The Autobiography Of Henry VIII

by Margaret George

  I glanced out the east window from the Queen’s Privy Chamber. The same Thames flowed by, rushing now and swollen with the spring waters. I looked about me, rejoicing in the bare boards and open rooms. I always became excited at new beginnings, and that was what empty rooms meant to me.

  Within my mind I heard music—vanished music from other rooms, other times. Such was my mood that morning that I did not question it but stood and listened. Slow, long, plaintive . . . things that once had been, but were no more . . . it had a sad beauty all its own.

  They were real notes, though. A false one was struck, whereas a false one was never struck in memory. . . .

  I moved forward, turning my head. The sound was stronger in my left ear. It was coming from the rooms deeper within the Queen’s suite. I passed through the audience chamber, through the outer council chamber. The sound was richer. I stood in the entranceway that branched to both the left and the right, and I could not discern from whence the sound came. I waited some moments, holding my breath. My ears did not decide for me, but my intellect. I knew (being one, myself) that musicians always preferred natural light to artificial. Windows lined the left side of the Queen’s apartments, letting in God’s light. Therefore I went to the left, and—

  Stopped absolutely, my breath frozen, movements arrested, while my mind recorded for all time the sight of a great, ivory-keyed virginal, all naked in a stripped room, with Mistress Catherine Howard leaning against it, picking out notes. I watched her labouring, alone in the room, an expression of pure delight on her face. I knew what it meant to be left alone for a whole day to play a new instrument, to learn and master it with no one listening. It surpassed sensuality, it surpassed almost all other experiences.

  Each note sounded out loud and clear, flinging itself jubilantly into the spring air. I stood, hidden, as long as I dared. Then I felt it was deceitful, so to intrude and spy on an artist’s solitude, and I stepped out boldly.

  “Mistress Howard,” I said simply, making my way across the worn floorboards toward her, “I see that you, too, delight in a well-tuned virginal.”

  She gasped and drew back, like a child caught at something naughty. “Your—Your Majesty—” She stumbled up and grasped at her skirts. The pushed-back virginal bench fell with a crash behind her.

  “Nay, nay.” I hated it when, in a private situation, I evoked embarrassment and fear. Officially, of course, it was different. “I myself enjoy practising in deserted rooms, where no one can possibly overhear.”

  She bent over and pulled up the fallen bench.

  “Pray you,” I said in what I hoped was my most soothing voice, “continue your playing. I always enjoyed hearing the Lady Mary play the virginals, and—”

  Not Anne Boleyn. I shut out that horrible memory, of her and her musicians, which kept emerging into my consciousness like a toad after rain.

  “—Lady Elizabeth, too. Where did you learn to play so well?”

  The lass smiled and smoothed her skirts. “At my grandmother’s. I had a tutor.”

  “When did you begin? You must have studied for many years.” I seated myself beside her on the narrow bench.

  “No. I”—she thought swiftly—“it was for one year only, when I was thirteen. Yet I studied diligently then. And continued to practise after my tutor had departed.”

  “You enjoy music, then?”

  “I love it.” She smiled. I was struck by her composure; but then, when artists come together, it often happens that their calling overcomes shyness, differences in station, everything. We speak a common language, and everything else is hushed. It happened, even, that my love and desire for her were set aside for a moment in the glow of her music, where we became equals.

  I reached out and fingered the keyboard, remembering old melodies; she listened. Then she played, and I listened. Midway she laughed, and I glanced at her glowing skin and deep black lashes and was overcome with love, desire, all blended and heightened by the music and even, absurdly, by the virginal before us with its chipped old keys.

  She turned to look at me, not averting her eyes, as proper maidens do, but looking me full in the face. Her eyes were ice-blue and rimmed in some darker colour, which only made her appear all the more remote and untouched, waiting for me.

