The Autobiography Of Henry VIII

by Margaret George

  I drew on my furs. It was a long distance to the Queen’s apartments here in Greenwich, and ever since my fall I had felt constantly chilled. It was still January. January twenty-ninth. With a start, the significance of the date snapped into place: today Katherine’s coffin was being lowered into the vault at Peterborough. Her last earthly act, as it were, before she resolved herself into a memory. Anne’s travail had come while Katherine was yet above ground.

  There was no merriment about the Queen’s apartments today. The servitor who admitted me was quiet, and the furniture was set in order against the walls of the Audience and Presence chambers. As I penetrated further within, the number of attendants increased, but their silence was as heavy as great snowfalls in northern forests. I passed through the Privy Chamber, with its musical instruments mutely arranged on the window seats, and into Anne’s inner suite. Dr. Beechy met me.

  “All is lost,” he said. “The Prince is dead.” He indicated a blanket-wrapped mound in a basket, resting on Anne’s writing desk. The basket had pushed aside her Italian pens, her inlaid letter-boxes.

  “It was a Prince?”

  “It had the appearance of a male, of some sixteen weeks. Do you wish to—?”

  I nodded. A physician’s attendant brought the basket to me. I pulled back the coverings and stared at the jelly-like creature there, almost transparent, and only a few inches long. The male genitalia were recognizable. I pulled the cloth back over it.

  “I will see the Queen now,” I said. “When was she—when was this delivered?”

  “Not above half an hour ago,” Dr. Beechy said. “She strove, with all her might, to keep it within her womb. She quite exhausted herself by her efforts, making this issue more painful than a normal birth. She needs . . . comforting.”

  “The Queen has miscarried of her saviour,” a diplomat wrote that week. Indeed, Anne had lost the son upon whom she had based all her schemes and visions of triumph. She was done for.

  “So,” I said, as I approached her bed, where she was still being sponged and ministered to by her women, “you have lost my boy.”

  She looked up at me. Stripped of her jewels, her immaculately coiffed hair, her stunning costumes, she was as ugly and wiry as a sewer-rat. Like one of those, she swam for safety.

  “O my Lord,” she cried, “he was lost for the great love I bear you. For when my uncle, the Duke, brought me word of your accident, and that you were not thought like to live, my pains began—”

  Liar. That was two days ago.

  “Has Her Majesty been in labour since Thursday?” I asked Dr. Beechy blandly.

  The honest, frightened physician shook his head. “Friday it began, Your Majesty.”

  “It was for despair that your love had left me!” she cried. “On Friday I saw the locket that Mistress Seymour wore.” She used her thin arms to hoist herself up to a sitting position, where she glared at me. “Can you deny that you are giving her tokens? I will not have it!”

  “You will not have it? You’ll have what I dictate that you have, and endure it as your betters have done.”

  “Katherine?” she screamed. “No, I’m no Katherine! And your maids shall never live to flaunt their tokens in my face!” She opened her hand, and lying on her palm was the locket I had given Jane—my mother’s locket.

  “I tore it off her neck, her thick, bullish neck. She’s plain, Henry, and has a fat neck. It’s pale and lumpy-looking.”

  Her whole body was straining forward, and the cords stood out on her neck. I could see a vein throbbing slowly, right under her ear.

  “Your neck is prettier,” I allowed her. “Slender and with a curve. Yet the head it bears up is filled with evil and curses and malevolence. You’ll get no more boys from me.” It was not a threat but a statement, and a promise to myself.

  She hurled the locket at me. I caught it easily, although she meant it to hurt me or damage itself against something hard.

  “When you are on your feet again, I shall speak to you,” I told her, closing my fingers over the locket.

  I left her chambers.

  I was free. She had no further hold over me.

  LXXI

  March had come in like a lamb, the country folk said, so it was bound to go out like a lion. They were correct, but not for the reasons they thought. This mid-March day, I, the lion, was hawking with Cromwell, my presumed “lamb.” At least he was always obedient and docile; in that way he was lamblike.

