The Autobiography Of Henry VIII

by Margaret George

  We were two men together, and the fact that we had cared for the same woman served as a bond. “Bessie is ill,” he said, after a pause. “Perhaps the North did not agree so well with her.”

  I could not help but pity women, always consigned to live in localities of their husbands’ whim and choosing. “Is it—”

  “Her lungs.”

  Yes, I had noted that consumptive appearance in her, but thrust it away in my mind. “I see.” No need to say she’d heal. There was no healing from consumption. I remembered Dr. Butts’s words, how it seemed to have staked out the Tudors for its victims. Suddenly the leg-sore, if it were a substitute, looked easy.

  “I am grieved,” I finally said. I touched his hand. He nodded and, keeping his eyes averted, turned away.

  So Bessie would return to her Lincolnshire and spend a last summer there. I prayed it would be a warm one, with field flowers aplenty, and that characteristic wild thyme scenting the air.

  Suddenly I felt very naked and stripped by death. All along, he had been plucking people from me, but there had been so many on the branches that I had never begrudged him his due. The way of all flesh, I had murmured sanctimoniously to myself, knowing he had a certain quota and that I, and those dear to me, would not be called up for some time yet. Well, he had run down his list, and now we were at the head of it.

  I returned to my own apartments and sat glumly staring at the floor. I wanted to be alone; I did not want to be alone. There was only one person for such a mood—Will.

  “You have sent for me?”

  I scarce was able to look up. “Yes. I need you.” I had never spoken those words before to any man.

  “I am here. What troubles you?”

  I told him, then. How death had me and those I loved by the throat. How I felt his very fingers on my windpipe, until I scarce could breathe. I named those he had already claimed, and those he was even now in the process of possessing.

  “I feel him, too,” admitted Will. “Of late I have had to note that there is something chronically wrong with my body. I never have the whole functioning of it any longer. There is always something I must favour, some part I am waiting to have healed. It is disheartening. We are not what once we were. But that is not a signal that death is at hand. Merely that we are being granted a long life. Deaths of those we love en route are also signs we are being spared. Philosophers who discuss the possibility of long life always say that old people long to die, because they are so lonely, having outlived everyone they have had links with. Why is that? Why are they lonely? There are as many people about as in their youth. But the ability to form strong links apparently ceases after a certain age. Affinity arises in youth, and, if we are lucky, endures through to old age.”

  I nodded. Brandon. More. My sister Mary. Bessie. Will himself. But Catherine, my sweet Catherine . . . her I loved, and that was a new thing. I was still capable of forming bonds. I was not past that stage.

  Just as suddenly my unhappy mood was gone, and this melancholy talk annoyed me. I did not think, then, to trace the source of my reactions. I had grieved because Bessie, the love of my youth, was dying, but became indignant when Will suggested that my capacity for loving and being loved was being exhausted. You see, there was the problem of Catherine Howard, and fitting her into all this.

  CI

  Only a few hours later I lay on the silken sheets of the great royal bed, toying with Catherine. I had drawn the embroidered gold-threaded curtains about us, until we could play at being in a tent on the plains of France. Candlelight leapt up and down in the errant drafts of air seeping under the bed-drapes, but that made it all the more eerie and otherworldly, a playhouse for adults. . . .

  Catherine giggled as I touched her throat. I traced its curves and hollows, finding the skin slippery and moist. How was that possible in the dry days of winter?

  “For New Year’s I was given a cream from Syria,” she said, as if reading my thoughts. “It was compounded of substances we have not here in England.”

  From Syria? “Who has been to Syria?” I could not help enquiring. No one traded openly with the Infidels these days.

  “Francis Dereham,” she laughed. “He was a pirate in the Irish Sea for a time. Pirates ‘trade’ with everyone.”

  I frowned.

  “My cousin,” she whispered, tickling my ear with her tongue. “You remember.”

  “He looked like a pirate,” I grunted. She was arousing me, and I wished not to be aroused. Not quite yet. “He is not here? He and his like must not be seen with you at true court.”

