The Autobiography of Henry 8
Page 10
“Then the presence of one more or less can hardly matter.”
I had said it wrong in my excitement. “I did not mean—I meant that your presence would be precious to me.”
“I cannot, Your Grace.”
“Why not?” I burst out. All the others had come, even from the Continennd o more important things, such as finding a servant like Wolsey ready at hand, and finally to my wife, Katherine, who was pleasing to me in every way and now pleasingly great with child. I remember leaning against the window in my work closet (through which I could feel the north wind; the sash was poorly fitted) and thanking God for all my blessings.
Warham celebrated High Mass in the Chapel Royal on Christmas Day, and the entire court attended: the Royal Family and the attendants on the upper level, the rest of the household on the lower level.
Then the secular festivities began. There were masques and miming, and three fools scampered about. A great banquet with some eighty dishes (one of them being baked lampreys, my favourite). Still later, a dance in the Great Hall.
Disguised, as custom decreed, I danced with many ladies to the lively string-melodies of the rebec and the thump of the wooden xylophone. Only one woman made bold to guess my identity: Lady Boleyn, wife of Thomas Boleyn, one of my Esquires of the Body. She was a vain, tiresome woman, much given to flirtation and, as she thought, charm. She began by announcing straightway that she danced with the King; she recognized him by his strength, his manliness, his renowned dancing skill. (A clever move. Should I not be King—as her chances were only so-so that I was—then the hearer would be flattered, as she imagined; and if she were, by accident, correct, then the King himself would marvel at her astuteness.) I did not enlighten her, but let her go on about her stepchildren, who were all deserving of accolades and (now it came) positions at court. Mary, George, and Anne. (Cursed names, all! Would that I had never heard them!) I extricated myself as soon as possible.
WILL:
I am sure he did not mean to include Mary in this wish; and certainly he would not undo the children that resulted from his inability to extricate himself truly from the Boleyns. If only the daughters had been as unappealing as the mother! Incidentally, this should lay to rest the old rumour that he dallied with Lady Boleyn as well. Where this got started I cannot imagine; ill-wishers are determined to give the King as large and indiscriminate a lust as Jupiter himself.
HENRY VIII:
It was time for the musical interlude. To everyone’s surprise, I myself took my lute and went to the middle of the floor.
“I have composed a song for the season,” I announced. It was not strictly true; I had composed it merely for myself, when trying to settle in my own mind exactly what I wished from life. Everyone stared back at me, yet I struck the chord and was not in the least afraid. I sang, boldly:
Pastime with good company
I love and shall until I die
Grudge who will, but none deny,
So God be pleased this life will I
For my pastance,
Hunt, sing, and dance,
My heart is set,
All goodly sport
To my comfort
Who shall me lep in them. Just when it should have been finished, the doors opened and two Frenchmen appeared (one could identify them as such by the excesses in their costume, so much slashing that their topcoats were virtually nonexistent), carrying something the size of a large trunk by handles on either side.
Every eye in the Great Hall turned toward them as they descended the steps, slowly, carrying their burden solicitously. Their abnormally high heels clicked on the stones.
They came toward me slowly, making their way to within five feet of me. Then they laid their coffin-like weight down and pulled back the covering. It was a pie, the immense size of which no one present had ever seen.
“His Most Christian Majesty Louis, King of France, presents you with this meat pie as a New Year’s gift. It is made from a gigantic boar which His Majesty himself took.” They bowed.
I stood overlooking the vast pie, as large across as a desk. The pastry was intricate and teased into various shapes, baked a pleasing golden brown.
“A sword,” I said, and one was placed in my hands. I slashed open the top of that pretty thing and was greeted with a foul odour: all was rotten within. The boar-meat was decomposing, the filling a green slime.
I backed away. “ ’Tis foul,” I said.
“As French manners,” finished Wolsey, his voice loud in the hush.
