The Autobiography Of Henry VIII

by Margaret George

  “I have never seen you more Juno-like,” I said. “But what of the German merchants?” No one else had dared to tell me of their misdeed.

  “Where Cheapside runs into Ludgate Hill, the two greatest cross-streets in London, they erected their ‘tribute’ to me—a triumphal arch, all archways and pilasters and fountains, with Apollo and the muses, and on each side pillars holding up our coats of arms—”

  “And? It sounds pretty.”

  “Crouched over it all, with a nine-foot wingspan—the Imperial eagle, with Charles’s features! His talons were reaching out to grasp our crowns. Oh, the message was clear—quite clear!”

  I felt hot anger cascade through me, turning icy cold on its way down. “So,” was all I said.

  Anne sank down in a chair and changed from Juno into a very human woman who had undergone an exhausting ordeal. Even apart from the emotional overtones, physically the day had been gruelling, especially for a pregnant woman.

  I knelt before her. “Stupid, spiteful men made a hurtful gesture. It is as hollow as the papier-mâché of which the eagle is constructed. I pray you, be impervious to it. It reflects on them, not on you.” She looked so weary and frail, her fatigue showing in every muscle. “God’s blood! Must they vent their hatred on a helpless woman?”

  She reached out and traced her hand along my face. “Well,” she said. “It is done. They can do no more to me.”

  That was true. They and Katherine’s partisans had done their worst, and the day was over, with no real misfortunes. “Would you like some sherbet?” I asked.

  When Cromwell’s exotic delicacy was offered her, she exclaimed over it like a child, able to make me feel I had presented her with all the jewels of India. That was ever her magic: to make me feel thus—when she chose to do so.

  The great bells of the Abbey were chiming ten as she finished the sherbet and put her bowl down. She fidgeted, smiled, and tried to hide her nervousness. There would be no sleep for her that night, I could see. So I must help her.

  “You must rest. For the Coronation tomorrow.”

  “I cannot,” she sighed, drumming her fingers on the chair-arms. They rattled like summer rain on a tent.

  “Have some syrup. The monks make a special syrup that soothes and assures sleep. There are times when one cannot afford to be restless and tired.”

  “A sleeping potion?” She looked at me wonderingly. “You employ sleeping potions?”

  “They can be good, if used for good reason.”

  “Yes . . . there are potions like that . . . potions I have used. . . .”

  “To make your skin more fair!” How quickly I came forward to provide a harmless explanation for her confession.

  “Aye . . . for my skin, of course . . . and for women’s needs, at certain times . . . yes, this is a good reason. My Coronation eve—”

  “To make you more beautiful. To help you remember always the feeling of the oil on your forehead, the first weight of the crown as it is placed on your head.”

  “Do you remember?” Her voice was soft.

  “Yes. I remember every word, every moment.”

  I was wrong. I did not remember “every word, every moment.” When Anne was escorted the short walk between Westminster Palace and Westminster Abbey early the next morning under a canopy held by four knights, I had no recollection of having ever done such a thing. I watched her as she disappeared into the Abbey, a tiny figure all swathed in ermine-trimmed purple velvet, and then she was lost to sight. I must retire to the secret viewing-place I had had specially constructed in the adjoining chapel of St. Stephen’s (where Cranmer had made his private “disqualifying” vows) if I wanted to view the actual Coronation ceremony.

  Now, high in the screened balcony, I looked down on the grey stone, splashed with hundreds of human jewels—Anne alone in purple, the colour of royalty. Once she had been a plain knight’s daughter, as common as anyone down on the sacred pavement below. But I had seen her, had raised her up and fashioned her into a Queen; she was my creation.

  Now the solemn moment was upon her. Cranmer, robes trailing, came toward her, took her hands, and led her past the rood-screen to the high altar. There she was seated on the ancient, crude wooden crowning-throne.

  Yes, I remembered that. I remembered the cold, uncomfortable wood, and I remembered thinking fleetingly of the barbaric chieftains crowned here long ago, clad in fur and leather and sword, who had found this rude seat of kingship hewed to their taste.

