The Autobiography Of Henry VIII

by Margaret George

  The pen in my hand, I wrote out: How long ago was I stricken? How long till I be well? And why can I not speak? I put the most frightening question last, as if to reduce its power and importance.

  Dr. Butts nodded, pleased with my efforts. “You were stricken on Wednesday last,” he said loudly. Did he think me deaf as well? “At the rate you are mending, I would say another fortnight before we have you up and about. As for your speech”—he shook his head—“it puzzles me. I cannot understand why it has not returned. Perhaps the evil humours from your leg have seeped into your throat.”

  He noted my frown. “But now that the leg is open, and draining, these poisons will flow from your system, freeing your throat.” He paused, then added, “God willing.”

  So he, too, acknowledged this stoppage of voice as a Divine Sign. Behind all his smooth physician’s talk he knew the truth. Only God decided when such a mark would be lifted.

  O Father, O Son, O Holy Ghost—wherefore had I offended, fallen short? If I had even known my transgressions, I could amend them. But I was ignorant!

  There was no way I could hope to find the clue to my failing by use of reason and memory. It might be in some small thing, so small I would have overlooked it at the time. (Although would God be so unfair as to smite me so hugely for a small thing?) I must pray for enlightenment.

  I closed my eyes and concentrated on prayer. I addressed God as a King should wish to be addressed: reverently and humbly. I found myself rummaging in the cupboard of my mind for appropriate phrases. After I had exhausted my stock I created new ones, fashioning them lovingly and tenderly. Then I began thanking Him for all His blessings in my life. As I began enumerating them, I slackened my pace, astonished at how richly I was blessed, but at the same time feeling more and more vulnerable. With each good thing we hold, God possesses us more and more, because we tremble lest he whimsically remove it. And even that fear, we are told, is disloyalty, and therefore a sin. . . . Was that my sin? My lack of utter trust in God? What if—

  No. I stopped myself. I had promised myself to pray, to pour out my thoughts and wait for an answer, not interrupt the process half through and answer myself. I continued with my blessings, and began to list not the things I possessed, but the things I was lent to enjoy, things no man may own. The seasons. Sleep. Dreams. Memories. Music. Then I thought of specific things about those things. I imagined one leaf on one tree, saw it through its entire life, from its swelling as a bud, to its sticky pale green unfoldings, to its flat, dark, dusty prime in high summer.

  As I did this, first with the leaf and then with other things, I entered a sort of trance. I began to talk to God directly, yearning to open everything to Him, because only then could I be united with Him, only then could He reach into whatever was diseased in me and heal it. My speech was wordless, if that is possible for you to understand. I gave myself to God as nakedly as little Edward gave himself up to his nurse every evening, and with the same complete abandon.

  I felt an odd bliss, a peaceful ecstasy. My eyes were closed—or were they open? I was not in any worldly place.

  My answer came, too, but in wordless form. This palpable sense of peace meant that complete surrender was what God required of me: to continue to give myself to Him without reservation, as I had just done. It would take learning, but those moments would have to come more and more frequently. God would keep me dumb until I had learned to pray with my mind and whole being, rather than just with my lips.

  CIII

  Whilst I waited to be led further into this rich and baffling relationship with God, my earthly body must needs lie on the fur-warmed couch and endure the wait. It must be beguiled, for earthly hours are long to our earthly clay, even though they pass in a trance for the mystic.

  Evening was coming on when Timothy Scarisbrick, a chamber-groom, entered with a tray of food for me. Where was Culpepper, I wondered, but it was a fleeting thought, and quickly skipped away. This lad pleased me well. He was straight and pale and Christ-like, at least the way I imagined the young Christ to be during the unknown years when He was simply Mary’s son in Nazareth. He set the tray, a delicate ivory-inlaid thing (it looked Syrian—I liked not that association) on my lap, and pulled off the cover. Eggs, chopped chicken, and soup. Invalid’s food. Pallid and wan, like the invalid it supposedly nourished.

