Although I did not suffer from that grave disorder, other aspects of my life concerned with that delicate element were all at odds. I continued on. How could I have overlooked him?
Because he was illegitimate. I had recognized him as mine; but he was not born in wedlock, which barred him from the succession.
I paced my chamber. I remember the sun was streaming in, making patterns on the floor which I disrupted as I passed through the hot golden shafts again and again. Did this truly prevent his becoming King, I wondered. Was there no precedent?
Margaret Beaufort had been the descendant of John of Gaunt’s bastard. There was talk that Owen Tudor had never properly married Queen Catherine. I disliked these examples, however, as they undermined my own claim to the throne. There had been William the Conqueror, of course, known as the Bastard. There was also doubt that Edward III was the son of Edward II. Most assumed he was the child of Queen Isabella’s lover, Mortimer. Richard III claimed that his brother Edward IV had been the son of a lover, sired while the good Duke of York was away fighting in France.
These were unsatisfactory examples, not apropos to my case. No, this would not do.
My son was my son! All knew him to be such. I could not confer legitimacy upon him. But I could confer titles upon him, make him noble, educate and prepare him for the throne and name him heir in my will. He was but six years old, and there was time to let the people know him and learn to love him, so that when the time came ...
I stopped stock-still. The answer had been before me all the time. Not a perfect answer, but an answer. I would make him Duke of Richmond, a semi-royal title. I would bring the boy to court. He must be hidden away in the country no longer.
Katherine would be unhappy. But she must recognize that only in this way could Mary be protected against self-seekers lusting after her throne. Our daughter deserved a better fate.
WILL:
One which she did not receive, alas. What Henry most feared has come to pass. The Spanish King Philip II saw Mary only as an opportunity to make England an appendage of Spain. He married her, pretending love; when she refused to put the entire English treasury and navy at his disposal, he left her and returned to Spain. She weeps and pines daily for him. She is the most unhappy of women.
XXXII
HENRY VIII:
There would be a formal investiture ceremony. Along with my son, I would elevate others: my cousin Henry Courtenay would become Marquis of Exeter; my nephew Henry Brandon, Charles and Mary’s nine-year-old son, would become Earl of Lincoln. I would make Henry, Lord Clifford, Earl of Cumberland; Sir Robert Radcliffe would become Viscount Fitzwalter, and Sir Thomas Boleyn, Viscount Rochford. (There are those who snicker at this last appointment, assuming it was made on Mary Boleyn’s merit. This is blatantly untrue—Sir Thomas had served me faithfully on many delicate diplomatic missions.)
WILL:
However skilled a diplomat he may have been, he cou, aststanding example. The man was quite clearly a sycophant, willing to sell his children for the highest title.
HENRY VIII:
It was held in June, 1525, at Wolsey’s magnificent palace, Hampton Court. Yes, it was finished at last, sitting on its banks of the river twenty miles upstream—a good six hours’ row—from London. Here the Thames had shrunk to a friendly, smaller stream, with only a slight rising and falling due to the tide. All around was green: green meadows, trees, flowering shrubs. The air seemed clear and purified ... like Eden itself?
HENRY VIII:
He dismounted, sliding off his beast like an ungainly sack of meal, and walked—waddled—slowly toward me.
“Your Majesty,” he said, bending as low as his girth would permit, “Hampton Court is yours.” He straightened and smiled, and I smiled back. All was proceeding according to form. I motioned to my men. But before I could do anything further, Wolsey held up his hands—great white things, like a fish’s underbelly.
“No, Your Majesty. What I said, I said truly. Hampton Court is yours.” He fumbled in his bosom, and all the while the morning sun glinted off the folds of his satin. At length he stopped and pulled out a scroll.
“It is yours, Your Majesty.” He came up to me and put it into my outstretched hand, making a great arc out of the motion.
It was a deed to Hampton Court. Affixed to it was an affidavit, signed and witnessed by two lawyers, that he was offering it as a gift to his sovereign.
