Midnight in Westminster Abbey

by Sean Dennis Cashman

  “And there were compensations for us as boy kings with guardians,” said Edward III. "When I was young, I had more than my share of interfering relations. And there was a complicating factor. Some of them were English and some of them were French. The English and the French were always at loggerheads when they weren’t actually at war.

  “The compensation was that we were young and that we had our true reigns—our own rule as adults to look forward to. We lived in hope that we could do what we wanted when we became kings in our own right.”

  “Yes, I made that mistake,” said Richard II. “But there’s something we can do about it now—if we act together.”

  Georgie understood from their looks and the way they put their fingers to their lips that these kings did not want him to hear any more. They fell silent. Georgie went back to his sister in the nave of the abbey. There he sensed a new atmosphere among the audience, a sort of heightened expectation about the next contestant for Queen for a Day.

  ****

  Anne of Bohemia was on her knees praying in a side chapel when the TV crew called her to the Queen for a Day show. When she put on the embroidered cloak her husband Richard II had worn at his coronation—no more than a child’s cape really—it set off her simple lead-coloured sheath dress very nicely.

  As the rules of the show allowed her to take one artefact to plead her case, Anne of Bohemia had chosen her artefact with care. It looked peculiar. No one could think what its horns signified. Cradling it in her hand, Anne moved centre stage on the TV set and set the strange thing on her lap.

  “My story is simple and brief. I was daughter of one holy Roman emperor, Charles IV, and sister to another, Sigismund. I was betrothed to King Richard II. But coming to England was not without mishaps. Our boat smashed to pieces on the rocks in a storm as soon as my bridal party disembarked. The English court took this as a bad omen. Although I didn’t know it until then, many nobles had opposed the marriage. I brought no dowry.”

  “Quite the reverse,” said a voice in the audience. “We had to pay your father.”

  "Well, as all foreign queens discover, no one is considered good enough for a young English king. The aristocrats are nervous before someone with a better bloodline. The commoners don’t like foreigners. But if the king marries an English woman, they think she’s getting above herself.

  “English people always have an uneasy relationship with immigrants, newcomers—call us what you will. They want us to work—paid or not—but not to claim other rewards.” Turning to the moderns, she added, "I think you know what I mean. We used to call the commoners plebs but that caused no end of bother.

  "I came here without great looks. What I did have was charm. I had to work at that full time in public and behind the scenes. Even my husband’s few admirers admit he wasn’t an easy person. He thought he was most intelligent. But he didn’t have much common sense. He was used to flattery. I had to tame his excesses without him realising it.

  “However, ours did prove a love match. Richard liked my sweet disposition.” Saying this, she rose and scattered sweets—candies—among the little animals in the front rows. Taking her place on stage again, she continued, “And dear Richard needed me. He respected my opinion. But I knew that for our marriage to be a real success beyond our bedroom I had to win over the dear English people—and not just the barons and earls but also the merchants and the common people. Being a queen isn’t just dressing up to be seen in public. It’s a matter of winning hearts and minds.”

  At that, she set the strange artefact on her head.

  “What’s that on your head?” said a green lounge lizard from among the heraldic devices.

  Anne took the strange object off her head and passed it around. Seeing it close up the animals thought it was part bag, part ram’s curled horn.

  “A handbag? A purse? A pocket book?” came cries from the audience.

  "It’s a Bohemian horned headdress. It may have been inspired by the headdress of the Egyptian mother goddess, Hathor. It seems I set a new fashion—more popular in the fifteenth century after I was gone than in the fourteenth century when I was with you.

  “I also won people over by political acts of kindness. I interceded between Richard and the people of London. I won over noble women first. Not by the headdress. No. By introducing the side saddle for women who wanted to ride but to stay modest—rather than the hump-humping of a lady’s legs astride a stallion or moving up and down—posting—in equestrian sports. The side saddle was more decorous and less provocative than women riding like men with their skirts hitched up.”

