The Autobiography Of Henry VIII

by Margaret George

  And I was so nervous, so anxious, my heart was pounding louder than my empty stomach was growling. I felt it not, so filled with joy and dread was I to be approaching Beaulieu. I would see Mary; we would talk; all things would be resolved, for love could overcome any barrier.

  Beaulieu: a beautiful red brick royal residence, almost a miniature Hampton Court. Mary had been ordered here to separate her from her mother, so that Katherine would know that things were no longer as they had been. It was all aimed at Katherine; I had not meant it to sunder Mary from her past as well. Nor I from mine. Mary kept residence here, as she had at Ludlow, in full state as a Princess Royal. Her household included some hundred servitors, as befitted her supposed rank.

  Beaulieu was closer on the horizon, its russet bricks seeming to slap the wild blue sky above it. As we approached, before us groundsmen and manservants were shovelling the snow, tossing the sparkling white stuff over their shoulders.

  In the outer guardroom we waited. The household was thrown into confusion at our unannounced visit, and struggled to straighten and order itself. This I did not want.

  “Nay, but we’ll come in!” I announced, pushing our way inside to the receiving chamber, all tiled and empty.

  “Your Grace—Your Majesty—” A young servitor stood awestruck.

  “Is . . .” (What title to use?) “. . . my daughter’s Chamberlain in attendance?”

  Lady Coopey, Mary’s chief attendant and administrator, came into the chamber, adjusting her head-covering. “Your Majesty.” She knelt.

  I raised her up. “No more of this. I would speak with my daughter. The rest”— I motioned toward my group, half frozen and starved—“would appreciate a fire, and to share your dinner. It is near dinner-hour, is it not?” The smell of stew, and breads baking, had told me it was. My own hunger had been suppressed by my desire to see Mary.

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  “Then see to it.” I waved my hand. “As for ourself, we would wait in a private place.”

  In the little oratory off the chapel, I looked over the furnishings. Prie-dieus. Paintings of the saints. And two stones, placed side by side under a painting of the Virgin. This puzzled me.

  The door opened. Mary came in.

  She was a woman.

  This was the sudden, unexpected thought that came to me upon beholding her.

  “Mary!” We embraced. Then I held her away and looked at her.

  She had been yet a child when I saw her last, and I had hardly seen her at that, so fired was I with Anne-madness. At sixteen, she had preserved some vestiges of the little child, the girl, I had known.

  At eighteen, all that was gone. She had transformed herself, and in my absence.

  “Your Majesty.” She bent herself low.

  “No. Father,” I insisted, raising her up.

  “As you wish.” Those words, so precise, so proper, so distant, said many things.

  “Mary, I”—I wish to embrace you, to talk with you, to laugh—“it is good to see you.”

  “And it is good to see you.”

  And also with you. Must she sound like a Mass?

  “Let me look at you.” The perpetual parent’s request.

  She was tiny. She had grey eyes and a chalky complexion. Her hair was golden, in the process of turning muddy, like Katherine’s. She had my small-lipped mouth, which was my least attractive feature, and hers as well. When we clamped our mouths, our lips seemed to pucker from tightness. She was beautifully dressed, wearing jewels even before midday, and had great dignity. She kept her eyes on me all the while, never dropping them. What a marvellous, miraculous mixture she was of us both.

  “Do I meet your liking?” Her voice was low, gruff, as if to remind me: I am myself, not merely a blend of you and Katherine.

  “Entirely.” I beamed. Her responding smile was reluctantly given, wary.

  That wariness: I was responsible for it. Therefore I must banish it straightway. “Mary, I have . . . missed you.”

  It was true, and never more so than now. The heart is a peculiar thing; it cannot always choose where it will love. Regardless of my head, my heart always chose Mary.

  “And I you, Your Majesty.” Her little white hands clutched one another.

  “You could come to court,” I suddenly said.

  “The court is ruled by . . . oh, I cannot bear it!” Without permission, she turned away, and sobs began to shake her. “No, I cannot come there. Pray let me, if I go anywhere, go to my mother!”

