The Autobiography of Henry 8

by Margaret George

  One by one the houses were being closed. Those monks who had a true calling were being transferred to larger, stricter houses. The rest were to leave and find their livelihood elsewhere. Their monastic property was to be sold and the proceeds to revert to the Crown. The relics were being sent here, for my inspection. It was an unhappy task.

  Monasticism had begun as a pure flowering of spiritualism. The great founder of communal Christian living (for until then there had been only desert-living Christian hermits) was Saint Benedict. He thought it better for men to live with other men, and gathered together hermits and wrote instructions, called the Rule, by which they could actually increase their spiritualism by living in a community governed by holy rules. In his view, a man should best divide his time between prayer, study, and manual work.

  In time, other interpretations of his Rule prevailed. The Cistercians stressed manual labor and apartness from civilizalisasted eight months and even the summers were grey and raw, leading Northumberland men to claim they had “two winters—a white one and a green one.”

  Since ancient times these peripheral lands had gone their own way, little connected to anything further south. A few great warrior families—the Percys, the Nevilles, the Stanleys—had claimed overlordship of these dreary, cruel wastes, and through them, the Crown had demanded obeisance. But these people knew nothing of me, and I nothing of them. The only touch of love and softness they had ever known was through the great Cistercian monasteries: Fountains, Rievaulx, Jervaulx, Kirkstall. There they could stumble in following a snowstorm and find warmth, food, shelter. There, and only there, could travellers stay the night in safety. There they could be taught to read and write, if they so desired.

  Now rumour reached them that their abbeys were to be closed. They had heard, distantly, that ties with Rome were broken. For them, the Church—through Rome—was their one distinction, their one blessing, that set them apart from their wild neighbours even further north. Word had reached them that the newly independent “Church of England” had set forth its beliefs in a statement of Ten Articles that leaned toward Lutheranism and dropped four of the seven Holy Sacraments.

  This was the aforementioned Ten Articles of Faith to Establish Christian Quietness, a statement of doctrine drawn up by my bishops in hopes of doing exactly that. The recent changes had so confused the laity that I had thought some clarification of beliefs was in order.

  The resulting Ten Articles were a magnificent compromise between the traditionalists and the reformists. Like all compromises, it evidently satisfied no one of either persuasion and unduly alarmed both factions.

  The northerners heard, also, in a distorted and distant way, that commoners had replaced noblemen in the King’s Council. They had always been served well by “their” noblemen, and feared for themselves without their guardians. But more than anything else they feared change. Like the slow-growing trees in their region—which took three or four years to attain the one year’s growth of a similar tree in southern England—they were unable to respond quickly to climactic changes. The plant that grew from their soil was the Pilgrimage of Grace.

  A pilgrimage was what they called it, but a rebellion was what it was. It broke out in spots, like the pox, all over Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. Eventually the mass coalesced into a great pustule—some forty thousand strong —in the area of the middle of Yorkshire. I did not pop the pustule directly —that would have made too great a splatter—but lanced it and let it drain away and dry up.

  So much for metaphor. Now let me set down, in summary, exactly what happened in those autumn months of 1536.

  I had sent my commissioners north to supervise the suppression of the small monasteries, as stipulated in the Act of Parliament. The first resistance they met was in the hamlet of Hexham, in Northumberland. There an armed mob of monks and townspeople chased them out.

  Next, a spontaneous revolt arose in Lincolnshire. The rebels surrounded the castle of Kyme, where Bessie Blount and her new husband, Edward, Lord Curt, where I met with him at Christmas.

  Thus ended the so-called Pilgrimage of Grace—neither a pilgrimage nor imbued with grace. But it did alert me to the deep-seated affection for the monasteries and the “Olde Religion” in my far-flung territories. When I met with Aske, one of his requests—and a reasonable one, too—was that I show myself to them, so that they might know me as well as my southern subjects, and that I agree to hold Jane’s Coronation at York. It was a pleasant thought, and would make Jane’s crowning altogether different from Anne’s.

