The Autobiography Of Henry VIII

by Margaret George

  They were all people of velvet: Audley so yielding and cautious; Riche so smooth and pleasing; Mistress Seymour, so soft and comforting. They played according to character, and as a result I won the game easily, being the only one to play boldly and abrasively.

  Pope Julius. It was a clever game, but belonged to simpler times. The truth was that Pope Julius was dead, and there had been three Popes since. My enemy, Pope Clement (or had he been my friend? Certainly I could never have had a more apathetic foe) was now dead, succeeded by a much more hardheaded gentleman, Alessandro Farnese, called Paul III. Rumour had it that Paul intended to implement what Clement had only threatened: a Holy War against me. The Roman Catholic Church was on the offensive at last, having gathered its forces after being stunned by the initial successes of Martin Luther. Pope Julius was simple to understand and manipulate; he made a fitting board game.

  I was vaguely disappointed when the game ended, although it ended under my own aggressive bidding. I had enjoyed my partners, enjoyed especially Mistress Seymour and the way she held her cards and pushed her token about the board. I cannot explain why observing the hand and arm motions of a graceful woman should prove so appealing, like a ceremony of sorts, a dance.

  The bell was rung; we must change tables. Outside I saw the heat waves reflected in the light coming in the windows, rising from the river.

  Noon. More was being led out.

  Going up the scaffold, he turned to the Lieutenant of the Tower. “I pray you, Master Lieutenant, see me safe up and, for my coming down, let me shift for myself.”

  “Now you come to this game with points already,” explained Anne. “You may keep them, only demerits will subtract from the total score—”

  He put his head down on the block and made a joke with the executioner. In the Tower he had not shaved, but had grown a long beard. He smoothed it neatly down and asked the headsman not to strike it, as “it has done no treason.”

  We played a second round. At my table were those who had already won—Cromwell, Norfolk, and Edward Seymour. This game was more difficult. My opponents did not hold back and kept strategies in their heads the entire time, not merely one or two plays, but contingency plans as well.

  The air grew stifling. Sweat gathered about my neck, wilting my fair linen collar.

  I had told More “not to use many words.” Brief was best. Looking his last at the crowd gathered on Tower Hill, he asked them to pray for him, and to bear witness that he was suffering death in and for the faith of the Holy Catholic Church.

  “You have overlooked this Intrigue point, Your Majesty,” said Cromwell. “Now you must lose this round.”

  “Careless of me,” I granted him.

  More turned to the executioner, who was growing faint-hearted. “Pluck up thy spirits, man, and be not afraid to do thine office. My neck is very short. Take heed therefore thou strike not awry, for saving of thine honesty.” A bungled stroke with the axe meant torture and humiliation.

  “I have a turn here in reserve,” said Seymour. “I have been saving it all the while.”

  “He is a deceptive knave,” smiled Norfolk. “Thinking all the time, never showing his hand.”

  “I have two turns,” I said. “One to cancel out yours.” I shoved his Matrimony token off the board.

  “You should be betting, Your Majesty,” said Cromwell.

  “I have no coins with which to do so,” I replied. “And a man must always make good his debts.”

  “You know where to obtain that which you seek,” he said. “ ‘Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.’ ”

  His snide Scriptural quotes did not sit well on this fetid July day.

  “I die the King’s good servant, but God’s first.”

  The cannon from the Tower sounded, carrying across the water, coming in through the open windows of our gaming room.

  More was dead. His head was cut off.

  “Your move, Your Majesty.” The three at my table waited politely.

  I made my move. I had known several rounds before what it would be. All the time I looked at Anne, walking between tables, overseeing her obscene card party of death.

  It was obscene, and she was obscene, and my inordinate desire for her was likewise obscene.

  It all stank as the polluted July Thames outside the windows. There was nothing fine about it.

  Choking, I pushed back my chair and left the game room.

