The Autobiography Of Henry VIII

by Margaret George

  More, I knew, counted on my not flinching. Otherwise I would not be the ultimate “discipline” that he sought so ravenously.

  “So it will be next summer until all is . . . tidied up?”

  “Can you bear to wait that long?” Crum was so anxious that I show my power.

  “The question is, can you, Your Majesty?”

  “I would prefer that they repent, yes! So I will provide them with ample opportunity. And the leisure to consider their peril.”

  “The ninety and nine do not satisfy you. . . . Ah, you do take your title, Supreme Head of the Church, in earnest.”

  “Do not mock me.” Of course I took it in earnest. “Cromwell,” I said, turning to other matters, “there will never be another Wolsey. But surely it is time I recognized your position in a title that somewhat describes your function. Therefore I have decided to name you Principal Secretary. You know what that means.”

  “No, I do not.”

  “Then make of it what you will.” It would be interesting to observe just how he wore the label, and into what sort of garment he fashioned it.

  My sleep that night, on the hard, straw-stuffed pallet in Wolsey’s old sleeping chamber, was light and restless. Therefore I knew not whether I slept or woke when, in the cold blue dawn, I heard voices. My ears perceived a faint melody, so faint it seemed almost to be a dream-fancy, floating light and clear, celestial. . . . Angels? I gave myself over to them, feeling myself borne upwards, lightly, arms outstretched. So this was death . . . and being brought into God’s care. . . .

  I awoke in full daylight, knowing that I did not belong yet on earth, reluctant to come back, to put on shoes and comb hair and see others.

  As I stepped out into the dining chamber, a great tumult assaulted my ears. Looking out the window, I saw a throng of students in the streets below, wearing costumes and waving May branches.

  May Day. It was May Day.

  Shaking my head slowly, I turned to see a young student servitor spreading plates upon my table. He wore an outlandish antler-helmet on his head, and was covered in streaming ribbons of all colours.

  “Blessed May to you, Your Majesty!” he said.

  “Thank you. I had forgot.”

  “Then you did not hear the singing?”

  Aye. I had heard singing. But—

  “What singing?”

  “The Carol to the May. ’Tis sung by choristers at the top of Magdalen Tower at dawn every May Day.”

  So the voices had been human, after all.

  “I was not informed.”

  “I am heartily sorry, Your Grace.” He truly seemed to mean it.

  “These costumes,” I said. “Do you wear them all day?”

  “Oh, indeed! Even though they always get rained upon, or at the very least, we shiver in them. ’Tis all part of it. The legend has it that the Devil keeps his bargain still. The Devil is a reliable fellow.”

  Yes, he was. “How so?”

  “Well, we generally prefer cider to beer, here in Oxfordshire. But a local beer brewer, he sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for a promise for a spell of nasty weather around May Day, to kill the apple blossoms. And so May Day is cold and damp, always.”

  “Always?”

  “The Devil honours his promises.”

  “The Devil is a gentleman.”

  “Indeed, Your Grace! That’s just the way to put it!”

  LXI

  Just after Michaelmas, when all the feasting was done and the last of the goose-carcasses were cleaned away, my son was married.

  Henry Fitzroy was now fifteen and had fallen in love with his companion’s sister, Mary Howard, Henry’s two-years-younger sibling.

  It would have been in vain to tell him to wait until the fancy passed. In vain, not because it would not have passed (as it most surely would have done), but because when the time came for him to marry, I could never have selected a more suitable bride than this daughter of the house of Howard. Therefore I gave my blessings to the nuptials and arranged that the wedding should take place at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor.

  It was not to be a state affair, even though Fitzroy’s titles gave him formidable rank as a peer of England: Duke of Richmond and Somerset, Lord Warden of the Marches, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and Lord High Admiral of England, Wales, Ireland, Normandy, Gascony, and Aquitaine. It was not to be a state affair simply because to do such a thing, at the very time that the Oath of Succession was being administered, would be to focus undue attention upon yet another claimant to the succession. The issue was heated enough already when loyalties were pulled between two females, Mary and Elizabeth. Reminding everyone of a comely royal lad of marriageable age was not politic.