  Now the sensual memories began to return. Smell: the lulling incense rising in columns around me; the rich scent of new velvet; the damp, clean odour of freshly washed stone. Sounds: the murmur of the holy oil as the Archbishop poured it into the golden Ampulla; the soft padding of holy feet on the cold stones; the detached chanting that echoed far back into the chapel where my father and mother slept their marbled sleep.

  A hush had fallen. The moment of anointing was here, and the clink of the Anointing Spoon against the Ampulla was clearly heard. I looked down at Anne in wonder. Walked I so? Appeared I so as I knelt? Was I flanked by candles so? Why could I not remember?

  Now, suddenly, Anne was Queen. It was over. What was done could not be undone. But why would I think of undoing even at this moment?

  The Coronation banquet followed immediately in the enormous Hall of Westminster Palace, where we had assembled, weeks earlier, for Easter Eve. Tables to serve five hundred awaited the Coronation guests. I myself would watch from yet another window in yet another adjoining room.

  From my vantage point, the tables below me, set with linen and golden plates and goblets, could not have been more perfectly appointed. And Anne would preside at last at the royal table on the dais, with no need for me.

  She swept in, like a great burst of Nature. Not the hesitant coming of spring, all shy and in bits and pieces, but a trumpet-sound, the cracking of ice in winter. Anne was here!

  She took her place, shining over them all, a column of purple. Then she sank down on her seat. Servers swarmed over the Hall, goblets flashed, platters laden with the season’s plenty passed to all. The traditional “Champions” in armour clattered on horseback up and down the Hall, challenging any who questioned Anne’s right to sovereignty. With their swords and steeds they would vanquish any malcontents.

  A quaint, pretty custom. Could they prevail against the sullen, silent crowds lining the London streets yesterday? Like the throning-chair, the Champions belonged to another day of man.

  My eyes swept the Hall and saw Thomas More’s chair, empty.

  It was late that night before Anne and I met again. She seemed the same as always. Thus do changes of great moment disguise themselves as no change at all.

  Wordlessly, I took her hand. I led her to my bed, and there, all other thoughts gone, dissipated, flown—I merged with her as I never had with another human being. Even God was forgotten.

  LI

  The week following Anne’s crowning was a respite from all earthly cares. The sun shone constantly; the citizenry were released from work; wine ran from public conduits; every day there was a tournament at the palace tiltyard. And every night there was unparalleled bliss in Anne’s bed, where I explored sensual playgrounds whose existence I had never even suspected.

  Returning to the workaday world was as difficult as leaving a dream. In the land of the Infidel, I am told, men sometimes sit for days, months, even years in dens hung with silk, and smoke a dream-inducing drug. That was what I felt I had been allowed to do, and I was loth to leave it. Just so quickly is euphoria addicting.

  As long as I remained inside my palace, revelling in ceremonies and a woman’s arms, all was joy. But outside there was little joy, let alone euphoria. The people still wanted “no Nan Bullen.” Thomas More still sat in his study at Chelsea, translating Latin, but never sending even a note of felicitations to me. He had returned the twenty pounds wordlessly. The Pope still tried to inveigle Charles into going to war with me to defend Katherine’s—and the Church’s—hono
ur. Katherine herself, the “wronged lady,” continued to style herself Queen from Buckden, the red brick palace in the fens, where she had grudgingly allowed herself to be transferred.

  Also in East Anglia, my sister Mary still lay ill. As soon as his Coronation duties were over, Charles Brandon rode back to be with her. I promised to follow by the end of June, and sent a basketful of strawberries, which she had always loved, from Hampton Court, with affectionate orders that she eat them immediately and be cured.

  And now came the short, cruel message: Mary lay dead. The strawberries had reached a woman who had no need of eating.

