The Autobiography Of Henry VIII

by Margaret George

  “ ‘Lead us not into temptation,’ ” Cranmer intoned, “ ‘but deliver us from evil, from the gate of hell.’ ” He sprinkled the coffin down in its depths, its dark, forsaken depths. “ ‘Rescue his soul, O Lord. May he rest in peace.’ ”

  The paid gravedigger came forward and threw a spadeful of clods and dirt into the hole. An instant, and then it hit and gave back a distant echo.

  “ ‘O God, Whose nature is always to have mercy and to spare, we humbly beseech You on behalf of the soul of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, whom You have bidden to depart out of this world: that You would not deliver him into the hands of the enemy, nor forget him forever, but command him to be received by the holy angels, and taken to Paradise, his home, that as he had put his faith and hope in You, he may not undergo the pains of hell, but possess everlasting joys.’ ”

  Pretty words. Reassuring words. But had Brandon ever truly had a relationship with God? We had never spoken of it. And it was my fault, my fault—I had not shared the Light of Christ with him. I had had the Spirit, but hoarded it in my own breast, whilst we talked of campaigns and loves and all earthly things.

  I had sent Brandon to hell, unless some other kinder soul had brought him Christ’s love. For knightly deeds were not enough, unless they were done for the glory of God. And Brandon had not done them for that.

  O God! To have the truth and not share it is as grave a sin as to be lacking it altogether!

  Forgive me, Charles! I begged. I did not know—and I did not always know what I did know. Even now, I am not sure—what is truth and what is intrusion upon another’s private conscience?

  Cranmer stood before the open hole.

  “ ‘Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of His great mercy to take unto Himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground: earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust: in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through Our Lord Jesus Christ: who shall change our vile body, that it may be like unto His glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby He is able to subdue all things to Himself.’ ”

  The Duke’s household chamberlains came forward and broke their staves and threw them into the pit, signifying that their master was departed forever.

  Now the grave was ready to be filled in.

  “Let us now pray as Christ hath taught us,” Cranmer said, and led us in the Lord’s Prayer.

  Out in the dazzling, hot sunshine, we blinked. We were still alive; that was the shock, not the brightness or the incongruity. Inside, all was stopped and cold. But outside, all the while, life was burgeoning. Insects attacked us and bit us. Flowers drooped from the heat of the sun; the attendant had forgotten to water them the evening before. The sheer busyness of life seemed a sacrilege. We were immediately sucked back into its demands.

  Outside, people gathered in little knots and began talking—the more frivolous the subject, the better. There is a great need for that after a funeral, and I had no doubt that many would engage in the marital duty as soon as they reasonably could. It almost seemed to be a part of the obligation—or perhaps the rebellion against death.

  You see how alive we are? As long as we do this, you cannot touch us. This certifies how alive we are. Nothing of your domain, death.

  In the Great Hall of Windsor Castle, the funeral feast awaited. I had ordered the finest cakes and meats to be provided, and the best ale from Kent. The traditional little funeral cakes from Suffolk were provided by the household baker from Brandon’s estate of Westhorpe. He had made each one exquisitely, with the ducal arms in miniature on the lid of the pie.

  “To honour my master,” he had said, when presenting them. They must have taken him days.

  “He is honoured,” I assured him, “in servants like you.”

  I eyed them now, neatly arranged upon the royal gold platters. Why are exquisite foodstuffs part of death? The living expect to be fed, even though they have done no labour.

  The hall was filling up now, as the mourners came in out of the sharp noon sun. The two factions of the Privy Council grouped about their rallying points—Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey—like eddies of a whirlpool, black cloaks turning slowly about their centres.

  About the Seymour centre there were William Petre and William Paget, the principal secretaries; Tom Seymour himself, of course; and important, but missing, was John Dudley, serving now in Boulogne as captain.

  Swirling and circling around the hub of their wheel, Henry Howard, were Bishop Gardiner; the Duke of Norfolk; and Thomas Wriothesley—the conservative spokes.

