The Autobiography Of Henry VIII

by Margaret George

  People were sporting on its surface. There were young lads with bones strapped to their shoes, sliding about, playing all sorts of games. There were others swatting stones back and forth with sticks. The figures all looked black, their sticks and legs making them appear as insects.

  “I did not kill that world!” she repeated. “Any more than these gamesters killed summer.”

  “Yet you sport upon its surface, and that seems to be a desecration,” I said. “To some.”

  “To More and his like!” She turned to me, her black eyes hard and gleaming. “You will not permit those slanderers to live?” she asked. “For if they live, they insult me daily by their existence.”

  “Unless they change, they will not live,” I said. It was not a promise but a fact. One that I deplored and prayed would soften and give way to something else, something more . . . malleable.

  “Good,” she said. “I was afraid that a softened version of the Oath might yet be offered to them.”

  In the privacy of my midnight chamber I had framed a version of the Oath that encompassed only Parliament’s enactment and left the Pope and his dispensation untouched. I had thought to offer it to More and Fisher. But I had never worded it to my own satisfaction. How could she know of it?

  “There are no variations in the Oath,” I insisted. This seemed to satisfy her—or did it?

  “I know full well you love More!” she burst out. “And I know in what way, and in what manner! In an unnatural manner!”

  “Unnatural?” Her cryptic allusions baffled me.

  “ ‘Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind; it is abomination.’ Leviticus, Chapter eighteen, verse twenty-two.”

  “Anne!” I cried. “This is unseemly! And where did you read the Old Testament?” I asked, irrelevently. Was her Latin that proficient?

  “It is true, is it not?” She ignored my question. “You have ‘lain down with him’ in the meadows of your mind; sported and frolicked with him there, excluding all others. Craved his approval and love, sought it and cried for it? And now, even now, when he defies you and throws that love back in your face, you seek to mollify and placate him! Your darling must have a special Oath, handmade and tailored and tenderly fashioned by his lover—the King!”

  “His lover is not me,” I said.

  “Pity!”

  “His lover is pain, disguised as Christ.” And he will wed her, with my executioner officiating as priest, I thought.

  “Very allegorical,” she sniffed. “But it fails to clarify just how you intend to rescue your beloved from the pit he has diggèd for himself, as the Bible puts it.”

  “There are only the regular steps by which to ascend. The Oath, and utter loyalty.”

  “No special hand extended from the King? In an allegorical sense?”

  “You should know well of allegories! You stage enough of them—insipid, mincing things, but all the same. You as a goddess, surrounded by worshipping fops! Do you enjoy the fawning, the stylized, false verses and compliments? Fie, lady, I outgrew them by the time I was twenty!”

  “By then you had been King three years. When I have been Queen three years, perhaps I shall follow suit.”

  “No, you shall follow suit now! Lent is soon approaching, and you will cease these ‘entertainments’ for the duration. Do you understand me, Madam?”

  “Indeed.” She managed to infuse the word with disdain.

  More and more our times together were like this: acrimonious, full of rancour and mistrust, a collapsing of respect. Yet I continued to desire her and crave her presence; I knew not why. She vexed my soul, not comforted it.

  During the next few months it became increasingly clear that the refusers of the Oath would have to stand trial. At the end of 1534, Parliament passed another act, the Act of Supremacy, acknowledging my title as Supreme Head on Earth of the Church of England and defining it as treason to “maliciously seek to deprive” me of any of my rightful titles. Now the men in the Tower would have to be judged on that aspect as well.

  Bishop Fisher was calm throughout his imprisonment, never seeking any deliverance. The Pope made a belated gesture of support by naming him a Cardinal. But Fisher cared not. He was an old man, an extension, really, of my grandmother Beaufort, never comfortable in the world that had grown up around him since her death. From the beginning of my Great Matter (styled by some “the divorce”), he had taken a stand against me. In the formal hearing of the divorce case at Blackfriars, Warham had presented a list of signatures of all bishops supporting my cause, including Fisher’s.