  After this “nourishment,” the physician came again, listened to my heart, removed the drainage cup and replaced it with another, and patted my mound of furs solicitously. “Rest well,” he pronounced, like a priest giving absolution. I gestured for my pen and pad, and wrote two requests: 1. Applewood for the fire. 2. Niall Mor, for music. My servers nodded in unison, as if relieved it was so uncomplicated.

  The applewood was already hissing and perfuming the air with its incomparable aroma when Niall Mor approached my bedside. He was wearing some sort of dark swirling cape, and his bright hair shone like fire-opals. I half expected spurts of fire to spring up from his footsteps, as he reminded me overwhelmingly of Pluto, god of the Underworld, in a sketch I had once seen as a child—a sketch showing the god with flowing mantle and smoke rising from his sandal-straps and flame on his head-circlet.

  “You wish me?” he asked in a soft, pleasing voice. Too pleasing, as it knew it pleased. That spoiled it.

  I wrote out: Play and sing for me. Songs of Ireland. Anything you like. Tell me; explain the verse.

  He unslung his small harp, which he fondled like a woman. “This is a diatonic harp, gut-strung. We use it either alone, in single lines of melody, or else in what we call Cerdd Dant, where we sing poetry in counterpoint to the harp.” He swirled a bit in preparing himself to play.

  “We have, in Ireland, special triads.” He began plucking the harp-strings, so sweetly that they seemed to caress the air.

  “Three things that are always ready in a decent man’s house: beer, a bath, a good fire.

  “Three smiles that are worse than griefs: the smile of snow melting, the smile of your wife when another man has been with her, the smile of a mastiff about to spring.

  “Three doors by which falsehood enters: anger in stating the case, shaky information, evidence from bad memory.

  “Three times when speech is better than silence: when urging a king to battle, when reciting a well-turned line of poetry, when giving due praise.

  “Three scarcities that are better than abundance: a scarcity of fancy talk, a scarcity of cows in a small pasture, a scarcity of friends around the beer.”

  I liked it not. It was gloomy; there was something ominous even about the “happy” triads. I shook my head.

  He shrugged, clearly not understanding why I did not want more of it.

  He struck a chord and began a new poem.

  “Lovely whore, though,

  Lovely, lovely whore

  Slept with Conn,

  Slept with Niall,

  Slept with Brian,

  Slept with Rory.

  “Slide then,

  The long slide.

  “Of course it shows.”

  What peculiar sentiments the Irish had! Why would they celebrate a whore in verse and achingly poignant melody?

  I smiled. The music was exquisite, that I acknowledged. I nodded vigourously, so that he might play on.

  From his harp came a sparkling sigh, a whispered wave of beauty.

  “Ebb tide has come for me:

  My life drifts downward

  Like a retreating sea

  With no tidal return.

  “I am the Hag of Beare,

  Five petticoats I used to wear,

  Today, gaunt with poverty,

  I hunt for rags to cover me.

  “Girls nowadays

  Dream only of money—

  When we were young

  We cared more for our men.

  “But I bless my King who gave—

  Balanced briefly on time’s wave—

  Largesse of speedy chariots

  And champion thoroughbreds.

 
; “These arms, now bony, thin

  And useless to younger men,

  Once caressed with skill

  The limbs of princes!

  “Why should I care?

  Many’s the bright scarf

  Adorned my hair in the days

  When I drank with the gentry.

  “So God be praised

  That I misspent my days!

  Whether the plunge be bold

  Or timid, the blood runs cold.

  “But my cloak is mottled with age—

  No, I’m beginning to dote—

  It’s only grey hair straggling

  Over my skin like a lichened oak.

  “And my right eye has been taken away

  As down-payment on heaven’s estate;

  Likewise the ray in the left

  That I may grope to heaven’s gate.

