The Autobiography of Henry 8

by Margaret George

  II

  I should never have begun in such a manner. These jumbled thoughts cannot stand as a passable collection of impressions, let alone a memoir. I must put things in some reasonable order. Wolsey taught me that: always in order.

  Have I forgotten so soon?

  I began it (I mean this journal) in a vain attempt to soothe myself several weeks ago while suffering yet another attack from my cursed leg. Perhaps I was so distracted by the pain that I was incapable of organizing my thoughts. Yet the pain has passed. Now if I am to do this thing, I must do it properly. I have talked about “Father” and “the King” and “Arthur” without once telling you the King’s name. Nor which ruling family. Nor the time. Inexcusable!

  The King was Henry VII, of the House of Tudor. But I must not say “House of Tudor” so grandly, because until Father became King it was not a royal house at all. The Tudors were a Welsh family, and (let us be honest) Welsh adventurers at that, relying rather heavily on romantic adventures of both bed and battle to advance themselves.

  I am well aware that Father’s genealogists traced the Tudors to the dawn of British history, had us descended directly from Cadwaller. Yet the first step to our present greatness was taken by Owen Tudor, who was clerk of the wardrobe to Queen Catherine, the widow of Henry V. (Henry V was England’s mightiest military king, having conquered a large portion of France. This was some seventy years before I was born. Every common Englishman knows this now, but will he always?) Henry and the French king’s daughter married for political reasons and had a son: Henry VI, proclaimed King of England and France at the age of nine months. But Henry V’s sudden death left his twenty-one-year-old French widow alone in England.

  Owen’s duties were such that he was in constant company with her. He was comely; she was lonely; they wed, secretly. Yes, Catherine (daughter to one king, wife to another, mother of yet a third) polluted—so some say—her royal blood with that of a Welsh rogue. They had two sons, Edmund and Jasper, half-brothers to Henry VI.

  But Catherine died in her mid-thirties, and Owen’s sufferance was up. Henry VI’s Protector’s Council ordered “one Owen Tudor the which dwelled with the said Queen Catherine” to appear before them, because “he marriage with the Queen to intermix his blood with the royal race of Kings.” Owen first refused to come, but later came and was imprisoned in Newgate twice, twice escaping. He was elusive and supremely clever. After his second escape he made his way back to Wales.

  Once Henry VI came to maturity and discarded his Protector, he treated Owen’s two sons kindly. He created Edmund Earl of Richmond, and Jasper Earl of Pembroke. And Henry VI—poor, mad, sweet thing—even found a proper Lancastrian bride for his half-brother Edmund: Margaret Beaufort.

  To recount these histories is like unravelling a thread: one means only to tell one little part, but then another comes in, and another, for they are all part of the same garment—Tudor, Lancaster, York, Plantagenet.

  So I must do what I dreaded: go back to Edward III, innocent source of all the late troubles. I say innocent because what king does not wish an abundance of sons? Yet Edward’s troubles, and those of the next generations, stemmed from his very prolificness.

  Edward, who was born almost two hundred years before me, had six sons. A blessing? One would have thought so. But in truth they were a curse that echoes d lost none: a military genius.

  The strands of all three families were, as I said, interwoven. It is difficult for me to tell of the cruelties visited by one upon the other, as the blood of all now flows in my veins.

  Yes, Edward IV was a great fighter. I can take pride in that, as he was my grandfather. Yet my great-grandfather was fighting against him, aided by my great-uncle, Jasper Tudor. They were crushed, and Owen was captured after the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross in 1461. He was executed—by Edward’s orders—in the marketplace of Hereford. Until the axeman appeared to do his office, Owen could not believe he would actually die. The headsman ripped off the collar of Owen’s doublet, and then he knew. He looked about and said, “That head shall lie in the stock that was wont to lie on Queen Catherine’s lap.” Afterwards a madwoman came and took his head and set a hundred candles burning about it.