  That could not be. Not with the network of possible conspirators coalescing around Katherine. Should Mary join her, that would be a lodestone few malcontents could resist.

  “I cannot, alas.”

  “Cannot? No, will not! I long for my mother, and she for me! For how long will you separate us? No matter how long,” she answered herself, “it can never truly separate us! My heart is with her, as hers with me!”

  “And I? Where is my heart? Excluded?”

  “With the Great Whore!” She turned, not defiantly—defiance I could have broken—but sadly. “That is where your heart is. Not with me, nor with the Queen. I must reconcile myself to it. Is that what this visit is for? To teach me to reconcile myself to it?”

  No, I wanted to say, it was to see you, persuade you to sign the Oath. Filthy reasons. The first selfish, the second political.

  Our reconciliation was not to be. Nothing was to be. Anne had made us enemies, now and forever.

  “What are these rocks for?” I asked irrelevantly, as my eyes rested on them.

  “A pilgrim brought them back from Nazareth,” she said. “To remind himself that the rocks Our Lord walked on were ordinary rocks. Also to remind himself that all things are equally holy and hard.”

  “Mary! I need you! I want you! Can you not—will you not—frame a way in your mind that you can come back to me?”

  “If it means repudiating my mother, saying she was not your true wife, no. If it means repudiating my greater mother, the Church, then no.”

  “Can you not even consider my claims, my side?” Was she so completely her mother’s partisan?

  “Oh, I have studied them. I have read every proclamation that you have worded, have studied the proceedings of Parliament, and followed all your reasonings. I even read the form of excommunication, and knew it applied to you, and trembled for you. I read your Assertio Septem Sacramentorum and knew every word. Father, I understand your anguish, and your spiritual intelligence and integrity. But you are wrong!”

  She reached out her hand and took mine. “I cannot champion wrong even in one I love—against my will!—much as I may wish to. For even if he believes himself right, and I, knowing better, convinced otherwise, follow him—it is I who am damned!”

  Mary and I: loving each other, even though urged by others not to. I heard her anguish and keened to it. But I could not say other than, “Then you are an ungrateful, disloyal daughter! You must submit to me as your lawful sovereign. And no longer shall you live in the estate of a Princess, for you are no Princess, but a bastard, like Henry Fitzroy.

  “It grieves me,” I added. I would be gentle. “Sin does not always feel like sin. But we must acknowledge it as sin if it is declared by Our Lord or Holy Scriptures to be so, regardless of our personal feelings in the matter. The truth is that your mother—in spite of her personal piety—was not my true wife.”

  “And the Great Whore is?” she cried. “God Himself calls mock on it!”

  “It is not for you to interpret or speak for God!” I shouted. “Therein lies the deception of Satan!”

  “No, I do not interpret for myself. That is Protestant, and I am certainly none of that! It is the Church’s interpretation I follow, hard as that may be.”

  “I am the Church!” I cried. “God’s law has made me so!”

  “With all respect, Your Majesty, it is you who have made yourself so. Not God, nor His law.”

  Out upon her! She was irreconcilable with my life.

  “I am
sorry, Mary, that you speak these words.”

  Take them back! I begged her, in my mind. I wanted her so desperately.

  She was silent.

  “I know they were spoken without thought.”

  More silence.

  “I will overlook them.”

  “No, Father. Do not deceive yourself so. For I spoke true.”

  Will you not even allow me the mercy of self-deception, then? Perhaps it is not a mercy, but a curse. One that I seek too often.

  “So here you stand? Even as Martin Luther?” I attempted a joke.

  “Eventually we all must.” She stood, blanched and stiff and imperious. Not the sweet, soft girl I had loved. I had lost her, back in time and her own growing.

  “Very well, then. Know this: that thou art”—I switched to the impersonal form—“a most disobedient, disloyal, and unloving daughter. That thou no longer shalt style thyself ‘Princess’ but be content with ‘Lady Mary,’ and no longer abide at Beaulieu, with a mighty staff of servants to do your bidding, but go serve as a handmaid to the true Princess, Elizabeth, at Hatfield . . . there to learn humility and resignation to the station to which God has called you.”

