The Autobiography Of Henry VIII

by Margaret George

  Her infuriating lectures on morality; her political duplicity; her treasonous letters to the Emperor; her Popish plots and affectations . . . the list multiplied itself, romped on its own.

  Yet, unbidden, came images of the laughing young Princess, her eyes glistening with love and joy of life; the young mother’s pride in Mary’s musical progress; the young wife’s eager attempts to delight and amuse and please me, to put on silver masks and dance in her chamber on Twelfth Night, even though she thought it silly; to pretend not to recognize me when I came dancing, in a costume from Turkey. . . .

  The wife of my youth. She had been the wife of my youth, and in dying she took that with her. Those lost days gleamed now more brightly than ever.

  I mourned for the Spanish Princess, angry that her life had been, on the whole, so sad. And now there was no hope for anything better, no last-minute changes. She lay beyond all changes.

  What sort of faith did I have, then? Presumably she had passed into another world, where all such considerations were cast aside. She was in glory, clothed in a spiritual body, no longer the Spanish Princess or the crippled, sickly old woman she had changed into, but changed yet again into something glittering and immortal. While her physical body was being cut open and embalmed, the immortal Katherine was long since departed, rewarded beyond anything I could ever have bestowed on her.

  So I believed . . . so I believed. . . .

  But if it were not so? If the poor old body was all there was, then what a cruel reward. I wept, alone in my private box in the Chapel Royal, astonished and bewildered at my tears. Did I not believe? Were all my beliefs hollow, worthless? That was what my tears betrayed.

  For if the dead are not raised, neither has Christ been raised. It follows also that those who have died within Christ’s fellowship are utterly lost. If it is for this life only that Christ has given us hope, we of all men are most to be pitied.

  I should not be weeping for Katherine’s bitter life, if I truly believed that each particle of that bitterness was pleasing to God and was now earning her tenfold of glory and reward.

  I was a liar, then, a hypocrite. No, I was a doubter. There was a difference. One was honest and human, the other was not. Even Peter had doubted.

  God, most almighty and everlasting, please remove these doubts that burn and torment me far worse than my leg. Remove them, or I cannot go on.

  Somewhere I heard a stirring. There was someone else in the chapel, down below. I decided to go. I felt more oppressed and troubled than when I had first sought the silence and darkness. Perhaps it would do for another what it had failed to do for me.

  I was halfway down the long gallery when I heard the door open and turned to see a figure stealing away from the chapel. It was Jane Seymour, and she was rubbing her eyes. She walked slowly until she came to a window seat, then sat down. She stared, blinking, at the floor.

  I approached her carefully. She looked up at my approach, and her eyes and the tip of her nose were red. She attempted to smile, as if that would render them invisible.

  “Mistress Seymour,” I said, settling down—uninvited—beside her. “Can I be of help? Are you troubled?”

  “I am troubled,” she admitted. “But you cannot be of help.” She fumbled for a handkerchief.

  “Only give me the chance,” I offered, glad of the opportunity to take my mind off Katherine.

  “I would leave court,” she blurted out. “As soon as the roads are passable, if Your Majesty would so graciously permit me.”

  “But why?”

  “I am not meant for court,” she said. “It is not as I thought it was, not as it will ever be again. I think I was—forgive me, Your Majesty—thinking that the Princess Dowager and the Lady Mary might return again. I had prayed”—her voice faltered—“that they would take the Oath, and return, and . . . but it is never to be, and I can wait no longer. And I mourn for the Qu—the Princess Katherine.” Unable to stop her sobs, she lowered her face into her hands.

  I felt tears rush to my eyes, as if to be companions to Jane’s. “I as well,” I admitted, wishing my voice did not tremble slightly. I put my arm around her. “I mourn for her. And, Jane”—I hesitated—“I am touched that you dare to mourn her, to grieve for her openly.”

  Jane was good, and like all truly good persons, she underestimated the power of the evil around her.