I looked about me. All this—a gift? The strengthening sun hit the new red bricks, and already a heat was growing on them. They flamed against the clear June sky. Inside the compound were more apartments, two stories high, circling two inner courtyards. Wolsey’s triumph-piece. How could he give it away?
I was embarrassed. To refuse was an insult, to accept was to cause Wolsey great pain.
I lifted my head and tried to look at the throbbingly blue sky overhead, tried to think. But I got no further in my head-lifting than the row of elaborately decorated chimneys I glimpsed, tantalizingly, just beyond the outer courtyard. I wanted this place!
“Thank you, Wolsey,” I heard myself saying. “We accept your gift, with great thanks.”
His face did not change, nor betray any emotion: in that instant, my admiration of him leapt tenfold. A consummate master of dissimulation!
WILL:
A very bad example for Henry, and worse yet that he admired it. At that time, when Henry was presented with Hampton Court, his face was a looking-glass; all men could read by its reflection what passed in his mind. Within a few years he became the man who said, “Three may keep counsel, if two be away. And if I thought my cap knew my thinking, I would cast it into the fire.” By the end of his life, he could pass a pleasant evening with his wife, knowing he had just signed a warrant for her arrest the next day. Wolsey gave him his first instructions in the art of subterfuge, deceit, and acting—and as always, Henry soon surpassed his teacher.
HENRY VIII:
I tuife, reached out her hand to the boy and laid it on his little shoulder. She was still beautiful, and had that contented look one wears when one is cherished and in turn cherishes the cherisher. So she was happy with Brandon. Good.
In the front row of court personages I glimpsed Bessie Blount Tailboys, witnessing her son‘s—our son’s—triumph. She was still pretty, and her masses of blonde curls accentuated her healthy complexion. I looked at her and smiled. She returned the smile. There was nothing between us, nothing. How had we gotten this son? A miracle!
Now the others must come. Henry Brandon, my nine-year-old nephew, to be made Earl of Lincoln. He was big and boisterous and clumsy, like his father. I glanced once again at my son, standing so still and apart from the others, his face so grave ... no, Henry Brandon was different, cousins though they might be.
Then came Henry Courtenay, my first cousin. I elevated him from Earl of Devon to Marquis of Exeter. True, there had been suspicion of his family’s loyalty, at one time. But he had been guileless and eager for friendship. I remember his clear blue eyes; they looked straight into mine as I pronounced the words that changed his status. They were the color of a faded blue gown, and utterly without malice. I was to remember them years later, they were to haunt my sleep, when he was found to be a traitor. In my dreams they were always looking at me, and at the same time the sun beating down on my head, making rivulets of sweat trickle down my face. His face was clear and one would have thought him at Ultima Thule, so cool was he.
I wanted this over now. I was hot, uncomfortable, and hungry. I must confess I also looked forward to the sumptuous banquet I knew Wolsey would have prepared. His banquets were legendary, and each time he tried to surpass his last effort. Most important, it would be cool inside. The sun was a torch overhead.
There were only a few more. Henry, Lord Clifford, became Earl of Cumberland. Sir Thomas Manners, Lord Roos, became Earl of Rutland. The lowest-ranking ones were last: Robert Radcliffe, to become Viscount Fitzwalter, and Sir Thomas Boleyn, to become Viscount Rochford. As Sir Thoma
s came forward, I was conscious only of a deep relief that the ceremony was ending. As he approached, I glanced briefly toward his family assembled on the platform.
And then I saw her. I saw Anne.
She was standing a little apart from her mother and her sister Mary. She wore a gown of yellow satin and her black hair fell down over her bodice—thick and lustrous and (I somehow knew) with a perfume of its own. Her face was long, with a pale cast, and her body slender.
She was not beautiful. All the official ambassadorial dispatches, all the puzzled letters later written describing her, agree on that. She had nothing of the beauty I had come to expect of court women, none of the light, plump prettiness that honeyed one’s hours. She was wild and dark and strange, and my first awareness of her was that she was staring at me. As I looked back at her, sternly, she did not drop her eyes, as all good subjects are taught to do. Instead she continued staring, and there was odd malice in her eyes. I felt unreasoning fear, and then something else....