  When had these factions arisen? There had not been factions when I had had Wolsey. Perhaps factions were part of the New Order, something that came along with the New Men. Certainly they had existed alongside of Cromwell. He had been the darling of one faction and the curse of the other. Now both parties snapped and snarled at one another like rabid dogs in August. What was the purpose of factions? To steer the sovereign in one direction or another. But this sovereign would not be steered—surely they knew that.

  Then it must be another sovereign they sought to control.

  Edward.

  They foresaw my death, and looked ahead to the control of Edward.

  It was my funeral they celebrated now; mine after which they congregated and ate their meat pies and laid their plans. This was how it would be. This was its true rehearsal. It was one thing for me to realize this; it was another for my enemies to do so.

  Damn them! I would stay alive as long as possible, thwart their plans!

  In truth, there was no one fit to rule in my stead. There must needs be a balance between old and new, the selfsame balance as existed inside my head. Therefore, therefore—I must appoint both factions to act as Protectorate Council for Edward. They would cancel out the bad aspects of each other. But, oh! so cumbersome . . .

  I looked at them. They were such small men. The meek shall inherit the earth. But what is the translation, the exact translation, of meek? Surely it is not “colourless,” “shortsighted,” “timid.” Such were the men who strove to guide England.

  I walked about the guests, smiling and pleasant. My person was now so large that dragging it about was an effort for me and meant that I could address only the person standing directly before me. I spoke to Brandon’s widow, Katherine, who, although tear-streaked, seemed reconciled to “the hand of the Almighty.” I talked with my nieces, Frances and Eleanor: pretty lasses, and seemingly healthy and intelligent. They had married and had children already—unlike my own childless, bastard daughters. . . .

  The sun streamed through the high-placed windows of the Great Hall. I took a seat—a great mourner’s bower, all decked in black—and watched. I felt dead myself, and my whole being ached. There was but a little way to go, and it must needs be alone.

  Kate was talking with Tom Seymour. I saw them, far down on the floor below. (Is this how hawks see?) I wondered what they were saying. I watched her face, and it was a face I had never seen. She loved Tom Seymour.

  I knew it, and even could say the words to myself. She loves Tom Seymour.

  Now I indeed felt buried in the crypt with Brandon. All he had experienced, as a true knight . . . and yet never, never had a woman he loved, loved another man first and thoroughly. He had died without that wound.

  Well, our wounds are our selves.

  I swung myself down from my seat, addressed the company, and went to my private apartments.

  But not before I began to see strange horns sprouting from the hired mourners’ cloaks, shimmering and glowing.

  CXXX

  All this took place over a year ago. And what has happened since then?

  In regard to France, prudence dictated a settlement, although God knows I have no love either of prudence or of the French. But for the time being it seemed wise to negotiate something, and so I permitted French envoys to come to London and draw up a peace treaty. That was after New Year’s,
and there were festivities honouring them, although they were faint and lacklustre compared to similar events in the past. Oh, how we used to celebrate treaties! I remember the Treaty of London in 1518, when Mary was betrothed to the French Dauphine, and Wolsey so happy, and Katherine of Aragon so glum. And then . . . but I ramble. Yes, there once were bright festivities. But brightness has dimmed—or perhaps my eyes can see beyond the lustre to the hollowness now, and so I spare myself the expense and participation altogether. Thus I allowed the French to buy back Boulogne for two million crowns over an eight-year period. It is worth more than that to England, but only if we could truly defend and victual her on a permanent basis. I tried to do that, and failed. Now I had to give her up, like a wife I could not keep.

  Wife. Kate . . . ah, Kate. A wife I could not keep. Well, no more of that.

  My health continues to improve. I have grown a bit more unwieldy, but the corner has been turned, and as my leg is now completely well—no more attacks!—I hope to begin exercising shortly, and regain my youthful shape. It is still there, hidden, and I will bring it forth, now that my illnesses are past.