  He was comely. I was proud of him, proud of his Tudor looks and his sensitivity and regal bearing.

  And still another reason was that Anne did not care to be reminded of my living son, since she had not given me one of her own. That Bessie had was a continual insult to her.

  It puzzled me then, why Anne had not. It was not for lack of coupling, or for lack of joy in our bed. Since I had returned from my “pilgrimage,” there had been no more of that earlier trouble. Our bodies spoke even sometimes when our words could not bridge the gap between us—by that I mean the gap that separates each individual from any other. Nonetheless we were son-less. The Princess Elizabeth was a year old now, thriving at Hatfield House, attended by her sister Mary, who insisted on referring to Anne as “Madam Pembroke” even now. She was as stubborn as Katherine. . . .

  Katherine. As I selected my rings from an octagonal inlaid Spanish box, I thought of Katherine. She had refused the Oath, as I had expected. But her manner of doing so was to barricade herself in her rooms at Buckden and refuse to admit Brandon or to speak to him and his commissioners. He waited two days in her Great Hall for her to emerge so he could apprehend her and force her answer.

  When he ascertained that she had a cook, provisions, and her confessor locked up with her, he knew she would not come out for six months, would perhaps even starve herself to death in there and call herself a martyr for it. Her confessor would give her last rites and send her soul right up to heaven. In disgust, he left, after dismissing the rest of her servants and carrying off her furniture. The townspeople reviled him and threatened his life even for that. An ugly mob, they surrounded the house and harassed my commissioners, waving their stupid pitchforks and hoes.

  That was enough. I needed no Anne to urge me to end this childish, stubborn, and aggravating behaviour of Katherine’s. Brandon could do nothing, but I was King. I ordered her removed immediately to the gloomy fortified manor of Kimbolton, and put under house arrest. Henceforth she would have two “keepers,” Sir Edmund Bedingfield and Sir Edward Chamberlayn, loyal to me. She would live in total isolation, with no visitors and no correspondence permitted her. She was now politically dead.

  But even there, she found a way to be contumacious. She refused to speak to anyone who did not address her as Queen. Since there were only fifteen who did—her confessor, her physician, her apothecary, her “master of the rooms,” two grooms of the chamber, three maids of honour, and six menial servants—she shut herself up with them and would not set her foot beyond her own doorsill out into the “contaminated” parts of Kimbolton where her keepers and the staff lived. She would not eat food prepared in their kitchen, but set up her own little stove and made her own pitiful meals.

  Alone in her extreme isolation, she willed things to be different than they were, as if by sheer force of mind she could control others. Faith can move mountains, so Scripture says. She believed that I was the mountain that could be moved by her faith.

  I was running late. I must hurry. Which rings for today? There was the oval ruby I had acquired in France, that first time I had crossed there. The lapis lazuli, set in Arab filigree, a gift from Suleiman in token of my marriage to Anne (and repudiation of Katherine, thereby insulting Suleiman’s enemy, Charles: the enemy of my enemy is my friend). The square-cut
emerald that Wolsey had given me to “celebrate” his Cardinal’s hat. I never wore fewer than four rings. I chose the last, a garnet that had been mine in childhood. It barely passed the knuckle of my little finger now.

  The attendant snapped the box shut, flashing the Spanish-Moorish design before my eyes once again: triangular ivory teeth biting into an ebony field, repeated over and over, until that carefully guarded, red and green geometric flowering center. Lush and abstract, guarded and yet sensual . . . the Levant. Katherine in her chamber within a suite within apartments within her royal prison. . . .

  I must transfer the rings to the carved ivory box lately presented to me by the new French ambassador, Castillon, as his introductory gift. No more Spanish reminders.

  Anne professed to be pleased that there was to be a secondary joining of her mother’s house (Howard) to mine. She planned the wedding feast at Windsor and even took it upon herself to select a wedding gift of a pair of falcons, a peregrine and a tiercel, along with an able trainer.

