The Autobiography Of Henry VIII

by Margaret George

  “Your Majesty, the Imperial ambassador,” my page announced.

  “We will receive him.” I settled myself on the throne of majesty, under the royal canopy. All forms must be observed, else people note there is something amiss . . . like a dog marking a wound, smelling blood. Always wear a bandage. That way they can’t smell, can’t detect, don’t know.

  The great high door opened, and Chapuys walked through. How many times had he come through those very doors? Perhaps a hundred? He had come often when Katherine was still a problem, and before Mary and I were reconciled. Lately he had come much less.

  “Your Majesty.” He dropped to one knee. I marked that it was difficult for him. The fluid motion of old was gone. His knees hurt, I could tell.

  “My dear Imperial ambassador.” I motioned to a padded chair near my throne. “Pray sit beside us.”

  He stood as easily as possible and then made his way to the comfortable chair. Once settled, he looked up with wary eyes. “Your Majesty sent for me?”

  “Yes, Chapuys.” I inhaled deeply. “You and I need no fencing, no probing. We have known one another too long. Therefore let us discuss this like honest, rough men. The truth is, one of your community, a confessed Spaniard, has abused his privilege. That privilege, Sir Ambassador, was being allowed to witness the executions on . . . on February thirteenth past. He has written a description of it, but, more heinous than that, has presumed to “explain” them. Since it was through your influence and permission that he was permitted inside the Tower grounds, it is you whom he has abused and betrayed. For of course, henceforth your privileges to grant such permissions must be revoked.”

  His little monkey’s face glared back at me. “Oh. Are there more executions scheduled? I should be grieved to be excluded.”

  Oh, that infuriating Spaniard! Ever had he goaded me thus!

  “That is not the issue.” I kept my voice calm. The days were past when I exploded and revealed all my thoughts, all my passions, all my cherishings. Old man. Old man. Safe and guarded old man. Well, there was advantage in that. “The issue is what you permitted one of your countrymen to do, and on English soil. This thing”—I had it right handy in my working pouch—“is lies.”

  “Is it against English law to print lies?” he asked blandly. “I mean, against specific laws?”

  “The printing press is so new we have not had time to formulate laws regarding it! But gentlemen follow certain codes of behaviour, certain standards, and they are as readily applicable to the printing press as to anything else!” But what if they were not? What if all that had been “understood” were no longer so, but some new order must rewrite the rules?

  “But when you broke from the Papacy, you set an example.” He spread his hands. “It said that none of the old rules, the old deferences, held true any longer. That applies to kings as well as to the Holy Father, you know.” He shrugged. “So a common citizen wrote a defamatory ‘history’? That will become so common in the new age, which you have championed, that no one will take notice of it.”

  “But it is lies!”

  “So?”

  “He says here”—I thumbed angrily till I found the place—“that Cromwell interrogated Catherine. Cromwell was dead! Did he come to life for the occasion, then?” There. That proved my point.

  “Indeed he did.” Chapuys chuckled—a superior, amused laugh. “And many more Cromwells will do likewise in this wonderful”—he all but spat the word—“new age you have helped birth. Where there is no respect for authority—smite the Pope!—and an exalted respect for the individual—oh, the Englishman is a god!—this sort of thing will abound. You’d best accustom yourself to it. Truth is whatever some ordinary man wishes to hawk, if his credentials are passable and his prose grammatical, and he can afford to have it printed. In this case the man did witness the execution; there are his credentials. His prose may be lies, but they are recited in the King’s English. His pockets permitted the printing. Oh, but there’s a fourth element, without which the others falter: men must hunger for his drivel and be willing to pay to read it.”

  He spoke true. The Spanish Chronicle, as it was called, answered many hungers. The truth was not among them. “So you refuse to refute it or make any gesture to suppress it?” I asked Chapuys.

  “I have not the power,” he said. Convenient excuse.

  “I would you did.”

