The Autobiography Of Henry VIII

by Margaret George

  O sweet Parliament! To enjoin me to do what I longed for above all else!

  Two days later the request was made: the people begged “King Henry to frame his most noble heart to love a noble personage by whom His Majesty might have some more store of fruit and succession to the comfort of his realm.”

  The Bill of Attainder against Cromwell described him as “a most false and corrupt traitor, deceiver, and circumventor” against the King, and charged him with heresy and treason. He was accused of many things, but the most heinous was that he was a “detestable heretic who had spread heretical literature, licenced heretics to preach, released them from prison, and had been heard to say (so, others had known of his heresy, and merely feared to come forward and expose him!) that the Lutheran Robert Barnes—condemned to be burnt for heresy—taught truth, and that even if the King turned his back on it, “yet I would not turn, and if the King did turn, and all his people, I would fight in this field in mine own person, with my sword in my hand against him and all other.”

  In addition, when the nobles had recently mentioned his humble birth, he reportedly threatened, “If the Lords will handle me so, I will give them such a breakfast as never was made in England, and that the proudest should know”—proof that he had the secret power to take control of the government, if he could command such forces against Norfolk and the others.

  Cromwell was executed for high treason on July twenty-eighth, 1540. As I had foreseen, he sent many letters from his cell in the Tower. I am sure they were persuasive as only the Devil can make them, imparting magic to ordinary words. I dared not read them, but let matters proceed on their own course. It was his own laws, in the end, that killed Cromwell. It was he who had introduced the novelties of holding prisoners without legal counsel; arrest without an opportunity to speak; attainder without legal condemnation; execution without benefit of trial. The harshness that he had visited on others now ensnared him.

  As a commoner, he was not given the privilege of execution in the privacy of the Tower green, nor of the aristocratic scaffold and the imported swordsman from France.

  WILL:

  Although Henry did not read Cromwell’s letters, for some odd reason of his own he kept one, unopened, along with his journal. Here is what the condemned, wretched man wrote his master. Ironic that we should be the only ones to read it, long after the fact.

  Mine accusers Your Grace knoweth. God forgive them. For as I ever had love to your honour, person, life, prosperity, health, wealth, joy, and comfort, and also your most dear and most entirely beloved son, the Prince His Grace, and your proceedings, God so help me in this mine adversity, and confound me if ever I thought the contrary. What labours, pains, and travails I have taken according to my most bounden duty, God also knoweth. For if it were in my power—as it is in God’s—to make Your Majesty to live ever young and prosperous, God knoweth I would. If it had been or were in my power to make you so rich as you might enrich all men, God help me, I would do it. If it had been or were in my power to make Your Majesty so puissant as all the world should be compelled to obey you, Christ knoweth I would. Sire, as to your commonwealth, I have ever after my wit, power, and knowledge travailed therein, having had no respect to persons (Your Majesty only excepted). But that I have done any injustice or wrong wilfully, I trust God shall be my witness, and the world not able justly to accuse me. I cry for mercy, mercy, mercy!

  He did not receive it. He was executed, and by a particularly inept headsman. The man kept missing his aim, so that it took several strokes finally to sever Cromwell’s head.

  The rumours among the people as to Cromwell’s downfall were quite fanciful; for example, that Cromwell had amassed great stores of men and arms, with fifteen hundred men wearing a Cromwellian livery, in order either to marry the Lady Mary or to make himself King; that he had been heavily bribed by the Protestants to arrange the Cleves marriage; that he had boasted that the Emperor was going to award him a crown for his “services.” (In making England Protestant?)

  HENRY VIII:

  A large crowd of his own sort gathered to watch him die. It is a curious fact that they tend to be more bloodthirsty for the punishment of a fellow lowborn who has passed into higher echelons than for that of the nobility upon whose territory he has supposedly encroached. The elevation offends their sensibilities in some basic way. So they cheered loudly (I am told) when Cromwell’s head leapt from his shoulders and landed in the hay.

