The Autobiography of Henry 8

by Margaret George

  One of Luther’s heresies was in claiming that there were not seven Sacraments; that the Church (for mysterious, self-serving reasons of its own) had invented five of them. These five were Matrimony, Holy Orders, Penance, Extreme Unction, and Confirmation. Only Baptism and Communion remained. Under Luther’s interpretation, marriage was a legal contract; Holy Orders was unnecessary, for priests had no special powers; confession was something one did directly to God, not to a priest; Extreme Unction was a silly superstition; and Confirmation was a redundant version of Baptism. Christ had not performed any of them, therefore He could not have felt they aided in salvation.

  I believed—no, I knew—that Luther was absolutely wrong. Each of these Sacraments conferred grace; I had felt it come upon me when receiving them. I also felt called to refute him, on paper, lest he lead more souls to their damnation.

  I would find all Christ’s teachings on the matter, and those of every one of the doctors and fathers of the Church, from the very beginning up until today.

  It proved to be a formidable task. For upwards of four hours a day I laboured on the work. It required a staggering knowledge of theology, I was soon to discover. I had prided myself on my knowledge of the Churchmen and early Fathers, but culling the exact text for a minute philosophical point was an Herculean labour. I began to feel I lived among the dead, concerned only with the obscure opinions of those long since gone to dust, whilst ignoring the living and their distressingly selfish concerns about wages and room allotments. What was real? I began not to know, and as I shuttled back and forth between two disparate worlds, I became disoriented.

  In many ways I felt comfortable and soothed in the world of the mind, albeit the minds of dead men, for their thoughts, purified and preserved, were eternal. It would have been so easy to lose oneself here forever; a temptation, a siren call....

  These were my labours by day. By night they were of another nature entirely.

  As I have said, I brought Sir Thomas Boleyn’s daughter Mary back from France, where she had evidently served under Francis—in a minor capacity, for he had a regular mistress already, Jeanne le Coq, a lawyer’s wife. In Richmond Palace I established a French suite of rooms (where Father had kept his wardrobe!). “I would explore France further,” I said, “and experience those aspects of living in which France is said to excel.” Mary must have the accoutrements necessary to duplicate her feats with Francis. She would duplicate, I would surpass. Yes, I carried my rivalry with him even this far....

  The walls of the rooms were hung with tapestries depicting not Biblical scenes, but classical ones. French furniture was copied by my cabinetmakers, and the mirroite was like crossing the Channel.

  Mary awaited me on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, our assigned time. That in itself was French. The assignation. For the French prided themselves on their logic and rationality, and confined their lovemaking to prearranged trysts. One would think that would diminish the pleasure, but by divorcing pleasure from passion, it both heightened it and lightened it.

  All their positions had been catalogued and named, like their ballet steps. How pastel, how artistic they sounded; how far removed from anything to do with sweat, groaning, or fear.

  In France, so it seemed, the ancient, natural way of copulation had been entirely abandoned. Everything was from the rear or from the side. The moment of culmination they turned to poetry: la petite mort, the little death. Not, as in English, the moment of truth, the great anguish.

  Mary led me trippingly through these exercises. “The position for a King who has had a tiring day of Council meetings,” she whispered as she demonstrated one method.

  “Was it Francis’s favourite?” Sharing this woman with him, engaging in exactly the same acts in exactly the same body, was quiveringly arousing. “Did he do this—and this—and this—after his meetings?”

  Expertly Mary swam under me, bringing herself to la petite mort several times in succession, as if to avoid answering. That was another French fashion—no amoureuse worthy of the name was satisfied with only one petite mort. No, there must be a series, the more of them the better.

  “What of Francis?” I kept whispering.

  “It was never—he was never—” she murmured obligingly. “He was smaller than you.”

  Such exercises and flattery were only the beginning of her artful repertoire. There were many other things that decency does not permit me to record, even here.