  She nodded. Still her tears came, even as she sought to bring them under control.

  “Jane, when my mother died, I felt that I had lost everything of love and beauty in my life,” I said. “I felt deserted. Already the Princess Katherine was there, already a new person of kindness and grace was in my life, but in my grief I could not see her. I only felt betrayed, lost, and powerless. Do not let your grief blind you that way. Thus evil robs us twice.”

  My words made no sense to her, I could tell.

  “My mother had a locket, which I have kept always. I will send it to you, and wish you to wear it, to accept it as a gift from my mother. Will you do that? And wait six months before leaving court? If you still wish to, then I shall not keep you.” I paused. “Oh, Jane—by then you shall truly be as wise as a serpent. You are already as gentle as a dove; therefore the court needs you, whether you need it or not.”

  I meant not “the court” but “the King.”

  Katherine’s death was formally announced to the court, and then proclaimed throughout England. She would lie in state at Kimbolton, and then her funeral cortège would proceed to Peterborough Abbey, where she would be interred. I appointed the chief mourners and ordered the principal gentry of the neighbourhood to attend her coffin from Kimbolton to Peterborough, two days’ slow journey, and sent the necessary black cloth for their mourning apparel. At court, there would be solemn obsequies in honour of Katherine. I commanded all the court to attend, dressed in mourning.

  Katherine’s letter to me arrived two days after the news of her death. It was with a sort of fear that I opened it, for there is a dread in reading, for the first time, words from a dead person.

  My most dear Lord, King, and husband. The hour of my death now drawing on, the tender love I owe you forces me, my case being such, to commend myself to you, and to put you in remembrance with a few words of the health and safeguard of your soul which you ought to prefer before all worldly matters, and before the care and pampering of your body, for the which you have cast me into many calamities and yourself into many troubles.

  For my part, I pardon you everything, and I wish and devoutly pray God that He will pardon you also. For the rest, I commend unto you our daughter Mary, beseeching you to be a good father unto her, as I have heretofore desired. I entreat you also, on behalf of my maids, to give them marriage portions, which is not much, they being but three. For all my other servants I solicit the wages due them, and a year more, lest they be unprovided for.

  Lastly, I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things.

  I felt stunned. Her last sentence . . . I had expected Scripture quotes, prayers, Latin. But she was done with all that; she had strength only to set down her true thoughts. And, above all, she had desired to see me? The young Princess, then, was there within the old woman, right up to the end? All that we are survives within us, nothing extinguishes the rest. . . . I ached: for the young self in me would, above all things, have granted that wish.

  Her will, following, showed her few earthly concerns. She wished to be buried in a convent. She wished Mary to have the gold collar which she had “brought out of Spain.” She wished all her servants to be paid their wages in arrears, and extra besides. She wished church vestments to be made of her gowns.

  The court obsequies were to be held on January twentieth. Cranmer would lead the prayers on behalf of the soul of the deceased. The day was the coldest yet that winter, raw and blustery, with a stinging wet snow coming from the west. Even in the early afternoon, the gloom was so deep that it appeared twilight.

  Anne and her party were not present. The Queen’s ch
air was empty. By her absence she shamed herself, not Katherine.

  Returning to the palace from the chapel, I saw, through the thick blue gloom, Anne’s apartments all lighted, including her Presence Chamber with its throne. The twinkling lights mocked us below, all the people in black who had honoured Katherine.

  I gave no indication that I had seen it, lest I give further scandal. But when the court had gone its own way, each to his or her own quarters, I went to Anne’s and demanded entrance. Her chamberlain admitted me. He was costumed in a festive manner.

  From within I could hear music, glimpse movement. There was dancing.

  “Your Majesty, the Queen did not expect the honour of your presence.”

  “Obviously.” I pushed my way past him and walked slowly out into the middle of the grand chamber where a thousand tapers were burning, and a whole company of men and ladies were dancing. They were all clad in yellow, bright lemon yellow, and in the center were Anne and her brother George, looking as though they had been dipped in gold, touched by Midas himself.