  “I also, Your Grace. It is a silly thing, and glorifies Catherine, making her more in death than ever she was in life. She was a”—he hesitated, as if unwilling to yield a point, but compelled by innate honesty to do so—“she was an embarrassing choice for a Catholic figurehead. I fear she has blackened the name of Catholicism in England. Better to have rested it with the Princess of Aragon than to have dragged it through this cesspool.”

  I appreciated his candour. “Well, the Protestants had Boleyn,” I laughed. “It is dangerous for any spiritual body to set up a human being as their representative.”

  Suddenly he was laughing, a great genuine caw of delight. “Except in the case of the Holy Father,” he said.

  “No, that is precisely what I did say!” Now I, too, was laughing. “He is as bad as Anne and Catherine, in their ways. No, it cannot be a man!”

  “But, Your Grace—you are now the Supreme Head of the Church of England!”

  “Not as a spiritual example.” I rose from my throne. My fondness for Chapuys, my old adversary, overcame me. Adversary he might be, but he belonged to my world, my old, known world, and all at once that was becoming very important to me. There were so few of us, and we were dwindling all the while. I threw my arm about his shoulder, his scrawny little shoulders.

  He was old. He, too, was marked for passage, passage away from me. I was to be alone. Fear shook me.

  “You tremble,” he said, almost tenderly. We were enemies come to respect, then tolerate, then love one another. Where were the Princess of Aragon, the Boleyn Witch, Jane, the Princess of Cleves, the Howard whore, in my life now? But Chapuys remained.

  “I do, sometimes,” I admitted. “In March I can never seem to keep warm enough.”

  “In July, even, here in England!”

  “You retire soon.” I knew it.

  “Yes. At last.”

  “The sun will warm you, will heal you. I know it. You have waited a long time.”

  “I have forgotten the sun. In truth, England feels like home to me. I came here briefly, so I thought. I would serve my time and then go back to the sun, the flowers, the black-and-white of Spanish noon. But I made the mistake of coming to love the Princess of Aragon. I could see her as that young girl, setting out for England—and I wanted to serve her.”

  “That you did.” I released him, old bony man. “You saw her as that Princess when to everyone else she was a dowager. Well . . .” I closed my eyes, bade the images go. “We all need our champions.” I had none, but no one need know that. “Your master, the Emperor . . . think you he will implement the Papal bull against me? Heed the call to holy war?”

  “You and I both know that if he did not rise on behalf of his aunt, he will scarce stir now. Although he has become more pious and religious of late, that is offset by the turmoil in Germany and the Low Countries. Protestantism there . . . it is that which he will battle, not England’s. You are quite safe from the Emperor,” he conceded. “Only pray do not tell him I said so.”

  I embraced him again. “Naturally not.”

  “One thing more, Your Majesty.” Chapuys pulled back. “The Princess Mary. Is she to be married soon?”

  “I cannot see how that may be. Until the French and the Emperor recognize the importance of an alliance—”

  “She is distraught. She needs a husband. I speak as a friend, not as an ambassador or as her conspirator. She is twenty-six years old, Your Grace, no longer a child, and soon will pass her childbearing years. Oh, have mercy on her!”

  I was astonished at this outburst. “But to whom shall I marry her? A prince of—”

&
nbsp; “A duke, a count, anyone! His orthodoxy does not matter! Only see her as a woman, a woman in desperate need of a husband and children. My master, the Emperor, would be irate if he heard me speak thus. But if you loved her as a child . . . Your Grace, her needs are no less now! Only you can free her. She needs to love someone, something. Else her natural goodness will grow all crooked.”

  Mary. For so many years, an enchanting child. Then a pawn in the war between Katherine and myself. Then—a nothing. I had not thought of her needs, I had been so assiduous in meeting my own. I had thought she would keep, keep until I was at peace.

  Nothing keeps. It grows grotesque, or it withers.