  Fisher had risen in gaunt dignity and said, “That is not my hand or my seal.” Warham had admitted that Fisher’s signature had been “added,” but only because it could be done in surety. Fisher grunted, “There is nothing more untrue, My Lord.”

  In the beginning there had been others against me—Warham himself, for example. But in the end, alone of all the clergy, Bishop John Fisher stood unconvinced and unswayed.

  He was finally brought to trial on June 17, 1535, on a charge of high treason for depriving the King of one of his titles by denying that he was Supreme Head of the Church in England. He admitted that he did not accept me as Supreme Head, but sought to exonerate himself by denying that he had “maliciously” done so. But the verdict came in: guilty, and he should die.

  The Carthusian priors of the houses of London, Beauvale (in Nottinghamshire), and Axholme (in Lincolnshire) were hauled up out of the Tower and made to stand trial. Along with them were three stubborn monks from the London house. They all refused, for the last time, to take the Oath. They all tried to say they had never intended their own private thoughts and opinions to be “malicious.” But this failed to convince the examiners. They were sentenced to be hanged, then cut down alive and their entrails pulled out and burnt, and to be drawn and quartered, on May fourth. Reportedly they went to their deaths singing and with glad countenances, watching each of their fellows being torn limb from limb, absolutely undeterred.

  Now there was no one left but More.

  More must stand trial, and it must be a grand and public trial in the largest hall in the kingdom: Westminster Hall, where Coronation banquets were held. More was too monumental a public figure to command less.

  First he had had several “pre-trials,” or examinations. These examinations were led by Cromwell, Cranmer, Audley (who had replaced More as Chancellor), Brandon, and Thomas Boleyn. In all of them he maintained his “silence.” I could report all the intricate reasonings he used, but I will not. The truth of the matter is that he based his case (clever lawyer that he was) upon legal hair-splitting—basically upon whether his silence was “malevolent” or not. It was the legal implications of silence that were on trial, not More himself.

  His sophistry and legalisms did not impress his judges, and they found him guilty.

  Once he saw that silence could do him no good (and that his judges had fathomed him true, in any case), he asked to make a statement. This request was granted.

  “This indictment is grounded upon an act of Parliament directly repugnant to the laws of God and His Holy Church,” he said. He went on to explain that no one portion of Christendom could make laws governing the Church in that particular land, if they ran counter to the laws in every other land. England could not declare herself above the laws binding other Christian countries. We—Parliament and I—claimed that we could. And there the argument ended.

  I have restrained myself from describing More’s trials and arguments in all their details, since the end was the end. It is torture to retrace each step and say where one action, one word, could have altered the outcome. His family came to visit him in the Tower and did their utmost to persuade him to sign the Oath, excuse himself, liberate himself.

  In the Tower he spent his time writing. There were several books, some in Latin—Of the Sorrow, Weariness, Fear and Prayer of Christ before his Capture was the longest—and others in English: A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation; The Four Last
Things. The latter described the four things that a man on his deathbed must deal with: death, the Day of Judgment, the pains of Purgatory, and the eternal joys of heaven.

  More examined the moment of death carefully and concluded that there was no “easy” death: “for if thou die no worse death, yet at the leastwise lying in thy bed, thy head shooting, thy back aching, thy veins beating, thine heart panting, thy throat rattling, thy flesh trembling, thy mouth gaping, thy nose sharping, thy legs cooling, thy fingers fumbling, thy breath shortening, all thy strength fainting, thy life vanishing, and thy death drawing on” was in store for you.

  From his window in the Tower, More saw Richard Reynolds of Syon and the Carthusian monks being carted out of the Tower for their felons’ execution at Tyburn. Reportedly he looked at them longingly and then said to his daughter Margaret (who continued to visit him and beg him to recant), “Lo, dost thou not see, Meg, that these blessed fathers be now as cheerfully going to their deaths as bridegrooms to their marriage?”

