unison!”

  I looked at her. I had fulfilled my promises to her, made so long ago. Tonight all England would call her Queen, and I had brought it about. She for whom I had banished my wife, insulted the Holy See, and jeopardized my kingdom, stood in the falling dark, reaching out to me. I took her hand: it was small and warm. I raised it to my lips, feeling the smooth skin. No lizard-diamonds there—not even their forerunners.

  “I must dress!” She snatched her hand away, like a child. “Ah! I have waited so long for this night!”

  “Mass begins at ten,” I reminded her. “The court will gather in the Great Hall and then walk to the Abbey together.”

  I waited for her, surrounded by all the men and women of court. We were all attired in new-fashioned clothes, and in the torchlight our costumes and jewellery winked like the iridescent butterflies of summer, What a night of splendour, after long darkness! Now I would speak the words I had imagined myself saying for so long, and to this very company.

  “My dear friends,” I began, holding up one hand for silence, which fell before I even moved my arm back down. “It is with great joy, yea, greater joy than I can say, that I tell you that at last you have a Queen—my beloved Anne. We are wed.”

  They stood looking back. Had they not heard?

  “Yes!” I repeated myself. “Though I have been your King, your chosen and anointed King for twenty-four years, I have never given you what it is your God-given right to have: a loving and true Queen. By His grace, she is here—”

  Anne appeared at the far door of the Great Hall, a blaze of silver. Indeed, she appeared so dazzling and extraordinary she seemed no mortal. I stood, silenced, as she made her way toward me where I stood on the dais. The men and women of the court watched her, their faces still expressionless.

  “Queen Anne.” I extended my hand and she took it, moving easily up on the dais beside me.

  “Queen Anne!” I shouted with joy.

  “Queen Anne,” repeated the people. But the joy was not there. They bowed and curtseyed only as custom required them to.

  “Thank you, my good subjects!” said Anne shrilly. “We thank you.”

  No, no, I wanted to tell her. Not that way. Not in that tone of voice. Well, I would explain it to her later.

  “May you all find the joy that God has given me in so humble and virtuous a Queen and so true a wife,” I said. The people attempted to smile.

  “Now you may have the traditional cramp-rings,” Anne said, in that same high-pitched, haughty voice. She opened a glittering silver bag.

  What was this? She was enacting the ancient rite of distributing iron rings to cure those suffering from cramp and rheumatism: rings that received their power only through the Good Friday blessing of a true monarch. She must have obtained the rings and performed the hallowing rite secretly, planning to distribute them tonight. Why had she not spoken to me of this beforehand?

  “Come, my good people. These will ease you, will help those who suffer. They were blessed yesterday by your loving Queen.” She held out a handful of iron rings. No one came up. Anne gestured once again. I motioned, and then they slowly came up and began to take them—with all the willingness of a housewife removing a dead mouse.

  “Bless you!” Anne kept repeating in what she must have believed was a queenly manner; clearly she had rehearsed it. Without consulting me.

  At last the hideously embarrassing ceremony was over, and the last of the Good Friday cramp-rings had been distributed.

  The trumpets sounded from the Abbey across the courtyard. It was time for the royal procession; Anne and I leading the Duke of Richmond, my handsome fourteen-year-old natural son; the Duke of Norfolk (without his Duchess, from whom he was separated, and also without his laundress, with whom he was now living); the Duke of Suffolk (also without his Duchess, my sister Mary, who lay ill at their country manor); Henry Courtenay, the Marquis of Exeter; Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, and her son, Lord Montague; the Earls of Rutland and of Bath; Lady Margaret Douglas, my romantic niece (daughter of Margaret Tudor and the Earl of Angus) . . . and behind all these, the great
throng of untitled court people. Somewhere amongst them was plain Master Cromwell.

  The Abbey was dark; dark as the tomb. Then there was a scraping, a sound of flint against stone, as the new Easter Fire was kindled—kindled and then quickly caught on a taper and transferred to the great Paschal candle, a cylinder of pure beeswax as big around as a man’s thigh.

  “Alleluia!” proclaimed Cranmer.

  “Alleluia!” answered the people, resoundingly.

  “He is risen!”

