The Autobiography Of Henry VIII

by Margaret George

True, it could. Look what the New Learning had done to Katherine and Mary—turned them hard and manlike. Elizabeth already showed alarming tendencies that way, and it was making her grave and unappealing—like Arthur! No man would ever want Elizabeth, I thought sadly, even if she weren’t ugly and a bastard in the bargain.

  “Ah.” So the beautiful Lady Anne kept herself as God had originally created women—uneducated, save in the ways of pleasing men. “She must be an enchanting musician.”

  He looked startled. “Is she?”

  “Is she not?”

  “I never heard her play.”

  She was modest about performing before strangers, then. O, excellent! What virtue in a maiden! I could not help but compare her to the other Anne, who could hardly be restrained from showing off her overrated prowess on the lute before whoever happened along.

  “I do not think she does play,” he added. “Her brother, the Duke, thinks that musicians are loose company and have a bad effect on women’s morals.”

  Mark Smeaton. God, would the name—the thought—never lose its power to knife me? Why did it still hurt, after more than three years? Three years, six months, and two days . . . Wotton, remembering too, looked embarrassed. “Perhaps he is correct,” I said lightly.

  So the Lady Anne would not arrive with an assortment of inlaid lutes, or ivory-keyed virginals, or new compositions to share with me. There would be no musical evenings by the fire on long winter nights. How disappointing. But there would be no Mark Smeatons, either, no delicately fashioned instruments presented as gifts to the Queen from smirking courtiers.

  “The King’s Musick will provide for our listening pleasure,” I said, “and for our dancing, there will be . . .” I stopped. “She does dance?”

  “No, Your Grace. That is, I have never seen her do so. According to her brother, he regards dancing as a sinful pastime, as corrupting as spending time with musicians.”

  “God’s blood! No dancing?” Even Katherine had danced!

  He smiled thinly. “No dancing.”

  No dancing. Well, my dancing days were past, anyway. I had not danced since Jane’s death, and even then I had been hard put to keep up, with my leg-sickness. And since then the leg had grown worse, not better. And there was my weight gain. . . . It would be painful and ungainly for me to dance now. Better that I had a good reason, in the personage of my virtuous young wife, than the true one, in the personage of my decaying old body.

  “What does she do?” I could not help asking.

  “Sewing. I have heard that she does marvellous needlework.”

  I thought of Katherine and her endless embroidering of my linen shirts—all those K’s and H’s intertwined. I had had all the stitching taken out as soon as we separated, but still she sent me new ones for as long as she lived. She had been working on another one at Kimbolton when she died. They had sent it to me. It lay in my oldest clothes chest, a silent rebuke.

  “Oh.” It would be a serene and virtuous life with the Lady Anne. But the truth was that if a woman were beautiful a man could exist on that alone. A Greek statue could not play the lute or dance or debate Scripture, yet one could spend hours in its presence, transfixed and made happy by its beauty.

  While Anne braved the sharp November winds and made her way obediently toward me, it was time for me to choose a suitable wardrobe for my marriage. The truth was that my once-splendid attire had fallen on bad days. I had destroyed my favourite clothes in a fit of grief one day, as I remembered scenes with Jane whilst I had been wearing them. The rest—the ones with no painful remembrances—I had worn carelessly, not bothering to have new ones made. That was also a form of mourning. So now I was reduced to just a few items that still fit me.

  Yes, I had remained stout—even, truth to tell, grown stouter, which I had vowed would never happen. I cared, but I did not care. That is, part of me, whatever old part of me was left, cared; the rest, the hollow-shell Henry, did not.

  Now, suddenly, I was anxious to acquire new trappings . . . just as I had eagerly refurbished Father’s royal apartments so long ago. The tailor had called, and I prepared to be measured and choose fabrics, all in a high good humour.

  What brilliant scarlet silks! From Flanders? A new dye process? What depth of satin—like a rich topaz! And now the measurements . . . he laughed nervously . . . the thin tape measure whipped out, a pale snake. Waist: fifty-one inches.

  All gaiety gone for an instant. Fifty-one inches? Had I gained fourteen inches in my waist? In only four years?