  LXIV

  I sat in a great crystal palace—or perhaps it was ice. I could not tell because I could not touch the pillars or the walls. They gleamed and shone like icicles. But there was no dripping, and I was not cold.

  I was interviewing someone, only this was his palace, not mine. I wanted him as my servant, or counsellor. Yet it was he who seemed to be setting the rules and conditions. He was unusually articulate and self-possessed. I was frustrated because I knew I would not have him after all. I wished him to demonstrate his powers, but he seemed uninterested in doing so. Was it true, what they claimed for him? I wished to see, before I felt regret at not having him . . . or not serving him myself.

  I asked. He laughed (a smug, hateful laugh) and waved a gloved hand. The walls crashed and turned to water, and bubbled up under the chair I was sitting in. I was carried away, spinning, my arms frantically clasping the chair arms, my legs on the rungs, carried down a dark watery chute. . . .

  I awoke. The sound of water was a deluge around me. It was beating against the windows, and I could hear trickles. Somewhere it had found an entrance, had nosed open a little crack between stones or through a piece of loose mortar.

  My mind cleared. Rain. There could be no rain tonight. It was impossible. The sky had been absolutely clear at sunset. The soaked fields had been granted respite. The crops would recover, and the harvest be normal. That was what the clear sky had promised.

  The downpour, which had penetrated even into my sleeping mind, continued to soak the already waterlogged earth outside.

  It has not stopped raining since More died, the common people were saying. On the night of July sixth it had begun to rain, and it had continued, intermittently, for the six weeks since. The vegetable crops had already been drowned, rotted. The grains—oats, barley, wheat—by far the most important, as yet were salvageable. But if they were lost!

  Damn this rain! I leapt from my bed and went over to the window. It was not a sweet, soft rain. Ugly, hard thrusts of water were striking against the glass.

  Henry Norris stirred on his pallet and rolled over. He no longer slept at the foot of my bed, as it was too close to the outer, waterlogged wall and invited mildew. Instead he had moved to an inside wall.

  It was raining on More’s head, which had turned black impaled on Tower Bridge (so they told me). At least it was not growing into an object of veneration and superstition like Fisher’s. I myself had not seen it, nor did I intend to.

  This whole business disgusted me, sickened me. Only let this summer be over, let a year’s cycle come round, so that every vicissitude of weather (all normal, all normal) was not converted into an “omen” or a “judgment.” This time next year there would be an heir to the throne; Anne’s boy would be born. Then see how they would remember More—not at all! They were fickle, shallow creatures, the people. Anne’s son would give them instant lethe, instant forgetfulness, on the subject of More, Fisher, the Oaths.

  One thing cancelled out the other—did it not? There could be no gains without payments. And these things were my payment for Anne.

  The rain hissed at me.

  Do your worst, I dared it. Do your worst, and I shall yet prevail.

  I badly needed to make a summer progress about the realm, to reassure my people and to take readings on their minds. Yet, because of Anne’s pregnancy, I dared not risk her travelling, even in the comparative comfort of a litter, at this time; and I myself would stay with her, watching over her and taking care of her.

  She was difficult during this pregnancy, hard to please. She had fancies, one of
which was that as long as Katherine and Mary lived, she could not bear a living son. She needed music to soothe her, and therefore Mark Smeaton must be promoted to become her personal musician, for only his lute-playing “chased away the demons.” She needed entertainments to amuse her, and therefore I brought the Oxford players to court, and bade them write and perform some “fantastical history of times past,” so as to entertain the Queen.

  They did so, writing a history of Dr. Faustus and performing it most grandiosely, with red-tinted smoke and demons dragging the damned Faustus down to hell. Anne was delighted with it and showed lively interest in the red smoke and sudden apparitions of the Devil, since she had attempted a similar effect in “Cardinal Wolsey Descending to Hell.” Hell always interested people from an artistic standpoint.