We turned toward the grinning Frenchmen. “Give your master our thanks,” I said. “But my taste does not run to rancid meat. I have a livelier appetite for fresh French things. Such as my title and inheritance. Convey this putrefying mass back to Louis, with our compliments.”
They looked sickened, as well they might.
“Yes, it belongs on French soil,” I said. “See that it returns to its true source.”
I hated Louis. Such a calculated insult must have reply! Yet I would not, must not, upset Katherine. I must laugh at it, belittle the insult. For the time being.
XVII
That night was the appointed time for the “impromptu” invasion of the Queen’s quarters by myself and my attendants. (Perhaps you are not aware of this today, but the Queen had her own set of chambers, quite apart from mine. This was, I am told, traditional only in England and had, through the centuries, facilitated adultery on both sides. I record the custom here simply because I foresee its passing into disuse soon. If only Anne Boleyn had not been apart from me ... or Catherine Howard....)
Twelve of us had costumes of Kendall green, all velvet, with silver visors. We were to invade Katherine’s room, to burst in suddenly with a great fanfare of trumpets, to pretend to be Robin Hood and his men abducting the fair maidens. Then, after a mock struggle, we would dance by torchlight. It was arranged, of course, that eleven of Katherine’s attendants should be present to make the numbers even.
It went according to plan. We waited outside the Queen’s door, then, of one accord, flung open the door. The women shrieked. Katherine dropped a jewel-box, a carved ivory thing, and it broke on the floor. Her hands flew up to her mouth. She had been preparing for bed and was wearing a wine-colgleamed in the torchlight. I thought her extraordinarily beautiful, in spite of her thickened figure.
“Ah!” I said. “The Queen yields herself to me.” I held out my hands (with rings that surely Katherine recognized) and nodded toward the musicians. “Play a pavane, if you please.” I took Katherine’s hand, and we began to dance.
“I know it is you, my Lord,” she whispered, as we came close in one measure.
“Do you?” I was enjoying the game. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” she said, as she passed me, her velvet cloak brushing mine. “I would know your hands, your touch, among ten thousand.”
I smiled noncommittally. I had always been fascinated by legends of kings and princes who wandered about disguised—the Roman Emperors and Henry V, before he came to the throne. It could be dangerous (if only for what one overheard), yet I longed to do it.
Suddenly Katherine went pale and reeled against me. She clutched her belly. The music went on, insistently, but she stood rooted. Then she cried out and crumpled to the floor.
We all stood where we were. Only Wolsey (ever-present Wolsey, who had stepped in to oversee that the midnight repast was adequately prepared) knew what to do.
“A physician,” he said quietly to a nearby page. He issued orders in a calm voice. “Take Her Grace to the lying-in chamber. It is not prepared? Then to her own bed.” The erstwhile Merrie Men picked Katherine up and conveyed her to her own chamber. Attendants, physicians, servitors—they all converged on the Queen’s chamber, bringing clean cloths and medicines and instruments, while Katherine cried out in the ancient pain of childbirth.
At dawn all was done: the child was born, a hideous, half-formed thing, three and a half months before its time. Dead. They carried it away in the
early blue light and buried it—I know not where. It had no soul, and needed no churchly offices.
Alone in the blue-tinged light, I made my way to Katherine. She lay, white and sweat-stained, upon a couch, while her attendants changed the blood-soaked linen upon her bed. She grasped a crucifix and looked near dead, her mouth half open. I had a dreadful thought: how ugly women look in childbirth. This was not my Katherine, but a woman of fifty, a hard-faced stranger.
I knelt by her side, but she was deep asleep and did not stir. At length I rose and left the room. Although I had not slept, I did not feel tired, but quite the opposite: possessed by an abnormal alertness. I walked stiffly out into Katherine’s audience chamber, where the torches from the dancing still burned. I put them out, then continued my restless walk toward my own apartments. It was an ugly dawn. Sleet was whipping against the windows. The passageways were cold.