I was forced to attend to the ceremonious words and procedure transforming her father Thomas into a viscount, and then it was over, and we could retire to Wolsey’s Great Hall for the celebratory banquet.
Katherine said nothing and kept her eyes averted. It had been humiliating for her, I realized—v width="1em">“But I—”
“Clear the tables, Wolsey. More food will only make us stuporous when we once again face the heat.” I hoped that sounded reasonably logical.
“Yes, yes, of course.” He scurried away to do my bidding.
Now the hall was cleared and the guests began to mill about and talk—not the least about the King’s strange behaviour, first in elevating his bastard son, and then in cutting short the celebratory banquet.
There was no sign of her. No sign of a bright yellow dress among all those revellers, and I searched for yellow; I could see a yellow purse or sash or neckband from a hundred feet away. Yellow danced before my eyes like a mocking field of butterflies. But no one with long black hair in a yellow gown.
I was angry; I was bored; I wanted to be gone. I also felt stifled in the Great Hall. It was too low-ceilinged, and thereby oppressive. The windows did not admit enough light. This was not a confessional, it was a place for gaiety!
I must have light and air! What possessed Wolsey to build such a box? Was it to remind him of his priestly past? I shoved my way over to the side doors and pushed them open. Heat, like a living thing, poured in. It was hot as the Holy Land outside. Even the air was heavy, worse than that inside the Great Hall.
Then I saw them in the garden. I saw a yellow dress, and a slim young girl inside it; I saw her holding hands with a tall, gawky youth, and I saw her—her!—lean forward to kiss him. They were standing before the flower garden, and all about them were yellow flowers. Yellow dress, yellow flowers, hot yellow sun, even yellow dandelions at my feet. I slammed the door.
Wolsey came toward me, clutching a yellowed letter. “I thought you might like to read—”
I dashed it from his hands. “No!”
He was stricken. “But it is the history of the land of Hampton Court, when it was still called the Hospitallers’ Preceptory, and owned by the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem—”
Poor Wolsey! He had made a grand offering, and I had trampled on it. I retrieved the letter. “Later, perhaps.” I swung open the door again; once again the sultry air of a foreign land swam in. The flower garden, some fifty feet away, shimmered in the light and heat. The yellow-clad figure was still there, and the tall boy was no longer letting her kiss him; he was embracing her. They stood very still; only the air danced around them.
“Who is that?” I said, as if I had seen them for the first time.
“Anne Boleyn, Your Majesty,” he said. “And Henry Percy. Young Percy is heir to the Earl of Northumberland. A fine lad; he’s in my service. His father sent him to learn under me. He and Boleyn‘s—pardon me, Sire, Viscount Rochford’s—daughter are betrothed. Or rather, the betrothal will be announced once Percy’s father comes south. You know how difficult it is for those on the border to travel—”
“I forbid it!” I heard myself saying.
Wolsey stared.
“I said I forbid the marriage! It cannot take place!”
“But, Your Majesty, they have already—”
“I do not carnd B1; Ah, but years later how I was to wish I had allowed him to complete that particular sentence! “I said I will not permit this marriage! It is ... unsuitable.”
“But, Your Majesty ... what shall I tell Percy?”
They were still in the garden, hugging. Now he was toying with her hair. A grin spread over his silly face. Or was it a grin? The rising heat made it difficult to see.
“You, who have no trouble telling kings and emperors and popes what to do?” I began to laugh again, too loudly. “You cannot speak to a—a”—I thought hard for the image the hateful Percy boy evoked in me—“a silly, long-legged bird—a stork?”
I slammed the door and shut out the vision and the heat. Wolsey was discomfited.
“A boy? You fear to face a boy?” I taunted him. “And yet you would have been Pope?”
“Yes, Your Majesty. I’ll tell him.”