  “So,” I said quietly, but my one word and the presence of mourning black snapped them to attention. They stopped dancing, and the music faded.

  Anne came proudly to me, while all eyes watched.

  “You shame yourself,” I said, not attempting to lower my voice. “Exulting at Katherine’s death reveals only your own spite and shallowness.”

  “Do you not exult also? ‘God be praised, now we are safe from all threat of war,’ you said upon hearing the news.”

  I had said it only for political expediency, to let the Pope know he was done for now. I had not meant it in my heart.

  “For the benefit of the Bishop of Rome,” I replied, “whose spies are about.”

  “I am grieved for the attention the Princess Dowager has received for her ‘good end,’ ” said Anne, loudly. “There is talk of little else but her saintly departing. Already people are directing prayers to her, asking for her intercession. Can you afford to have created another saint? First Fisher, then More—now Katherine?”

  I signalled for the musicians to take up their playing again, to drown out this conversation.

  “You push me too far,” I said. I wished to choke her for her taunting words.

  “It is true,” she answered. “The people have canonized Fisher and More, in their hearts—never mind what Rome pronounces—and they are well on their way to doing it with Katherine. You should be dancing with us, to counteract it, not leading them in honouring her! Your own security demands it, regardless of your feelings.”

  “Fie! You dress your own evil gloating in political wrappings. Dance, my love, all you wish. Soon the time for your dancing will cease.”

  I turned and left her in yellow, as I had first beheld her.

  The embalmer at Kimbolton, who performed an autopsy on Katherine, submitted a secret report to me. He had found all the internal organs as healthy and normal as possible, “with the exception of the heart, which was quite black and hideous to look at.” He washed it, but it did not change colour; then he cut it open, and inside it was the same.

  “Poison,” I said softly. I had known it all along. Anne’s poison. It was that triumph she celebrated at her Yellow Ball. I wondered if the particular poison she had chosen was, indeed, yellow. How like her if it were.

  Now only Fitzroy, Mary, and I were left to dispatch. Emboldened by her success, she was foolhardly enough to commit her plans for Mary in a letter to Mrs. Shelton, Mary’s “keeper”: “Go no further. When I shall have a son, as I soon look to have, I know what then will come to her.”

  Go no further. No more poison for now? Mary was safe, then, for the present.

  LXX

  A tournament had long been scheduled for the end of the month. I did not wish to cancel it now, as it would indeed seem as though England were mourning a Queen rather than a Princess Dowager if I did so. Holding the tournament would signal that the time for observing the death was past. In addition, it was necessary that I quench the rumours and questions beginning to circulate about my health. If I rode in this tournament, it would be proof that there was nothing wrong with me.

  I was forty-four now, well past the age when most men participated in tournaments. Brandon had retired from the lists several years ago. But I still enjoyed the challenge, enjoyed the whole ritual associated with it, and I was loth to give it up.

  That January afternoon, one had to be a Northman born to relish the idea of putting on cold metal armour. It was a bright, blue-and-white day, the edges and outlines of all things appearing extra sharp. The air seemed thinner and harder than normal, and even the sounds of the trumpets and pendant bells on the horses were as brittle as icicles. The tournament colours, bold and primary, made a great heraldic shout against the white snow as the challengers rode out. Today the clash of metal against metal would ring and echo coldly, and sparks would be struck, like showers of stars.

  My leg was not well. The inflammation had increased until it was beginning to be difficult to walk without betraying my infirmity. Sitting a horse was not any easier; it required different muscles and squeezed the ulcer in a different way but was just as painful.

  I rode out, twice around the lists, armed cap-à-pie, as they say, with a surcoat of silver bawdakin, accompanied by thirty footmen, dressed all in white and silver. Then the jousting proper could begin. There were some twenty of us competing.

