The Autobiography of Henry 8

by Margaret George

  As we passed through the courtyard, I saw the body of the lion being dragged away.

  We were shown to our quarters, and our household servants began unpacking and assembling the furniture we had carted with us. Soon silver ewers of heated water were brought for us to wash ourselves with. The festivities were to begin that evening with a banquet in the Great Hall.

  Then Nurse Luke informed me that Mary and I were not to go.

  I could understand why Mary must remain in the nursery—she was but two! But I was seven and surely should be allowed to go. All year I had assumed that when this season’s Christmas revels began I would be part of them. Had I not reached the age of reason with my birthday that past summer?

  The disappointment was so crushing that I began to howl and throw my clothes upon the floor. It was the first time I had ever shown an open display of temper, and everyone stopped and stared at me. Well, good! Now they would see I was someone to take notice of!

  Anne Luke came rushing over to me. “Lord Henry! Stop this! This display”—she had to duck as I flung a shoe at no one in particular—“is most unlike you!” She tried to restrain my arms, but I flailed out at her. “It is unworthy of a Prince!”

  “A Prince old enough to attend formal banquets does not throw his clothes on the floor and scream like a monkey.” Satisfied that I was under control, she lumbered up from her knees.

  Now I knew what I had to do. “Nurse Luke, please,” I said sweetly, “I want so badly to go. I have waited for it all year. Last year he promised”—this was pure invention, but it might serve—“and now he makes me wait in the nursery again.”

  “Perhaps His Majesty has heard about what you and Margaret did this afternoon,” she said darkly. “Running ahead of the party.”

  “But Margaret is going to the banquet,” I pointed out, logically.

  She sighed. “Ah, Henry. You are a one.” She looked at me and smiled, and I knew I should have my way. “I will speak to the Lord Chamberlain and ask if His Majesty would reconsider.”

  Happily I began picking up the strewn clothes, already planning what I should wear. So that was the way it was done: first a show of temper, then smiles and favour. It was an easy lesson to learn, and I had never been slow at my lessons.

  At seven that evening, Arthur and Margaret and I were escorted into the Great Hall for the banquet. In the passageway outside I saw a band of musicians practicing. They hit many sour notes and looked apologetic as we passed by.

  As part of our education, all Father’s children were tutored in music. We were expected to be able to play one instrument. This was a source of much struggle to Arthur and Margaret. I, on the other hand, had taken as readily to the lute as to horses, and loved my hours of instruction. I wanted to learn the virginals, the flute, the organ—but my tutor told me I was to wait and learn one instrument at a time. So I waited, impatiently.

  I had expected the King’s musicians to be well trained, and now disappointment flooded me. They were little better than I.

  WILL:

  This is misleading, as Henry was extraordinarily talented. Most likely at seven he performed better than slipshod adult musicians.

  HENRY VIII:

  As we came into the Hall there was a fair blaze of yellow light. I saw what appeared to be a thousand candles on the long tables that ran along the sides of the hall, with the royal dais and table in between. There were white cloths for the full length of the tables and golden plate and goblets, all winking in the unsteady candlelight.

  As soon as we entered, a man appeared at our sides and bent over and spoke to Arthur. Arthur nodded and the man—all richly dressed in burgundy velvet—steered him toward the royal dais where he would take his place with the King and Queen.

  Almost at the same time, another man appeared and addressed himself to Margaret and me. This one was somewhat younger and had a round face. “Your Graces are to be seated near the King at the first table. So that you may see the jester and all the mimes clearly.” He turned and led us through the gathering number of p welcomed his beloved son and heir, Arthur—here he made Arthur stand so that all could see him—to the revels. He made no mention of Margaret and me.

  Servers brought us watered wine, and the courses began: venison, crayfish, prawns, oysters, mutton, brawn, conger-eel, carp, lamprey, swan, crane, quail, dove, partridge, goose, duck, rabbit, fruit custard, lamb, manchet, and so on, until I lost count. After the lampreys I could take no more and began declining the dishes.

