The Autobiography Of Henry VIII

by Margaret George

  For three days, I am told, I remained thus: unable even to get out of bed, while the hellhound had me to itself. Then an eerie cold light began to shine on me, and I got up, dressed myself, and gave orders for the funeral to proceed. I composed a letter to Francis. (Francis! What clearer evidence of my derangement than that I should choose him?) I announced Edward’s birth, then added, “Notwithstanding, Divine Providence has mingled my joy with the bitterness of the death of her who brought me this happiness.”

  I composed an epitaph for Jane. I designed a gravestone for her, and selected Mary as chief mourner. I had my tailor come and measure me for mourning clothes, and ordered cloaks and doublets and hose and shoes, all in black. When he suggested perhaps the quantity was excessive, I insisted that he was mistaken. I ordered Cromwell to select all the black onyx from the Jewel House, and bring it to me. I paced and strutted and consulted books and Scripture.

  Then I collapsed, and it was back to bed once more.

  All this I remember as in a waking dream. Whenever I stopped moving, I was attacked by paralysing sorrow.

  Slowly my head cleared. Then I began to be tormented by recurrent thoughts and obsessions, that in themselves became demoniac. They circled back again and again, as if to drive themselves like nails into my mind. It was in defence against them that I started to write them down, hoping that if I did so they might retreat. Perhaps the act of recording them would placate them, so they would leave me in peace.

  I have kept the papers all these years. I do not know what is written on them, nor do I care to reread them. The transcribing did serve as an exorcism. I affix them here, only because I have no other suitable place to put them.

  If grief is only in my mind, where does my bodily pain come from? In my chest there is a tightness, as if several men with thick arms were squeezing me, pushing my breath out. I feel as if I cannot get my breath, cannot expand my chest. My muscles do not obey. Or when they try, they are weak. I am suffocating. There has come a choking in my throat, something that constricts on its own, and aches on its own. When I cry, it vanishes. But within a few moments it is back again. Like a bear-keeper, it keeps me chained by a short leash.

  I have dreaded going into certain rooms, passing by certain things we looked at together, as if it would be too painful. But when it happens—by accident, or necessity—I have been surprised to find it does not hurt, not any more than her absence hurts anywhere else. I feel her absence no more keenly when looking at a beehive than when looking at a book she had never seen. Why is that?

  I want Jane back. I would settle for only one minute with her. I would settle for only one question to ask her. I would settle for the chance to say only one sentence to her. Only one!

  I see her everywhere. I see bits and pieces of her: in one woman’s way of straightening her necklace, in another’s timbre of voice, in yet another’s profile. As if she were a mirror, broken, and the shards lay everywhere, in the most unexpected places.

  I have been blaming God. But how much of it was my fault? The rumours that she took ill on account of bad handling . . . I am beginning to believe them myself. If only I had not forced her to participate in the night ceremony after the christening. If only I had let her rest. . . . The quails. Why did I indulge her fancies and let her eat so many? It was injurious to her health. . . . And then, the infinity of smaller things in which I might have unwittingly contributed to her death. Every day I find more of them. . . .

  I remember once someone said to me, describing his wife’s death: “First one thinks about it every second of every day, even when one is sleeping; then every minute, then every hour; then only a few times a day. Then comes a day when one does not think of it at all, all day long.” That is impossible. The man was a liar. Or else he never cared for his wife.

  The season is starting to change, and I hate it. I had somehow “got used” to the absence of Jane in autumn. But now to relearn it all over again . . . to have a whole new set of reminders, and also of things we cannot share, things I can see and she cannot. Is that why there is the traditional “year of mourning”? Because until one has gone through each season in turn, grief will keep pulling out new surprises at every corner?

  As the season turns, I realize something I have been fighting so hard against: Jane is now the past. As long as it remained the same month, the same season, it was as if she and the present were still the same. But now they are starting to diverge. There are things occurring now that she cannot see or know about. Enough of these days will make Jane entirely a creature of the past. But I do not want it so! I will keep her here, in the present, with me—if I have to stop every clock in the kingdom to do so.