  The day was one of those March oddities—glum and yet alive with potential. Everywhere ice was melting, and one could hear the water flowing in streams and brooks, trickling out of woodland snowbanks, oozing into our horses’ hoofprints. One felt the growth ready to spring out of the dry, tightly packaged stems, one could see the glimmer of green beneath the trampled, brown, straggly grass. The wool-puff clouds against the sky seemed rinsed clean and purified. March was a tonic, a scourge, an astringent.

  It was a fine day for hawking. Cromwell and I needed to confer, and what better excuse to betake ourselves deep into the countryside and leave the palace spies and eavesdroppers behind? Crum had long been eager to show me his birds, and I had been eager to see the creatures for whom he actually seemed to have warm feelings.

  He kept both peregrine falcons and goshawks. By law, one must be at least an earl to fly peregrines. I intended to make Cromwell Earl of Essex—depending on how well he served me in what he judiciously refrained from calling the King’s Greater Matter.

  He asked me which I preferred to fly today, and I chose the peregrine. He chose its smaller mate, the tiercel. We took them from the hawk-house, hooded, upon our gloved wrists, and rode west beyond Richmond, until we were in the open country near Hampton. All the while the falcons were quiet, but Crum chattered on, uncharacteristically, about them.

  “Her name is Athena. I had a difficult time training her to the lure. But she’s strong. She even takes big old hares. Isn’t afraid of them!” He made sweet clucking noises to her.

  “Mars, here”—he lifted his wrist—“enjoys rook-hawking best. He loves to plummet out of the sky and fall on a rook, break its neck, let it drop, in a shower of black feathers. It’s a lovely sight!” he sighed. “Mars can even take a jackdaw. I get particular pleasure out of watching that. The ’daw tries to outfly him, but can’t.” Crum frowned. “Now, now!”

  I noticed that Mars was flexing his talons, and one tip had almost penetrated Crum’s leather hawking glove. “I love to see them kill,” he said simply. “They are spectacular in flight and fight.”

  “Would that we could emulate them,” I agreed. “Our best methods are clumsy by comparison, and there’s no sport in our executions.”

  “A subject that, alas, calls for our attention.”

  We reined in and prepared to slip the falcons. There was a flock of rooks nearby. We pulled off the hoods and let the falcons take off from our wrists after the unfortunate black birds.

  “Have you obtained the evidence?” I asked quickly. I had been forced to reveal the truth about Anne—Black Nan!—so that he would understand the force he was working against.

  “Of witchcraft? No, Your Majesty.”

  The sleek, dark shapes of the falcons, climbing quickly above us, were breathtaking.

  “But she is a witch! Why can you not find the evidence? Then—execution will be demanded.”

  “I thought to discover it. I assumed there would be certain potions, powders, books. But all I found was . . . adultery.” He looked apologetic. “Her serving-woman, Lady Wingfield, has told me a strange tale . . . of men hidden inside closets in the Queen’s bedchamber, waiting for code-words bidding them to emerge and come to her bed. It is all . . . bizarre.” He handed me a piece of parchment, long, stained, with many entries and inks. “Oh, look!”

  The falcons had overtaken the rooks, and were now above them, singling out their targets. Then they would drop, perpendicular, wings folded close to the body, like smooth, dark stones of death.

  “Yes, yes.�
� I had seen falcons kill before.

  I glanced at the paper in my hands. I felt myself go weak, felt my hands tremble. I did not wish to see this, but at the same time I was compelled to read it.

  It detailed that the musician Mark Smeaton and “others” had had regular sport in Anne’s bed.

  A great thud in the sky, which carried to our ears: the falcons had hit the rooks, attacking straight from above. The rooks were dead, and plummeting. The falcons swooped yet again, catching them as they fell. A lazy swirl of black feathers followed them, like a funeral party.

  My eyes were forced back to the paper. The details went on and on, relentlessly.

  This list would be read out in court, to her shame.