  The assembly was impressed. You could tell from the approving murmurs.

  “Richard and I weren’t together forever. The plague killed me off. I was twenty-eight. Richard was heartbroken—mortified—any term you want to use.”

  “These answers don’t suggest she should be queen for a day,” said Mary Tudor from the front row.

  “I never asked for it.”

  But Richard II, who had come back from the cloisters, made his wife’s case for her.

  “It’s what happened later that makes her an ideal candidate. She thought of everyone but herself. But she was degraded in death. While I was raised after death into a Christian symbol of legitimate ruler, Anne suffered.”

  He turned to Anne and asked, “Are you ready?”

  Anne did not want to go on.

  “Must I?”

  “Not if you find this too intimate. But if you are elected queen for a day, you will have the chance to do a great good work for others.”

  Now Ginny caught a different smell from that of the previous Annes—not the sweet vapour of bourgeoning flowers but the darker, musty smell of dead autumn leaves, decaying and sodden on a frosty ground and some blown about by a gusty northern wind. Something cruel was about to happen. The audience shivered with apprehension.

  Anne of Bohemia summoned up her courage. She clenched her tiny hands into tight fists of firm resolution. Then she raised her arms and hands so that Richard II could take off the borrowed cape—the ceremonial gown he had worn as a boy king. Anne shivered in her coarse shift. She prayed silently. Then, closing her eyes, she said to the little assembly, “Please forgive me. This is not as intimate as it looks.”

  With a feeble effort, she tore her gown—rent it—to reveal not a young woman’s luscious body but something incomplete: an incomplete shoulder, a partial arm, a hand fragment. The queens at the back of the audience shielded their eyes.

  “Grave robbers did this,” Richard explained. “Too good for this world. Too good for the next. Too good for the endless purgatory of a marble tomb. The robbers wanted relics of an unacknowledged saint.”

  In a rare act of joint compassion, Elizabeth I and Mary I used their many jewel-like bones to fashion a shimmering drop cloth of diamonds and pearls to give Queen Anne back her modesty.

  Georgie gaped at the reduced appearance of the Tudor queens since only their heads dressed with their Venetian masks now remained hovering above the little scene like disembodied angelic faces in a fresco, which, of course, is what they now were. Ginny thought they looked like disembodied heads by Pablo Picasso in some Cubist painting.

  The modern visitors sensed growing boredom with the TV reality show among the kings and queens and their animals and courtiers. More, the modern youngsters thought that audience members already had their individual favourites. The appearance of another contestant with a sorry tale to tell would not change their allegiance. What they wanted was more free entertainment.

  “What would you do with your freedom if you became queen for a day?” Queen Mary II asked Anne of Bohemia.

  “I would give it to others.”

  At that, the kings who had begun their reigns as boys, now some grown up, some still children—the very kings who had returned from their huddle in the cloisters—were back. They dispersed themselves among the audience. Then they moved purposefully to the front and clasped hands in a circle around Anne of Bohemia.<
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  “You ask me to intercede with Heaven for you, to grant you your dearest, shared wish—is that right?”

  “Yes,” they answered in unison as they knelt together.

  Ginny noticed that Edward III was getting almost beside himself with excitement. He became ecstatic with one thought and exclaimed, “Philippa—together again!”

  Ginny noticed another king beside himself. But Charles II’s excitement was not joyous but so angry that he positively bristled. His brow was furrowed with irritation. His habitual pose of seamless, smooth control crumbled until he could no longer cover his exasperation. He bounded over to Edward III, pushing aside several other monarchs, and shoved Edward’s shoulder to spit out in white-hot anger, "What the hell do you think you’re playing at? This is no way to get your precious Philippa back!

