“It was a revolution in words, all right,” said the distinguished man of letters.
Having overheard Chaucer’s choice remark, James VI and I was again back among them: “Our famous poet is correct,” said the double-faced king. “My creature bishops wouldn’t have liked to admit it at the time but Tyndale’s concept of ancient Israel in the Bible—his and everyone else’s—as he had translated half the Old Testament and all of the New into English—provided the basis for English for the next 400 years. Where there was no word for a Hebrew concept, Tyndale invented English words—and phrases.”
“To Tyndale, English was nearer to Greek and colloquial Hebrew than it was to Latin,” Chaucer further explained. With a gesture, he drew the lion and the unicorn to him.
“Where there was no word for an English idea, he invented a word—for example,” said Chaucer who then paused. The lion put on a pair of spectacles and said in BBC-received pronunciation, ‘scapegoat’ and ‘castaway’." Then the unicorn said in a Scots-light Edinburgh accent, ‘granddaughter’ and ‘busybody’.
Chaucer added, “What we may think of as the welcome plainness and simplicity of the King James Bible were not praised initially—not until simplicity was considered a major virtue. However, its old-fashioned solemnity was liked from the very first.”
With that, he fed the raggedy lion a small carcass. As the lion licked his lips with a reluctant show of deference, it said, “James was a crafty political animal, all right. He censored some of the Bible. He ensured that the word ‘tyrant’, which appeared 400 times in the Geneva bible, was eliminated from his King James Bible. He did this to remove any temptation readers might have to compare the unruly self-serving kings of the Old Testament with him.”
At that, the lion took off his spectacles and yawned again. Stung by his bad breath, Georgie said spontaneously, “What a pong!”
While he still had the youngsters’ attention, James VI wanted to broaden the subject from the Bible: "Like many a budding author, I would like to say that my treatises on witches and on the pernicious habit of smoking tobacco—turned me into a scholar of great repute.
“For my other greatest achievement? Well, it’s all around you in Westminster Abbey. Would you like a clue? Let me talk you through it.”
James VI pointed to the workmen’s tackle lying on the abbey floor. Ginny guessed that James had been scouting out suitable locations and shapes for royal graves and hammering markers for the sites into the floor.
James I said, “How do you keep a lasting record of your family? A box of old photos hidden in the attic? Framed photos plastered around your living room to bore the neighbours? Hurried snapshots—‘selfies’—on your mobile phones or tablets?”
The Scottish unicorn, anxious to emphasise its importance at the English court, took over: “Well, think how the kings and queens of old did it.” The unicorn then adjusted its waistcoat (or vest) stylishly to underline its pleasure. “They made their subjects aware of their place in history and the right of their families to be there. How? The giant expressionless statues of the pharaohs? Gaudily painted and idealised statues of the emperors in ancient Rome?”
Determined that the unicorn should not steal any more lines, James I said, “Formalised tomb effigies of the medieval kings—‘les rois maudits’ of ‘la plus belle France du monde’—my own Angevin ancestors here, there and everywhere?”
“What about a family tree for immortality?” said James VI giving another clue. “The tree should grow upwards like a mighty oak. But most family trees in print grow downwards with descendants from some patriarch at the top. Then there is a series of descending ledges for successive generations, each linked by spikes, plain or dotted, and a series of numbers—1, 2, 3—to indicate serial marriages—of which there are many. You don’t need me to tell you that.”
“And if you can’t provide a picture but you need to explain it in printed words, how difficult is that?” said James I. “You can see the outsize problem your William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe had in explaining how tangled Lancaster versus York family relationships among sons and grandsons of the mighty Edward III led to the horrible civil war in the acid reign of poor old Henry VI.”
James VI picked up a ball of string from among the work tackle and started pulling at it as if to demonstrate both the twisted and snarled explanations of Shakespeare and his own perfect answer to the question, “How long is a piece of string?” As the double-dealing king spoke, he pulled and twisted the ball of string this way and that until his four hands were trapped in a cat’s cradle of convoluted crochet.