  I shuddered when I heard the cannon and knew it done. Had the demon within him perished at that moment? Or did it but seek a new home, and would it wander about till it found a willing host?

  Catherine and I were married that day, that very afternoon. It was not intended so, but so it happened. Was it an omen? I tried not to think so, as coincidence had brought about the exact hour on which our nuptials would be performed, but I could not put away the thought of that homeless malevolent spirit, restless without Cromwell’s body to inhabit. . . .

  XCIII

  We became husband and wife at four in the long summer afternoon at Oatlands, a royal manor house in Weybridge, about fifteen miles from London. The ceremony was entirely private, in contrast to that gaudy mistake with Anne of Cleves. There I had been publicly married as a King to a Princess I did not love; now I would be clandestinely married as a man to a woman I adored. Lest anyone say that once before I had had a brief, secret ceremony to a woman I “adored,” let me remind him of the differences. I married Anne Boleyn illicitly with a reluctant priest, with none of my family present and in fear and haste. My so-called former wife refused to recognize me as a bachelor, and threatened dire things if I attempted to marry again.

  But now the proper dispensation had been granted by the Church of England, acting in Convocation; a bishop performed the ceremony. My former “spouse” sent her good wishes, and all my children attended the ceremony in the Privy Chamber that hot afternoon. True, the Lady Mary was distant, but only because Catherine was some three years younger than she. She could not understand how I could wive someone almost thirty years younger than myself. It is something that maiden women, who wot not what passes between a man and a woman in the dark, do not, cannot, understand. Some day Mary would comprehend—and forgive.

  The Lady Elizabeth, however, was pleased to be present, as Catherine was her cousin, and the child needed friends and relatives in a friendless world. She seemed to respond as though she had once again stepped into the warmth of a family, and shyly handed Catherine a carefully arranged bouquet of summer field-flowers.

  The chamber windows were wide open and gave out onto the July fields of rye and barley, stretching golden and lazy. All was at its peak, and the harvest would prove worth all that had gone into its making. So I felt, as if the harvest of my life were now pending, and all that had run before (the cold winter of my boyhood; the early spring of my accession—hard, cold, forced before I was ready—the strife and clearing and burning and plowing in England ever since) were fields cleared at last, fertile and calm, ready for this.

  “With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow: in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, amen.” I slid the ring onto Catherine’s finger, pushing it up slowly, feeling the delicate folds of flesh yielding until the gold reached its limit and stuck there. Waves of heat spread up from my loins as I traced that ring’s journey with my finger. “No other will but his” was engraved on its inner circle, and oh! I knew what that will was. It was pure carnality, hallowed now by the Bishop of Winchester and his words. Miraculous words, to turn lust into a Sacrament.

  “The Lord mercifully with his favour look upon you: and so fill you with all spiritual benediction and grace, that you may so live together in this life, that in the world to come you may have life everlasting,” intoned Gardiner. I turned to Catherine, kissed her heartily, saw her shining eyes turn upwards, then close.

  We had a small wedding supper, as any private citizens would d
o, gathering our friends and family around a table set in the dining hall. No Great Hall existed at Oatlands, just a high-ceilinged chamber on the second storey, hung with hunting trophies. Stags’ heads and boars’ heads stared at us with their glass eyes.

  Catherine and I sat side by side and laughed at everything. We laughed at Brandon when he stood up, cup in hand, and made a solemn toast about matrimony. He himself had been married four times, and had been one of the chamberers on my wedding-night public bedding with Katherine. It all seemed to come together now, all was one. We laughed, and we touched. And touched. O sweet Jesu! That touch!

  We smiled at Cranmer’s gentle well-wishes. (And touched.) We clapped at the Lady Mary’s. (And touched, under the table, lest she see.) We bowed gravely at little Edward’s. He spoke three words in Latin, memorized for the occasion. And all the while the sun was lowering, making shadows on the rows in the grain fields outside. At last it set, but the interminable summer twilight lingered on and on, until I longed to order it to disappear.

