The Autobiography of Henry 8

by Margaret George

  Now only Fitzroy, Mary, and I were left to dispatch. Emboldened by her success, she was foolhardly enough to commit her plans for Mary in a letter to Mrs. Shelton, Mary’s “keeper”: “Go no further. When I shall have a son, as I soon look to have, I know what then will come to her.”

  Go no further. No more poison for now? Mary was safe, then, for the present.

  LXX

  A tournament had long been scheduled for the end of the month. I did not wish to cancel it now, as it would indeed seem as though England were mourning a Queen rather than a Princess Dowager if I did so. Holding the tournament would signal that the time for observing the death was past. In addition, it was necessary that I quench the rumours and questions beginning to circulate about my health. If I rode in this tournament, it would be proof that there was nothing wrong with me.

  I was forty-four now, well past the age when most men participated in tournaments. Brandon had retired from the lists several years ago. But I still enjoyed the challenge, enjoyed the whole ritual associated with it, and I was loth to give it up.

  That January afternoon, one had to be a Northman born to relish the idea of putting on cold metal armour. It was a bright, blue-and-white day, the edges and outlines of all things appearing extra sharp. The air seemed thinner and harder than normal, and even the sounds of the trumpets and pendant bells on the horses were as brittle as icicles. The tournament colours, bold and primary, made a great heraldic shout against the white snow as the challengers rode out. Today the clash of metal against metal would ring and echo coldly, and sparks would be struck, like showers of stars.

  “It was a Prince?”

  “It had the appearance of a male, of some sixteen weeks. Do you wish to—?”

  I nodded. A physician’s attendant brought the basket to me. I pulled back the coverings and stared at the jelly-like creature there, almost transparent, and only a few inches long. The male genitalia were recognizable. I pulled the cloth back over it.

  “I will see the Queen now,” I said. “When was she—when was this delivered?”

  “Not above half an hour ago,” Dr. Beechy said. “She strove, with all her might, to keep it within her womb. She quite exhausted herself by her efforts, making this issue more painful than a normal birth. She needs ... comforting.”

  “The Queen has miscarried of her saviour,” a diplomat wrote that week. Indeed, Anne had lost the son upon whom she had based all her schemes and visions of triumph. She was done for.

  “So,” I said, as I approached her bed, where she was still being sponged and ministered to by her women, “you have lost my boy.”

  She looked up at me. Stripped of her jewels, her immaculately coiffed hair, her stunning costumes, she was as ugly and wiry as a sewer-rat. Like one of those, she swam for safety.

  “O my Lord,” she cried, “he was lost for the great love I bear you. For when my uncle, the Duke, brought me word of your accident, and that you were not thought like to live, my pains began—”

  Liar. That was two days ago.

  “Has Her Majesty been in labour since Thursday?” I asked Dr. Beechy blandly.

  The honest, frightened physician shook his head. “Friday it began, Your Majesty.”

  “It was for despair that your love had left me!” she cried. “On Friday I saw the locket that Mistress Seymour wore.” She used her thin arms to hoist herself up to a sitting position, where she glared at me. “Can you deny that you are giving her tokens? I will not have it!”

  “You will not have it? You’ll have what I dictate that you have, and endure it as your betters have done.”

  “Katherine?” she screamed. “No, I’m no Katherine! And your maids shall never live to flaunt their tokens in my face!” She opened her hand, and lying on her palm was the locket I had given Jane—my mother’s locket.

  “I tore it off her neck, her thick, bullish neck. She’s plain, Henry, and has a fat neck. It’s pale and lumpy-looking.”

  Her whole body was straining forward, and the cords stood out on her neck. I could see a vein throbbing slowly, right under her ear.

  “Your neck is prettier,” I allowed her. “Slender and with a curve. Yet the head it bears up is filled with evil and curses and malevolence. You’ll get no more boys from me.” It was not a threat but a statement, and a promise to myself.

  She hurled the locket at me. I caught it easily, although she meant it to hhard.