  Even though I am completely well, daily I work on my will, setting forth the secret governing council for Edward, selecting and culling names, then discarding them. It is a great labour. No one is to know of my plan. I keep them all in the dark. There are surprises in my choices! I outsmart my councillors. They think they know me, but they do not. I have hidden my papers well, inside . . . no, I will not write it here. But I mean for the “changers” to be checked and balanced by the “stayers.”

  That is why I had to chop off the head of the serpent, the Howard serpent, Henry. He meant to coil round my Edward, imprisoning him. Venomous, ugly thing. I stopped him.

  But all is well in the kingdom now. I have kept my naughty factions balanced and soothed, and they have caused no further problems.

  Only the voices in my head, the annoying visions, have proved a problem. Occasionally I have done things I could not remember, but always I have rectified them as soon as possible, and no harm has been done.

  Oh, yes—there was that fool who just recently (yesterday, or was it longer ago?) asked me what my earliest memory was. I was cross with him. I must send for him and make it up. Those sorts of things, those tidying-up things, occupy me much of late. Yet majesty must always be gracious.

  It is time-consuming, making up for the voices in the head. But they are growing less, and then I will have more time to attend to the things dear to my heart. I have waited all my life to do so. At last it is almost at hand. O, to be just a man!

  CXXXI

  WILL:

  And there it ends, just as the King himself did, some few days later. King Henry VIII died when he was fifty-six years old, in the thirty-eighth year of his reign, expecting to live and reign much longer.

  He was never the same after Brandon’s death. Despite the brave words in his journal, he was melancholy and ill—either in body or in spirit—for most of the time remaining to him.

  The things to which he referred—did he honestly see them as such? If so, his mind was so distorted that he was truly no longer himself. Here are the facts, as every Englishman knows, but perhaps you do not, on the Continent:

  The King’s health was abominable. His heart began to fail, often beating wildly and erratically, leaving him short of breath and dizzy.

  At the same time (I hesitate to write it thus) he stopped making normal piss, so that his body could not rid itself of its water. The physicians collected his urine daily and studied it, could give it a name—“urine of dropsy,” very wise!—but were helpless to treat it. This dropsy puffed him up to grotesque proportions and rendered normal movement impossible. Unable to walk much of the time, he had to be hauled about in his palaces on a specially equipped litter, and raised and lowered into his bed by mechanical devices.

  His heart thumped like a sick bird while his body ballooned with water. And there was no treatment; it was a common way to die, but it had no name. Except “old age.” (Yet not all the old are afflicted thus.)

  The fluid, and the swelling throughout his entire body, pressed upon his brain—and that, together with his “visitations,” made him erratic and violent and suspicious. When the pressure was especially bad (and one could always tell by a simple glance at his face; puffiness there meant puffiness in his mind as well), he turned against those dearest to him. He gave orders for both Cranmer and his beloved Kate to be arrested and sent to the Tower—upon the urging of their enemies, who watched for the telltale swelling of their sovereign’s face as sailors watch the sky. Coming to himself again, he rescinded those orders and confounded their ill-wishers. But it was an ugly time for innocent and guilty alike.

  The prestige and influence of the Protestants increased day by day in England, despite the King’s attempts to hold the country to a Catholicism without the Pope: a vision of his own, shared by nobody else. The true Catholics hoped for a restoration of some sort, if not under Edward (who was hopelessly smeared with Protestantism), then perhaps with Mary. The Protestants rubbed their hands with glee that they would soon come into their own. Anne Askew, the “vision-visited-virgin,” as Henry described her, was a sacrifice of the Protestants, to prove that the New Religion could produce martyrs as valiant as the much-vaunted early Christians and their bouts with the lions. She was brave, and proved their point. She was the last religious execution in England under King Henry. She was also not a virgin, as veneration would require, but a married woman whose husband repudiated her for her religious fanaticism.