  She was even fouler than I had imagined. My hands were contaminated in touching this filthy compilation. “The Great Whore,” I murmured.

  I raised my eyes. Cromwell had been watching me all the while, his black button eyes riveted on me.

  “I thank you,” I finally said. “It is time I knew the full truth.”

  Cromwell nodded. “Truth somehow always seems connected with pain. ‘The painful truth,’ we always say. Never ‘the joyous truth.’ I am sorry, Your Majesty,” he said quietly.

  “God sends pain to correct us,” I said, by rote. I had been taught that. Did I truly believe it?

  “Nonetheless, it hurts. The only way to avoid it is to cease to care.”

  Was that what Cromwell had done, after his wife’s death?

  “It would be restful not to care,” I agreed. It would be a peace, an absence I could not imagine. All my life I had cared—about everything.

  “Shall we?” He indicated the field, with the fallen rooks. “If we don’t remove them, the falcons will feed full, and will hunt no more today.”

  Feeling outside myself, I watched as I walked toward the kill. I walked, and used a lure to remove the falcons so we could stuff the poor, mangled rooks into our bags. All the while there was another Henry along, one whose wife had just been irrevocably revealed as an adulteress, a whore.

  Why could I not feel? Why this strange detachment, this jumpiness, along with a perpetual shadow, an inner tolling of a bell?

  The falcons were off again, and Cromwell and I continued the eerie conversation.

  “I have had Master Smeaton to dinner,” he said. “I entertained him last week, at my London house. He was flattered to be invited. I was able to . . . persuade him to talk. He admitted everything. That he had had carnal relations with the Queen.”

  “He said . . . ‘carnal relations’?”

  “I have his words,” said Cromwell. “Allow me?” He indicated the horses, and his saddle-pouch. We walked back, and he drew out a sheaf of papers.

  “The details of the conversation,” he said. “I thought it best.”

  I read the entire hateful thing, wherein Smeaton confessed his adultery and named William Brereton, Francis Weston, and Henry Norris as her lovers as well.

  Henry Norris. My companion of the chamber, my friend.

  Did she take an especial relish in bedding him?

  He must have protested. I knew Norris, an honourable man. He must have been a difficult quarry, a challenge to her ingenuity and persistence. But she had evidently succeeded.

  According to Smeaton’s confession:

  Anne had asked Norris why he had not been more eager to conclude his arranged marriage with Margaret Shelton, and, answering for him, said, “Ah, if any accident befell the King—such as his jousting accident this January—you would look to have me for yourself. You look for dead man’s shoes!”

  So I was reduced to this teasing formula. I felt diminished, depersonalized, weakened.

  Francis Weston was likewise neglecting his wife in favour of Norris’s fiancé. When Anne chided him, he had replied, “There is one in your household I love more ardently than either my wife or Mistress Shelton.”

  “Why, who?” asked Anne, innocently.

  “It is yourself,” he confessed.

  When she came upon Mark Smeaton alone, skulking and looking forlorn, she asked him, cruelly, “Why are you so sad?”

  “It is of no importance,” he answered, with as much dignity as he could command.

  “No, please tell me.” Her voice was full of luring concern, and he wished to believe it. “Are you unhappy because I have not spoken to you in company?”

  After bedding with him, she had undoubtedly taken a taunting delight in ignoring him when others were present.

  “You may not look to have me speak to you as I should to a nobleman, because you are an inferior person,” she had explained, sweetly.

  “No, no. A look sufficeth me,” he had answered. “And so fare thee well,” he wished her.

  There was more of this sort of thing. Anne had given Mark gold pieces “for his services.”

  I had no desire to read further, any more than a man would wish to plunge headfirst into a cesspool.

  “There is one thing more,” Cromwell said. He produced another paper. “George Boleyn’s wife, Jane, has confided in me that—that—here, you may read her very words.” He looked embarrassed for the first time.

  I took the paper. It stated, simply, that Queen Anne Boleyn and her brother George were lovers. That they had committed incest together many times.