  They say “you must accept God’s will.” If I accept it, then she is truly gone.

  Yesterday I stood in her room, unchanged (I had not let them touch a single article; only to clean away the dust that had fallen since her death, which was an intruder), and knew the sorrow, the yearning, she felt, never to be able to return. Is that what death really is? To leave a room and never be allowed to come back? (And not know it at the time of leaving?) Is it really just that simple?

  I saw her yesterday. No, it was not a dream, I am quite certain. I was not even looking for her (as I used to do) and so when I saw her, passing between doorways on London Bridge, it was like . . . I cannot say what. A gift? That one extra instant I spoke of earlier, granted me? I could not speak to her, or ask those questions. I could not even follow her. But she had been there. She looked . . . happy. How could she be? It seemed a horrible betrayal if she could be happy.

  My faith was like a potted plant, kept indoors. It could not weather a winter. I had been ignorant of God’s true nature until now. God is not “good,” He is cruel. And one cannot predict His actions, not through prayer or knowledge or insights.

  These thoughts held me captive, tortured me, as surely as if I had been chained to a pillar in a dungeon. Indeed, that was how I felt—shackled, paralysed, held prisoner, while the rats of memory, desire, and loss swarmed over me, gnawing wherever they liked, diminishing me.

  Then, while I slept one night, a strange change occurred. I awoke on that February morning—almost three months after Jane’s death—full of strength and bitter anger. I looked at the crucifix on the opposite wall and despised Christ, hanging there. I wanted to kill Him, if He had not been dead already.

  I saw the black-hung walls and despised them as well.

  You think I’ll weep? No, that I’ll not! Never again shall You receive that pleasure as a gift from me!

  It was God to whom I spoke. I despised Him, and despised myself for all my weak mewlings and supplications to Him. How He must have enjoyed them! How He must have laughed at my prayers, begging Him to spare Jane; how satisfied He must have been to behold my misery, made visible by these repulsive black hangings. God had robbed me of Jane, now I would rob Him of myself.

  I’ll serve another master, I threatened Him. In all the legends, this would have been sufficient to have called forth the Dark Presence. At once the Prince of Darkness (or one of his lesser demons) would have appeared in my chamber, contract in hand. It would have specified terms: so many days, so many years, in exchange for one (1) immortal soul of the High and Mighty Prince, Henry VIII of England, Wales, and France, as signed below. . . .

  But no one came. There was no puff of smoke, no sulphurous fumes. That angered me, too.

  So you are as unreliable as the other one, I sneered to myself. The least you could do is have a reception for me. I gave grand ones whenever I signed a treaty with a foreign power. You are cheap as well as evil.

  I would serve no master, then, but myself. I would hit out and destroy; I would indulge every whim and appetite that raised itself. I wanted to destroy, to pull down all the ugly rottenness around me. If there was no good left in the world, there was a surfeit of bad, and I would spend myself on it. Not in the name of God—that betrayer, that assassin—but in my own name: King Henry VIII.

  LXXXI
>
  I ordered an end to the mourning which I had imposed on the court even through Christmas. (Would that grieve God? Good!)

  I began to confer with Cromwell again. Many things were afoot: the bishops had completed their “interpretation” of the Ten Articles of Faith to Establish Christian Quietness, all set forth in a volume called The Bishops’ Book, designed to answer laymen’s questions; it awaited my endorsement. A number of greater monasteries had offered their surrenders: Whalley, Jervaulx, Kirkstead, and Lewes. Rich prizes. I should love to see them demolished. I wanted to hear the groan of the stones being pulled out of their sockets, and the crash of stained-glass windows hitting the ground to explode in multicoloured shards. I wanted to see the “miracle” statues, with their hidden wires and water-filled reservoirs, pitched onto a roaring fire made from monastic choir-stalls and embroidered vestments.

  In addition, I was being courted by the Continental powers. It seemed I was an eligible bachelor again, and a rich one at that. Cromwell begged me to “consider the matter and frame it to your most noble heart.”

  I would never marry again. But for amusement I would look at the portraits. It was sport to order others to perform. “I cannot marry without knowing their appearance. The matter touches me too near my person,” I explained.