  The silver trumpets blared, the candles blazed into light all over the Abbey.

  “Bestow the kiss of peace!” commanded Cranmer.

  Everyone stirred as faces were turned toward neighbours and the cheek-kiss was given.

  Then the traditional Mass of the Resurrection began. Nothing was omitted—from the procession of newly baptized Christians in their white robes to the public renunciation of the Devil and all his works and all his ways. Let anyone dare to challenge my Church, I thought smugly, to say everything was not intact!

  Now the solemn part began, the sacred mysteries of the Canon: the Offering, the Consecration, and the Communion, followed by the commemoration of the living . . . “that it may please Thee to keep and strengthen Thy servant Anne, our most gracious Queen; that it may please Thee to be her defender and keeper, giving her the victory over all her enemies, we beseech Thee—”

  There was a scraping and movement in the back, which grew louder and made Cranmer halt in his chanting.

  People were leaving.

  I turned and stared. It could not be. But it was. And not just a few recalcitrants, but row upon row. They turned, looked mournfully up toward the altar where Cranmer stood, then filed out through the great Abbey doors.

  They refused to pray for Anne as Queen, or even to remain in a building where others did so!

  I stood, stunned, unable to believe what I had just seen—the spontaneous public rejection of Anne. Such a thing I had never even considered. I had seen the Pope and the Emperor and some conservative Northern lords, like the Earl of Derby, Lord Darcy, Lord Hussey, the great Marcher lords, Katherine’s partisans, as Anne’s enemies. But the common people! She was one of them. How could they reject her?

  Katherine must have paid these people! Her sneaking little monkey of an ambassador, Chapuys, was behind this insulting display. Well, I would have him brought before me and punished.

  In the meantime, there was this interminable Mass to endure—this Mass, so long awaited, now so ruinous. Beside me, Anne was still. I could feel her anger; it had a shape of its own.

  Alone in our royal apartments that night, she screamed with fury. It was past two in the morning, and by this time I had thought to be drifting off into a sleep of paradise—in Anne’s arms, feeling her kisses and murmurs of endearments and pretty thanks for all the dangers I had braved to make her Queen, to have brought her to this moment.

  But this moment had turned, like so much else in our lives, into an experience of pain and sorrow, of humiliation and frustration.

  “I hate them!” she shrieked for the tenth time. “I shall be revenged on them!” Then, to me: “Why did you not stop them? Why did you stand there like a ploughboy?”

  “I was as stunned as one,” I muttered.

  “You should have rounded them up and had them questioned!”

  “No, that would have pleased them, given them importance. Better to ignore them. That is the way of Kings.”

  “No! I must be revenged on them!”

  Was it then that the unbidden thought exploded inside my head, past the barriers of desire and obsession? This is the behaviour of a commoner, not a Queen. Common she was born, common she remains. She is not the stuff of royalty. Immediately my love for her intercepted the thought, wrestled it to the ground, and deprived it of its liberty.

  “They are long since asleep in their beds. We could not find out who they were, even if we wanted. Forget it.” I myself intended to question Chapuys, but privately. “There is always a stir at a change. Even spring brings sadness of a sort.”

  I patted the bed, for which I still had hopes. “Come to bed, sweetheart. Let me make love to my Queen.”

  But I was as useless with her as I had been that other time, and I slept not at all the rest of that evil night.

  Were we cursed? Side by side we lay, each pretending to sleep, while those words ran like rats through our brains.

  XLIX

  It had happened all over the land. In church after church, when the prayer naming Anne as Queen had been read, people either fell silent or left the Mass. They spoke as loudly as the madman who had run about the streets the previous summer, yelling, “We’ll no Nan Bullen!”; as forcibly as the crowd who had pursued Anne and tried to stone her; as angrily as the Ahab-preaching friar.

  Now, for the first time, I had doubts about Anne’s Coronation. Anne had coveted it, and I had promised it. But what if the people rejected her as wholeheartedly on that day? How much worse that would be than no Coronation at all.

  What could I do to prevent it? I could not physically silence every Londoner; there were more than a hundred thousand of them. Nor could I silence them with money. The Royal Treasury was almost empty, and the Coronation would require every spare pound. Behind the golden garments and sumptuous dinners of state, the Crown was in urgent need of money. Toward the latter end, I conferred with Master Cromwell.