  “And I, who feasted royally

  By candlelight, now pray

  In this darkened oratory.

  Instead of heady mead

  “And wine, high on the bench

  With kings, I sup whey

  In a nest of hags.

  God pity me!

  “Alas, I cannot

  Again sail youth’s sea;

  The days of my beauty

  Are departed, and desire spent.

  “I hear the fierce cry of the wave

  Whipped by the wintry wind.

  No one will visit me today

  Neither nobleman nor slave.

  “Flood tide

  And the ebb dwindling on the sand!

  What the flood rides ashore

  The ebb snatches from your hand.

  “Flood tide

  And the sucking ebb to follow!

  Both I have come to know

  Pouring down my body.

  “Man being of all

  Creatures the most miserable—

  His flooding pride always seen

  But never his tidal turn.

  “I have hardly a dwelling

  Today, upon this earth.

  Where once was life’s flood

  All is ebb.”

  His voice floated off, flying on the sweet harp-sound. I felt wretched. The cruel selection, celebrating the horrible: the decaying, deceitful aspects of men and women—was it purposeful? What fool would choose such a poem to cheer a stricken King? It must have been unintentional, and therefore an oblique compliment. One sings such a song only to the young and healthy.

  Nonetheless, I felt as if my supper lay like a Lenten carp, belly-up, inside me. I gestured for him to leave me. He frowned in disappointment. Oh, the lad had much to learn in court. It was well he had come to do so.

  Alone, I lay back and inhaled the applewood. But in my mouth there lay a bitter taste. “Cruel,” I murmured, but no sound issued forth. Still waiting. Well, it was God’s will that I learn patience and obedience . . . and embrace His mystery. I shivered and drew the fox-fur collar about me. It was a cold and barren vigil I must keep. And where was Catherine?

  When all one has to do is lie abed, one quickly loses the normal rhythm of the day, the one that governs everyday life. There is a great wisdom in the orderly arrangement of the hours and the daily passage of light and dark. An invalid can rearrange those units to suit himself, like a child playing with blocks, and he soon makes a jumble of it.

  So I lay awake half the night, because I had had no occupation during the day to exercise and tax me. “Christ prayed all night,” it says in the Bible. I tried to do so, but fell into that eerie suspended consciousness that bordered on rapture, communing with the Holy Spirit and then waking, or gliding into full awareness, as the dawn stirrings began in the adjoining chamber. By the time Culpepper had appeared with my newly warmed bedjacket, and the beaming young Scarisbrick approached my bedside, grinning, with the laden tray of breakfast food, I was already sleepy, worn out from my night of wrestling with the angel, so to speak. When other men’s blood was stirring, mine was settling. O cursed life, an invalid’s! No wonder they never mend.

  Culpepper was busy and preoccupied. He brought in my clothes, he attended to all my needs, but in a rattled, distracted way. Once he brought a delicately embossed leather envelope to hold all the correspondence from our ambassadors abroad, made with marvellous flaps and pockets, with a special container for wax and the Royal Stamp. He had designed and commissioned it.

  I grasped his arm and nodded thanks. I hated this dumbness. Even though I knew it was—must be!—temporary.

  Catherine came in directly after Mass, which she attended daily at eight. She had a devout soul, which, like most physically attractive people, she attempted to hide, as if it were a shame, or would cause others to regard her differently. In the young, that is of paramount importance.

  But when she came to me, directly after receiving her Maker, she glowed with a beauty beyond the worldly, could she but know it. I smiled at her, reached up and touched her cheek. The evening previous (when the wood was burning and my body settled), I always wrote out a little letter to her, telling her of my thoughts, my love for her, and my observations on her beauty. Each morning she gladly received it, blushing. And each morning (or was it my imagination, my thwarted, lusty imagination?) she seemed more highly coloured, more skittish.

  Thus I pretended to be the patient patient. In truth, I longed to throw off my furs and blankets and take my place once again in the councils of men. How long, O Lord, how long?