  “This is abomination,” I finally said. “It is so filthy, so perverted, so—” I could think of no word to describe it adequately, to describe her. “She is the English Messalina,” I whispered.

  Satan . . . and our pride. He attacks us through our pride. He had heard me assure myself that the Sixth Commandment was the only one she had not broken. I had believed her chaste, though evil. Satan had taken that as a challenge. . . .

  “A Queen’s adultery is treason. Imagining the King’s death is treason. When shall we make the arrests, and hold the trials?” asked Cromwell.

  “Soon. Let it be soon.”

  The falcons had made another kill. I cared not what it was. I knew they could kill; what was the surprise in it? It was when a thing acted against its nature that there was surprise in it.

  “ ‘When the Tower is white and another place green

  There shall be burned two or three bishops and a queen,

  And after this be passed we shall have a merry world,’ ”

  Cromwell recited. “It is a popular rhyme. We have not burned a bishop—how could we, burning is only for heretics and witches. Perhaps this is the start?”

  Anne would burn. The Witch would burn. And she had known it all along; her fear of fire had been due to her foreknowledge.

  LXXII

  A month passed—a careful, watchful month on my part. I gave Cromwell leave to do what was necessary to arrange the arrests. He should move stealthily and avoid causing the parties alarm, lest they take flight or move (in Anne’s case) to strike at us first. My leg still ailed me, but had not worsened, and the same held true for Fitzroy and Mary. I had no doubt that she planned more fatal measures for each of us, but was biding her time, as four royal deaths in four months would arouse anyone’s suspicions.

  During those days, I had to continue to allow Henry Norris to serve me daily in my chamber. Whenever he laid out my shoes and hose, I wondered if he thought, Dead man’s shoes, dead man’s shoes . . .? It took every particle of self-control I possessed not to betray my knowledge of him. I felt surrounded by betrayal, dissemblance, and vice.

  Without Jane’s presence at court, there would have been no clean thing in my sight, and then I truly would have known despair. I glimpsed her often in the company of Anne’s maids of honour, but as I did not frequent Anne’s chambers, I never saw her close. Other times I would see her passing in the gallery, or walking in the palace gardens below, always in the company of two or three other women. Just watching her move, seeing her gentle gestures, was soothing.

  But at length evil thoughts about her came to me. Immersed as I was in corruption and the dark side of human nature, it was inevitable that my mind became
tainted by association. I listened to the spiteful remarks made about her, and then to the ones my own head put forth.

  Jane is a tool in her ambitious brothers’ hands. They are prompting her every move, calculated to appeal to your tastes—and your weaknesses.

  Jane is not the virtuous woman she pretends to be; she but plays a part.

  Jane sees an opportunity to make her fortune from your misfortune. A pale little opportunist, Mistress Seymour, beneath her prim manner and righteous words.

  But if Jane were not true, then everything in the world was false. . . .

  I would know the truth. I had never shunned the truth, and I would not begin now.

  Those were my high-sounding words. In actuality, I was desperate to silence those mockers, for they were undermining my last source of earthly serenity.

  So I succumbed to their tactics, and devised a test for Jane, disliking myself for needing to do so, telling myself all the while that it was necessary.

  I wrote her a letter, in which I told her that I knew the circumstances of her loss of my mother’s locket, and that, by God’s good grace, I had recovered it. I told her that there were troubling doubts in my mind concerning her. Along with the letter I sent a purse bulging with gold sovereigns, more than a hundred of them. I gave the purse and letter to a groom of my chamber, and told him to present this to Mistress Jane Seymour in private, and then to wait for her answer.

  That evening he came to me, with the letter and pouch as I had given them to him.

  “Have you not obeyed me?” I protested.

  “Yes, Your Majesty. I found Mistress Seymour walking alone in the privy orchard, in the rows of pear trees, and I approached her, and handed her these things. She took them, and after glancing at them, she—she fell to her knees, Your Majesty.”