  I expected some start, some protest. There was none. “I am Your Majesty’s most obedient handmaid,” she said, sweeping to the floor.

  I longed to lean down, embrace her, tell her I loved her. But if she could be hard, she would learn that I could be harder still. Ruby must crack against diamond.

  “Indeed,” I said. “I acknowledge your fealty. Know, then, that you must go straightway to Hatfield House and begin to serve in the Princess’s household.”

  “Be it unto me according to thy wish,” she said.

  “Stop echoing Scripture! You shame it, and yourself! You are no Virgin Mary, lass, so do not style yourself thus!” Had she inherited Katherine’s tendency to religious excess?

  On the way back to London, my men, well fed now, were eager to know the cause for my stormy and hasty departure. I had stamped into the dining hall, bade them tuck the food straight into their bellies, and leave. I did not seat myself, but grabbed several pieces of meat pie and white manchet bread, and ate them ravenously, all the while standing and directing my party to get their cloaks.

  Now the dry-eaten food seemed lodged in a series of little lumps from my mouth to my stomach. That, and my choler, choked me. I longed for Will to ride beside me, but he had departed from Beaulieu to his sister’s house. None of the others would do, not at this moment when I realized that I had lost my daughter; that my Great Matter was not resolved upon my clever juggling of Papal bulls and decretals and consecrations and Parliamentary acts; that treason lurks in hearts and goes unconverted and undetected in most cases. The line must be, would have to be, drawn across families and old loyalties. Even my own.

  But to have lost my daughter—no, it was too hard. I could not bear it, I would soften it somehow. Then I was minded that I had tried to soften it, and it was Mary who would not have it so.

  So be it.

  I motioned for George Boleyn to come forward and ride with me. That he did, looking gratified and puzzled.

  “George, I love you well,” I began, for the pleasure of confusing him further, “and therefore I will make a present to you. From henceforth Beaulieu is yours.”

  Yes, Mary must surrender it to Queen Anne’s brother.

  He looked dumbfounded, as all are at receiving utterly undeserved gifts.

  “As soon as the Lady Mary has removed herself, and her household has gone, you may take possession of it.”

  I waved away his stammering, inadequate thanks.

  Another few miles farther on the ride, I beckoned Chapuys to take his place beside me. I was holding audience on the road, as surely as if I had a secretary to direct my appointments.

  Chapuys rode forward, his entire being as eager as ever for some sparring. I would not disappoint him.

  “Ambassador,” I said, “You must be made privy to the conversation betwixt the Lady Mary and myself. I have forbidden her to continue to style herself ‘Princess,’ and her household has been disbanded. I just gave Beaulieu to Boleyn.” I nodded back at the grinning George. “She is being sent to wait upon the Princess Elizabeth. By implication, she has refused the content of the forthcoming Oath of Succession. That makes her a traitor.”

  “Of what does this Oath consist?”

  How many times was this question to be asked—this cursed, hateful question?

  “That the subscriber recognizes the Princess Elizabeth as the rightful and sole heir to the throne. That is all.”

  “And, by implication, that Mary is illegitimate, because your marriage to her mother was no marriage, because it was founded on a dispensation that was false, because the party granting it had not the power to do so, because he had no power at all?”

  “The implications—they are not worded! One swears only to the words as stated, not implied!”

  “A lawyer’s answer. Well, then, your former Chancellor More should be able to take it readily.”

  “More will take it. He is a sensible man, he will not quibble over ‘implications.’ But your . . . concerned parties . . . will not be able to, as what is stated in the Oath is what is odious to them, not what is implied.”

  “God will have to sustain them.” He smiled smugly. “And God’s agents,” he added.

  “So you threaten me? Of course. I thank you for your honesty.” I dismissed him as easily as in a palace audience. He understood the rules.