Earlier I had welcomed this cold. I had wanted a cold Christmas, and so I had it. Anything I wanted, I had only to command, or so it had seemed.
Yet the thing that I had most wanted, that above all I cared to keep, was lost.
XVIII
WILL:
Yes, he had seemingly lost the magical power to command fate, which habrief moment. He would spend the next twenty years trying to recapture it—years in which everything happened, and yet nothing happened. They were painful to him without touching him or changing him in essential ways. They left him confused and in that state somewhere between anger and hurt: they left him at the mercy of the Witch.
HENRY VIII:
Neither could I command happiness to return, and my sadness lingered for weeks afterward, well into the new year. Katherine and I brooded together over our loss, drawing ourselves tightly into a partnership of grief. We ordered extra Masses to be said and increased our personal pieties. I could talk to no one else about my feelings in the matter; it touched me too near my royal person. But Katherine, Katherine, royal herself, she understood....
When at length her time of healing was past, I found that our very closeness and sympathy of mind made me approach her differently when we returned to the marriage bed. Why is it, I wondered then (and wonder still), that friendship seems to stifle lust, to smother it under a pillow of intimacy? For lust is not intimate; it thrives on strangeness and mystery, and needs it to survive. Katherine, my mysterious princess from Spain, now my friend in sorrow ... nevertheless I knew her, as a man should know his wife, so it says in Scripture.
It was Wolsey whom I asked to say extra Masses for Katherine’s and my private intentions. Wolsey had already proved himself my man in the Privy Council. It had been politic to appoint him, as he had immediately begun acting on his own initiative to counter some of the Fox-Warham-Ruthal schemes. Wolsey was subtle; I appreciated that, as when he showed no curiosity upon my request for the extra Masses. Wolsey was discreet, and he was honest. I had acquired a valuable servant. Now I must learn to use him to the best advantage—for both of us.
He sent a steady stream of summaries and memoranda about the shifting politics abroad. He seemed to compile a new report every hour. I was so engrossed in reading a stack of them (as well as a summary of the palace inventories) that I did not hear Katherine enter my workroom one morning late in May. Of course her step was very light. She was standing behind me before I even felt her presence.
“What does my love study so intently?” she asked softly.
“All our property,” I answered. “Were you aware, for example, that you—or rather we—possess”—I stabbed a finger at the paper and read the word it rested upon—“a dozen painted tiles from Spain?”
“No. But I should love to see them installed. I miss the tiles of home—so bright and clean. Not like the dark wood here.”
“Where were they used?” I was curious.
“On the floors. In the walls. Every place where you have paintings and hangings, or wood. Reds and oranges and yellows, they were.”
“I shall have them put in the floor of your Privy Chamber at Greenwich, then. With the date entered upon a new tile, to mark the end of the first year of our marriage—and of our reign.” I had just been thinking of the date, and how grow into just a husband and wife, yet the end of the first year of marriage was the end of being a bride; everyone knew that.
“Have I? But I, too, have something to give you.” She took my face in both her tiny hands and said, “I am with child. Our prayers are answered.”
I must have looked as I felt, for she kissed me then, long and sweetly—more like a bride, still, than a true wife.
Midsummer’s Day, and my nineteenth birthday, and the end of my first year of marriage came all in June. I could look back on the past twelve months and wonder how I had done as well as I had, considering that I had known nothing of either ruling or marriage when I started. By the grace of God, and my own determination, I had succeeded in making the transition from Prince to King, and now the thing seemed to be running by itself. I would soon venture into the one area as yet untouched: the business of foreign wars and dealing directly with the rulers of Europe. War was the calling of kings, and the sine qua non of great kings.
During the extended summer—warm weather lasted even into November—I studied the situation on the Continent like a man watching the steps of a complicated dance and awaiting the proper beat in which to enter it.