  She exhibited none of the behaviour I had come to expect from a pregnant woman: the happiness, the contentment, the interest in the coming child. She was restless and self-absorbed, with glittering, feverish eyes. Yet that was of no moment, as long as the child was healthy. Anne was like no other woman in the world; her pregnancy was as singular and disturbing as she herself.

  The cursed rain kept up all through the remainder of the summer. There were occasional fair days, as if to tease us, like a beautiful woman who has no intention of yielding her favours but continues to make promises. The first grain crop was now ruined, and the flooding of the fields made it impossible for a second to be sown. This winter there would be hardship at the least and starvation at the worst.

  The people had stepped up their visits to shrines, imploring Our Lady, Thomas à Becket, and all the others to hear them. The monasteries reaped a tidy profit from all this, as Crum never failed to remind me. I had allowed him to appoint inspectors to compile records of the assets and holdings of all the clergy in England, to be summarized in a Valor Ecclesiasticus. They had fanned out eagerly over the realm to get their information.

  Crum liked the fact that offerings were pouring into the shrines’ coffers all across the land. I found it ominous. More’s head had disappeared from London Bridge. Who had taken it, and why? Were they setting up a shrine to him, too?

  I had no one to confide these apprehensions to. Crum was not a man to tolerate apprehensions, either in himself or in others. He would discuss only the realities of a situation, not its intangibles. Cranmer, close as I was to him in many ways, had so many apprehensions himself that I did not wish to encourage them.

  As for Anne, she had isolated herself completely in that court world where she whiled away her time. What happened beyond the doors of the Queen’s apartments was not of the remotest interest to her. As her spirits alternated between high-pitched nervousness and melancholia, I let her suit herself. Anything to keep her happy and to protect the pregnancy. Except dancing, which was too vigorous. I forbade her to dance.

  Thus it was with stunned disbelief that I beheld her dancing with great abandon late one evening after she had ostensibly retired. We had had supper together, a quiet one, as I had given leave in August to all the courtiers who wished to return home for visits. Court was always closed during the summer hunting season, and I was usually on progress. Anne had kept on the men in her retinue, but given the women leave to go. As we dined, I could hear Mark Smeaton playing plaintive love songs in the next room; the incessant rain muffled the actual melodies.

  Anne picked at her food until, despite myself, I cautioned her to remember the child, to nourish him. How she hated admonishments! Yet I could not help myself. Was she trying to starve my son?

  “I do! I do!” she argued. “I eat well—”

  “You do not look it. You are thinner than ever. In how many months is the child to come?”

  “Five.”

  I thought back to how Anne had looked the April before Elizabeth’s birth. That was just after the Easter Eve fiasco. There had been panels in her skirts then. . . .

  “Yes. I put the panels in before May Day.”

  She had read my thoughts. Astonished, I reacted to that rather than to what she said.

  “But the second is not the same as the first,” she continued. “Each child is different—my body is different.” She suddenly began to eat. “Nonetheless I shall feed him. Yes, so he’ll grow.”

  “Is he unnaturally small?” Another apprehension to add to the others. “What does your physician say?”

  “Dr. Beechey?” She shrugged. “Oh, he is not concerned. . . .”

  After the supper, she had bade me good night, as she said she was tired and wished to sleep early. All would have been well for her, but I wished to help her sleep by taking her a sleep-posset which I would prepare myself. So I returned to her apartments an hour hence, and found:

  A wild dance going on, with Anne leaping about acrobatically, being handled and passed between men, including her brother. She lacked but a tail to complete the resemblance to a monkey. The men were leaping about, clapping, tapping, bowing; wearing fantastical hats and clicking castanets. The music was wild, thumping, and rhythmic. The tambourines, the heel-stamping, and the castanets drowned out the sound of the door opening. No one saw me—not for a full two minutes. Then George Boleyn, passing opposite, did. And stopped so suddenly that Francis Weston, following, ran into him.