  In the end, though, the rebellion in the North failed because it had only the common people’s loyalty, not that of the great lords of the North: the Nevilles and Percys; the Earls of Derby, Shrewsbury, and Rutland. These looked at the magnificent Cistercian monasteries and realized the properties could be theirs, if they but supported my policy. And they were right.

  The other rebellion, more unexpected and uncharacteristic, came from within the royal apartments. Jane herself took the part of the Pilgrims. Tender-hearted, she hearkened to their complaints and tried to persuade me to capitulate to them.

  “Can you not let the monasteries in the North remain?” she begged. “Their needs are different from ours, their land is different. How can you know unless you see for yourself?”

  “There can be no exceptions,” I tried to explain, gently. “For once exceptions begin, they never end. The Welsh, the Cornish, the fen country— all will want their special concerns catered to. Besides, this business of the monasteries concerns only myself and Rome.”

  I had an ugly flash of memory. “These rebels, like Darcy and Hussey and Dacre, Lord Abergavenny, were first seduced into treason by Chapuys’s plot to help Katherine’s cause. The Pope is part of it—else why would he have dispatched that filthy Plantagenet creature of his, Cardinal Pole, to come as Papal legate and lend a hand to the rebels? No one co-operates, of course. The Cardinal languishes in Flanders, unable to find a willing sea captain to sail him across the Channel. May he rot there in the Lowlands!” My voice was rising at the perfidy of it allhelpn honourable, thoughtful man—ironically, just the sort of “commoner” I liked to have on my councils and to which his Pilgrims objected.

  The Percy family had ruined itself in the Pilgrimage. Earlier, Henry Percy (Anne’s erstwhile lover), now the sixth Earl of Northumberland, had bequeathed his familial lands to the Crown upon his death. Whether poor dying Percy did it as a gesture of despair or mockery toward his brothers, I knew not, but it presented an elegant solution to the problem of no Crown holdings in that wild area. Naturally the two younger brothers, Thomas and Ingram Percy, objected, and became traitors and rebels in hopes of reclaiming their ancestral lands. All the while Henry Percy lay on his deathbed, his whole body “as yellow as saffron,” they said.

  Some of the rich northern abbeys, thinking to protect themselves and win favour, gave shelter and aid to the rebels. Their actions had exactly the opposite effect: they convinced me that all the monasteries must be closed, for they were no friends to me or my government.

  After the New Year, two leftover rebels, Sir Francis Bigod and John Hallam, impatient to have their “demands” met, regathered forces and attempted to capture the cities of Scarborough and Hull. Two abbeys, Watton Priory and Jervaulx, joined in, and the next month rebellion broke out in two other shires, Cumberland and Westmorland.

  That was enough. There would be no pardon, no promises on my part carried out. The traitors, one and all, would perish, and in the sight of those they had led. Robert Aske was hanged in chains on market day in the square at York; Sir Robert Constable, in the market at Hull; and Lord Hussey was beheaded in Lincoln.

  Lord Darcy (“Old Tom,” who had shouted at Cromwell, “Yet shall there one head remain that shall strike off thy head!”) was beheaded at the Tower, along with Thomas Percy; and Tyburn (where traitors met the prescribed felons’ death) took care of the Abbot of Barking, the Vicar of Louth, and the Lancaster royal herald who had knelt in fealty to t
he rebels. Seventy-four lesser rebels were likewise executed in Carlisle.

  The rebel monks, some two hundred of them, were executed as the stinking traitors they were. At Sawley Abbey, they had actually crept back into their officially closed house in arrogant disregard of the law. So I ordered the Earl of Derby to hang the abbot and a score of his monks from the church steeple, on long pieces of timber, so that all his “flock” could see what befell traitors. The white-clad bodies swung from the silent tower (the bells having already been melted down and carried away). I daresay their silent movements spoke louder to the neighbourhood than any ringing bells ever had.