  I confronted the mirror set up to one side of me, and looked—truly looked—at myself for the first time since Jane’s death. My first impression was of a great white whale. No! And the ripples in the figure—were they entirely of fat or merely the uneven surface of the metal? I was so stunned I was able to put it just this baldly to myself.

  A red thing appeared behind the whale, its surface equally wavy. So it was the fault of the mirror after all.

  I turned to see Thomas Culpepper standing behind me, a greedy look on his face. “Ah, Thomas,” I said. “I should have known you could scent expensive fabric all the way through the door of the King’s inner chamber. Yes, you may choose something.”

  I was fond of the lad, and since he had replaced Henry Norris as the man who attended upon me in my Retiring Chamber, I was not embarrassed to have him see me thus undressed. I knew all his secrets—yes, even the sordid business about his meddling with the gamekeeper’s wife, and his attack on her rescuers. Shameful!

  “Oh?” A grin spread across his handsome face. He never refused favours.

  “An early present to one of my groomsmen,” I said. “I am being measured for my wedding clothes.”

  “The wedding will be a public one?” He looked surprised. “I thought—”

  “Why ever not?”

  “Just that your previous marriage to Queen Jane was so private, quiet.”

  And the one to Anne Boleyn even more so! I knew what he meant: with your matrimonial history, Sire, is it seemly to make a public show for the fourth?

  “I shall do as I please!” I roared, reading his mind and answering it. “So you think people will laugh at me? They’ll think me an old fool, is that it?”

  He looked annoyed, not frightened. But then, his problem lay in lack of prudence, not lack of courage. “No, Your Grace.”

  “You think I can’t afford it?” I couldn’t, not very well. Where had that monastic money gone, so quickly? On the coastal defences, much of it.

  He smiled his dazzling smile. “Only that it will take place in deep winter—hardly a fitting time for great outdoor rejoicings. That is all.”

  Clever lad. As nimble with his tongue as with his sword . . . and his member. The latter two got him into trouble, and the former rescued him time and again.

  “Oh, go choose something.” I cuffed him on the back of the head, and put back on my dressing robe. “Make the waist forty-nine inches,” I told the tailor. No need to yield to the inevitable yet. A wedding doublet of fifty-one inches? Not for King Henry VIII!

  Culpepper held up a garnet-coloured velvet, as rich as a gem of King Solomon’s. But it did not suit his colouring. It made him look consumptive and too long indoors. “No,” I said.

  Still he persisted in studying it. “There is one it would well become,” he finally said.

  “A lady?”

  “Aye. My cousin Catherine. She is orphaned and has little.”

  Culpepper was not noted for his charitable spirit, so I suspected he meant to seduce her, using the velvet as a bait. “How touching.” I did not offer the luscious stuff he craved. “Come, choose something.”

  The lingering lust on his face was replaced by the original greed. He chose cloth-of-gold, patterned with scarlet threads running crosswise. It would make him appear golden and shining all over, a god of youth.

  Envy tore through me. As you are now, so once was I. . . .

  My bulky figure glistened back at me from the mirror. As I am now, so shall
you be. . . . I finished the lines with fierce satisfaction. Preen and prance and love your cloth-of-gold looks now, my lad, they can’t last, they never do. I kept mine longer than any man has a right to, but they’re gone and there’s no bringing them back. Damn you! You don’t believe I was once magnificent, do you? Wolsey, Katherine, they would tell you, but they’re dead. . . .

  “Enjoy it, Culpepper,” I said, indicating the material.

  LXXXV

  It was time to talk to Crum. Crum, who had evidently never known a human passion, and so could never mourn its passing. Jolly, sensible Crum. Lately I had come to envy him, had come to believe that I had been cursed in the nature I had—always yearning, always feeling, always hurting. I wondered what it must be like to go through life as Crum, taking things only as they are, neither less nor more. Well, his sensible head would help me choose the Queen’s new household.

  “It has been a long time since a brand-new household was set up,” he observed. “The seven years between Your Grace’s mother’s death and Queen Katherine’s Coronation were the last long period England was without a Queen.” He tactfully did not state the obvious: that for a long time I had had two Queens simultaneously, and my widowerhood after Anne’s death had lasted exactly one day. Probably he thought nothing of it, made no moral judgment. A rare man, Crum.