  Unlike the knights in King Arthur’s time, no Black Challenger or Unknown Green Knight appeared to enliven matters. There had been times, long ago, when I myself had ridden as a disguised challenger, but these days no one did that. Pity. A lot of things were a pity.

  My destrier pawed the ground and snorted, sending great clouds of breath-smoke from each nostril. Across the barrier, at the far end of the tiltyard, waited my opponent. He wore the colours of the Marchioness of Exeter. It was my cousin Courtenay I faced (unless his wife had taken a bold lover). He was a fair fighter.

  I gave my horse his signal; he leapt forward in the clear, thin air, and even inside my metal helmet I could hear the thunder of his hoofbeats heavy, heavy, heavy on the frozen ground. Through the row of slits in my visor I saw the Marquis coming toward me; the slits framed him so that he was all I saw. I raised my lance and dropped its butt into the great cupped notch on my breastplate where it was designed to rest, braced myself in the stirrups, and aimed.

  Something hit me so hard that I was paralysed, utterly unable to move. I saw sky wheeling above me, like a falcon’s lure, faster and faster, bits of white and blue chasing one another, and it was not cold at all, but balmy and with the scent of white roses. . . .

  I felt fur beneath my cheek, and I heard voices: gentle, murmuring voices, like Jane’s bees. I lay still and listened, because I had no strength to do otherwise. It was soothing to be here and let the voices wash over me; to take my own time to awaken, without chamber attendants on a schedule to assist me.

  “. . . it cannot be kept from her. Nor from them.” I wondered of whom they spoke. Eavesdropping is a dangerous pastime, to be hazarded more easily by adults than by children.

  “I have sent for Cranmer. I took it upon myself to do so.”

  “You?”

  “He will require the Last Rites. To let him depart without them is murder.”

  “Why? Because he stands in mortal sin at the present?”

  “All men have something to confess, or to be forgiven. Even the saintly More, and Katherine, required it.”

  “So much more him, eh?”

  “You speak treason!”

  Silence.

  “No, I meant not that. Only that he has the souls of the realm on his soul. More and Katherine were free to indulge and pamper their individual souls.”

  Why could I not discern the speakers? Their voices were anonymous.

  “I’ve told the Queen.” A known voice at last. The Duke of Norfolk’s.

  “What were your words?”

  “That the King had been unseated
in the lists and his horse had fallen on him, and as he is yet unconscious and barely breathing for these three hours past, he is not like to recover.”

  “What did she say?”

  She rejoiced, I answered them silently. She rejoiced that her spells and witchcraft had been strong enough to bring this about.

  “She—laughed. But she is ever wont to laugh when she is taken by surprise,” her uncle explained.

  In a few minutes I spoke, and took them by surprise, my early mourners. They seemed genuinely exultant to have me back. True or false?

  WILL:

  True. Henry had been King for so long that no one remembered anything else, and he had led his people out into a confusing landscape from which only he promised a map for deliverance. They were terrified at the thought of his leaving them in that place. This was the first time the shadow of the King’s death had crossed their minds, for they were accustomed to thinking of him as robust and eternal.

  HENRY VIII:

  I was recuperating—discreetly, of course, making my resting seem like “musing,” my bland food passed off as “fasting Lenten fare” and my curtailed activities as “attention to personal matters.” My leg was scabbing over; evidently the fall had shocked it into involution. But my senses were not right. I felt light-headed, and I kept forgetting why I had walked into a room.

  It was Dr. Butts who came to me with the news: “The Queen has been brought to bed before her time. She is calling for you.”

  Before her time . . . yes, it was months before her time. No child could survive, born so untimely. The child was lost, the son that was to be her salvation.

  “She calls for me?”

  “Indeed. The attendant midwives say she is fighting so hard against the birth because of her fear of you. But what is dead, or not fit for life, must pass out of her body. She hinders it for her own purpose. Please, Your Majesty, come and assure her.”