  “When you are on your feet again, I shall speak to you,” I told her, closing my fingers over the locket.

  I left her chambers.

  I was free. She had no further hold over me.

  LXXI

  March had come in like a lamb, the country folk said, so it was bound to go out like a lion. They were correct, but not for the reasons they thought. This mid-March day, I, the lion, was hawking with Cromwell, my presumed “lamb.” At least he was always obedient and docile; in that way he was lamblike.

  The day was one of those March oddities—glum and yet alive with potential. Everywhere ice was melting, and one could hear the water flowing in streams and brooks, trickling out of woodland snowbanks, oozing into our horses’ hoofprints. One felt the growth ready to spring out of the dry, tightly packaged stems, one could see the glimmer of green beneath the trampled, brown, straggly grass. The wool-puff clouds against the sky seemed rinsed clean and purified. March was a tonic, a scourge, an astringent.

  It was a fine day for hawking. Cromwell and I needed to confer, and what better excuse to betake ourselves deep into the countryside and leave the palace spies and eavesdroppers behind? Crum had long been eager to show me his birds, and I had been eager to see the creatures for whom he actually seemed to have warm feelings.

  He kept both peregrine falcons and goshawks. By law, one must be at least an earl to fly peregrines. I intended to make Cromwell Earl of Essex—depending on how well he served me in what he judiciously refrained from calling the King’s Greater Matter.

  He asked me which I preferred to fly today, and I chose the peregrine. He chose its smaller mate, the tiercel. We took them from the hawk-house, hooded, upon our gloved wrists, and rode west beyond Richmond, until we were in the open country near Hampton. All the while the falcons were quiet, but Crum chattered on, uncharacteristically, about them.

  “Her name is Athena. I had a difficult time training her to the lure. But she’s strong. She even takes big old hares. Isn’t afraid of them!” He made sweet clucking noises to her.

  “Mars, here”—he lifted his wrist—“enjoys rook-hawking best. He loves to plummet out of the sky and fall on a rook, break its neck, let it drop, in a shower of black feathers. It’s a lovely sight!” he sighed. “Mars can even take a jackdaw. I get particular pleasure out of watching that. The ’daw tries to outfly him, but can’t.” Crum frowned. “Now, now!”

  I noticed that Mars was flexing his talons, and one tip had almost penetrated Crum’s leather hawking glove. “I love to see them kill,” he said simply. “They are spectacular in flight and fight.”

  “Would that we could emulate them,” I agreed. “Our best methods are clumsy by comparison, and there’s no sport in our executions.”

  “A subject that, alas, calls for our attention.”

  We reined in and prepared to slip the falcons. There was a flored ly. I had been forced to reveal the truth about Anne—Black Nan!—so that he would understand the force he was working against.

  “Of witchcraft? No, Your Majesty.”

  The sleek, dark shapes of the falcons, climbing quickly above us, were breathtaking.

  “But she is a witch! Why can you not find the evidence? Then—execution will be demanded.”

  “I thought to discover it. I assumed there would be certain potions, powders, books. But all I found was ... adultery.” He looked apologetic. “Her serving-woman, Lady Wingfield, has told me a strange tale ... of men hidden inside closets in the Queen’s bedchamber, waiting for code-words bidding them to emerge and come to her bed. It is all ... bizarr
e.” He handed me a piece of parchment, long, stained, with many entries and inks. “Oh, look!”

  The falcons had overtaken the rooks, and were now above them, singling out their targets. Then they would drop, perpendicular, wings folded close to the body, like smooth, dark stones of death.

  “Yes, yes.” I had seen falcons kill before.

  I glanced at the paper in my hands. I felt myself go weak, felt my hands tremble. I did not wish to see this, but at the same time I was compelled to read it.

  It detailed that the musician Mark Smeaton and “others” had had regular sport in Anne’s bed.

  A great thud in the sky, which carried to our ears: the falcons had hit the rooks, attacking straight from above. The rooks were dead, and plummeting. The falcons swooped yet again, catching them as they fell. A lazy swirl of black feathers followed them, like a funeral party.