It seemed that King Louis XII of France was besieging Pope Julius in Bologna, laying violent hands upon Christ’s vicar, and calling a schismatic Council at Pisa to repudiate Julius’s authority. Ferdinand of Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian solemnly ordered him to desist, or face just punishment. They called their alliance the Holy League, and who could dispute its solemnity? Or that England, as a Christian realm, would be compelled by conscience to join it?
There was no obstacle of desire: I desired war, and my subjects would demand it of me. There was no obstacle of opportunity: as soon as the invitation to join was issued, then we would step in. There was no obstacle of means: the war could be easily financed out of the Royal Treasury, without having to bother with Parliament.
“But, Your Grace,” Wolsey had said, seeming to know my plans even before I uttered them, “it might be best to call a Parliament, and save your own treasury. The people will grant you anything, in your newness. Later it will not be so easy.”
“It would be stingy to do that,” I objected. “It smacks of my father, and that I would never do.”
“Your father was wise in financial matters. He would never have spent his own money when he could spend someone else’s instead. A splendid maxim.”
“An old man’s maxim! Not a true knight’s!” Somehow, to approach Parliament, cap in hand, asking for an allowance, for permission, like a child—no, never! “I hope never to call a Parliament as long as I live,” I suddenly thought out loud. “Yes, to be so rich I never have to raise money through them—I want that!”
“Then you will have to find other means, Your Grace,” said Wolsey. “For, as I pray God sends you long to reign over us, your treasury can scarcely last for sixty years! No, you must tap another source. Then good riddance to Parliament, I say.”
“Heavy, Your Grace,” Dr. Linacre warned as he handed him into my waiting arms. “Very heavy. He must be made all of muscle.”
Yes, the bundle was weighty, solid. I could feel the squirming power of the child.
“Praise be to God!” I cried, holding him aloft. “Now the future is assured!” I held my successor in my hands.
Striding in to see Katherine, who was already bathed and resting on fresh sheets, I could scarcely keep from shouting with joy. “Sweetheart,” I cried, “you have given England all she wished of you!” There she was, her face radiant, her amber-colored hair falling all about her shoulders—a Madonna, a Madonna whom I adored. I fell to my knees beside her and kissed her hand. “Thank you,” I said. “For the great gift you have bestowed on me, and on our country.”
“On myself, too,” she said.
“He must be named Henry,” she declared. “He is big and strong, like you.”
I had not planned to name him Henry, but Edward, after my mother’s little King-brother.
“Henry,” she repeated stubbornly. “It must be Henry.”
“If it means so much to you, then, so it shall be.” So long as it was not Alfonso or Felipe or some such foreign-sounding name from Spain. “As soon as you are able, we will invite the realm to celebrate with us. There will be tournaments, feasts, wine from public fountains ... and commoners can come, too. Into the palace ground,” I said on sudden impulse. “He is their Prince, too!”
The Queen’s physicians and attendants looked bewildered, and even Katherine shook her head.
“This is not Spain, my love! Here in England the King must go out amongst his people, and let them come to him,” I insisted.
“You enjoy playing with them,” she said, half-serious, half-smiling. Even then I wondered in which sense she meant “playing.” But I did not pursue it.
“In six weeks’ time,” I promised her. “After the christening.”
In six weeks’ time Prince Henry had grown amazingly, and was unable to fit into the christening gown Katherine had diligently embroidered. It was meant for an average-sized child, not for this chubby giant. Hastily, extra panels were added to both sides and sleeves.
The baptism, performed by Archbishop Warham, was glittering and splendid. Katherine, giving her Spanish love of lavish celebration free rein, insisted on the excessive number of candles, the double-length cloth-of-gold cape I would wear, and the coloured bonfires afterwards. The infant Prince Henry, wearing his two-yards-long white gown, became a member of the Body of Christ before a hundred witnesses. He cried when the water was poured over his head—a good sign, as it meant the Devil was being chased out of him. A murmur of approval passed around the nave of the church. That for Old Scratch.