Putting two wrinkled fingers in his mouth, James VI blew out a whistle. Immediately, three charming boy gardeners came scurrying in, dragging a wheelbarrow containing some very ugly boulders and some very tiny pebbles. At a sign from James VI, they began laying out the boulders at the top of the chancel to represent Edward III and his several sons.
“This great boulder represents the mighty King Edward III,” announced James I.
“And these seven smaller boulders below on the second (imaginary) line represent Edward’s seven sons, beginning with one for Edward, the Black Prince. (By the way, he’s now in Canterbury Cathedral). And so on. See.”
The darling little boy gardeners followed the first boulders with other smaller boulders for Edward III’s various grandsons and their wives; then pebbles for the great grandchildren. Before the gardeners had even finished setting out all the stones, James I stopped them with a gesture and said to his new audience, “Is this a successful way of staging a kings’ family tree on a royal stage—turning the characters into stones and pebbles and laying them out in order? It takes forever and most of you have already gone to sleep.”
At another sign from the king, the gardeners, now assisted by lesser flora and fauna heraldic devices, scooped the boulders and pebbles back into the wheelbarrow. They dragged it off, clattering along as they trundled it away.
“No,” said James I. "You see I had to find something permanent to play the Stuart bagpipe in your ears and keep it lodged there. How did I do it? Well, the means were at hand. Once again, he indicated the builder’s tackle on the ground. Clever Ginny knew she had guessed correctly.
“By planting family graves in a particular order with Henry VII and his wife, Elizabeth of York, first and his descendants afterwards, we tell visitors all the way from here to infinity who was what and who was supreme,” said James I.
James VI insisted, “I wanted another Mary—my own much-lamented mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, dug up from her grave in Peterborough Cathedral and moved centre stage to emphasise my direct line from Henry VII.”
"You’ve heard the expression ‘written in stone’? Well what I planned was revisionist history written in stone with everything linked to the burial site of Henry VII. I wanted this because burial there would underline my combined Plantagenet, Tudor and Stuart legitimacy.
“I also had to move Elizabeth I from the tomb of my grandfather to a new and splendid tomb. When I say ‘splendid’, I mean splendid. The new sculpture for her tomb was by Maximillian Colt with some details by Nicholas Hilliard. The image of Elizabeth was modelled on her death effigy by John Colt—the said Maximillian’s brother. But by shovelling the discredited Mary I underneath Elizabeth, I imply the sterile dead end of both Mary and Elizabeth Tudor. After all, they didn’t have any children. I didn’t want them in the way, queening it over us and queering my pitch—so to speak. I needed to concentrate English minds. Don’t be surprised.”
James I continued, “This is how I became the king of queens.”
James VI added, “To underscore my point, I gave Mary I and Elizabeth I a joint religious plaque: ‘Partners both in throne and grave, here rest we two sisters, Elizabeth and Mary, in the hope of the Resurrection’.”
Revealing his mean streak James I added, “It was my private joke: no one reading the inscription can decide which of these two demonic sisters would be more offended by these words.”
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He sniggered most indecorously, Ginny thought. Having heard all this and digested some of it, the two youngsters became even more suspicious of James VI and I. They now saw the two Jameses’ attempts to be cordial with little flickering smiles in a sinister light.
Geoffrey Chaucer, however, supplied the verdict of history itself: “James had planned to displace and supplant Elizabeth I but his strategy of shuffling the tombs around had the opposite effect from what he intended. For one thing, an engraving of Elizabeth I’s new tomb was widely circulated. It took pride of place in many parish churches across the land as something to wonder at. Elizabeth’s reputation now soared and has remained higher than that of most kings and all queens.”
James guessed that his American guests now distrusted him and he was getting ready to put them in their place.
The little party now noticed a kindly old man in threadbare clothes and wearing a nightcap curled up and asleep in an Anglo Saxon chair.
“Is he having what the English call ‘forty winks’?” asked Georgie.