  “Catherine,” I finally said, astounded at how calm and unwavering my voice was, “I love to hear you play, and I fain would play beside you all my life. There is much of me that has been lost, misplaced—not irretrievably, as I had feared—but for a time. I would share that person with you, and in return I would give you—I would give you—whatever your heart longs for,” I finished weakly.

  “A new virginal?” she asked. “The keys of this—”

  She did not understand! “Certainly, that. But, my dear, what I am asking you—”

  What I am asking you is this: Can you love an old man of near fifty? Can you be wife to him?

  “—is whether you would be my—”

  Whether you would consent to be Queen? One does not beg someone to accept a high state office! It is its own reward!

  “—whether you would wed me?”

  She stared at me as if I were mad. Then she said, slowly, “I cannot . . . no . . . it cannot be . . . you have a wife already.”

  Anne Boleyn’s words! I felt flung into a vortex of time, where nothing had changed, and we were condemned to repeat the same mistakes and words forever and ever. . . . Your wife I cannot be, for you have a wife already; and your mistress I will not be. . . .

  “I have no wife!” Those words, too, were the same. “I have the power to put her aside.” Different words, now. Words earned through six long years of testing.

  “You mean—I would be Queen?”

  “If you consent to become my wife, yes.”

  She shook her head, dazed. “Little Catherine Howard, to be Queen of England?”

  “My dear,” I said, choosing my words, “one of the greatest pleasures in being King lies in the power to select others worthy of being elevated to honours and reverence. To discover unseen, unknown personages, who, but for me, would never attain the prominence and recognition they deserve. Think you not there are gifted, talented, and beautiful people aplenty in Ireland? Yet they will be born, live, and die unseen—like human compost. You”—I took her perfect, rounded little chin in my hand—“are born to wear a crown. Catherine, be my wife.”

  “But the good Lady of Cleves—”

  “She will be well provided for. Do not accuse yourself of disloyalty in supplanting your mistress. She and I have never been truly husband and wife. Sister and brother are we, and so shall we remain.”

  Still she sat silent. Then: “I do not believe it. You trifle with me.”

  “Never! If you would prove me, so shall it be! I shall never seek to be alone with you until the night Cranmer hath given us the Church’s blessings.”

  “Truly?”

  “Aye, truly! A true maid shall you remain until then.”

  She fell to her knees and began kissing my hand. “Good King Henry, you know not what you do. I am unworthy to become your wife.”

  Her lips were warm, plump, and moist. I felt my manhood stirring. “Nay. Only the unworthy take an elevation as a matter of course. Your very reticence reveals your worthiness.” Her lips continued their work. I disengaged myself and raised her up. “My beloved Catherine,” I said. “I thank God for this day. Wait upon me, and trust me. I shall bring all this about so swiftly, you will be amazed!”

  The sun streamed into the odd little room; I watched the motes dance in the rich spring light. It was magic, all of it. I kissed Catherine’s hands, heard her gasp and pull away, then run from the room, like a child scampering away. A frightened child? Or an excited child? In either case, a child who forgot her manners and did not beg leave to be excused.

  A delectable child who would teach me to play again! My palms were sweaty as I closed the cover over the virginal keyboard.

  LXXXIX

  Every Wednesday eve
ning for the seven weeks between Easter and Whitsun, Cranmer entertained both prelates and courtiers with music recitals in the red brick Archbishop’s Palace at Lambeth. It lay close by the Thames, just across from Westminster Palace and Abbey, and offered a delicious indulgence of all five senses on a spring evening: vision, of course, in the sunset lingering on the wide, fresh river; smell, in the delicate spring scents of the damp earth and early flowers all around; taste, in the asparagus and fish served on little white wheat-cakes before the recitals, along with woodruff-flavoured white wine; touch, in the very softness of the May air coming in through the newly opened casements. And sound, from the musicians themselves, and the precision-tuned instruments: viols, dulceuses, lutes, and even a harpsichord from Italy. Sometimes Cranmer would provide an exotic one, like an ivory cornett.