  I tell this so that when I recount that Owen’s eldest son, Edmund, married Margaret Beaufort, thirteen-year-old heiress to the claims of the House of Lancaster, you will not imagine they lived quietly. The battles raged all about them. Edmund escaped from all these cares by dying at the age of twenty-six, leaving his wife great with child. That child was my father, born when his mother was but fourteen. It was January 28, 1457.

  WILL SOMERS:

  Seeing this date chilled me. It was also on January 28 that Henry VIII died. In 1547—the reversal of the numbers it is like a parenthesis. The father born, the son dying.... Yet I do not believe in such things. I leave them for Welshmen and the like.

  HENRY VIII:

  She named him Henry, a royal Lancastrian name. Yet at that time he was by no means an important heir, merely a remote figure in the overall confusing fabric. This in spite of being the grandson of a queen (on his father’s side) and the great-great-great-grandson of a king (on his mother’s). But as the battles went on, those with higher claims to the throne were killed (Henry VI’s only son, Edward, and Richard, Duke of York), and each battle advanced Henry Tudor closer to the throne. In the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471, every male Lancaster was destroyed, save Henry Tudor. And he fled to Brittany with his uncle Jasper.

  Henry VI was done to death in the Tower that same year. The Yorkists did it. It was a mercy: Henry VI was, perhaps, a saint, but he was not meant to be King. His poem,

  Kingdoms are but cares

  State is devoid of stay

  Riches are ready snares

  And hasten to decay,

  proves that. A Yorkist sword released him from the cares of his kingdom, and I cannot but say they did him a good office.

  But my father’s tale is also long to tell: there is nothing simple in these histories. Father went into exile, crossing the Channel to Brittany, where the good Duke Francis welcomed him—for a fee. Edward IV pursued him, tried to have him abducted and murdered. Father outsmarted him—Edward was stupid—and outlived him, watching and waiting in Brittany e of York. They say he had them smothered as they slept, and buried them somewhere in the Tower.

  Many men smarted under Richard’s rule and fell away, joining Father in Brittany until he had a court in exile. And in England there was such discontent that rebellious subjects invited Father to come and claim the throne.

  He tried first in 1484; but fortune was against him, and Richard caught and executed his principal supporter, the Duke of Buckingham. The next year things were again ready, and Father dared not wait longer, lest what support he had erode. He set sail and landed in Wales with an army of only two thousand men, against a known ten thousand for Richard III.

  What compelled him to do this? I know the story well, yet I also know Father: cautious to the point of inaction, suspicious, slow to decisions. Still, at the age of twenty-eight he risked everything—his life as well—on what looked to be a hopeless venture. Two thousand men against ten thousand.

  He was greeted wildly in Wales, and men flocked to join him, swelling his ranks to five thousand, still only half the number of Richard’s forces. Still he pressed on through the August-yellow fields, until at last they met a few miles from Leicester, at a field called Bosworth.

  There was fierce fighting, and in the end some of Richard’s men held back. Without them the battle was lost. Richard was slain, hacked in a dozen places by his own lost supporters as he sought to attack Father himself.

  They say the crown flew off Richard’s head in the heat of battle and landed in a gorse bush and that Father took it from there and placed it upon his own head amidst cries of “King Henry! King Henry!” I doubt the truth of this, but it is just the sort of story that is repeated and eventually believed. People like simple stories and will twist even the profound int
o something plain and reassuring. They like to believe that one becomes king by a Sign, and not by anything as inconclusive or confusing as a mêlée. Hence, the crown in the bush.

  In fact, it was not simple at all. Despite the battle and the crown in the divinely placed bush, there remained many recalcitrant people who simply would not accept Henry Tudor as King. True it was that he had royal blood, and had made the late Yorkist King’s daughter his wife, but diehard Yorkists were not so easily placated. They wanted a genuine Yorkist on the throne, or no one. Thus the treasons began.

  There were no Yorkists left, but the traitors would resurrect the smothered sons of Edward IV (my mother’s brothers). They did not dare to “discover” the eldest, Edward; even they were not that bold. Richard, the younger, was their choice. Each coterie of traitors found a ready supply of yellow-haired boys willing to impersonate him.