  Then he berated himself for his “sinful” life. He was ever obsessed with his own sinfulness and even of the sorrow of the world at large and its purpose. He wrote:

  But if we get so weary of pain and grief that we perversely attempt to change this world, this place of labour and penance, into a joyful haven of rest, if we seek Heaven on earth, we cut ourselves off for ever from true happiness, and will drown ourselves in penance when it is too late to do any good, and in unbearable, unending tribulations as well.

  More had at last embraced his dark side. When he closed the gate at Chelsea on his way to his first examination, he was said to have murmured, “I thank God, the field is won at last.” He had turned his back on that quietude of Chelsea, on his wife and family, too, and thanked God that they would no longer be there to torment him, keeping him from becoming that monk who had first, in youth, served with the Carthusians as a novice. He never wished to see them again. That was what neither I, nor others, for a great long time, could comprehend.

  He had said it clearly, himself, to Margaret, when she came to visit him in the Tower. “I assure thee, on my faith, my own good daughter, if it had not been for my wife and you that be my children, I would not have failed long ere this to have closed myself in as strait a room—and straiter, too.”

  Now he had passed the test, forsworn—albeit belatedly—the things of this world, and could pledge his vows in blood. Undoubtedly, to one of that mind, it was a great relief. He had not disappointed or betrayed himself to a lesser life.

  The execution was fixed for July 6, 1535. He told his daughter, “It were a day very meet and convenient for me—Saint Thomas’ Even.” His assignation with eternity was neatly fitted in with the Church calendar, which seemed to soothe him.

  How could I feel upon receiving this news? Like a father whose daughter has chosen to marry unwisely, yet is deliriously happy in the meanwhile? Should I rejoice with her, grieving in my heart? Or should I use my authority to forbid the match?

  I knew no action I could take would prevent this marriage. It had been contracted since More’s earliest days.

  Yet I wanted him here with me, on earth!

  Even had I tried to bring that about, he had already answered that to his satisfaction in a poem he wrote immediately after Cromwell visited him in the Tower and sought to convey my anguish and love.

  Aye, flattering Fortune, look thou never so fair,

  Nor never so pleasantly begin to smile,

  As though thou wouldst my ruin all repair,

  During my life thou shalt not me beguile!

  Trust I shall God to enter in a while

  His haven of Heaven, sure and uniform:

  Even after thy calm, look I for a storm.

  So he longed always to be beyond any possible ties or recall to earthly matters.

  LXIII

  Fisher was executed on June twenty-second. His judges had pronounced the same sentence on him as that meted out to the Carthusian monks.

  “I cannot imagine such a death,” Anne had said, upon reading the sentence.

  “It is the usual felon’s death,” I replied. “Have you never known of what it consists?” Every English child had witnessed executions. Tyburn, where commoners were executed, was a popular public excursion place. People took their food and blankets and forced their children to watch, “lest you fall likewise into crime.” It was instructional. I had always thought it was a pity that hell was not equally observable.

  “No. I have never watched an execution. Nor do I wish to.” She was agitated.

  “Perhaps you should. As Queen, you should know to what we condemn felons.”

  “It is the fire part I cannot bear!” she said. “To be burnt, to be touched by that evil, hot, licking, consuming thing—oh, they knew well what they did when they made hell a place of flames! I would never go there, never, never—”

  “Then do not sin, my sweet.” I smiled. The remedy was at hand. Those who did not wish to go to hell knew precisely what they should do to avoid it. It was all laid out.

  “Spare Fisher!” she said. “Do not let the flames touch him. No one deserves that!”

  “A signature on a paper would have prevented it.”

  “Even so . . .”

  I had intended all along to commute his sentence, to allow him a painless beheading. But Anne’s outburst puzzled me. It showed me yet another side of her.

  “Have you long been troubled by this fear of fire?” I asked her.

  “Always. Since I was a child, when once in my room a lighted piece of wood escaped from the fireplace. It landed on a stool nearby. It glowed and then subsided. I went to sleep watching it—and then awoke, suddenly, to a blaze. The horrible heat, the diabolical grin of the fire—‘I fooled you, now I have you. . . .’ ” She shuddered. “And the crackling, the roasting . . .”