  “You are not supposed to take more than a bite of each dish,” lectured Margaret. “It is not like eating in the nursery! You filled your belly with prawns, and now there’s no room for anything else!”

  “I did not know,” I mumbled. I was feeling drowsy from the wine (watered as it was), the late hour, and my full stomach. The flickering candles before me and all up and down the table were affecting me oddly. I had to struggle to stay awake and upright. I hardly saw the grand dessert brought in, a sugared replica of Sheen Manor, and I certainly did not want any of it. My only concern was to keep from slipping sideways, lying down under the table, and falling fast asleep.

  Then the tables were cleared and jesters and mimes came in for what seemed an interminable time. I could not focus on them and just prayed for it to be over before I disgraced myself by collapsing and proving Father right —that I had been too young to attend the banquet.

  WILL:

  A candid opinion of how jesters are perceived by their audiences. It was always a mistake to have us follow a banquet; full stomachs make people unreceptive to anything pertaining to the mind. After eating, a man does not want to laugh, he wants to sleep. I have always believed that in place of the old Roman vomitorium (where they could relieve their distended bellies) there should be a dormitorium, where people could sleep and digest. Perhaps royal architects could incorporate this design in their plans. It should, of course, be directly off the Great Hall.

  HENRY VIII:

  At last it ended. The jesters exited, tumbling and throwing paper roses and paste beads out over the spectators. The King rose and prodded Arthur to do likewise. No one in the Hall was permitted to stir until the Royal Family had left the dais, and I wondered what Margaret and I were to do as I saw the King, the Queen, and Arthur making their way out. Suddenly the King turned and, with a solemn nod, indicated that Margaret and I were to join them. He had known all along, then, that we were present.

  They took no notice of us as we trailed along behind them. The King was busy talking to Warham, and the Queen walked alone, seemingly lost in her own thoughts. Behind her, like a raven, came Margaret Beaufort, all in black, straining to overhear the King’s private conversation. Beside me my sister Margaret walked, complaining about her tight shoes and the late hour and the roast swan, which was upsetting her digestion.

  The King’s apartments were on the opposite side of the Manor from the Great Hall, a matter for great grumbling in the kitchens. But when we finally reached them I felt a sense of disappointment. They were old and shabby, not even as spacious or well furnished as the nursery at Eltham. The ceiling was ueen, who was extending her hand. “Also for your marriage.” She handed me a slim package, then nodded at me to unwrap it. I did so, and found an exquisitely illustrated Book of Hours. I looked up at her in surprise.

  “Your marriage with the Church,” she explained. “Now that you have progressed so far with your lessons, perhaps you can make use of this.”

  I was disappointed for inexplicable reasons. Yet what had I expected? “Thank you, my Lady,” I said, and returned to my seat.

  The evening continued in such strained merriment. The King spent much time conferring with his mother, and the Queen never left her ornately carved chair to speak with any of us, but fidgeted with her hands and the fastenings of her dress and listened to Margaret Beaufort’s urgent whispers beside her.

  Occasionally I caught some of her words. Cornish. Army. Tower. Defeat.

  And still no one had mentioned t
he lion or the dogs. That was the most puzzling part. I did not understand, but then I understood so little.

  I did not understand, for instance, why the King, who was known to be stingy, had had such a sumptuous banquet. I did not understand why, in spite of his words about making merry, he was so obviously glum. I did not understand what the Cornish had to do with all of it.

  I was trying to sort out all these things in my mind while dutifully staring at the Book of Hours to please my mother, when a messenger burst into the room. He looked around wildly and then blurted out for us all to hear: “Your Grace—the Cornish number some fifteen thousand! They are to Winchester already! And Warbeck is crowned!”

  The King sat, his face a mask. For an instant there was no sound but his heavy breathing. Then his lips moved, and he said one word: “Again!”