  I dispatched Hans Holbein, More’s former painter who had done a passable job on Jane’s portrait, to the Continent to take portraits of Christina of Denmark and Anne of Lorraine. That should take months.

  I began to order banquets and celebrations. My appetite had returned, and fearsomely. Before, I had cared about my appearance. When I was young, it was important to me that the English King be more awesome than the French monarch. Then, I cared that Katherine, Anne, and Jane should find me desirable, handsome. Now there was no reason not to eat, to steep myself in pleasures of the palate. What else was left to me?

  When the fish course came round, I no longer abstained from eels (a notably fatty fish). When the meat was served, I had both beef and lamb. I drank flagons of wine at every meal, so that they passed in a haze of pleasure. I ate all desserts and even called for sweetmeats in my chamber in mid-afternoon. I had no other pleasure but eating. Riding and hunting were taken away from me; there were no women and all the things that go with them: dancing, fêtes, musical evenings. But there was food—marvellous, unbridled food.

  WILL:

  Now I understand. This was Henry’s “Nero” period, when he behaved cruelly and erratically, and from which (unfortunately) much of his reputation is derived. (How unfair, that eighteen months should eclipse almost forty years!) He grew fat. As one eyewitness described him: “The King has grown so marvellously excessive in eating and drinking that three of the largest men in the Kingdom could fit inside his doublet.”

  His beautiful features expanded and swelled, until his eyes were like little raisins set in a red mass of dough, and his strong neck became enruffed in a series of fat-rings.

  He behaved grossly, and uncharacteristically: belching at banquets, eating with his fingers and throwing bones over his shoulder, yawning if he were bored; leaving betimes at entertainments and audiences, insulting ambassadors and councillors, making obscene, scatological jokes; and—most uncharacteristic of all—committing sacrilege. He threw his crucifix in the fireplace and pulled up the Virgin’s skirts and spat on her, before likewise consigning her to the flames.

  He wrote a mocking, threatening letter to Charles and Francis when they signed a ten-year truce and peace treaty. He called Francis “that quivering husk of a disease-eaten fruit-tree” and Charles a “degenerate, balloon-jawed descendent of a baboon” and said their “feeble union, undertaken under false pretences and for preposterous aims, would bring forth a strange fruit of hideous appearance, pustule-ridden and smeared with excrement, with a hollow but rotten interior.”

  When Pope Paul III published, publicly, his excommunication of Henry VIII and called for a Holy War against him (as earlier Popes had called for a Crusade against the Turk) Henry laughed uproariously (while wolfing down grouse and woodcock, a dozen altogether) and muttered, “If that Judas-serpent should slither from out his homosexual den of pleasure”—a great wipe of his mouth—“he should find a great shoe, yea, a leather boot, ready to stamp him and make his guts issue from out of his lying, double-tongued mouth.” Then a belch, given with a great flourish.

  He cared for nothing. He abandoned music (unlike Nero, he did not fiddle while the monasteries burned); all sport was neglected; he never attended Mass, except when required to. He had become a great, slobbering, vicious hulk.

  I avoided him as much as possible, and he called for me seldom. I was one of the pleasures for which he had lost delight.

  HENRY VIII:

  The Bishops’ Book was published, and instead of quieting controversy, it sparked it. Because I myself had not authored it, people assumed that it was not authoritative, that further changes in doctrine were possible. The reformers knew exactly where they hoped to see the ark of the Church of England come to rest—near the Lutheran “Mount of Wittenberg.” The traditionalists wished only to hold fast, and felt threatened.

  Despite all precautions, the heretics took root in England. Reformers did not consider the Church of England to be a domestic affair (my affair!). They infiltrated and sought to gain control. Even the filthy Anabaptists established a foothold. I ordered all of them to quit England. But they left their Bibles, tracts, and ideas behind to poison the minds of my people.

  At the same time, the Papalist partisans needed to be crushed. I announced that there were to be no more visitations to shrines, no pilgrimages, under pain of death. All “miracle” statues were to be taken from their shrines, sent to London, and examined. If these were truly miraculous, then they should be able to perform, even under adverse circumstances.