  “Today I have a new palace to offer her, one no Queen has ever set foot in—Nonsuch. I would assure that the Queen’s royal apartments be readied in time to receive my bride in January.”

  “We must make the assignments for her English servitors,” Crum said. “She brings only ten Flemish ladies with her. The rest we must appoint. I have here a list”—he handed me a roll with at least two hundred names—“of all the women who have been suggested—or who have suggested themselves.”

  My eye skimmed the list.

  Elizabeth Fitzgerald, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Earl of Kildare, and the object of young Henry Howard’s poetical fancy, whom he celebrated in verse as “the Fair Geraldine.” She had married old Sir Anthony Browne not long ago after Surrey’s high-minded courting of her. I wondered how marriage to that withered stalk was satisfying her? Had her practical marriage disillusioned the enraptured Howard? I ticked off her name as approved for court duty.

  Lady Clinton. Wife of the Earl of Lincoln. “Bessie?” I wondered out loud.

  “Aye. Evidently she’s quite beautiful still, as the young Lord Clinton was mad for her. Could hardly wait till Gilbert Tailboys had expired to wive her. Clinton was a good fifteen years younger, too.”

  Yes, and he was swaggering, bonny, and bold. The sort Bessie liked. And now they wished to come to court. Yes, of course. I realized with a start that Bessie had become a quasi-relative of mine.

  Catherine Howard. Culpepper’s cousin. Now living on the dowager Duchess of Norfolk’s charity in a loosely run household near London. Culpepper had said she was an orphan.

  “Who were Mistress Howard’s parents?” I asked Crum. There were so many Howards they were like strawberries in a tangled patch.

  “Edmund Howard and the widowed Jocasta Culpepper.”

  I groaned. Now I remembered. Everyone had thought the widow Culpepper was a fool for marrying that feckless, fortune-hunting Edmund Howard, a younger brother of that vast tribe of which Duke Thomas was the eldest brother. He was a particularly ineffectual fop, who annoyed me so much on his brief visits to court that I had given him a minor post in Calais . . . at which he had failed, of course. He had died in debt, trying desperately to borrow. A weakling. I knew now why Culpepper could see his way clear to Edmund’s daughter. But coming from such stock, she could not amount to much. Still, perhaps service to the new Queen would train her in the ways of gentlefolk. Certainly she would not learn such at the Duchess’s establishment, known locally as “the Lambeth Zoo.” I checked off her name, designating her as a maid of honour.

  “Lady Elyot.” I snorted. “Too Lutheran. I’ll have none such at court.” Crum looked pained. “I know about her private ‘prayer circle,’ ” I said. “I know also that she keeps Lutheran tracts and prayed for Lambert. Oh, she keeps attendance at Mass as well, but she deceives me not. No.”

  Crum shrugged, as if it were no matter. But was it? Lately he had displayed what approached keen interest in heresies and heretics. He kept copies of every seized book and tract, and seemed to know them all by heart.

  “The ‘Lash with Six Strings’ will whip her, then,” he laughed.

  “There are those who say you have taken the strings from that heresy law,” I said slowly. “ ’Tis reported that you do not enforce the articles in it, and warn people who are under suspicion. And ’tis true, we have had remarkable few arrests. One would think all England is traditional and devout, with nary a dissenter abroad in the land.”

  He laughed again. “Perhaps the burnings at Smithfield have discouraged displays of heresy.”

  “Ah. But your job, dear Crum, is to root it out of its secret hiding places. A job that you seem strangely lax in pursuing.” I cocked one eyebrow at him. The warning had been well taken. “Now let us continue with the list—”

  The lists were complete, and workmen were putting the final pegs in the wooden panelling in the Queen’s Audience Chamber at Nonsuch. It was a time of gay anticipation—on the surface, at least. But although I went through the motions of a man eager to greet his bride, doing all the things such a man would do, inside there was no true lightheartedness. I wanted to feel that way, and hoped that feeling would follow actions. Jane would want me to be happy, would she not? I kept her portrait at my bedside. Each night as I saw it I felt sad that soon it would have to be put away, out of sight. But not tonight . . . not yet.