  “The traitors!” spat the King’s mother. “Punish them!”

  The King turned an impassive face to her. “All, Madam?” he asked blandly.

  I saw her expression change. I did not know then that her husband’s brother, Sir William Stanley, had just gone over to the Pretender.

  She met him, steel against steel. “All,” she said.

  Then the messenger went up to them, and there was a huddle of consultation and much alarm. I watched the Queen’s face: she had gone pale, but betrayed no further emotion. Suddenly she rose and came toward Arthur, Margaret, and me.

  “It is late,” she said. “You must to bed. I will send for Mistress Luke.” Clearly she wanted us gone, just when I most wanted to stay.

  Nurse Luke came promptly, to my great disappointment, and ushered us out. She was full of cheerful questions about the banquet and our gifts. As we walked back to our quarters, I could feel the cold, worse even than in the King’s chamber. It seeped into the open passageway like water through a sieve.

  The torches on the wall threw long shadows before us. They were burning low; it must be extremely late. As they dwindled down to their sockets, they gave off a great deal of smoke.

  In fact the passageway seemed blurred from the smoke, and ahead it was even thicker. As we turned into another passageway, suddenly the cold was gone. That was how I pe“Now we must go to the Tower. So it will look as if we had to take refuge. They planned it well.”

  Suddenly I understood it all. I understood the little, puzzling things: that Father had had the banquet in order to show the court and powerful nobles what a wealthy and mighty King he was, how secure, how established. He had brought his children to Sheen and obliged Arthur to sit by his side, had pointed Margaret and me out after the revels to show the solidarity of his family, to present his phalanx of heirs.

  He had hanged the dogs because there was treason all about, and he wished to warn potential traitors that they could expect no mercy from him. Appearances were important, more important even than reality. People credited only what their eyes beheld; no matter if it were calculatedly false or staged.

  And I understood the big thing: the enemy had its own resources and could pull everything down around you in an instant, leaving you to curse and throw rocks into the river. All enemies must be destroyed. One must ever be on guard.

  And the most frightening thing of all: Father’s throne was not secure. That fact hammered itself into my soul with cold nails. Tomorrow, or next week, or next year, he might be King no longer....

  “O Henry, why?” wept Arthur, still clutching the white, ermine-furred gift robes against himself. Then he answered his own question. “I suppose it was a careless cook.” He pushed his hand across his nose, sniffling. “When I am King, I will make the kitchens safer.”

  Then I began to cry, too, and not for the burning Manor, but for Arthur, poor, foolish Arthur....

  “Aye,” I said. “Make the kitchens safer. That would be a good thing.”

  Sheen Manor burned to the ground. We went to the Tower for safety, and Father’s forces defeated the Cornish, finally, but not before they had reached London itself. A great battle was fought across the Thames on Blackheath, and from the high window of the Tower we could see the men milling, see the puffs of smoke from guns. We could see, too, small sprawled figures that no longer moved, until, as the day went on, they outnumbered the moving ones.

  The pretender Warbeck was taken and locked securely in the fortress portion of the Tower, and we came out almost as he went in. A simple matter of which side of the walls one was on determined everything. Father was King again and could walk freely where he chose, while Warbeck was confined within the sunless walls.

  Father made grand plans to have Sheen Manor rebuilt in the modern style, with great numbers of glass windows. To emphasize his recent victory, he changed its name to Richmond Palace. (He had been Earl of Richmond before becoming King.) He spent uncharacteristic sums on the new palace, and as a result it was surprisingly magnificent.

  He also began making plans for Arthur’s long-standing betrothal to Princess Katherine of Aragon finally to lead to a wedding. He was determined to see Arthur settled in the marriage bed as soon as possible.