  “What the queens who win Queen for a Day are supposed to do is take the money and run; rise with the dawn chorus. Then they’re supposed to get out and cross over to the other side when the abbey doors open to tourists. Then we expect them to use their initiative and their wherewithal to generate shush funds for all of us royals trapped here. Philippa’s not coming back because she’s out there already. Making Whoopee, I hope, since she’s no longer stuck with a booby like you!”

  And, turning to Richard II, Charles continued his harangue with even more venom:

  “And you of all royals should know better. You can’t relive the past and do things better second time around. We have to go with the flow—not return to fantasy islands of childish inanities. Your adoring Anne of Bohemia should be planning for your future and ours—not playing games with the past. It’s as if your tragedy has taught you nothing. You’re no better than a tourist!”

  Charles II intended this last ordinary word as a supreme insult. But it was drowned out in a mounting chorus of expectation from the heraldic animals: “Hallelujah! God save Queen Anne. Thank the Lord for his mercy!”

  Ginny only heard Charles II’s insult because she was following the tenor of his denunciations. They made her think hard: Philippa of Hainault gone already? Dead kings and queens creating a shush fund outside Westminster Abbey? What was this?

  Anne of Bohemia was in a trance and heard nothing. She asked the little group of kings, “Whatever the restraints upon you, you were happiest as youngsters—is that right?”

  “Yes,” they chorused.

  Back in compere mode, Charles II saw this as a defining moment in the contest.

  “Do we need to put the contest to a vote?” he asked the audience with barely suppressed exasperation. Then he added, “Whom do you name queen for a day? Anne of Cleves? Anne of Denmark? Or Anne of Bohemia?”

  Up rose the great, expected, repeated chorus of “Anne of Bohemia, Anne of Bohemia!” mainly from the pretty little animals and other heraldic devices.

  “The people have spoken,” announced Charles II. “Democracy has worked,” he added ruefully.

  Anne of Bohemia was looking over the sorry faces of the little princes who had died young. She was waiting for a reason, an explanation for what they all wanted. They and the other former boy kings who had grown up had already drawn straws. The shortest straw had fallen to Richard II. Shedding his customary artifice, he spoke from the heart.

  “When we were young, even if the grown-ups around us were no better than wicked uncles, we had this inner gift. We knew we would be kings with power when we grew up. We thought the world around us would be ours to command. We were full of hope and optimism.”

  “Yes, hope that always deceives,” said Edward VI sourly, as if recalling a blighted life.

  “Yes, but hope and belief in the future,” argued Richard II.

  The little group of former boy kings stood up, some of them rather sheepishly. Georgie noticed that various boy gardeners had joined them, standing to one side. Now it was Anne’s turn to kneel. She closed her eyes and prayed silently, “Heaven, grant this wish—not for me but for others—restore these sovereign spirits to the perfection of their eager youth, full of hope, promise and desire.”

  As she prayed, Anne clasped her fingers with what was left of her little hands so tightly that her nails drew drops of scarlet blood in her palms.

  Among the royal crush, Ginny detected the almost strangled plea of Charles II: “For God’s sake, don’t do it. Stop yourself before it’s too late.”

  Charles II covered his face first and then covered his hair as he shook his head in his hands.

  Unseen among dark recesses close by, Richard III whispered to his appropriated horse, “Here in these confines slyly have I lurk’d to watch the waning of mine enemies. Yes, I know I’ve borrowed the words of another character—some old bag-lady queen—in what is, after all my play. But it sums up my contempt for these foolish would-be boy kings.”

  HEAVEN SENT

  The kindness of Anne of Bohemia proved more appealing and potent to Heaven than the selfish personal interests of Charles II or Richard III. Rays of mysterious golden light appeared on high and cascaded upon Henry III, Edward III, Richard II, Edward V, Edward VI and James VI. The light enveloped their heads and shoulders like a glorious fairy tale fog and dwindled into a mist dancing on their bodies and legs, swirling from one to another. It also enveloped some royal relatives.