  She lay back in the pillows, wriggling like a silverfish. “I sent him away,” she yawned. “He will doubtless return to piracy.”

  “As proper brokenhearted lovers do. Is he brokenhearted?” A casual question.

  “He has no heart. Or what he has, ’tis black.”

  She laughed, lying upon the pillows, a Gypsy herself. Now she was holding out her arms, an expression of utter desire and yearning on her face. I could see how she loved me, wanted me. In her young and unlined face there was lust in its purest form. There—was that not proof of how she craved me?

  She was wearing, beneath her gown of velvet, lacy undergarments of silk, and re-embroidered silk. They were warm with her body heat, almost like living creatures as I peeled them away. At last she lay naked before my gaze. Her stomach was so flat and taut I could see it throbbing as her heart beat. It was like the trembling of skin stretched over a drum-head.

  I was not ashamed to undress and reveal myself to her. In years past I had been called an Apollo, an Olympic athlete, and I was in the process of reclaiming that body, thanks to my regimen of daily riding, strength-tossing of a great beam, and, in the secret hours in my withdrawing chamber, lifting of weights. As her skilful fingers pushed back the folds of my sheer linen undershirt, I wanted her to see me. I wanted to present myself to her, a sacrifice of my love.

  She withdrew the linen shirt, and we were husband and wife, naked as Adam and Eve. She traced her fingertip (polished with red stain; was that, also, a gift of the pirate?) along my chest, midway between my shoulders and my nipples. She raised a wake of gooseflesh.

  “Your chest is so broad,” she said dreamily. “Half again as wide as a yeoman’s.”

  I looked down at her. Lounging against the pillows, parts of her half-visible in the feather mattress enveloping her, she looked like a sleek, voluptuous snake. She was not Eve, but the serpent.

  I wanted to be one with her. I ached to blend myself with her. “Catherine”—I murmured, sucking her mouth into mine—“wife.”

  She arched herself up toward me, pressing her slippery, perfumed flesh against my own unadorned, natural body. They met, locked.

  She flung her legs around my body. They felt like warm serpents, coiling about me, capturing me. Her private parts, her succulent woman-parts, were opened and moistly waiting to receive me. There were so many layers of them, spread open like an intricate flower-heart, with its deep, shadowed core. With a cry of joy, I flung myself into that core, and was swallowed up in ecstasy.

  That is the poetical description. Now shall I give it the plain description, that which would be required in a court of law? For I have found myself, as I wrote this, first reluctant, then angry. I write from a vantage point and a knowledge I did not have then. You have had the duped version, as well as I could recreate it, though it sticks in my throat to remember it. Now you shall have the true version, shadowed with later knowledge.

  There she was, the harlot, all oiled and anointed, and she bewitched me. In her presence and with her performance I believed myself desired and adored, and when I thrust myself home into her very self, I believed us united, I believed I had a wife. She moved with me, she returned each motion, shuddering as if she were transported to Paradise, and I plunged into her person, engulfed in the depths, inflamed with my love, and felt her quivering, trembling, then jerking with release. She emitted strange cries, and I felt the squeezing pulsations, coming like wa
ves from her inner parts. My seed had seeped out all around, bathing us both, giving sticky blessing to our love. I lay on her, savouring the pulsations, the emissions. I could feel the last feeble spurts and oozings from my organ and her womb.

  Why do I record this? The memory is not sweet, it is disgusting. But it should be sweet, it should live on as a cherished memory. Only the truth is this: one-sided love leaves no sweetness, no memories. It is like a puff-pastry, sustained not by actual events but by the intoxicated lover’s emotions. When those emotions collapse, nothing remains to remember. There. I have recorded it all. My shame and folly, her treachery, our mutual pleasure. For there was pleasure, that is the pity of it. That is the part I cannot understand—that pleasure. It stands on its own, unassailable, like a god.

  A week later I was stricken, felled.