  All seemed merry to me those evenings, all a haze of sensual indulgence, for Catherine Howard was there most times, included for her musical interests, along with her uncle the Duke and Bishop Gardiner. Interest in music seemed to be a privilege of the aesthetes and the traditionalists. Protestants frowned on it as a “lightness,” which was why the Lady Anne of Cleves had never been trained in it. Truth to tell, most of the delights of the senses seemed relegated to the traditionalists, while the New Men would have everything purged and plain. And chokingly boring!

  Those evenings confirmed my commitment to Catherine, to our future, and to my need to check Cromwell. In Catherine I had come home. In the autumn of my life I had a gathering-in place, where I could bring in my stores and sit in the slanting yellow sunlight and know it all well done. And not over yet. In the autumn to come, there would be a new harvest, I knew it. I would have other sons by Catherine, glorious sons, and Mary and Elizabeth would not be needed for England.

  They said, later, that I was mad for her. They said the same about Anne Boleyn, and wondered if both women had cast the same spell. They were cousins; had they perhaps learned the same potions, the same incantations? No, it was not the same at all. With Anne I was consumed, caught up in an incandescent swirl that obliterated the world, and myself. With Catherine—ah, that beauty, that perfection. . . .

  When I think of my feeling for her, and try to liken it to anything similar, what comes to mind, over and over, is a time I stopped in the woods alone. It was still, and I wanted to let my horse catch his breath. So I tethered him to a tree and walked some little way and found a rock to sit on. It was all brown in that forest—brown leaves above, more brown leaves making a crinkly layer on the ground. My breeches were brown, and my boots too. The toadstools at my feet, growing up all around the rock, were various shadings of brown: fawn, taupe, weasel. I was astonished at how many different ways there were to be brown. And then I saw it—a tiny, iridescent blue butterfly, spreading its wings against an oak leaf. It shimmered against the brown like a jewel in a velvet case.

  Catherine was that shining butterfly in the brown autumn of my life. Perfect, jewel-like, with no other purpose than to bring beauty—a purpose she completely fulfilled. I treasured her, guarded her, and doted on her. That was not the same as madness.

  Cromwell was not invited to the delicate evenings at Lambeth Palace, and was surprisingly unadept at hiding his curiosity about them. Oh, his spies undoubtedly reported all that went on—whether a composition by Tallis was performed, and which lute was in use, and even to what key it was tuned—but they could not, as yet, read men’s minds, although I was told they could lip-read a conversation accurately from fifty feet away. A chilling thought. Cromwell disliked being excluded from cultural events, as though he were still the blacksmith’s son from Putney, with manure wet on his shoes. Like most Reformers and purists, he yearned to be invited to the very frivolities he condemned.

  He busied himself on those delicious Wednesday evenings as if they were of no account. On those long May twilights, as my royal barge drifted away from the water-steps of York Place (recently re-named Whitehall and expanded) and the red-gold sun reflected gloriously in the hundreds of windowpanes on the water-side of the palace, I always saw the dark shape of Cromwell hovering just inside. He never even opened a casement . . . lest the spring air beguile him?

  Those evenings at Lambeth, besides being excursions into the realm of the five senses, were also excursions into the past. There, with the Old Men—Howard and Brandon and Fitzwilliam and Lord Lisle—it was always 1520. It was easy there to believe that the world had not changed. There had been no Martin Luther, no suppression of the monasteries. No apprentices had thought to follow trades forbidden them by tradition; no nonsense about a goldsmith’s son becoming a lawyer. It had been a safe, domesticated world in 1520, albeit a mummified one.

  Real life now lay with Cromwell, back in the palace. Knowing this, the aristocrats delighted in pouring poison in my ear regarding him.