  But in carrying pleasure to its furthest bounds, I exhausted pleasure. It grew to a surfeit. (As Bishop Fisher had predicted in his famous sermon: “First, the joys and pleasures of this life, be they never so great, yet they have a weariness and disgust adjoined to them. There is no meat or drink so delicate, so pleasant, so delectable, but if a man or woman be long accustomed therewith, he shall have at length a weariness of them.....”)

  All this while I was labouring in the theological thickets to complete my Assertio Septem Sacramentorum. I found a curious similarity between my two endeavours, in that preciousness ultimately kills all vitality in its subject. Theological hair-splitting and over-refined lovemaking techniques are cousins, bleeding their respective victims dry.

  XXX

  At length the book was finished. It was two hundred and fifty pages, all in Latin. I was pleased with it. Only then did I show it to anyone else, so that I was in effect presenting them with a fait accompli. (See how very French I had become; I thought in French phrases even beyond the bounds of pleasure.) It was to Thomas More and Wolsey and John Longland, Bishop of Linck. He held it three weeks past the time the others kept it. I knew then that he was actually reading it, and finding fault with it.

  More had lately been lured from his private life as a London lawyer. In Court of Star Chamber he had defended a Papal ship seized as forfeit under maritime law. His defence was so brilliant that Wolsey, who had represented the Crown in the matter, immediately set about to harness More’s talents for himself. He induced More to begin serving as Master of Requests—which meant that he must receive petitions presented to me, both at court and on progresses. From there I had named him to the Privy Council and had made it clear that he was to be part of the English party at the Field of Cloth of Gold. Little by little he had been sucked into court life.

  More requested to speak with me upon returning the manuscript. I could have received him in the audience chamber, seated upon my throne. But I preferred to speak with him man to man, not King to subject. He should come to my “counting room” and I would have warm, friendly firelight there, not the torches of ceremony.

  He was older now. But of course it should be so. A number of years had passed since I had, boyishly, given him the astrolabe to prove a point. He had been a grown man when my mother died. Now we were both men, and things were ordered differently. I did not have to send presents to prove that I was King and master.

  He bore the manuscript in a box.

  “I hope there are no changes,” I said, “as the presentation copies for His Holiness are already being prepared—by monks, of course. They have expertise at these things, at calligraphy.”

  “Not so much, anymore,” he murmured. He handed me the box. “I find only one fault in it. You stress the Pope’s authority too strongly. Perhaps it should be more slenderly stated.”

  Was that all? Relief came in waves.

  “Luther attacked it so viciously, I felt bound to shore it up again.”

  “You overstate the gravity of the office,” he said. “Pope Leo will buckle under the weight of it when he reads it. He is not meet to carry it. Nor, I think, is any other man on earth, the way you have presented it.”

  “But what did you think of the thing as a whole?” The question burst out.

  “I thought”—he paused—“it was an admirable work of scholarship. You have clearly shown much diligence in pursuing the references—”

  “The thinking! I mean the thinking, the analysis, the deductions! What of them?”

  More drew back, as if from a physi
cal assault. “They were certainly ... persuasive. And thorough.”

  But of course they should be persuasive, convincing.

  Suddenly I did not care to pursue it further. He had said “admirable,” “diligence,” “persuasive,” and “thorough.” Grudging compliments. Not the highest accolades. What he meant was competent, not stirring.

  He had seen no genius there.

  Well, what of it? Was he competent (that word again) to judge?

  “I thank you for your time in reading it,” I said. “I will take your suggestions into account.”

  In my head, not in the manuscript, which was even now being copied out on the finest vellum by the obedient monks.

  “We were glad of your company in France this summer past,” I said. “And of your willingness to undertake the diplomatic mission to Calais, regarding the return of Tournai.”

  He smiled. Or did he? His face seemed to have no provision for smiling. All its lines were sombre and downward.

  “You find yourself in our midst at last,” I said.

  “Yes. A surprise to myself,” he said.