  At long last it grew dark enough in the feasting chamber for candles to be lit, then torches. It was time for our guests to take their leave, and so they did, with kisses and well-wishes. There was to be no ceremonial bedding this time. Like any wool merchant or soldier, I was free to take my bride to my bed unaided.

  It was a new bed, purchased from a local magistrate in the nearby village of Weybridge. He had commissioned it from a London artisan, meant it for a grand guest chamber he had had in mind for a manor that never came about. It was of good English oak and agreeably carved, and quite large, in aping the nobility. It stood now in the royal Retiring Chamber, its great four-posts scraping against the sloping ceiling.

  I led my sweet Catherine into the chamber, closing the snug, dark door behind me. It was passably dark in there, and the one lighted candle on the wooden chest danced in the billowing summer air. Two dormer windows gave out on the ripening fields. I made to close them. Catherine stopped me, putting her soft hand on my arm.

  “On this my wedding night,” she said, “I would not be shut up and closed, as in a tomb. I would have a little breath of heaven, of the world beyond.”

  “Whatever you wish,” I said. The windows remained open, and the grain-perfumed air came in, along with the cries of labourers and travellers on the road below.

  I wish I could tell exactly what happened in the next few hours. I said thus-and-so. She said thus-and-so. We did thus-and-so. Yet although my senses were fully alert (no wine for either of us that night), I became so transported by her very presence that everything was altered, and I cannot separate one action from another.

  It makes me angry that it is so. These were precious hours to me, hours that must now stand after all the nasty tide has swept in against them, and yet I cannot remember! I cannot remember cold details, only my own feelings, which were as strong as Hercules, but formless.

  I was with her. I possessed her. She was mine. The very touch of her hand was a gift. A gift which felt simultaneously natural and precious beyond thought. The ordinary me, the true Henry, was not worthy of such a gift, but this special Henry was, the Henry I became in her presence.

  All this was entirely natural, was it not? To hold her in my arms, to kiss her lips, to hear those words of endearment gasped out in jerks? The special Henry, the Henry created by this moment and endowed with extraordinary graces (this Henry who was both me and not me, stranger and ever-known)—he felt at ease in this bliss, this homecoming.

  I know she responded, created the Henry of whom I speak. In the fleeting moments in which I existed as this extraordinary Henry, I felt I was ever thus: not fading, not temporary. I was bold with her, taking her to bed as this Henry wished. We did not remove all our clothes, so anxious were we to consummate our union and join as one. We left our upper bodies completely clothed, and our lower bodies, naked, sought one another. It happened so quickly, so completely, that the twilight had not faded altogether before our first union was done.

  What a contrast was there: our lower selves still fused together in heat and sweat, and enfolded together, whilst our upper bodies touched not at all, save through layers and layers of linen and velvet and jewels.

  We rolled away. But no self-consciousness yet: no, none.

  I finally spoke, softly. “You are different from my fantasies.”

  “How so?”

  “I never thought you would know, so quickly, what it was you wanted.”

  “Are you disappointed?” she said sadly. “Because I did not feign reluctance, as a virgin is expected to?”

  “No, no,” I assured her. But did I speak true?

  “I meant to. But the truth is, my desire took hold and I had no will or power to restrain it.” Did she speak true?

  “Nor I.” I leaned over and kissed her gently. The jewel-encrusted doublet I still wore restricted my movement, reminded me of its presence. “It is time to undress,” I said softly.

  Together we unbuttoned and unclasped the bindings of one another’s garments. Then, although naked, we did not look directly at one another, but wrapped ourselves up in the bleached and scented linen sheets and began to talk, like children huddled together.