  CII

  WILL:

  I am intrigued by his remembrances here. He had appeared feverish, almost beside himself all during the Christmas festivities. So naturally when he sent for me on that first day afterward, I assumed it was because he wished to confess. I was his secular confessor, Cranmer his spiritual. And I knew what it concerned: his extravagant gesture in having a coin struck in Catherine’s honour. I intended to tell him exactly what public opinion was: that people were scandalized; worse than that (from his point of view), they ridiculed him. They called him a fond old man, a lecher whose private parts were blinding his eyes, an embarrassment. Catherine was not accepted as Queen. The people wanted Anne of Cleves, whom they perceived (thick though they were, they possessed a natural wisdom) as someone of character and noble blood. Catherine Howard? They knew a slut when they saw one, even if the King did not. I meant to tell him this, because I assumed he was troubled. But I never had the opportunity, although I should have been bold and made one. Before I could do so, he fell ill and his life was despaired of.

  I had been warming myself by a dying fire, wondering how to coax an extra log from the Privy Chamber allotment, when Culpepper tapped me on the shoulder, agitated as could be.

  “The King’s—dying,” he cried.

  “How?” I had left him well the evening before, jovially sunk in pillows and making lists for his northern progress. How he loved lists, and busy-work. He was never happier than when swamped in paperwork for one of his beloved projects.

  “His leg.” I shot a look at him. No one was supposed to know about the King’s malady. He kept it a fierce secret. How had Culpepper found out? And was he blabbing it about?

  “It closed over, and sent black humours to his head,” said Culpepper.

  What nonsense. It had closed over after the holidays, leaving as cheery and pretty a pink scar as one would desire.

  I stood up. I must go to him.

  What I beheld in his chamber was terrifying. Gone was the Henry I had known, served, and (yes) loved since my youth. In his place was a feeble, spasmodic man, his face greenish black. He thrashed about, unable to control his body movements, like a spitted animal. And he was completely speechless.

  Outside his chamber they waited, black-robed, like vultures. What would his passing mean to each of them? I shook, a victim of my own fear. Edward was but three years old. Sweet Jesu! We had no King!

  I heard wild, metallic laughter echoing. It was my own. Married for thirty years, to five different women, but he leaves no King behind. . . .

  Someone muffled me and escorted me out. I was crying, laughing, and motioning hysterically. I suppose I was a menace.

  HENRY VIII:

  The day had started so reasonably, so sweetly. I had drawn on my boots and made ready for the barber. I remember glancing toward the window and thinking how calm and utterly boring a day in late February can be. The sky was an ugly neutral offspring of grey and white, and every naked branch was motionless. The sun was nowhere in evidence, so swaddled was it by the blankets of clouds. Lent was approaching—the dreariest time of the year. The world was enervated.

  Then suddenly an intense heat, a squeezing, gripped my brain. I opened my mouth to call out, and I could not. I felt myself pitching forward, the inlaid, polished wooden floor zooming up to meet me, to smash me in the face—but it was I hurtling toward it, and I was unable to spread out my arms to break my fall. I toppled over like a chopped tree in the forest, smashing things around me—the little table with my reading glasses and bedside Psalter, the great chamber candlestick balanced on its three carved legs. I hit, expecting to feel pain, and felt nothing. My nose crumpled, and I could see blood beginning to flow. I tried to crawl away, and heave myself up, but I was paralysed. And then I began to choke and could not clear my throat. I was drowning in my own blood. It ran hot and salty down into my lungs, and breath began to fail.

  Someone lifted me, pulled my shoulders back, and a shimmering sheet of blood poured from my mouth. I remember the redness, how it was so much brighter than rubies. Then all brightness fled, and there was nothing.

  How long there was nothing I do not know. I awoke—if I can describe it so—to find myself lying upon a daybed. I was heaped round with pillows and furs and evidently had been there for some time. An angry fire spat and gurgled in the fireplace nearby, choked by its overload of logs. From my position beside it, I knew I had been moved there to take advantage of the heat. I stroked the fur of my covers on the fire-side. It was too hot. The pelt would be singed. I made a motion.