Recognising him as Henry III (whom she had met briefly) and noting his poor clothes, Ginny asked with concern, “Will he catch cold?”
“Oh, no. He’s dreaming, quite happily about you,” said James VI. “After all, you’re only a figment of his imagination.”
“You’re nothing,” continued James I. “A mere nothing, do you hear!”
He said this so loudly and with such contempt that Ginny said, “Don’t shout. You’ll wake King Henry.”
“What on earth is the point in your talking about waking him?” James VI said testily. “You’re only a passer-by in his dream. Neither you nor your brother are real human beings.”
Ready to protect her brother against outsiders, Ginny said without even trying to disguise her impatience with the two-faced king, “If I’m a figment of the old gentleman’s fevered imagination, what are you then—two conjoined dwarf intelligences—the wisest fools in Christendom? I don’t think so. You just told me you didn’t even write the book named after you. You’d best stick with your tobacco and your witches.”
To have the last word, James VI changed tack, saying. “I don’t think I should like America.”
“Here we go again,” thought Ginny who was thoroughly rattled but now mightily glad of her father’s previous advice. I suppose that’s because we have no ruins, no curiosities."
“No ruins,” replied James VI with glee. “You have your, ‘All men are created evil’—isn’t that what slave owners wrote in your Declaration of Independence? Or was it ‘created equal’?”
But if James VI expected James I to follow him with another putdown about ‘No curiosities’, he was in for a disappointment. James I (after whom the early settlement Jamestown was named) was hardly likely to denigrate America. Sensing this, Ginny recaptured the initiative in the puny war of words.
“And another thing,” she said with a smirk, “if I’m a figment of King Henry III’s poor old mind and you’re standing here before me as bold as brass—but not nearly so well polished—then you must be the figment of a figment, less than an atom, less than a neutron—two disappearing, shrinking men waiting in fear for their confrontation with a greedy outsize spider named the Alternative Truth, the Fake Truth and Nothing Like the Truth!”
And with that parting shot, Ginny clicked her fingers at the supposed royal double nothingness. She clicked her fingers so fiercely a second time that she woke Henry III who said as if he had never been asleep at all, “Did I hear castanets? Are we going to have a Spanish dance? Let’s begin with a fandango.”
Livid as they were at the barefaced audacity of the American girl, there was nothing the two Jameses could do but slink away to get ready for the kings’ secret ceremony. With more wit than he himself had ever thought he had in him, Henry III said, “You must excuse them. I expect they have other appointments of a similar nature in the vicinity.”
Ginny smiled with quiet satisfaction—almost as if she had been awarded a royal sign of approval. Select visitors like Georgie and herself were somehow important to the strange kings and queens. By their very presence, visitors to the abbey validated the kings: they made them real. The royal stage could not exist without the audience. The regal actors were only alive when they had an audience to play to. What did this indicate?
4 KINGS’ REVENGE
CORONATION EXERCISES
Outside the abbey Big Ben, the great clock of Parliament, struck twelve for midnight.
“Ceremony! Ceremony!”
Out came this cry, ever widening like a crescendo. It seemed there were far more kings and queens around than Ginny and Georgie knew about. The pageant about to be played out existed to meet the sovereigns’ need for royal togetherness as if they were social animals—just like their subjects.
The sovereigns milling around started dressing one another. The nave of the abbey had been turned into a temporary dressing room. What surprised the young Americans was not seeing the sovereigns putting on their ceremonial clothes but what lay underneath their garments. The kings and queens were incomplete, missing some external and internal body parts that had been removed before burial. Ginny remembered that Henry III had wanted his heart buried alongside his Angevin ancestors in Fontevraud in Anjou. And as Henry V had confirmed to Ginny, his organs had been removed and placed in a casket in Fosses.
Looking at these incomplete figures was like looking at modern metal sculptures with artistically exaggerated or diminished limbs or with elegant holes in their bodies. The kings and queens were as oblivious to the youngsters’ surprise as they were unmindful of their own missing parts.