  The death of “the most foolish proud boy that is in England”—Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey—quite broke Henry, in spite of the toss-away words in his journal. I know; I saw the agony he went through in admitting that Howard was indeed a traitor, bent on usurping his ancient familial rights against Edward’s new pedigree. What were Tudors and Seymours (diluted scions of Edward III, two hundred years ago) against the Howards, lords of the North from time out of mind? So, Henry Howard must pay the price of his treason, must go to his death, after his arrogant statements about the Howards being “meet to rule the Prince after the King’s death”; his adding royal arms to his escutcheon; his obsessive commissioning of paintings of himself with cryptic messages about “H” coming to rule over “T,” and “H. Rex” beneath a broken column, and so on. Such a fine mind; such a stupid man.

  Both Mary and Elizabeth were reinstated in the line of succession, yet remained illegitimate—a neat bit of legal juggling by their father to increase their rights and desirability as wives without compromising his belief that he had never been legally wed to their mothers. He loved those daughters, and wanted them to have as full and happy lives as possible. (A love sparsely returned on their parts. If the unnatural act reputed to Queen Mary is true, then indeed King Lear was well served by Goneril and Regan in comparison. To curse and desecrate her father’s skeleton . . . !)

  As to the French, the Scots, the Emperor, the Pope—well, as you know, Francis died directly after Henry, although he rallied long enough to send a teasing, insulting note to his fond old rival before both expired. The Emperor resigned his crowns, the Netherlands one in 1555, the Spanish one in 1556, and retired to a Spanish monastery. The Pope finally led his General Council at Trent, which hardened, rather than softened, the position of the Catholic Church against the Reformers. A battle line was drawn, and the Church seemed ready to fight rather than compromise. Why, it was almost as if she had principles!

  The Scots actually show signs of succumbing to the Reformed faith, which would change the entire character of their realm, in relation to both England and the Continent (requiring them to find some Scriptural excuse for their money-grubbing). It is true that Mary Queen of Scots adheres to the Old Faith; but increasingly she is at odds with her Council and countrymen and isolated in this matter of religion, so that she has to import foreigners, Italians and French and such, to buoy her up in her faith. A surprising turn of events, would
you not agree—although you hold that the Lord directs the Protestant victory?

  As for the King’s will: what a troublesome document that turned out to be! He used it to control his councillors, waving it over their heads like a schoolmaster with a whip. Do this, and (perhaps) I shall instate you: do not, and you shall (probably) be omitted from my will. He kept it in a secret place, amending it constantly (oh! he was old: only old men act so!), tut-tutting over it. The price he paid for this old man’s—and tyrant’s—luxury was that upon his death it was unsigned, almost undiscovered, and questionably legal.

  Those constant games that he played with his courtiers led them to play games with him. Hide the document—hide the news. Dangle me—and I dangle you. Divide and rule—unite and outsmart. The last few months were so Byzantine I felt that Suleiman would have been perfectly at home amongst us. Intrigues, flatterers, panderers, betrayers all stalked the corridors and Long Gallery at Whitehall, where the King lay fighting the Angel of Death. Factions in the Privy Council waited to seize power, sure that they could trounce their adversaries. When the old King was dead, when the breath was out of him at last . . . then they would move, sweep into power.

  But the Almighty had other ideas, did He not? Little Edward, Henry’s pride: his reign was like a shadow, insubstantial and quickly over. . . .

  And all their machinations and arrangements went down like dust, and they had to flee before Mary, Queen Mary, the Catholic angel of vengeance.

  Now need I set it down, what Henry’s death and interment were.

  The King died on January twenty-eighth, 1547, at two o’clock in the morning. He had been quite ill since autumn, and by mid-January he took to his chamber in Whitehall, from which he never emerged. He was confused and comatose, so he was spared the lengthy “death watch” that his father had endured, with smiling, courtiers and daily routines. There was no daily routine for him. He knew not when it was day and when it was night, but lived in a world of his own seeing and making. There were moments of lucidity; even an audience with the Imperial and French ambassadors on January sixth. They remembered it well, but it is doubtful that Henry did. It was a great effort to get him dressed that day, as I recall. He was eager to attend to them and make plans for a future conference. He selected his clothes and jewels and, hoisted onto his feet, walked stiffly out to receive the envoys in his Presence Chamber.