  “Be at peace. Fisher shall not face that,” I assured her.

  Indeed, Fisher was led out onto a tidy scaffold at Tower Hill, just outside the Tower walls. He had always been ascetic and gaunt, but his fourteen months in the Tower had turned him into a “death’s-head,” as witnesses described him. He went to his death calmly and insisted on wearing his best shirt, as it was the garment with which he would enter Paradise.

  That should have been that. But it was the beginning of a set of different challenges to my reign.

  Fisher’s severed head was parboiled, as was the custom, and set up on London Bridge. The midsummer weather was hot and stagnant; foul odours rose from the Thames, which sloshed back and forth in an enervated fashion. Fisher’s head (minus its Cardinal’s hat—that would have been too macabre a touch) should have rotted and turned into a horror. But it did not. Instead, it seemed to glow and become more lifelike every day. People began to gather on the bridge to pay homage to it, to tell it their troubles. . . .

  To ask it to intercede for them.

  Fisher was on the way to becoming a saint.

  I ordered this ended. In the night my servants took down the head and threw it into the river.

  Fisher, the incipient saint, was checked in his progress. But the weather, and the mood, continued ugly. There were pestilential vapours about, infecting the entire populace. It was best to do More now, and have the whole business finished. Then, that being done, I could go out on progress, ride out amongst the people, talk with them, soothe them. They needed me.

  An unhappy languor had fallen over the court, as in one of those tales of enchantment wherein a witch has put everyone under a spell. Anne seemed particularly affected, alternately nervous and apathetic. Others moved about as though their brains had flown, or were held for ransom.

  Then Anne told me her news, and that broke my spell.

  “I am with child.” Magic words. Words that called to action.

  “Praised be God!” I exclaimed. All would be right: out of these present troubles and hideous upheavals, the original purpose of which I had all but forgotten, a Prince would come.

  I clasped her to
me, feeling her slender supple body, all encased in silk. “Praised be God.”

  More’s execution was to be July sixth, a fortnight after Fisher’s. I granted his daughter Margaret permission to witness the actual execution. He bequeathed her his hair shirt (yes, he had continued to wear it all through his captivity), and hearsay is that it has been preserved in the family as a relic to this day. He sent no message to his wife.

  It was an oppressive summer day, not columbine-fresh as some can be, but lowering and heavy. The humours in the air hung waiting, malevolent.

  Anne, in her characteristic, brave fashion, had attempted to mock it by staging a “Pope Julius” party in her apartments. She had had a number of boards painted up for the game that had been invented in the summer of 1529 featuring Pope Julius (he who had granted the original dispensation in 1503), with stops called Intrigue, Matrimony, War, and Divorce. She had set up tables with rounds to determine which players should be matched, culminating in a Master Board with a grand prize. The “tournament” was to begin directly after the summer dinner at ten in the morning and play until a Grand Master emerged.

  All the windows of the Queen’s apartments were opened, and servants stood by with fans to make artificial breezes. Rose-scented incense supplied the sweetness that was lacking in the reeking outside air. As we were at Greenwich, there was the blessing of some slight breezes, borne inland from the sea. It was undoubtedly worse in the other palaces.

  The entire court was assembled for Anne’s “tournament,” from the Privy Council through the ladies-in-waiting. Crum was there, looking eager for the gambling; the Seymour brothers, Edward and Tom, back from a fruitless diplomatic mission in Paris; Norfolk, Anne’s uncle; and . . . as I have said, everyone.

  Anne, looking almost as yellow as her gown in the oppressive heat and her condition, flitted about explaining the rules of both the game and her tournament to everyone. At the tinkle of a bell, all began. I was seated at table with Thomas Audley, Richard Riche, the Solicitor-General, and Jane Seymour, Edward and Tom’s younger sister, whom I had not seen before.