Now I was surrounded by the press of people. Uncomfortable inside, tormented outside. Clearly, I must leave. The banqueting hall was a vise, pressing down upon me. Without thinking, I said, “I’ll have it all pulled down, and put up a new Great Hall.” Wolsey looked even more unhappy. Obviously something had gone wrong in his plans to impress me.
Agitated and not myself at all, I pulled out the deed to Hampton Court. “I thank you for your gift,” I said. “But you may stay here as long as you live. It is still yours.”
He looked like a stricken calf spared just as he approaches the slaughterhouse. (Why could I think only of animal images that day?) He had made his gesture and it had been duly registered, yet he did not have to pay the price.
“Thank you, Your Majesty.” He bowed low.
“Break the betrothal,” I said, pushing past him.
As I rode toward the river, where the royal barge waited, I became uncomfortably aware of the yellow marigolds bordering the courtyard. And once I was on board, bankside yellow buttercups mocked me all the way back to London, as they lay bright and open under the new summer sun.
A month passed. I heard nothing of the matter from Wolsey, did not see the new Viscount Rochford or his daughter. It was high summer, my usual time for sport and athletic practise, yet I found myself unable to lose myself in either. Instead I was sunk in self-evaluation and gloom.
I thought: I am now thirty-five years old. At my age my father had fought for, and won, a crown. He had ended the wars. He had produced a son and a daughter. He had put down rebellions, trounced pretenders. What have I done? Nothing that posterity would note. When latter-day historians wrote my history, they would say nothing beyond “he succeeded his father, Henry VII....”
I was a man imprisoned, feeling helpless, borne along against my will. True, I could command banquets and even armies, and order men to transfer from this post to that—it yet remained a fact that I was a prisoner in the truest sense. In my marriage, in my childlessness, in what I could and could not do. Would Father have been ashamed of me? What would he have done under my circumstances? Incredibly, I longed to talk with him, consult him.
Alternating with theary moods were acute longings to see Mistress Boleyn. Over and over I pictured her as she stood on the platform (I did not care to think of her in the garden with Percy), until the actual picture in my mind began to fade like a garment left too long to dry in the sun. I had thought of her so much I could no longer see her in my mind.
Clearly, I must see her again. To what end? That I did not ask myself. For yet another fading picture? No. That I knew. If I saw her again, it would not be for a brief glimpse, but for—what?
I sent for Wolsey. His discreet diplomatic summaries had arrived at my work room in a never-ending stream, but there wa
s no mention of the personal commission I had given him. Had he failed to execute it?
Wolsey arrived promptly on the hour. He was, as usual, perfectly groomed and garbed and perfumed. By the time he reached me in my inner room, he was alone and free of his ever-present attendants, of which he had as many as I.
“Your Majesty,” he said, bending low, as always. He straightened and awaited my questions on Francis, Charles, the Pope.
“Henry Percy—” I began, then found myself suddenly embarrassed. I did not want Wolsey to know how important this was to me. “The unfortunate affair between the Earl of Northumberland’s son and Viscount Rochford’s daughter—I trust it has been terminated. I told you to attend to it.”
He moved toward me—surprisingly swift for someone so bulky—and made motions for me to come closer.
“Yes. It is over,” he said confidentially. “Although it was quite a stormy end. I called young Percy to me and told him how unseemly it was for him to have entangled himself with a foolish girl like Mistress Boleyn—”
By this time he was at my side, breathing heavily. Did I wince when he referred to Anne as a “foolish girl”? I noted his eye upon me.
“—without permission from his father. In fact, I said”—here he drew himself up to full height, and puffed up like a pig’s bladder—“‘ I myself know that your father will be mightily displeased, as he has arranged another and much more suitable betrothal for you.’ Then the lad turned pale and looked as awkward as a child.... Your Majesty, are you unwell?” Wolsey solicitously rushed to me as I took a seat in the nearest chair, albeit shakily.
The Autobiography of Henry 8 Page 18