  The first was Lambert Simnel. The Irish crowned him as Richard IV. Father was amused and tolerant. After crushing the uprising in the Battle of Stoke in 1487, he appointed the erstwhile King a cook in the royal kitchens. Working before the hot ovens rapidly deflated his royal demeanour.

  The next, Perkin Warbeck, was less amusing. The Scots hailed him and provided him with a highborn wife. Father executed him.

  And yet the uprisings went on. There was a bottomless well of traitors and malcontents. No matter what Father did, there were always dissatisfied groups somewhere, plotting for his overthrow.

  In the end it made him bitter. I can see that now, and understnext;Ever since I was five years old I have been either a prisoner or a fugitive,” he once said), and even after he had supposedly won his right to peace, they would not let him be. They meant to drive him from the throne, or into his grave.

  Father married his archenemy’s daughter. He hated Edward IV, yet he had made a solemn vow in Rennes Cathedral that should his invasion of England be successful, he would wed Elizabeth, Edward’s daughter.

  Why? Simply because she was the heiress to the Yorkist claims, as he was of the Lancastrian. He had never even seen her and knew nothing about her person. She could have been crook-backed or squint-eyed or pockmarked. Yet marrying her would end the wars. That was all he cared about.

  As I said, he despised Edward IV. And why not? Edward had tried to have him assassinated. Edward had killed his grandfather Owen. Yet he would marry his daughter.... He understood the times. You murdered people, and it was like cultivating a garden: you nipped tender shoots, or the whole trunk, of whatever plant you perceived might be a threat later in the growing season.

  I put a stop to all that. No one is put to death surreptitiously in England now. There are no more pillow-murders or poisonings or midnight stabbings. I count as one of the great achievements of my reign that this barbarism has passed forever.

  But I was speaking of Father’s marriage. Elizabeth, Edward’s daughter, was brought out of sanctuary (where she and her mother had hidden from the ravages of Richard III) and given to him as part of the spoils of war.

  Thus Elizabeth of York married Henry Tudor. Royal artists created an especial emblem for them: the so-called Tudor rose, combining the red of Lancaster with the white of York. Less than a year later they had their sought-for heir: Arthur. They named him thus to avoid all “claimed” names (Henry was Lancastrian, Edward and Richard Yorkist), and to hark back to the legendary King Arthur. That would offend no one while promising fine things.

  Then followed other children. After Arthur, Margaret (named for the King’s mother). Then me. (It was safe to give the third child a partisan name like Henry.) After me, Elizabeth. Then Mary. Then Edmund. Then ... I cannot recall her name, if indeed she had one. She lived but two days.

  Father was twenty-nine when he married. By the time he was forty there remained to him four living children—two princes and two princesses—and the survival of his new dynasty seemed assured.

  I am told my father was handsome and popular when he first came to the throne. People saw him as an adventurer, and the English always like rogues and heroes. They cheered him. But over the years the cheering faded as he did not respond to it. He was not what they had expected after all. He was not bluff like Edward nor rough and plain as a soldier-king should be. In fact, he was hardly English at all in his thinking, as he had spent most of his life outside the country, or in Wales, which was just as bad. He was suspicious of people, and they sensed it and finally withdrew their affections.

  Here I am describing Father as an historian would, trying to note how he looked and how he ruled. Of course, as a child I saw and understood none of this. Father was a tall, thin man whom I saw but rarely, and never alone. Sometimes he would come to where we—the four children—lived, and pay one of his unannounced visitroops, calling on us for Latin or sums. Usually his mother, Margaret Beaufort, was with him, and she was a tiny woman who always wore black and had a sharp face. By the time I was eight years old, I had reached her height and could look her directly in the eye, although I disliked her eyes. They were bright and black. She always asked the sharpest questions and was most dissatisfied with the answers, because she fancied herself a scholar and had even left her husband for a time to go and live in a convent so that she could read all day.