  This prompted the first surrender of a monastery. When my royal commissioners took up their work again in April, the Abbot of Furness Abbey, in Cumbria, found it prudent to meet my representatives with a deed of surrender, giving the Crown “all such interest and title as I have had, have, or may have in the Abbey.” This unforeseen gift made our task simple—although it rattled Cromwell, who had made out a complex schedule for closing the monasteries, based on their resistance.

  “Sometimes it is difficult to appreciate an unexpected victory when one has been bracing for a struggle,” I said.

  “Yes. This schedule was ingenious,” he replied wistfully, running his hands over it, where it lay spread out on our consulting-table. “Now I shall have to expand the numbers quisitions.”

  The Court of Augmentations was the body Cromwell and I had created to process the monastic properties and dispose of them. “I think perhaps a new head is in order, to free you,” I said. “I shall appoint Sir Richard Riche.”

  Cromwell chortled. He looked quite like a jolly uncle when he did so. “A masterful touch, as the Pilgrims demanded his removal from power. After me, of course. They despised us.”

  I looked up from the table to glimpse the cold, promising March sky outside. This time last year I had been hawking with Crum, and had given him the fearsome commission....

  “It is all over now,” I said in wonder. It was all over, and peace had come again.

  “I beg your pardon?” Crum looked at me, alert.

  “I was only thinking how quiet it is in the land.”

  “All your enemies are dead, Your Grace.”

  LXXIX

  The day the abbot and monks of Sawley Abbey were hanged, I found Jane crying in her chamber.

  I had made arrangements to spend the morning with her looking over the plans for the Queen’s New Lodgings, now being constructed at Hampton Court. I had thought my Janey—for so I called her, between the two of us—would relish being able to choose the wood, the artisans to carve it, and all the rest to make the royal quarters a reflection of herself.

  Spread out all around her were drawings and samples of colours and materials. But she did not even seem aware of any of them. They surrounded her like dropped petals from an overblown rose, but she did not regard them.

  “Well, Janey,” I said, stepping into the chamber, “have you decided? You spoke of purple, once—”

  My spirits drooped as soon as I beheld her. No, I could not stand another source of sadness today! I could not comfort; I had no comfort to give. I wanted the monks blanked out of my mind.

  “Have you not decided, then?” I chided her gently.

  “I—they all looked suitable.”

  “Have you no preference, then?” I fought to keep the little saw-edge of irritation out of my voice. “These new lodgings are to be the equal of—”

  “Anything in France,” she finished for me. “But I am no Madame de Heilly.”

  “Francis’s mistress has no taste,” I said. “And these lodgings are for you, Janey. For you. Can you not understand how I wish for you to have a place of your own, not inherited from Wolsey or ... the others?”

  “Yes, yes.” It was then that I realized the apartments were for me, not for her. I needed to see her in surroundings that had no echoes.

  “Choose something, Janey. It will mean a great deal to me,” I begged her.

  “Very well.” She bent forwarhe anut, dark green is always suitable.”

  “No, I’ll not have that. ’Tis too—expected. I’ll have scarlet instead.” She pointed at a smear of colour.

  “The Westminster red.” I recognized it. “Most noble.”

  She smiled. “You will pin down my desires and preferences, in spite of myself.”

  “I wish to see you captured by them, so that in your absence I can still see you.” I hesitated. Should I tell her of what I had seen? “Is the choice really that difficult, that you must cry over it?”

  She quickly hid her face.

  “There should be no secrets between us,” I said, as gently as I could. “Nothing to be ashamed of.” She knew me, knew all of me. And I was glad of it.

  “It is not I who am ashamed! It is you—or should be!” she cried. “The monks—”

  Not this again.

  “—that you are having hanged this very moment—”

  The arrogant rebels of Sawley, then.

  “—in a mocking fashion—”

  “The punishment must fit the crime! And should serve as a deterrent for possible converts. These particular monks were arrant traitors.”