  “Your Grace, I know not how to express myself,” demurred Henry Howard, Thomas’s son, the Earl of Surrey. “But Cromwell is so—so—”

  “Not know how to express yourself? Nay, they claim you are the foremost poet in England,” I muttered. Yes, “they”—the critics—had lately adopted a phrase, “from Lydgate down to Surrey,” implying that nothing in between was worth reading. “Say it, man,” I insisted.

  “So vulgar.”

  He was right, of course. But why did I feel as though he had said it about me? Cromwell was only my minion. “He is well versed in the paintings and sculptures of Italy,” I maintained. Surrey himself had put on airs about his travels in France and his meetings with Florentine poets, as if these made him special.

  “A man may look at a painting and not be affected by it. Every peasant in Italy is surrounded by great art, but does it speak to him? Great Rome itself was but a haunt for cowherds until recently. The Forum where Caesar walked, become a place for squatters!”

  True, all true. People had forgotten their own history, and lived like savages in the great Temple of Venus.

  “Cromwell is a squatter in royal haunts,” continued Surrey. “He does not belong. The people of the North instinctively realize that. The demands of the late ‘Pilgrims’ showed how distressed good, honest folk are at the power of a Cromwell.” He smiled at me—a dazzling smile, because he still had all his teeth. That in itself indicated his sheltered life.

  “The ‘Pilgrims’ were traitors,” I said softly. “Several hundred were hanged in chains. Are you saying that you agree with them?”

  “About the New Men, yes.” He made what I privately called his “charming” face. It consisted of an ironic turn of the mouth, along with twinkling eyes. It meant “see how affable and likeable I am, despite my truly impressive credentials.” In fact he was neither as affable nor as likeable as he assumed.

  “What about the New Men? And who are the New Men?”

  “Cromwell—”

  “Cromwell is but one man. You said ‘men,’ so name another.”

  “Paget,” he said reluctantly. “And Audley. And Denny. And Sadler”—they began pouring out now, like steam escaping from one tiny rent—“and the Seymours!” he spat. His hatred stood quivering.

  “Which one?” I asked, as if it were of no moment.

  “Both of them! Edward, with his pious, grasping ways, and Tom, with his pirate’s manner—all swagger and bluster. No man would be taken in by him, of course, so he appeals to the ladies. Oh, he aims high—at the Lady Mary, I do think. And so do many others. The fact that you married their sister has quite gone to their heads.”

  And the chance to speak has gone to yours, I thought. Call Cromwell what you like, you fool, he never lets himself be flattered, and he never lets down his guard. He would never betray his mind so. I looked at Surrey contemptuously. “They come from good stock. It is upon such honest, decent Englishmen that the future of the realm depends.”

  “Aye, aye,” he quickly agreed, eager to be as beguiling as he imagined himself. “Certainly they are not made of the same material as Cromwell, no—for they are honest, and have no secret plans of any sort,
beyond recognition for themselves. But Cromwell, well, we don’t know his desires, do we? He does not seem to want any of the things any normal man would want. There’s talk”—he smiled a puzzled smile—“that he’s the Devil.”

  I wanted to laugh, but it never came.

  “There are those who, I’m told, can actually strike a bargain with Satan. They sit down and work out a contract with him, just as you do with the money-lenders of Antwerp. ‘So-and-so much interest to be paid on the loan of twenty thousand pounds, due on Whitsun of 1542,’ you say, and it is done. ‘My soul in exchange for such-and-such,’ they say, and it is done. Cromwell appears to have—I mean, there are so many signs—”

  He meant it. All the playfulness and deceit was gone from his face.

  “My dear son, you—”

  “Catherine!” said Surrey, as if a spell were being broken. Catherine had seen us deep in talk, and come over. She tugged playfully at her cousin’s arm.

  “They are taking seats,” she chided him, “and you will not be able to see.”

  Her presence took us out of that dangerous realm where we had entered, just for a moment. She grinned up at Surrey. They were cousins, first cousins. I could see little resemblance between them. Surrey was slender and blonde, Catherine small and auburn-haired. Both had pale skin, that was all.