  They failed the tests. The “Holy Blood of Hailes” remained lumpy (like the dried honey and saffron colouring it was) and did not miraculously liquefy before my commissioners. The “moving” Rood of Halles was exposed with its puppet-wires, and burnt. Bishop Hugh Latimer of Worchester, an ardent reformist, tore away an image of Saint Jerome—using only his left hand—which legend had claimed “eight oxen could not move.”

  False, false. All as false as God—the Great Charlatan, the Celestial Deceiver.

  There were heresy trials, to staunch the Anabaptist pollution. John Lambert was convicted of blatant heresy as a Sacramentarian and burnt.

  At the same time, recalcitrant evil abbots defied me and clung to their Papacy. The abbots of Reading, Colchester, and particularly Glastonbury were all executed. Glastonbury laid lying claim to being King Arthur’s Avalon, and boasted a “Holy Thorn” which supposedly sprang from the staff of Joseph of Arimathea, who had come to England with the Holy Grail—oh, the lies, the false hopes they would have us hope! The credulous fools who stood by the “Holy Thorn” on midnight of Christmas Eve, expecting it to flower! I hated them as much as I hated all things now. The abbots were hanged on their monastic grounds. My soldiers hacked and uprooted the “Holy Thorn” and set fire to its roots.

  I delighted in distributing the monastic property. To Cromwell I gave St. Osyth’s Monastery, Launde Abbey, and the Greyfriars at Great Yarmouth. To Sir Anthony Browne I gave vast tracts of land owned by Chertsey Abbey, Merton Priory, St. Mary Overey, and Guildford Priory. I gave Evesham Monastery to Sir Philip Hoby of my Privy Chamber, and Tewkesbury Abbey to his colleague, Edward Harman.

  I took a savage pleasure in all these nasty acts. Yet none was nasty enough, none affronted God enough. There was nothing that was purely His which I could mangle.

  Holbein returned from his mission with a portrait of Christina of Denmark. But before I could view it, I had already been told by Will of her remark, “If I had two heads, one of them should be at the King of England’s disposal.”

  So that lie was flourishing—that I murdered my wives? Katherine was not murdered by me, and neither was Jane. Blame the Witch for the first,
and God—that sweet, loving God!—for the second. But that was too difficult for the average dolt behind his wheelbarrow to comprehend. Easier to blame bloodthirsty King Henry.

  It is God who is bloodthirsty.

  Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.

  A killer who kills for sport. You have succeeded, O Mighty One. You even killed Your own Son. How feeble our imitations are—we kill only our enemies, or kill through the law. Will we soon “improve” ourselves, grow more into Your image? Become more God-like?

  I am trying, God, I am trying.

  I felt an urge for food: not hunger, but an urge for food—they are different. I ordered six tarts, and when they arrived—two apple, one plum, two strawberry, and one raspberry—I ate them all, stuffing them one by one into my mouth before I had even swallowed the first, mingling all their flavours together. I found no pleasure in taste anymore, but in excess . . . there I found negative pleasure.

  The northern rebellion, which had flared so briefly and visibly in the Pilgrimage of Grace, now died down to a secret, deadly smoulder. I created a Council of the North, headed by Bishop Tunstall of Durham, to govern that area from henceforth. Never again would I leave the northern shires on their own. They should see me, and I them.

  But there were those in the realm who had not been pleased, not pleased at all, with the outcome. The Pole family, headed by old Margaret Plantagenet (daughter of the Duke of Clarence, and thus great-great-great-granddaughter of Edward III) and her three “White Rose” sons—Henry, Lord Montague; Geoffrey; and the insufferable Reginald, the traitorous Papal dog-legate—had hoped to restore the fortunes of the nearly defunct White Rose. The North had always been linked to the House of York, and remained sympathetic to Richard III. The various leftover buds from that dynastic stalk—the Poles and Henry Courtenay, the Marquis of Exeter—had harboured ideas of bursting once more into dynastic bloom “if anything befall the King” . . . God willing.