  The talk was awkward, when the bodies had not been. I longed to speak of all my feelings, but sensed that was wrong. Catherine had recovered herself, and began chattering away in a high voice.

  “. . . and then the most stinking groom in the Duchess’s stables, he made gestures toward me. Naturally I was sickened: he was repulsive. How could he ever have thought I would respond? I told my aunt the Duchess. . . .”

  Why was she sullying our time together, our first union, with these tales of men who had wanted her and whom she had refused? It made me angry, it hurt me. Yet I let her go on, tried to join in, in a jolly fashion.

  From thence she went on about the most inane subjects. Her Howard cousins, Culpepper and Henry the Earl of Surrey; a book she had seen Mary Howard reading; a tale told the Duchess by a returning pilgrim from Jerusalem.

  It was all entertaining, witty—and impersonal. Why did she choose to speak of these things on this sacred night? Was it just nervous chatter, the chatter of a maid who feared the unknown? Yet she did not appear afraid or frightened or shaken in the least. Rather she appeared self-possessed, soothing.

  I did not understand. I only felt disappointed, somehow. Not in the lovemaking, but in her actions afterward. She was hard and gay, when all I longed for was to take her in my arms.

  Then she suddenly broke off her words and turned to me, flinging her arms around me. “Now I would be the bridegroom,” she murmured, pressing me on my back, positioning me just so, lowering herself upon me. As she felt me inside her, she leaned back: pulling, pushing, straining. I saw her fair white body, slim and yet big-breasted, in the candlelight, arching away from mine. Her lips were parted, and her chin jutted out. A mass of hair enveloped her, touched even my loins, tickling them. She worked, grunted, cried out. But I felt little. I could not lose myself, although her woman-parts engulfed me, seemed to suck me in. She fell forward, a sheen of sweat upon her back.

  “Ah,” she murmured, a bubble of saliva forming, and bursting, on her plump lips. Her arms trailed out on either side like those of a drunkard upon a board. Lasciviously she pulled up her left leg, disengaging our private parts. She came away from me with a great sucking noise and a trail of moisture. The drops landed on my belly: small, round, gleaming, and oily. I watched them as they formed, like little pearls.

  She gave an animal sigh of contentment.

  “It must take a great deal to keep you satisfied,” I finally murmured. The drops on my flesh flattened and trickled off, and I felt cold. Outside there was no light. The brief summer dark had taken hold.

  XCIV

  During the remainder of that unusually hot summer,I fluctuated between two poles of feeling. One part of me rejoiced in Catherine, in my new wife, and basked in her beauty and unrestrained sensuality. She said things I had never thought to he
ar a woman say. “I dreamed last night of your man-sword, and how it felt inside me, and I could not sleep, for both the memories and the expectations.” “The way you move is sinful, and takes me away in thought at embarrassing times. Today when the French ambassador stood before me, all I could think of was the way we had screamed out together at midnight last.” Now I myself would never be able to see Castillon, the French ambassador, without remembering Catherine’s midnight ecstasies.

  On the other hand, it happened again and again—she did not react, did not feel, turned a solemn moment into a trite jest. When I said, “It has never been so good, never in my life,” she replied offhandedly, “Oh, it must have been good with the Princess of Aragon, with my cousin Boleyn, with Queen Jane—for there are Princess Mary and Princess Elizabeth and Prince Edward.” Smile. Laugh. When I told her of how I loved her, she murmured, “It is carnal only, Henry, pure carnality. I know not else why we find ourselves thus.” Giggle. “Have you done this often?” Smirk. And ever: “Tell me, what do you think I—?” Do. Think. Look like. She never tired of hearing how she appeared. Once, when she came upon me writing some music for the virginal, she asked, “Are you writing a tune of our love?” She assumed I was—that she should be my subject and muse and fixation. The fact that it was so was no surprise, no gift. She claimed it as a personal victory, lugged it home with her as the hunters had done the stag and boar heads decorating our wedding-lodge manor.