  It was she who selected our tutors and guided our education. Of course, the best tutors went to Arthur and the second-rank ones served the rest of us. Occasionally I shared some tutors with Arthur. Bernard André taught us both history, and Giles D’Ewes taught us French. And John Skelton, the poet laureate, began by teaching Arthur but later became my own tutor.

  Skelton was a profligate priest, and we liked each other immediately. He wrote coarse satires and had a mistress; I thought him marvellous. Until then I had assumed that to be scholarly, one must be like my grandmother Beaufort. The black, the convent, the books were all linked in my mind. Skelton broke those links. Later, in my own reign, scholarship was freed completely from the convents and monasteries. (And not simply because I closed the monasteries!)

  We studied Latin, of course; French, Italian, mathematics, history, poetry. I received an extra heavy dose of Scriptures, theology, and churchmen, as I was earmarked for the Church. Well, no learning is ever wasted. I made extensive use of the knowledge later, though in a way that would have horrified my pious grandmother and her chosen tutors.

  How we lived: forever moving. Father had—or, rather, the Crown had—eight palaces, and with every change in season, the royal household would move. But we, the King’s children, seldom lived in the same palace as the King and Queen. They preferred us to live in the country, or as near to open fields and clean air as possible. Eltham Palace was an ideal site. It was small and set in green fields, but only three miles from Greenwich and the Thames. It had been built for Edward IV, my pretty grandfather, and was all of stone, with a quiet moat and well-kept gardens. It was too small to house a full court, but was perfect for royal children and our reduced household of cooks and nurses and guards.

  And we were guarded. In our pretty little walled garden we might as well have been in farthest Scotland rather than ten miles from the center of London. No one was allowed to come and see us without Father’s permission; he remembered the fate of the Yorkist princes too well. We did not, and found all the restrictions irksome.

  I was sure I could defend myself against any assassin. I practised with sword and bow and soon became aware of how strong and dexterous I was for my age. I almost longed for an evil agent to make an attempt on me, so that I could prove myself to Father and win his admiration. But no obedient murderer appeared to grant my childish wish.

  We were to take exercise outdoors. As I said, I early discovered my facility in physical things. I rode easily and well, from the beginning. I am not boasting; if I am to record everything, I must be as honest about my talents as I am about my weaknesses. It is this: I was gifted in things of the body. I had more than strength, I had innate skill as well. Everything came easily to me, on the field or in the saddle. By the time I was sev
enteen I was one of the ablest men in England—with the longbow, the sword, the lance; ing e made a gesture, and the crowd turned obediently toward the main gate.

  Margaret and Brandon and I stood where we were. As the crowd thinned, we saw what was lying on the ground beneath the dogs: the body of a lion. It was maimed and bloody.

  “What is it?” cried Margaret. “Why is the lion dead? Why are the dogs hanged?” She seemed merely curious, not sickened. I myself felt a great revulsion.

  “The King set the dogs upon the lion. He meant it as a demonstration of how the King of Beasts can destroy all enemies. Well, the dogs had the best of it. They killed the lion instead. So the King had to punish the dogs as traitors. It was the only way to salvage his lesson.” Brandon chose his words carefully, but the tone of his voice told me he did not like the King. Immediately I liked Brandon better.

  “But the King—” I began cautiously.

  “Is very concerned about his throne,” replied Brandon, incautiously. “He has just gotten word of another uprising. The Cornish this time.” He looked around to be sure we were not overheard. “This is the third time....” His voice trailed off. Or perhaps he sensed a coming welter of questions from Margaret.

  But her head was turned toward the crowd and the noise that met Arthur’s arrival into the manor grounds. The gates swung open, and Arthur rode in, clutching his saddle. He winced when he saw the eager faces and large numbers of people. A great shout arose on cue. The King stepped forward and embraced Arthur, almost dragging him from his horse. For a moment they clung together, then the King turned to the people.

  “Now my holidays will begin indeed!” he proclaimed. “Now that my son is here! My heir,” he said pointedly.

  He never noticed that Margaret and I were there; and a few minutes later we were able to slip easily in with our own party and endure nothing worse than a tongue-clucking from our nurse, Anne Luke.