  He reminded me of the deplorable moral state of the monasteries, where corruption existed side by side with immense wealth. “The sight of it must surely strike sorrow into the bosom of Our Lord,” he said piously. He asked permission to send a group of commissioners to visit and report on each religious house, and promised to have a summary of their findings in my hands within a year. “Then you may judge for yourself,” he said, “whether they should be allowed to remain open.”

  Of course, closing them would mean acquiring their assets for the Crown, since it was now forbidden by Act of Parliament to send ecclesiastical income to Rome.

  As for Cranmer, he moved swiftly to fulfil his duties. By mid-May he called and presided over a small ecclesiastical court, discreetly held at Dunstable, some distance from London, but near enough to Katherine that she could have appeared, as she was requested to do. Naturally she did not recognize Cranmer’s authority and so ignored the little hearing that found our prior marriage to be no marriage at all, and also (conveniently) pronounced my present marriage to Anne valid.

  Now we could proceed with the Coronation, which would fall on Whitsunday, a holy day in itself. I prayed that that would help sanctify it in the mind of the people. I tried not to betray my own anxiety to Anne, who had awaited this day as the culmination of all her dreams.

  This was to be Anne’s day, I had decided. I had had my own Coronation day twenty-four years ago, and there was no need to repeat it. I preferred to let my own memories stand and to allow Anne her own, personal and unshared. Therefore I would not accompany her at the ceremonies; I would stand back and observe like an outsider. I wanted to savour her Coronation, to revel in the knowledge that I myself had brought it about. It was my will, and my will alone, that had achieved this. Without my will, none of this would be happening. There would be no scaffolds being erected; there would be no sore-fingered seamstresses; there would be no bettors in Milk Lane wagering on rain on Coronation Day. I had created this moment, this event, as I never had my own Coronation. Mine was the will of God; Anne’s was the will of Henry VIII.

  Each night, when I came to Anne’s Privy Chamber, I had to be announced. I would wait impatiently in the antechamber while her maid of honour attempted to entertain me and Anne hastily put away her Coronation baubles lest I see them prematurely.

  On the Wednesday before the great day, I was especially anxious to see her, and I paced up and down the small area. All the windows were open, and the sounds of London on a May night came pouring in to my ears.

  The moon was near full. The sounds of the hammering (workmen were erecting th
e scaffolding in the streets, and were grateful that the full moon allowed them extra hours), the cries of youth outside the taverns, enjoying the languid night—all sounded as though real life were somewhere beyond the palace, as if it could actually be grasped. Yet I knew that every drunken Dickon leaning against the wattle walls of his tavern imagined us to be where real life resided, where all things were heightened—and so they were, so they were. There was no man so alive as I.

  “Will you have some wine, Your Grace?” asked Anne’s sweet attendant.

  Wine? Who needed wine on a night like this? “Nay, nay—” I waved her away. How rude of me. I stopped and looked at her, so I could remember this night always. She was part of it.

  She was small, and had honey-coloured hair. But these were not the main things I noted upon seeing her. Her overriding feature was paleness. A spider-web. A waning moon. A reflection of an old linen gown in a deep, shrouded well.

  “Oh, perhaps so.” I smiled and tried to be affable. She came forward and poured a portion of Rhenish wine into a chased silver goblet.

  “And you?” I lifted it.

  She demurred. I insisted. “It is lonely to drink, thus, alone.”

  She took a small portion, then excused herself, as if timid. I watched her walk to the window and look out.

  When would Anne be ready? Across the courtyard I could hear my favourite clock—the large astronomical one in the gate-tower—chiming nine. The voices from the tavern were louder but more slurred. I walked over to the lady, who was absorbed in looking out over the rooftops. She had a clean, clear profile.

  “Do you not ever—” she began, then faltered.

  “Ever what, mistress?” Hearing my own voice, I was surprised at how irritated it sounded. But I was ready to see Anne! Why did she keep me waiting thus?

  “. . . ever . . . ever look out on those roofs and feel certain—with a great, envious certainty—that all the people sleeping there, or living there . . . are happy?”