  She was to be interred in Suffolk, where she had spent the years since she married Brandon. She, who had once been Queen of France, had loved jewels and dancing and court gaiety, had lived a quiet country life for eighteen years—all for love of one man. Friend though he was, I envied Charles that. Suddenly, an unbidden thought: Would Anne have done such for me? Mary had gone from Queen to Suffolk lady gladly. Anne’s personal journey had been in the exact opposite direction—from simple knight’s daughter to Queen.

  “She will be buried as Queen,” said Charles in a choked voice. He had returned to court while Mary was being prepared for her funeral. “Queen of France. It is the least I can do—I who deprived her of the rightful title in life.”

  “She chose you, Charles,” I reminded him. “She chose to be your wife, to live in Suffolk and have children, rather than remain in the French court and be Dowager Queen.”

  That was no consolation to him. He seemed determined to believe that he had stolen her youth and privileges of rank from her.

  “To have a Queen’s burial—will that not be . . . extravagant?” I meant “expensive.” The costs of following protocol for a royal interment were staggering, and I knew well that Charles’s finances were questionable.

  “I will manage,” he mumbled, turning begging eyes toward me.

  Now was the moment when I should have offered, as a brother and a friend, to pay for the funeral. But I could not. I had no extra money, not even a shilling unaccounted for. Soon I would start reaping the former Church revenues: Parliament had already obligingly passed the Act of Annates, an act that would funnel one-tenth of Church income, which had hitherto gone to Rome, to me. But that future river of cash was a mere trickle as yet.

  The moment passed.

  “I will have the Lady Willoughby’s inheritance,” Charles said, the begging look still there.

  “What?” I did not understand him.

  “Lord Willoughby’s daughter—”

  “The child who was made your ward,” I remembered. “Katherine.” Ugh—that name. She had been named after the Katherine, for her mother, Maria de Salinas, had come from Spain with Katherine in 1501, when she came as a bride for Arthur.

  Soon thereafter the pretty Spanish girl had caught the eye of the amiable Lord Willoughby and they had married. After Willoughby’s death, Charles had assumed the daughter’s wardship. This meant that for a fee he provided her with a home until she married. It was commonly done; many peers kept several wardships at a time.

  “But the income from her wardship can hardly be sufficient to cover the costs of a royal funeral,” I persisted. Charles had never had any money sense, although he had had sense enough to betroth young Katherine Willoughby to his son, so that her lands and property would not escape his family.

  “We are to be married,” he said bluntly. “In three months—after the deep mourning period.”

  “But—she is betrothed to your own son!” was all that I could think of.

  “I broke the betrothal.” He shrugged. “She always had a fancy for me. I could see it. The way she’d look at me, coming to enquire about Mary or Henry—” The pride of a natural lecher shone through the eyes that only a moment ago had been so abject and grieving. I felt sick. I turned away; I was afraid I would strike him.

  “You must understand,” he wheedled. “Money. It is only for money. I did what I had to do to survive. I did love Mary, I was not unfaithful to her, but a man must live—why, I cannot even bury her otherwise!”

  “Yes,” I said quietly, the word a little stone dropped precisely into the charged air between us. “A man must live. It is not honour that gives him life, nor love, nor his heart beating, nor his chest moving. . . . I see now these cannot work at all, save in the presence of money. Money is the fuel that powers us all, that makes love and honour possible.”

  “Yes. I knew you would understand. You love Anne, do you not? Yet without—”

  Say it not! Say it not! “Without the crown she would not have had you.”

  “—plundering the Church, you could not sustain independence from the Pope and Emperor.”

  I whirled around and stared at this broad-faced, aging soldier of fortune. “How dare you compare our actions?” I screamed. “You grasping, covetous seducer, prostituting yourself on your wife’s bier! I am reforming the Church because it cries out for purging, for purification! Out of my sight!”

  “As you wish.” He bowed and left the room, his long black mourning cape an insolent swish behind him.

  And Mary had loved him! Sorrow and anger fought within me, and as usual, anger won.

  Outside, the bright June day seemed crueller than the ugliest day in winter. With Mary gone, I had lost the last link to my real family—and to the boy I had once been.