  The kings and royals within the swirling haze cried, “Hallelujah!” The vapour dissipated and the kings could be seen clearly in their new forms.

  The gardener Edward V was no longer an abused child worker but an angelic young king with promise in his heart and a spring in his step, accompanied by his younger brother, Richard, also enhanced by the magic vapour. Their sister, Elizabeth of York, also rejuvenated, came over to them as a blooming sunny girl on the cusp of becoming a grown-up queen, when she had married Henry VII. She embraced her brothers, brushed aside her tears of joy and let a spare boy kiss her hand dutifully before she wiped it with a neat handkerchief.

  Other sovereigns who had grown up to disappointed adulthood also reappeared in gleaming youth, especially Edward III—not as the precocious schoolboy he had been when he became king in name only but, instead, as a handsome virile youth just as he had been when he seized power from his wicked mother.

  Watching from the side, Ginny was interested to see the former grown-up kings turned back into boys and looking like younger versions of their older selves. Ginny thought, but did not say, “Adorable looking, certainly, but somehow blank.” For she was struck by how Edward V and his brother, and Edward VI and James VI, all looked something like Georgie. It was as if, whatever higher being Anne of Bohemia had prayed to, had used Georgie as a picture-perfect template for several young fellows and had then grafted onto this template some of the distinctive features of these kings as grown-ups.

  Young Edward VI was content. The major and minor ailments that had made him a sickly youth and brought him to an early death had gone. As he looked at his new self in a mirror casually propped up against a pillar, he sensed that he was now more idealised as an eager young spirit than he had been in any of his most flattering portraits on earth. He stretched his arms and they moved without pain or any lesser twitches. And he smiled.

  “Hocus, pocus,” Charles II muttered from the side lines and through gritted teeth. But few heard him and no one cared.

  The mystic haze had not completely disappeared but hung expectantly in a circle like a crown above the little group. Edward V and Edward VI now looked at one another with affectionate smiles that must have been pre-planned. They nodded, held hands and looked up at the circle of mist. Then they held out their other hands to another boy gardener who was standing demurely to the side. And so they drew him into the charmed circle of rejuvenated boy kings.

  The remains of the haze lowered again and caressed the head of the spare boy gardener who emerged from it as clean scrubbed and angelic as the two young princes. And so, too, did Georgie who was now among them. He looked enquiringly at Edward V who said simply, “You may be a newcomer but you are our new best friend an
d our new spare.”

  When he had shaken off the last flickers of the fairy mist, James VI looked beyond the boy kings’ charmed circle. And there he saw his divided self: the man king, James I of England, still standing among the royal crush outside the circle. After all, James I had never been a boy king. He had succeeded to the English throne as an almost middle-aged man. So the magic did not apply to him. There was no going back for him. And his younger alter ego, selfish James VI of Scotland, wanted it to stay that way.

  “Och, laddie,” he called out in mock Scots accent to his oblivious older English self. “You’re on your own from now on.”

  Once they had got over the pleasant shock of becoming healthy boys again, the newly formed young kings looked around Westminster Abbey with growing disappointment. Yes, the abbey was fit for weddings and funerals certainly and maybe a celebratory feast of cold cuts after a solemn religious ceremony. But it was hardly suitable for jousting, dancing and hanky-panky. Besides, there were nowhere near enough young monarchs like themselves for widespread merry-making.

  Young James VI’s excitement at the prospect of revisiting his youth proved short-lived. He gulped for there she was: his wife, Anne of Denmark, herself no longer a careworn hausfrau but a timid unformed girl of fourteen, her age when they had first been married. All those centuries ago, he had loved her at that age—loved her as a complaisant playfellow that he could adore as a living doll. Now the born-again James VI found himself trapped all over again. He wanted eager young boys to play with—not a girl to entertain and court. To make it worse, he had helped bring this down on himself. The prospect of fun and games with free-spirited boy kings had evaporated just as soon as it seemed about to be realised.