  I rode by myself in silence. All around me the January afternoon was piercingly bright and seemingly benign. The same winter that had sought to kill me two days ago now wooed me with all her skill. She displayed the pure blue sky that was her trademark, and all the play of light peculiar to herself: the shadows that were blue, not black; the yellow-red syrup of sun lying in little pools and cups of snow-formed landscape; the dazzling glow of a mound of snow, seemingly pulsating from within. Then London appeared on the horizon.

  It was time for yet another audience. I motioned Henry Howard to come to me. He galloped up to my side, his pretty face seeming even more fresh than the snow.

  “You are of an age with my son,” I said. Mary was lost to me, but not Henry Fitzroy. I must not neglect one for the heartbreak of the other. “You were born in 1517, am I correct?” I knew I was. I was master of just such minutiae.

  “Yes.” He was surprised, then flattered, as we all are when someone remembers a personal fact about us.

  “Seventeen. My son, Henry Fitzroy, is two years your junior. I would give him a companion to share tutors and pastimes with. Would you find that to your liking? I would treat you as princes together, at Windsor. What say you?”

  “I say—I say yes,” he said. “Oh, yes!”

  Two not-quite-princes, but both having princely blood. “Good. My son needs a noble friend. And you, I think, need to be with others of your age and station. Both of you have been too long confined with women and old men.”

  His laugh told me I was right.

  “In the spring you shall come to Windsor,” I said. “Directly after the Order of the Garter ceremony, in which both you and he shall take your places in that noble company.” In one offhanded phrase I had elevated him to the highest order of knighthood in the realm. Words, words. Words were so easy.

  We arrived back at Richmond long past sunset. Across the frozen Thames the lights of London shone as we passed by, amber and warm, and here and there jagged fingers of ice picked it up, glowing like elongated jewels. I was weary, weary. Since leaving Richmond three days before I had come close to death by white extinction; had encountered the insanity of St. Osweth’s; had seen my lost Mary transformed into an exact replica of Katherine, my enemy. The original reasons why I had sought this journey were overwhelmed by its findings.

  In the great torchlit palace courtyard, snow-packed and still, I bade my companions good night. Neville and Carew I embraced. A surfeit of affection, unable to reach Mary, now
flowed over onto my old friends. “Beware of Cuthbert,” I joked.

  To Cromwell I said, “I must meet with you before Parliament opens. I have decided to attend the opening in person.”

  Then we went our own ways, to our separate chambers, I to the royal apartments—and Anne.

  I must confess I did not wish to see Anne, or anyone, tonight. I was glad that Will was away. One of the most irksome things about matrimony was that one was never alone. It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. God intended marriage to counteract that paralysing loneliness which grips you at unexpected moments. But never to be alone with one’s thoughts or one’s Maker . . . why must it always be too much of one condition or the other?

  My own Privy Chamber was full of idle, questioning men. But I passed through them, seeking out the refuge of the inmost chamber within my private suite. There I sat for long moments, unblinking, aware that my body was starved, strained, and crying for the oblivion of sleep.

  I must see Anne. It was a duty, a duty of courtesy, like all knightly duties. We would have supper together, and I would tell her of all that had befallen me. Wearily I rang for an attendant, told him my wishes, and lay back awaiting my food and my wife.

  Anne came to me sooner than I would have wished, since I wished for no company at all. She appeared at the doors of my chamber, her cheeks dimpling with pleasure. I must appear likewise, I told myself, rousing myself from a sweet lethargy that had just taken hold.

  “O Henry,” she said, “you are safe! You are safe! I heard of the snowstorm. . . . I feared so, for your life!” Her eyes expressed all sorrow and concern.

  “It was an adventure,” I said, willing myself to rise up and embrace her. “In faith, I felt like Gawain in his quest for the Green Knight, passing through forests of ice and seas of snow.” Suddenly I was too tired to tell it, nor did I wish to. “We spent the night in a providential cave, and the next morning were on our way. All’s well . . . sweetheart.” There, that satisfied the recounting.