  “I love to plan wedding celebrations,” she said, “especially since I could never plan my own.”

  Even after all this time, she still lamented her lack of a proper wedding and its celebration, although at the time she had professed not to care. Why do women set such store by them, as if nothing less makes a marriage real and seals it?

  The wedding day in mid-October was as clear and sweet as the children getting married. All the colours were pure and bright and clean in the sky and in the autumnal trees and harvest. Gold and blue in earth and sky; gold and blue in their hair and eyes.

  There are many ages at which one can marry, and I am not sure which is best, or brings more happiness. But I do know that youthful love, first love, early love, is the prettiest for others to watch.

  The feast afterwards, to be held in the Great Hall of the royal apartments across from the chapel, was already laid and waiting as we lingered outside and talked in the lemony October light. I embraced Fitzroy and his new Duchess, feeling their slight bodies, young and elastic, under their formal velvets.

  “May you find joy in one another,” I said, “and live out your lives in rich contentment.” Two perfect stages of life; what more could they be granted?

  “Thank you, Father,” said Henry. He had a thin and musical voice, one that was a vague echo of another such.

  “I shall honour you, Your Majesty, as father and sovereign,” his bride said. She sounded older than he; why is it often so with women? She was a plain thing, yet she evidently incited lust and love in young Henry.

  “The feast awaits!” Anne was standing in the doorway, beckoning us. Yet it was unseemly for the Queen to call us like a farmer’s wife summoning her field labourers.

  The guests left the warm courtyard and came obediently into the Great Hall. They stared, entranced. Anne had transformed the Hall into a faerie-place of silver. Diana, the moon-goddess, had spun her web here.

  The feast was all of silver—the central presentation was a silver-feathered swan swimming on a beaten silver mirror. The wedding cake was sprinkled with silver leaf, and was to be cut with a silver knife. All dined from silver plates and drank from silver goblets.

  Afterward, the entertainments were hers as well. She had arranged an elaborate tableau about men doing obeisance at the temple of the virgin goddess, Diana, after the French style. All this would have been proper had she not elected to play the part of Diana herself.

  Excusing herself from the dais and the royal table, she slipped away to change into her costume. Surrounding her in adoration upon the raised stage were men from the court: Francis Weston, William Brereton, Francis Bryan. Her brother George acted as Apollo, and Mark Smeaton, her favourite musician, provided the lute music, specially composed for the occasion. Diana, adored by worshipful attendants, blessed the marriage. A poem by Thomas Wyatt was read.

  It made no sense. This was a wedding, not a celebration of virginity. It should have featured Hymen, the goddess of marriage, not a cold, chaste moon-goddess. There was no point to it at all, except to glorify Anne and hint that she reigned over a court of moonstruck, celibate youths. If it had not ended when it did, I would have ordered it stopped.

  On the way back to York Place, I upbraided her. “The Queen does not participate in tableaux,” I said. “It demeaned the celebrations.”

  “How so?” She sat up straight in the litter we were sharing. “That I would act, and costume myself? What greater honour could your bastard”—she paused before and after the word—“son have?”

  “The honour of a discreet and proper stepmother.”

  Bessie would not comport herself in such a manner, I thought. Bessie had proved a loyal and long-suffering wife of the weak Tailboys. I knew, because Cromwell’s spies had reported it, and also because I knew Bessie. I admired her in so many ways. She had not travelled from the North to attend the wedding, but had sent a gift of a pearl-encrusted gold goblet and cover. Gold from Bessie: she was not a silver-chaste woman, nor would she encourage it in others.

  “You should be delighted that men find me attractive,” Anne countered.

  “Not nearly so attractive as you find it yourself,” I snapped. “You are Queen of England, and my wife, not Thomas Boleyn’s daughter and a maid of honour at court, acting in tableaux, collecting beaux.”

  “Just because no men ever paid court to Katherine—”

  “Your absurd rivalry with her shall not excuse this! Katherine was royal, and she knew how royalty should comport itself!”