  My eyes were forced back to the paper. The details went on and on, relentlessly.

  This list would be read out in court, to her shame.

  She was even fouler than I had imagined. My hands were contaminated in touching this filthy compilation. “The Great Whore,” I murmured.

  I raised my eyes. Cromwell had been watching me all the while, his black button eyes riveted on me.

  “I thank you,” I finally said. “It is time I knew the full truth.”

  Cromwell nodded. “Truth somehow always seems connected with pain. ‘The painful truth,’ we always say. Never ‘the joyous truth.’ I am sorry, Your Majesty,” he said quietly.

  “God sends pain to correct us,” I said, by rote. I had been taught that. Did I truly believe it?

  “Nonetheless, it hurts. The only way to avoid it is to cease to care.”

  Was that what Cromwell had done, after his wife’s death?

  “It would be restful not to care,” I agreed. It would be a peace, an absence I could not imagine. All my life I had cared—about everything.

  “Shall we?” He indicated the field, with the fallen rooks. “If we don’t remove them, the falcons will feed full, and will hunt no more today.”

  Feeling outside myself, I watched as I walked toward the kill. I walked, and used a lure to remove the falcons so we could stuff the poor, mangled rooks into our bags. All the whilee wife had just been irrevocably revealed as an adulteress, a whore.

  Why could I not feel? Why this strange detachment, this jumpiness, along with a perpetual shadow, an inner tolling of a bell?

  The falcons were off again, and Cromwell and I continued the eerie conversation.

  “I have had Master Smeaton to dinner,” he said. “I entertained him last week, at my London house. He was flattered to be invited. I was able to ... persuade him to talk. He admitted everything. That he had had carnal relations with the Queen.”

  “He said ... ‘carnal relations’?”

  “I have his words,” said Cromwell. “Allow me?” He indicated the horses, and his saddle-pouch. We walked back, and he drew out a sheaf of papers.

  “The details of the conversation,” he said. “I thought it best.”

  I read the entire hateful thing, wherein Smeaton confessed his adultery and named William Brereton, Francis Weston, and Henry Norris as her lovers as well.

  Henry Norris. My companion of the chamber, my friend.

  Did she take an especial relish in bedding him?

  He must have protested. I knew Norris, an honourable man. He must have been a difficult quarry, a challenge to her ingenuity and persistence. But she had evidently succeeded.

  According to Smeaton’s confession:

  Anne had asked Norris why he had not been more eager to conclude his arranged marriage with Margaret Shelton, and, answering for him, said, “Ah, if any accident befell the King—such as his jousting accident this January—you would look to have me for yourself. You look for dead man’s shoes!”

  So I was reduced to this teasing formula. I felt diminished, depersonalized, weakened.

  Francis Weston was likewise neglecting his wife in favour of Norris’s fiancé. When Anne chided him, he had replied, “There is one in your household I love more ardently than either my wife or Mistress Shelton. ”

  “Why, who?” asked Anne, innocently.

  “It is yourself,” he confessed.

  When she came upon Mark Smeaton alone, skulking and looking forlorn, she asked him, cruelly, “Why are you so sad?”

  “It is of no importance,” he answered, with as much dignity as he could command.

  “No, please tell me.” Her voice was full of luring concern, and he wished to believe it. “Are you unhappy because I have not spoken to you in company?”

  After bedding with him, she had undoubtedly taken a taunting delight in ignoring Majesty. I took the liberty of writing them down immediately after quitting her presence, lest I forget.” He shrugged. “Perhaps it was foolish?”

  “No, no. You did well.” I appreciated caution and thoroughness. I opened the purse and gave him a sovereign. “We thank you.”

  I put the purse away, and the letter. Jane had shown herself to be all that I hoped for. Let this, then, silence the murmurs in my head. Let me not yield to the temptation to test her further. Let there remain some semblance of innocence and trust in me, lest I have nothing to offer Jane Seymour in myself.