  “Your Majesty!” George cried, yanking off his feathered cap. The music died. Nonetheless Anne kept swirling, defiantly, for what seemed forever in the profound silence, with all eyes upon her, until she suddenly cast herself at my feet, executing a perfect touching of the floor.

  Then she turned her face upward. “We imitate Spain,” she said. “And the Spanish dances from Valencia.” She waited for approval. I did not give it.

  “Go,” I said to the men. “All of you. Now.”

  Anne started to rise, but I put my hand on her head and kept her from standing. She was forced to remain thus while all her accomplices filed silently from the room. When the last one had left, I removed my hand.

  “Why?” I asked.

  Rising in that supple motion that had once so entranced me, she tossed her hair after the old manner.

  “The Imperial ambassador had just presented me with a gift of Jerez—a drink.” She indicated the small cask resting on her table. “The men sampled it, and it went to their heads.” She laughed. “It is stronger even than red wine,” she said. “Dangerous.”

  Her pretty lies. Always, the pretty lies. I could not help but admire them, as I admired proficiency in any art.

  “Why did you lie about the child?” For she was not with child, I knew that now. She never had been.

  “Because you wanted him so.” Clever woman—none of the denials a less cunning pretender would have used. Admit it with grace, then turn the reason for the lie into something plausible and endearing. “I wanted so much to give you a son. Perhaps in saying I was with child, I believed I could make it be true, could create the event—”

  Excellent. Falsehood made a virtue. “I could have gone on progress, but you kept me with you. If ever I needed to show myself about the realm, it was now. Yet you kept me here, for a lie. You deceived me in public, and you deceived me in private. While it was raining outside and the people were murmuring against me, growing the only crops possible under the circumstances, rebellion and treason, you danced with your men.”

  I stepped back from her. I did not want to touch her. “Lies. You are nothing but lies. There is no truth in you. Nay, do not touch me!” She had reached out for me. My flesh actually shrank from her.

  “Please—” she cried, stretching out her hand in supplication.

  “You are foul,” I said, feeling myself in an evil presence. The sensation was overwhelming, and I felt such revulsion I could think only of fleeing. The presence was not only evil but angry and powerful.

  She threw back her head and laughed: a guttural, wolfish laugh.

  I turned and quickly left her, before she could spring and—do what? I knew not.

  As I passed through the last of her chambers, I noticed her co
stumed guards standing at attention on both sides of the great double doors that separated her quarters from the rest of the palace. They were impassive, muscular things, clutching their halberds and staring ahead with empty eyes. For an instant I wondered if they were enthralled by their Queen, and whether, if I bade them bind her, they would obey me or their mistress. . . . Those blank, emotionless eyes . . . nay, it was but a fancy, a fancy.

  Within my own quarters, I made quickly for my inmost chamber, the one forbidden to everyone. Here I had always found a refuge. Tonight it felt close and pressing, like a coffin. I felt not as though I had barely escaped something, but as though instead I were trapped by it.

  In my ears I could still hear Anne’s ugly laugh, and the powerful feeling of revulsion swept over me once more, making my flesh tingle. All at once the feeling was familiar; I had felt it many times before. It had clamoured for my attention, striving to warn me for a long time.

  It had been there from the moment I had heard her name, that night in France—that apparition of black and white on the dark plain, that feeling of nameless dread and malevolence about me. . . . To name something is to call it into being, evoke a presence.

  I had felt it in the garden that first time at Hever when I had sought her out by the willows, and we had come face to face. My arms and neck had prickled in an eerie, disturbing way, and I had thought, fleetingly, of supernatural things, and felt unreasoning fear.

  Revulsion in the presence of evil.

  That was the earmark of evil: a warning that things are not as they seem, that contact has been made with something malevolent and harmful. It causes healthy people to flee from it, as to stay in its presence is dangerous. It is a protective grace God gives us: just as He causes tainted meat to taste foul, so He makes tainted people “feel” foul, although they may be passing pleasant to the other senses, especially that of sight.