  Not until I did, did I realize the implications. My body was free again. It obeyed my commands. I stroked the fur once more, feeling its sleek surface, just to test myself. But it was being damaged. They should move me farther away.

  Who were “they”? I was alone in the chamber. I could discern no one lurking round in the shadows. Good. That in itself was a favourable sign. It meant no one expected me to die. I remembered the crowds of “observers” in Father’s chambers those last few weeks of his life. Sweet Jesu! It was the same time of year! He had taken to his sickbed in January; lingered, hacking, through February and March; died in April.

  Suddenly it was very important that I talk to someone. I called.

  No sound came.

  My throat was swollen, blocked up from disuse. I cleared it, rattling all the membranes. Now! I called.

  Silence.

  I was dumb! God had taken away my speech.

  I strained all my muscles. Still, silence.

  I was so stunned there was nothing for it but to fall back limply onto the pillows.

  It could not be permanent. It must be some laggard part of my healing. When first I had fallen, I could not move my hands. Now I could. This dumbness, too, must fade. It must.

  The fire exploded with sparks and hissing. Then it subsided into sighing. Like a woman, I thought.

  But what had happened? There had been the morning, getting dressed. Then the seizure, the paralysis, the fall. My nose crunching. I put out a hand and touched my nose. It was heavily bandaged, with two wooden supports down each side. I had broken it, then.

  Why had I pitched forward? What malady had seized me? I threw all my will and might behind my throat, and called again. Silence.

  I had been struck dumb. Like John the Baptist’s father, Zacharias. Why? God never acted without reason. Zacharias had been struck dumb because he had argued with the angel Gabriel, when the angel came to announce the Good News.

  My Scriptures were in their customary place, and I sought them out, turning to the portion about Zacharias.

  Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John.

  And Zacharias said unto the angel, Whereby shall I know this? for I am an old man, and my wife well stricken in years.

  And the angel answering said unto him, I am Gabriel, that stand in the presence of God;

  And behold, thou shalt be dumb, and not able to speak, until the day that these things shall be performed, because thou believest not my words, which shall be fulfilled in this season.

  Had I, too, received a messenger or
a sign, and refused to believe?

  No. There had been no sign, no message. Of that I was certain. I would welcome a conversation with God, or his angel. All my life I had awaited it. But He had never spoken directly to me.

  The door creaked open. Someone was checking on the royal patient. I made gestures for him to come forward. It was a page. I mimicked writing motions.

  The lad looked clean frightened out of his skin. Perhaps, after all, they had expected me to die.

  Dr. Butts followed, looking grave and curious. He carried his leather pouch, crammed with potions and flasks. He sat down on a footstool beside my elaborate sickbed and touched my eyelids, then felt along my neck, He peeled back the coverlets and nightshirt and bent his head to my chest, motioning for everyone to be quiet so he could discern my heartbeats. Satisfied, he restored me to my covered state and then began to tape and probe the leg.

  As he removed the herb-soaked bandage, I was astonished. A great round wound festered in the old afflicted spot upon my thigh. It was deeper and uglier than I had ever seen it before. A small clay cup strapped beneath it was filled with foul secretions from the ulcer. Dr. Butts removed it deftly, and put another in its place.

  “The ulcer closed,” he said slowly, as if he were speaking to a child or a simpleton. “Your life was in danger. It has been three days now since I opened the closure and let it begin to drain. Thirteen cups have been filled with this discharge. It seems to have spent itself. Thanks be to God! It was backed up into Your Grace’s body, acting as a poison.”

  He looked at me, his bright eyes trying to discern any answering spark in me.

  “He motioned for writing paper and pen,” the page remembered.

  “A good sign!” said Dr. Butts. “Pray fetch them.” He continued to observe me. It was a strange feeling to be totally passive, unable to participate in one’s own life-drama.