“We were so used to even our most private functions being the objects of constant attention in life that we are still completely unselfconscious about dressing up and dressing down,” Mary Tudor told Georgie helpfully. “Even cross dressing,” she added.
The dressing up and adjusting of cloaks and gowns, doublets and hose, and belts and garters went on for some time among the monarchs’ charmed circle—a blaze of Technicolor reds, blues and different hues of gold and white. As the kings adjusted their ceremonial clothes and accessories, Ginny noticed that among them there was no difference between self-scrutiny to see that things were in order and adoring self-approbation.
“Look, Georgie,” she said. “It’s as if they’re saying, ‘Hey, look me over. I’m special’. They must have been a nightmare for artists painting their portraits.”
“They’re not all like that,” Georgie replied. “Look over there.”
Ginny saw that Georgie meant poor Henry III, who was fussing over his threadbare clothes without doing anything to improve them.
“No,” she agreed.
“Once again, do I have the honour of addressing King Henry III?” Ginny asked the forlorn king.
“If you call this muddle a-dressing,” answered King Henry. “I can’t get it right. Please don’t look at me. I’m such a mess. I just can’t dress for success. I’m an embarrassment sure enough.”
“He’s got that right,” Georgie said.
Ginny gave Georgie a sharp look and then said to the king, “I’ll try and help you, your majesty. Let’s set your cloak straight. It’s all over pins and needles. It will never sit right if you pin one side and forget the other.”
“It’s out of sorts. It gave me no end of trouble today. My dear son is too busy with his own robes to help me,” the king continued, almost tearfully. “When my mother dies, I’ll give you the job.”
Ginny was not sure if this remark was intended as a kindness or a snide reproof. She noticed that poor Henry’s hair was tousled and matted. Its greasy strands had got a modern brush entangled with it—a brush that Ginny now thought he must have taken from the abbey vestry.
“Let me disentangle the poor brush.”
“I think it’s hair from a fox’s tail,” said the king absentmindedly. Sniffing the wooden handle, he said, “Basil,” and added playfully, “it’s a basil brush.” Sensing that
Ginny might want to take it from him, he concluded peevishly, “While I hold it tight, they can’t airbrush me out of history.”
Changing tack King Henry said, “Anyway, it’s perplexing—waking up in the middle of the night and then having to go backwards in time to entertain you despite our having jet lag. But there is one advantage. Our memory works both ways—forwards as well as backwards. What happened after us is our future but it’s your past.”
Ginny was confused by this conundrum. She was more interested in appraising Henry’s many badges and devices. Henry III wore the sprig of broom from his grandfather (Henry II) plus a star and crescent, an escarbuncle of eight radiating rods or spokes from a centre. Four of them made a cross and another four made a saltire (a diagonal cross) with a jewel at the centre. The youngsters guessed Henry III was to act as master of ceremonies in the forthcoming ceremony yet everything about him was shabby.
Just beyond the leading kings and queens before Henry III, there formed an assembly of the sovereigns’ familiar badges. These symbols and emblems were courtly animals brought to life: barking bucks, snooty swans, blooming roses both red and white, and, dotted here and there, other surprising insignia such as an outraged but diminutive sun shining sulkily at being eclipsed by earthly animals. These attendants were all in a yellowy Eastman Color.
The animals pranced and strutted as they assembled, heads held high as if they were thoroughbred horses on display before a royal race at Ascot. To the left of Richard II, his white hart with its glistening antlers toddled along. To the left of Henry V was his superior Lancastrian swan with a small coronet around its elegant neck. Henry’s humble antelope trotted meekly, pulling the stock eradiated behind by a gold chain.
The royal roses were bickering. The three white roses of York were sniping at the outer petals of the three red Lancastrian roses. Four bigger red-and-white Tudor roses tried scolding the smaller Plantagenet roses with indignant looks and stage-whispered ‘tut-tuts’.
Midnight in Westminster Abbey Page 17