  “You will learn to feel at home here,” I said. “For it is truly where you belong. The most brilliant minds in the realm should serve their sovereign, as thinking is a higher tribute than rubies. And one that a loyal subject should gladly present his King.”

  More bowed silently.

  I had not meant it to be presented thus. I had meant us to sit before the fire, exchange confidences, gain confidences, foster camaraderie. But he was not warm, despite his amiable manner. Amiability can function as an effective disguise for absolute coldness. I felt his coldness, stronger than I felt the heat of the fire.

  “My mind is yours to command,” he said.

  That was not what I meant, not what I intended at all. It was he who had interpreted it so, twisted my well-meaning into something sullen and sinister.

  Oh, let him go! Why did I care so very much what he thought and felt?

  He was just a man, like all the rest.

  WILL:

  The book—a great presentation copy bound in gold, with inner leaves of parchment—was dispatched to Leo X. Reportedly the Pope immediately read five pages and said he “would not have thought such a book should have come from the King’s grace, who hath been occupied necessarily in other feats, seeing that other men which hath occupied themselves in study all their lives cannot bring forth the like.”

  The Pope, grateful for the unabashed support of a king, conferred on Henry a long-coveted title: Defensor Fidei—Defender of the Faith. Now Henry would no longer feel naked beside his theologically bedecked fellow monarchs.

  The little book was an astounding success. Many translations were printed, in Rome, Frankfurt, Cologne, Paris, and Würzburg, among other places, and they sold as quickly as they came from the printing presses. A total of twenty editions was produced before the Continental appetite for it was sated. It was at that point that Luther entered the fray, hurling insults at its royal author. Henry, disdainful of replying, directed More to defend the work.

  HENRY VIII:

  My theological darts had struck home. I knew that by the vehemence with which the stung Luther responded. The “spiritual” monk unleashed a volley of low-born insults against me in his pamphlet Martin Luther’s Answer in German to King Henry of England’s Book. He called me “by God’s ungrace King of England” and said that sind sadly.

  “Scurrilous, Your Majesty,” said Wolsey, glancing at the Answer to Luther on my working desk.

  “Indeed. I am somewhat embarrassed to have such a fellow as my defender—whoever he may be.”

  Wolsey sniffed his pomander.

  “The stench of literary shit is not blocked by cinnamon and cloves,” I said. “Pity.”

  “Yes, there is almost as much of that about as the common sort, now that every man has a pen and, it seems, access to a printing press.” He sniffed again. “I am thankful that you presented your work to Pope Leo rather than to the—Dutchman. And that good Pope Leo did not live to see the pamphlet wars and shit-fights.”

  I bit my lip to suppress a smile. “You do not care for Pope Adrian?”

  The truth was that Wolsey had entertained serious hopes of being elected Pope after Leo’s sudden demise. He had attempted to buy the Emperor’s votes in the Curia. But instead they had elected Adrian, Bishop of Tortosa, Charles’s boyhood tutor. From all reports the man was holy, scholarly, and slow as a “tortosa.”

  “I do not know him.”

  He had not told me of his bribery in the Conclave. Spying had become an adjunct to our dealings with one another. Did he know that I had commissioned More to write Answer to Luther? I hoped not.

  Now to the matter at hand: the Parliament I had been forced to call to raise money for a possible war.

  Yes, Francis had broken the Treaty of Universal Peace by invading Navarre, wresting it from the Emperor. Now the Emperor prepared for war and called on all those who had signed the Universal Treaty of Peace in 1518 to punish the aggressor, France, as the treaty stipulated.

  “What taxes do you plan to ask?”

  “Four shillings to the pound, Your Majesty.”

  “That is a twenty-percent tax! They will never agree!”

  “The honour of the realm demands it.”

  Was he that cut off from what was possible and reasonable? “It is unreasonable. Never ask for something that can be so easily refused. It sets a bad precedent.”