  I had had it all planned, down to the very day. Lady Anne would arrive in England on November twenty-fifth, escorted from Calais by the English High Admiral, William Fitzwilliam, and a great company of English lords. She would be met at Dover by members of my Privy Council and conducted from thence to Canterbury. There I would meet her, and the marriage would be solemnized by Cranmer in the Cathedral. Then we would set forth for London, keep Christmas there, and on Candlemas Day in February she would be crowned Queen.

  Accordingly, in mid-November I moved to Hampton Court, putting everything aside as I waited to hear of Anne’s arrival. Those days were odd, long-shaped. I was awaiting something, I knew not what. It would mark the end of my solitude, and also the end of my youth; for I thought of the Lady of Cleves as the wife of my declining years and pictured us growing old together, companionably. I welcomed the end of my solitude (or did I, truly? for the absence of passion is a much-underrated pleasure) but not the end of my youth (or did I, truly? always having to live up to one’s physicality is a wearying thing, as well). One day I realized I had gone all morning without looking at Jane’s portrait; had not even thought of it; and then I knew that I had not died with Jane, after all. Only partly—for I thought of her at noon, as usual.

  Hesitantly at first, then more eagerly, I began to plan the details of our wedding procession, of the February Coronation. A winter Coronation presented many more obstacles than a summer one, Culpepper was right. But suddenly obstacles were not tiring annoyances, but exhilarating challenges. I amused myself by thinking of ways to put the weather to work for us. If the Thames froze, there could be a glittering Ice Fair set up on it, with blazing fires and skaters and snow sculptures. How magnificent it would be! for dazzling white could far surpass gaudy summer flowers. A winter Coronation for a Queen who would share the winter of my life with me. It would be fitting.

  But the twenty-fifth of November found the Lady Anne still in Antwerp, one of her many stopping places on the slow journey between Dusseldorf and Calais.

  It was imperative that her first footstep on English soil be properly celebrated, for it was a great moment for myself and for England. In those days of feverish waiting at Hampton Court, each delay in her journey had given me opportunity to add yet another touch, another flourish to her
welcome. So when she finally was met at the border of the Pale of Calais by Lord Lisle, what a blinding array of colours must have spread before her, straight to the walled city of Calais itself. No field of wildflowers, no pirate’s treasure chest, could have matched it: the garrison cavalry, men-at-arms, and the King’s archers clad in green velvet with chains of gold; the lords in four colours of cloth-of-gold and purple velvet; the Lord High Admiral’s retinue of gentlemen in blue velvet and crimson satin, his yeomen in damask of the same, and his mariners gleaming in satin of Bruges. In numbers, too, the array was staggering: two hundred archers, fifty gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, thirty gentlemen of the King’s household (including Culpepper, Thomas Seymour, and Francis Bryan); hundreds of soldiers in the King’s livery of the retinue of Calais; the hundred merchants of the King’s Staple, and the ten thousand commoners of Calais.

  The Lord High Admiral of England, playing the peacock, with as many men about him in resplendent colours as that noble bird has feathers in its tail, conducted the Lady Anne into Calais by way of the Lantern Gate, where ships lay in the harbour garnished with banners of silk and gold. At her entry, one hundred fifty rounds of ordnance from the royal battleships Lyon and Sweepstakes greeted her, and thirty-one trumpets as well. The smoke from the cannon was so great, I am told, that for a full fifteen minutes no one could see anyone else, and so a great feeling of carnival and licence prevailed. When at last it cleared away, England had taken the Lady Anne to her heart, and the townspeople and soldiers formed a path through which she passed to her lodgings, cheering her all the way.

  Now, across the Channel, I busied myself ordering Christmas festivities for Hampton Court. It had been, of all the royal palaces, the one which measured me at the emotional watermarks of my life. It was here, as a young King, that I had come with Wolsey to inspect his ground plan and fabulous sewers (five feet high!). It was here that I had first been bewitched by Anne Boleyn in her yellow gown that stifling June day. It was here that Edward had been born and that Jane had died. Although it had as many unhappy associations as happy, it was so bound up in what I, Henry, was as a man, that there was no place else where I could rightly have welcomed Lady Anne.