  IV

  Arthur had been betrothed practically from the font at which he had first been christened Arthur, “in honour of the British race.” And what better wo realize that he would have made an excellent gambler. What a pity—and loss for his purse!—that he did not play, on principle.) Spain was an obvious choice, as Father preferred not to importune our ancient enemy, France, for a bride. If Spain would allow its princess to marry into the House of Tudor, this would constitute recognition that we were, indeed, legitimate rulers. It would be another bit of showmanship for Father, like the treasonous dogs. It would say to the world: Look, look, I am a true King. For the old, established royal houses would never sign marriage contracts with a Perkin Warbeck or his like. And once there were sons from that marriage, all unspoken reservations about the worthiness of the Tudor blood would be stilled. Arthur and Katherine’s children would be welcomed in every court in Europe.

  I think there persisted a feeling at the time that England was not a country in the civilized sense of the word. We were perceived as backward, remote, and barbarous—the latter because of our horrible dynastic wars, which had been going on since living memory. We were not truly wild, like the Scots or the Irish, but we were not yet an integral part of the rest of Europe.

  Everything took so long to reach us. When I was ten, that is, around the year 1500, glass windows in common dwellings were almost unheard of. No bluff, common Englishman would use a fork (or had even seen one), would wear anything but wool, would eat anything but the traditional “three B’s”: beer, bread, and beef. There were no rugs on the stone floors, nothing but dirty rushes where people spit and threw scraps. Even the King dined on a collapsible trestle table, and only women in childbirth could expect to have a pillow. This while Italian princes lived in open, sunlit villas, worked on inlaid marble tables, and sampled a variety of fine dishes.

  The Renaissance, the New Learning—those were but foreign terms to us, and anything foreign was suspect. Our great lords still tried to keep their own private armies of retainers, long after the princes of Europe had begun concentrating all military power in their own hands. Music, even at court, consisted of a small band of poor musicians playing outdated tunes on outdated instruments. Parliament was summoned only in order to raise money for the King, and then, often as not, the people refused to pay up. European ambassadors regarded a posting here as going into exile, where they would have to endure privations and exist among a baffling, unruly people. They prayed to endure until they could be rewarded by being sent to a “real” court.

  Of course, the common people would come out and gape whenever the English King would go from one palace to another. To them we were grand. They knew no better; but foreigners did. They used to mock the King and all our shabby, awkward, unfashionable grandeurs.

  At ten, of course, I did not know all this, but I sensed it. I saw how reluctant the Spanish were actually to send their daughter here, in spite of
the signed treaties promising to do so. I saw that the French King or the Holy Roman Emperor never met Father, never came to his court or invited him to theirs. I saw that the ambassadors who were here seemed to be old and badly dressed, and that some countries sent no ambassadors at all.

  It would be different in Arthur’s reign, I hoped. I wanted him to be that old Arthur come again—to be a mighty King, so filled with honour and strength and a sort of shining that it would change everything. As I was trying desperately to shape myself for a churchman, I saw his reign as bringing a new Golden Age Katherine had been stalemated once again.

  “No. She’s to arrive this autumn. And we’re to be married right after. I know the Spanish prize horsemanship. Katherine’s own mother rode into battle when she was with child! I—well, I—”

  “You don’t want to fall off in front of Katherine,” I finished. “But, Arthur, you’ve ridden for years, had innumerable teachers. What can I do that they could not?” You hate horses and have no feel for them, I thought to myself, and no teacher can make up for that.

  “I don’t know,” he said miserably. “But if only—”

  “I’ll try to help you,” I said. “But if you aren’t a good horseman, why don’t you avoid horses in front of Katherine? Do something else. Sing. Dance.”

  “I can’t sing, and I’m a clumsy dancer,” he said, his face set. “You can sing, and you can dance, but I can’t.”

  “Recite verse, then.”

  “I hate verse.”

  What can you do, then? I wondered. “Then you must let others make fools of themselves dancing and singing and reciting, and look on with amusement.”

  “And there’s something else! The—the wedding night!” His voice sounded higher than usual.