  “It is not the monks,” she wept. “It is you!”

  Now I was completely confused and bewildered. “I do not understand,” I finally said.

  “What does it do to you to order such things done?” she said. “It changes you, forever.”

  Poor innocent. Perhaps she did not know me, after all. I was changed that way when I had had to order my first executions after my Coronation, those of Empson and Dudley. After the first they are all the same.

  “I hope not,” I assured her, reluctant to reveal my true feelings. She would find them ugly. And possibly unacceptable.

  “What sort of a world will my children inherit? A world without monks and nuns, a world where abbots hang out of steeples—”

  Children.

  “Janey, are you—?” I had prayed, I had thrown myself on God’s mercy, for there were so many physical hindrances....

  “Yes. I have only just now begun to believe it.”

  So that was what all this was about. The tears, the scruples, the evasiveness.

  I embraced her, feeling her healthy, compact body against me.

  A miracle. For I had thought some punishment lurked, and a child would never be granted me.

  That Sunday, a Te Deum was sung in all the churches in thanksgiving for the Queen’s pregnancy. That meant it was officially announced throughout Christendom, and that everyone would hear of it: the Pope, the Emperor, Francis, the lingering rebels in the North. Truly it was a sign that peace had come again to England, that the horrible upheavals of the past decade were over, like a passing stormaks and doublets and hose and shoes, all in black. When he suggested perhaps the quantity was excessive, I insisted that he was mistaken. I ordered Cromwell to select all the black onyx from the Jewel House, and bring it to me. I paced and strutted and consulted books and Scripture.

  Then I collapsed, and it was back to bed once more.

  All this I remember as in a waking dream. Whenever I stopped moving, I was attacked by paralysing sorrow.

  Slowly my head cleared. Then I began to be tormented by recurrent thoughts and obsessions, that in themselves became demoniac. They circled back again and again, as if to drive themselves like nails into my mind. It was in defence against them that I started to write them down, hoping that if I did so they might retreat. Perhaps the act of recording them would placate them, so they would leave me in peace.

  I have kept the papers all these years. I do not know what is written on them, nor do I care to reread them. The transcribing did serve as an exorcism. I affix them here, only because I have no other suitable place to put them.

  If grief is only in my mind, where does my bodily pain come from? In my chest there is a tightness, as if several men with thick arms were squeezing me, pushing my breath out. I feel as if I cannot get my
breath, cannot expand my chest. My muscles do not obey. Or when they try, they are weak. I am suffocating. There has come a choking in my throat, something that constricts on its own, and aches on its own. When I cry, it vanishes. But within a few moments it is back again. Like a bear-keeper, it keeps me chained by a short leash.

  I have dreaded going into certain rooms, passing by certain things we looked at together, as if it would be too painful. But when it happens —by accident, or necessity—Ihave been surprised to find it does not hurt, not any more than her absence hurts anywhere else. I feel her absence no more keenly when looking at a beehive than when looking at a book she had never seen. Why is that?

  I want Jane back. I would settle for only one minute with her. I would settle for only one question to ask her. I would settle for the chance to say only one sentence to her. Only one!

  I see her everywhere. I see bits and pieces of her: in one woman’s way of straightening her necklace, in another’s timbre of voice, in yet another’s profile. As if she were a mirror, broken, and the shards lay everywhere, in the most unexpected places.

  I have been blaming God. But how much of it was my fault? The rumours that she took ill on account of bad handling . . . I am beginning to believe them myself. If only I had not forced her to participate in the night ceremony after the christening. If only I had let her rest.... The quails. Why did I indulge her fancies and let her eat so many? It was injurious to her health.... And then, the infinity of smaller things in which I might have unwittingly contributed to her death. Every day I find more of them....

  I remember once someone said to me, describing his wife’s death: ̶ehold my misery, made visible by these repulsive black hangings. God had robbed me of Jane, now I would rob Him of myself.