  Whilst I languished, of course I was visited. Will came in regularly to amuse me. Council members called to appraise me of their complaints. It was indeed the New Men versus the traditionalists these days. Churchmen came to read lists of appointments to me for approval. There were many places to be filled. I busied myself filling in those empty lines.

  It was all very neat and ordered. When my churning head wished for sleep, my attendants pulled the draperies and converted the chamber into soft night. The sun was barred from my presence like a prattling child. But that ordained a sleepless night to follow. O Lord, how long?

  Note that I did not practise upon my throat-instrument every few hours, hoping to find it restored. Each time I blew upon it, I was rewarded with a resounding silence.

  It had been ten days, and I was as utterly scrambled as an egg. No voice. An upside-down sleeping schedule. When Cranmer came to my couch-side, after Culpepper and Catherine had taken their leave and Will had bowed out darkly, he carried nothing. No Church-roll or certificates, or even his notes of a national prayer book. The Book of Common Prayer, he meant to call it, although he was bogged down within its windings.

  “There’s an uprising,” Cranmer said, in child’s English. “In Lincolnshire.”

  I gestured for him to continue. “It seems some desperate men conspired to meet at Pomfret Fair,” he apologized. As though it were his fault! “There are many wretched men in the North, their needs unanswered—”

  How many? was all I cared to know. I asked, in my throat, but nothing came. Angrily I grabbed a pen and paper and repeated myself in writing. How cumbersome it is to have to rely on these manual means of communication!

  “Three hundred or so. But the reports are garbled. Hourly they change.”

  And others may join them, I added to myself. There is a nest up there, a nest of malcontents. With the Scots sitting like a crown on their heads.

  I flailed about, anger overtaking me. I beat on my pillows, and tore them with my teeth. I was helpless, helpless—a prisoner of my own body! Furiously, I beat even on it. Take this, I thought as I raised both fists up high and brought them down on my thigh. The muscles shifted underneath like stirring dogs. I opened my throat to roar, and demanded that it obey. No sound came forth.

  Defeated, I wrote Cranmer instructions: 1. Find out their leaders. 2. Send Suffolk to me. 3. Begin preparations for possible action against them. He bowed and was gone. I lay back, feeling like Prometheus in chains. In our day, the voice-box has more power than muscles. And mine was bound, enchained.


  CIV

  I promised myself that I would not test God by repeatedly checking during the long hours of darkness. But when the first light broke through the iridescent frost covering the windows, that would be a Sign.

  The first light broke, and I raised my voice. Silence.

  Now I was truly frightened. I needed my voice restored; this was an emergency. It was not for myself I needed it, but for England. Still, God did not heed. And if he did not heed now . . .

  Mid-morning. Brandon appeared. He looked old, I thought. How detached we are in observing the aging of our contemporaries, as if we were somehow exempt from the same process, or as if it were applied unequally, and our poor friend got a double dose, whereas we ourselves got off lightly.

  I had already prepared a list of questions, which I handed to him. His baggy eyes skimmed over them quickly.

  “Yes, there are more rebels. That is what this morning’s dispatch said. Of course, it is four days old . . . the roads this time of year . . .” He shook his head. “All told, they are still fewer than five hundred. They are playing an old tune, Your Grace. Those who wished to dance to it already did their jig during the Pilgrimage. And afterward—in chains and in the gibbet.”

  Still, they have enough recruits to begin again, I thought. A never-ending supply of malcontents, traitors, like spring weeds.

  “Shall I crush them, Your Grace?” A simple request.

  I nodded. Kill the thing now. Pluck the plant up, roots and all. And this was supposed to be the place where I must venture forth, taking my Queen. Suddenly I was ferociously hungry to see this mysterious area, the North, which bred mists and rebels in equal quantity.

  “Shall I use the utmost force?” Shall I kill swiftly and brutally?