  “You speak true,” I said. “She is terribly alone.” Strange I had not realized it. I had ascribed strength and happiness all about me where it did not exist.

  Mary. I had loved her so, but when she took Katherine’s side I had thrust her aside. What was missing in me, to change allegiances so swiftly? Perhaps the madness reached far back, in an absence of normal feeling.

  Madness. No, I was not mad. But these pounding headaches! Where was my head-medicine, the syrup that quieted these ragings? I would have a draught now. The servitor brought it. The pretty emerald syrup. It would course through my veins in time for the next audience.

  There. All I had to do now was sit still, wait for it to take effect. But already there was a pounding outside, one that echoed the pounding within my own head.

  “Monsieur le Ambassador, Marillac, awaits his audience.”

  So he was here already? Very well, then. “We are ready,” I said.

  Monsieur Marillac came into the Audience Chamber. He was virtually a stranger to me, having come to England only a few months previous. Francis did not allow any envoy to remain long enough to form a personal bond with me. Was it because he feared my charm, my influence?

  “Your Majesty.” He dropped to one knee, then raised his face toward mine, smiling. Such a pretty smile he had.

  Wolsey had had a pretty smile. Oh, and such a servile manner, all flattering and obsequious at once.

  Wolsey . . . there was no more Wolsey.

  “We welcome you, Monsieur Marillac. ’Tis pity we have become so slightly acquainted with you, in all these weeks you have been on our soil. Come closer, Monsieur, and let me see you.” I examined his face, his costume. He was stout and placid, that much could I determine. The sort of man with whom I could make no headway. Rather like assaulting one of my new fortifications near the Isle of Wight—I had designed them massive, round, impregnable, and entirely modern, that is, given over to gun-defence and cannon-strategy. No romance or chivalry about them. So, too, this Frenchman.

  “How does my brother Francis?” I asked quickly.

  “Not well, I fear,” he said. “He is stricken with the sorrow that has afflicted Your Majesty.”

  Yes, I had received Francis’s “condolence”—a letter wherein he had intoned, “The lightness of women does not touch the honour of men.” I had not known whether to take it as commiseration or taunt. Whatever it betokened, I did not wish to discuss it with this stranger.

  “Ummm.” I grunted. My head yet throbbed. When would the syrup take effect?

  “When you left him, what were his instructions? Were you to woo me as his friend, or raise porcupine-like quills against me?” There, that would startle him, make him cough out the truth.

  “I—that is, he—”

  I had guessed correctly. The rough-spoken English way had unbalanced him.

  “When I left France, he was distant toward you. However, that was prior to—Your Majesty’s misfortune—”

  “Lies!” I leapt up from my throne and slammed my fist on the arm of it. “It was prior to his own lover’s quarrel with the Emperor!” I swung round, then, and glared at him. “Is that not right, knave?”

  It was all theatrics. Chapuys would have laughed. This greenwood knitted his brows, then did exactly as I had hoped: he blurted out the truth. “There has been a chilling of relations, since the Emperor has failed to recognize—”

  “Aha! Yes! The Emperor always ‘fails to recognize.’ He fails to recognize his nose at the end of his face, eh? Eh?”

  Marillac drew back. “Your Majesty?”

  “Your master is a fool,” I said casually, swinging round once more and sliding into my seat. “He knows he will have to do battle against me. Is he biding his time? Is that his game? Baiting me with foolishness like the money and support he sends the Scots, to incite them against me? Does he think I know not who prevented James from meeting me at York? Does he think I will forget the insult? Well? What does he think?”

  Marillac stared back.

  “Can you not speak for him? What sort of an ambassador are you, then? Have you no powers of representation? What, did you get no letters of instruction?”

  He was pitiful. Not even worth sparring with. This was not sport, it was cruelty.

  “Tell me this,” I finally said. “Is Francis in good health, or not?” I tried to make my tone gentle and disarming.

  “Indeed he is,” replied Marillac haughtily.