  April. The very word has a green sound. April. It should have a green look and a green smell as well, and this year it did. A strange odour perfused the air, as a green wind swept over the land. It was a sharp odour, a deep odour, of warmth and primitive beginnings.

  I rode alone in the meadows when I smelled it. I would have had Jane beside me, but I could not seek her company unchaperoned, and so I did not. The pastures and meadows turned velvety emerald; and the woodlands were a display of pastel colours, as the baby leaves of a thousand trees uncurled: not green at all, in their first hours, but lavender, pink, red, gold.

  Cromwell had all in order. The arrests would be made on May Day, following the customary jousts.

  “Everyone will be all together then, and that should simplify matters,” he explained. “The ceremonial presence of the Yeomen of the Guard will serve to disguise their true purpose.”

  Disguise, true ... the tortuous theme of the past half-year.

  “The arrests can be made unobtrusively. In the confusion and high spirits, no one will notice. They can be imprisoned by nightfall, all at once. Interrogation the next day, May second. Trial by May tenth. Execution by May fifteenth at the latest,” he said.

  “Good.” The sooner it was over, the better.

  “It will be necessary for you to attend with the Queen,” Cromwell said apologetically.

  “Quite so.” If she could play her part, so could I.

  We sat in the royal box, Anne and I. This was the first year I had not participated in the May Day tournament. The reason I gave out was my fall in the January jousts. Still, it was difficult to play the part of a spectator, as if I were an old King, one who existed only as a voyeur. It was a world with which I had no wish to acquaint myself, had always disdained and rejected.

  Humility, I thought. Being thought old and infirm and accepting it with grace is humility. Just as Christ pretended to be powerless before Pilate. (Although he could not resist the cryptic comment about only “allowing” Pilate to have power.) But comparing myself with Christ was pride. I extracted pride even from humility; I could squeeze it from any situation, like juice from an orange.

  Anne was in white, the same white she had worn, and so well, at her Coronation. She knew how fairly it set off her dark hair, her creamy skin; and such were her powers that for a few moments, as I sat beside her, I strad to the spectators, to the participants. The sun was bright on the field, and shone on the knights’ armour. I longed to be with them, instead of penned up in this watching box.

  Anne’s lovers all rode in the contests. I watched her carefully out of the corner of my eye to see how she behaved toward them. Weston and Brereton caused her no notice—poor men! did the
y suspect how little she regarded them? —but she quivered with attention to her brother George, who performed well enough. (Not as a champion, but certainly passable.) Then Norris took his place, riding against Francis Bryan. Before beginning, he made the customary bow to the royal box.

  Suddenly Anne leaned forward and flagrantly dropped her handkerchief. He picked it up, kissed it, passed it along his brow, then handed it back up to her. Their hands met, caressed.

  This effrontery was a spark to my tinder. It was so brazen, so blatant, that I could not endure it. The insult was too great.

  I stood up and said softly to Anne, “So, Madam. You shall have your reward.” I looked my last at her. I should never see her again upon this earth.

  I left the royal box, and informed Cromwell that I was returning immediately to the palace. “Make the arrests as soon as this course is over,” I ordered him. “Do not delay.”

  The handkerchief had been the last liberty Anne would take with my folly of having loved her. There is required a small act to kill love utterly; for reasons known only to God, large, heinous acts do not do it. Perhaps they are too great, have too many chinks and explanations. Only a small act of malicious disregard can achieve the final killing. A lace-edged handkerchief did what even Smeaton’s confession had failed to do completely, that is, in every corner of my being.

  Norris had not ridden, after all. He had divested himself of his armour and left the grounds straightway, riding after me. He overtook me before I was in sight of Westminster, and rode boldly up to me. I refused to look at him.

  “Your Majesty, you are angry at me,” he said.

  I did not reply.

  “Pray tell me my offence, so that I may amend it.”

  “The handkerchief ...” I began. “Was it necessary to mock me so? Or was that her doing?”

  “As God is my witness, I do not understand.”

  “Stop the pretence!” I hissed. “You are the Queen’s lover. I know the truth, and you shall die for it.”