  He shook his head. His jowls moved along with it. “They will not refuse,” he intoned, in a voice suitable for the Masses he never said anymore.

  Was it then that I began to entertain doubts about the sanctity, the wisdom, of the office of the Pope? If Wolsey could be seriously considered as a candidate—O, it was good that I had written my book when my faith was as yet untroubled.

  The business with Parliament went badly. Wolsey presented the case for the tax, and the noble calling of war against King Francis, the treaty-breaker. He spoke eloquently, as ever. He could have persuaded the birds to come down off the topmost branches of a tree. Any argument offered, he could have countered.

  But More, the Speaker of the House, offered the one thing Wolsey could not refute: silence. He claimed that it was an ancient privilege of Co as my Lord Cardinal lately laid to our charge the lightness of our tongues.”

  It was a stunning device. Wolsey had no recourse but to leave the Parliament chamber in defeat. In the next session one of his own household members, also in the House of Commons, spoke in a low voice about the ill logic of spending money to fight on the Continent when it could better be spent subduing the Scots at our backs, “and thereby make our King Lord of Scotland as well.”

  In the end I was allowed a tax of one shilling on the pound.

  “Who was the fellow who proposed incorporating Scotland into our Crown?” I asked Wolsey, after the fact, when his pride had stopped smarting.

  “Thomas Cromwell,” he replied. “A youngling from my household. He speaks when he should keep silent.” Thus Wolsey apologized for him.

  “I would think you would never hereafter commend silence as a virtue!” The wounds were still open and salt was at hand. “His suggestion had ... merit.” More was a different matter. Did he seek to prove his integrity by this contrariness?

  “Cromwell is a man who thinks only in terms of the attainable, not the permissible or the conventional. King of Scotland ... I’ll wager he sees the crown on your head even now.”

  “As I could be persuaded to, myself.” I felt the corners of my mouth go up in the facsimile of a smile. It was a trick I had learned lately to mask impatience or boredom.

  In the end we had to go to war, and Parliament had to finance it. Unfortunately for us, Parliament would finance it only so far, and that was not far enough. The war turned out to be a three years’ affair, and Parliament would sanction only a year’s participation. The result was that we paid our money, suffered tosses—but were excluded from the final vict
ory and its glories. For Francis fell in the Battle of Pavia, and was taken prisoner by Charles, in the end. The French army was destroyed. Fighting alongside his patron and master, Richard de la Pole, Edmund’s younger brother, the self-styled “White Rose of York” and Francis-styled “King of England,” was killed on the battlefield.

  “Now we are free of all pretenders!” I cried, when the news was brought me. I rejoiced. But it was a secondhand victory.

  In the opening volley of the war, we made great impact. I had recalled Brandon from his estates in Suffolk, where he languished, and put him in charge of the invading army. He and his men came within forty miles of taking Paris itself. But then the money, and the season, ran out. Snow fell and enveloped them, followed by ice. They could not winter over; it would be impossible to sustain an army of twenty-five thousand in the field in winter conditions. (To think that war must obey the trumpet-sound of the seasons!) I beseeched Parliament for the funds to enable them to take up in spring where they had left off. Parliament refused.

  So the opportunity to conquer France was thrown away on the smug vote of a few self-satisfied Yorkshire sheep-herders and Kentish beer-brewers!

  All English citizens had been ordered to return before the outbreak of the war. That included the few still in Francis’s court, such as the Seymour lads and Anne, Mary Boleyn’s sister. It was not meet that e imprisoned or held for ransom. Even the Bordeaux wine procurers hurried home, bringing their provisioning ships along with them.

  WILL:

  And thus Anne Boleyn—“Black Nan,” as she was known already—came to England. The Witch returned home....

  HENRY VIII:

  Going to Parliament had been demeaning in itself (but necessary, as I did not want to exhaust the Royal Treasury completely), but being refused by them was doubly so. Having to call my citizens home, admitting that I was unable to protect them abroad, was tantamount to impotence.