  WILL:

  As that past was laid to rest in Framlingham Church in Suffolk, the present Henry, severed from his past, strode across the summer, brave as a lion. To all outward eyes he was at his peak, still healthy, handsome, having attained his heart’s desire in a wife and coming heir, as well as a new concubine: the Church. He was fortune’s minion that day—his forty-second birthday.

  LII

  HENRY VIII:

  Where was my son and heir to be born? Where else but Greenwich, then Anne’s favourite residence—now a place I avoid, as it is thick with ghosts. At the time nothing else would do but that Anne must have her royal confinement there. So, by July, workers were already busy transforming one wing of the airy waterside palace into that strange sanctuary, a lying-in apartment. One month prior to her delivery date, Anne would have to retire there, with only a few trusted women, and remain in seclusion until after the birth. It was a velvet prison, designed to prevent any possible counterfeit babe from being switched with the true Prince. It was for the Queen’s protection.

  Anne, however, did not see it that way. “To be shut up during August, in high summer!” she lamented. “Kept secluded like a Turk-woman! No man to see me except a physician. ’Tis cruel, sweet Harry!”

  “ ’Tis custom. We have broken so many large ones, we are bound all the more to observe the small ones.”

  “And you will be away on progress!”

  “No,” I assured her. “I will never be more than a half-day’s ride from your side. I would not leave you, no, not for all the jewels in Becket’s tomb. We will be together up until the day you take your chamber with your women.”

  “Women!” She almost spat the word. “A lot of dull, boring creatures, who talk of nothing but milk possets and childbed fever and ‘how it was when I bore my Johnnie,’ ” she mimicked cruelly—and perfectly.

  “You do not care for the company of women?”

  “No! I do not! I want wit and music and poetry about me. You give me that. My brother George and his friends, Tom Wyatt, Will Brereton, Francis Weston—they are amusing. But a gaggle of gossiping, stupid women!”

  It was true. She always surrounded herself with men, and had no women friends. Her closest companion was her brother George, not her sister Mary.

  “It is but a short while. You will be glad enough of their presence when your time comes. I cannot fancy your wishing Tom Wyatt to see you in the hours when you give birth. The women will know what to do. After all, they have borne their Johnnies, as you say, which is of more value in a birth-room than knowledge of Italian sonnets.”

  She made a sour face
.

  “Now enough of this,” I said. “Besides, I have a jewel to tempt you into your lying-in chamber: a great bed that was once part of a Prince’s ransom. I am having it taken from my royal treasury-house and reassembled in your chamber.”

  She brushed aside my bribe, like a cunning child. “Being walled up delights me not. Can I not even have Mark Smeaton to play for me, to amuse me during those endless hours of waiting?”

  Mark Smeaton. That beautiful commoner, whose skill on the lute was near to genius. Where had he come by it, I had often wondered.

  “It is not possible,” I said, tight-lipped. Would she never understand? Things that Katherine, bred royalty from the womb, knew in her bones, were entirely missing in Anne.

  “But—” she began, and I cut her off.

  “I have decided upon Edward as his name,” I announced.

  “Oh.” She looked puzzled. “I assumed you would choose Henry.”

  “I have had a son named Henry who did not live.” How could she not know that? It seemed impossible that she did not know, would not have taken the trouble to find it out.

  She shrugged, as if it were of no consequence, my son Henry, the child of my youth—and Katherine’s.

  “I have been thinking of the christening ceremony,” she said dreamily. “It should be a great state occasion. Yes—the splendour should linger in everyone’s mind for a lifetime. I should like thousands of candles, and a font of pure gold, with Edward’s name engraved upon it, so that no lesser person can ever be baptized from it. As for my own gown, I think red satin—”

  Was not the magnificent, bankrupting Coronation enough for her vanity? I felt annoyance turn to anger within me. Ceremonies, pomp, show; gowns and gold and candles. She had no interest in her son’s name, only in the design of his baptismal font. She saw the birth of our son, England’s heir, as a showcase for herself, nothing more.