  “And I do not?” she flared, and held herself up like a cobra about to strike.

  “Evidently not,” I said.

  Yet that night I sought her bed. I wanted her as seldom before. I wanted to tear away her silver-gossamer veil, penetrate to that guarded chamber of hers, violate her strange, solitary, private eroticism. Anne, Anne . . .

  LXII

  I needed to remember those silver moments when I faced the hard, ugly fact that Thomas More had spent the winter months of 1534–35 in the Tower, along with Bishop Fisher (confined shortly thereafter). They were lodged in the more “comfortable” parts of the Tower, not in the dungeons below, where a dozen or so recalcitrant monks languished in darkness and deep chill, chained and helpless.

  Only three orders of monks had defied the Royal Supremacy and refused to take the Oath: the Franciscan Observants, a group of highly devout and visible “preaching” friars; the Carthusians, an order that stressed individual discipline and prayer, and was less a monastery than a collective group of hermits (this was the order that More had almost joined, naturally); and the Bridgettine order at Syon.

  The Observants I had a special fondness for. Their main chapel at Greenwich was where I had first been married, to Katherine, and where both Mary and Elizabeth had been christened. I knew them to be good and holy men. But their order stressed preaching. It was here that I had been denounced as “Ahab” by the Friar Peto.

  The Observants were vocal, and their preaching and pronouncements carried great weight not only in England, but also abroad. It was my duty to silence them, and silence them I did. In August, 1534, there were seven houses of Observants, with two hundred friars. By December there were none. By refusing to submit to the Royal Supremacy, they ceased to exist as an order in England. They were scattered and their houses closed. That was that.

  The Carthusians were another matter. They insisted on obstructing the earthly agents of both God and their divinely appointed King. They fought, argued, and threw up annoying barriers in every way possible—like their heroine, Katherine. How alike they were! What similar spirit infused them!

  Both of them met the same fate: imprisonment and isolation.

  The Bridgettines, a “double” order of both monks and nuns, had only one house, at Syon, near Richmond. Richard Reynolds, their scholarly prior, was proving as stubborn as Katherine.

  The rest of the realm had taken the Oath. Even More’s household had taken it. My commissioners had returned from the Nort
h with their listings, and there were no names subscribed on the refusal list.

  My rebellion had succeeded. My defiance of the Pope, of my false marriage with Katherine, had been accepted, sworn to as a law of the land. The astounding thing was not that it had been possible, but that there had been so few resisters. Doom-sayers and ill-wishers had predicted that Englishmen, the Pope, and Francis and Charles would never tolerate such an affront. Yet the Englishmen had acquiesced, the Pope had yet to order a Holy War against me, and for all that, Francis and Charles had yet to obey. A great company of “yets.” In the meantime I reigned supreme, and honoured Anne as Queen, and forced others to do likewise.

  I prayed daily that More and Fisher would repent and come to swear the Oath. They were not senseless men, and surely the Holy Spirit would talk with them, convince them.

  Anne, however, seemed to hope the opposite. She harboured an especial rancour toward More, one I could never understand, as she had scarcely met him, and certainly he had never failed to be courteous and respectful toward her.

  “He refused to attend my Coronation,” she said spitefully, “and made up that insulting parable about losing his virginity by so doing.” She rolled her eyes heavenward and pointed her hands together in a Gothic spire.

  I laughed. “He is a man from another time,” I said. “He is fifty-seven years old; when he was born, my grandfather was King. He thinks in those terms.”

  “I am pleased, then, that you have outgrown him. That world is passé.”

  “Passé. Always French with you, my courtesan!” I reached out to enfold her in my arms.

  “But it is passé,” she laughed, sliding away. “He pledges his troth to something that has died. Beautiful as it may be, it died. And I did not kill it!” She looked agitated.

  We were in her winter sitting-parlor at Richmond. In Katherine’s day, this very chamber had been hung with Biblical tapestries and fitted with prayer-niches. Now the windows were naked, giving out onto magnificent views of the frozen Thames below.