  Liar. I knew Francis was eaten up with the Great Pox, and it was beginning its deadly final assault on his mind.

  “I am grateful to you for being so truthful.” I smiled. “Francis is doubly blessed, then, in both his good health and his true representative. You may tell my brother of France that . . .” I had had a glib remark ready, but what came out was, “I hope we meet again on the plains of Ardes. Yes, if he would be willing, I would come again to the Val d’Or. No fantasy-palaces this time, no tournaments, merely . . . Francis, and myself. You will write him this?”

  “This very evening, Your Majesty.” The Frenchman bowed low.

  That evening what he wrote was, “I have to do with the most dangerous and cruel man in the world.” The double-dealing Frenchman! (And how did I know this? I had made use of Cromwell’s legacy: his spies and secret police. They served me well. I would not have formed them myself, but as they already existed . . . I had found them useful, and using them myself prevented others from using them against me.)

  Spies. There had always been spies. Julius Caesar had his, so ’tis said . . . although they must have been singularly ineffective, since they failed to warn him of the coming assassination. Spies were necessary, I suppose, to run a state. But I disliked the idea, the very fact of their being required.

  I preferred to believe I could read a man’s visage, could sum him up all by myself. I had realized the French ambassador lied. I did not truly need to have the contents of his letters espied, copied, and presented to me. It demeaned him and added nothing essential to my operating knowledge. But these new times required such machinations as a matter of course.

  My head was still pulsating. The emerald syrup had done little to dispel the discomfort. Evidently I had not taken enough. I poured a bit more into the medicinal beaker, and swallowed it.

  It was only a tiny bit, and yet within minutes I felt relieved of my symptoms. Why can but a little added to the dosage do that? There is so much physicians have yet to discover.

  At four o’clock the Scots envoy was to pay me a call. I sat and pulled out the lengthy chronology I had myself constructed of all our relations, going back to my father’s negotiations with James III, when he arranged my sister’s marriage. It had been a nasty history of betrayals and distrust on both sides. Why had the Scots steadfastly set their faces against us? We were their neighbours, we shared a common isle. Yet they preferred to ally themselves with France. When we fought France in 1513, they attacked us from the backside. When I sought a bride on the Continent, James V had entered the same contest and snatched Marie of Guise right from under my nose. And then there was the little matter of the York jilting.

  “The Earl of Arbroath,” announced the page. I seated myself just in time for the jaunty Earl, who strode in as if he always came to see the King of England.

  He was dressed in his formal Scots attire: yards and yards of sw
irling patterned wool, a dagger in his sock, a great overworked silver brooch holding a sash of some sort.

  Daggers were not permitted in my presence, since the Duke of Buckingham’s attempt on my life. I nodded to my Yeomen of the Guard, and they ceremoniously removed it.

  “Do you truly represent Scotland, Robert Stuart?” I inquired. “Is there a Scotland to represent?” That was the true question.

  “As much as it is in any man’s power to represent that glorious land, I do so.” His voice rang in the very mouldings of the ceiling.

  “Then you have many questions to answer, questions that have caused me sleepless hours.” I motioned him closer. “What is that tartan you wear?” I asked. It was a rather pleasing interweaving of shades and designs. Unsophisticated, but pleasing. “I notice it has white in it. Does that have a special significance?” I was curious.

  His great, fishlike mouth broke into a smile. “White is what we wear for dress occasions, woven into the rest of the cloth. It signifies that we will do no hard riding while wearing it. Riding would throw mud.”

  How primitive! How simple! Dark colours for riding. A stripe of white meaning, “There will be no riding, everything will be indoors and clean, upon my word of honour.”

  “Aye. I understand. Now, I would you answer me questions which are puzzling me about your master. The Scots King refused to meet with me in York, and I know not his mind. I have received no messages of any sort from him.”

  “He was afeared of kidnapping.”

  “Did he think me so little a man of my word?”