The Autobiography of Henry 8

by Margaret George

  “I said, what is in these containers?” I repeated. How dare he not answer forthwith?

  “I—it is—medicines seized from the monastic infirmaries,” he finally said. “That one you hold—it was used to help failing hearts... you remember ... as Carew had, that time in the cave—”

  Carew. Yes. Unfortunately, his heart had finally ceased to beat due to his treason, not to his disease. But for others who had the same affliction... ?

  “Is it efficacious?”

  “Indeed! It saved many lives; the monks of that abbey were noted for that particular cure.”

  “Why, then, have you not made it available to our own physicians?”

  “The monks—it would reflect well on them if it were known that they had devised such cures. No, I prefer—”

  “You prefer to hoard these medicines here! You prefer men to die rather than think well of the monks!”

  “It is necessary to discredit the monks!” he insisted.

  “Necessary for whom, Cromwell?” I murmured.

  The clock outside struck the half hour. I used listening to the clock as a pretext to approach the window-seat laden with the mysterious books.

  “Ah, yes,” I mumbled, opening the casement. I stuck my head out and rested my left hand on the sill, quite nds were raw. There, now they should be clean! I held them out to receive a coat of perfumed lotion.

  I called for a Privy Council meeting in mid-morning. I wanted to give them their assignments, make my humiliating “confession,” and have done with it. By this time tomorrow, I kept reminding myself, it would all be over.

  I sat alone in the chamber, awaiting them. I was all attired in sombre garments, befitting a less than joyous occasion. Brandon and Wyatt would carry the message to Anne, I had decided. As for the horrible acknowledgment—the entire Privy Council would have to hear it, to make it both official and binding.

  The first man into the chamber was William Paget. Stolid and utterly colourless and reliable, he was Secretary of the Council. He coughed and bowed deeply to me, then quietly took his place and awaited the others.

  Within three minutes William Petre arrived, clad likewise in colourless, drab attire. On his heels came Audley and Sadler. As they took their places, I could not help but think of wrens and poor winter birds sitting in dreary tiers on bare December branches.

  Then came the Old Men, all resplendent in luscious colours and sumptuous fabrics. Norfolk, of course, as ranking peer of England, draped in velvet; Suffolk, in cloth-of-gold; even Gardiner, as Bishop of Winchester and leader of the churchly traditionalists, along with Wriothesley his hanger-on, were brightly attired.

  At length the filing-in was complete and they all sat, obedient to the day’s business. As the King never personally attended Privy Council meetings, they knew this was no ordinary agenda.

  I rose. “My good Council and servants”—I stressed “good” and “servants” —“I am here to share with you a secret matter of mine own heart.”

  They looked uneasy.

  “Yea”—I pulled the prepared statement from its cover—“I, having contracted a marriage in good faith and having participated in a marriage ceremony with all good intentions, find now that my marriage is no true marriage in the eyes of God and the laws of men.”

  I looked up at their faces. They appeared frozen. Good.

  “The Lady Anne of Cleves was not free to make such a marriage, so it seems. There was precontract, from childhood, to the present-day Duke of Lorraine. This evidently is binding in every way.”

  Now for the difficult part. God, how I hated it!

  “Our bodies, in recognition of this, refused to join. We have remained chaste, and have not known one another.”

  The Earl of Southampton tittered. Then the others followed suit, trying all the while to suppress their mirth. The more they stifled it, the more it grew.

  Damn them!

  “So you wish to know the exact details?” I said sharply. Such a hush fell over them that a man scarce would have credited it. “Very well, then!” Do not do this, one part of me said. Yes, do! another taunted. Outdo them in vulgarity and embarrassment. “When I first came to the bed of the Lady Anne, I felt by her breasts that she was no young maid; their slackness, and the looseness of her belly-flesh, so struck me to the heartred and looked weary. But not afraid. That was good. That meant they had not failed in their assignment. Somewhere in the welter of rolls they carried on their persons (and it seemed they had more than a stag had antlers, so did they protrude all over) were the signature and seal I craved.

  “Well?” I rose from my chair.

  “She agreed, Your Grace,” sighed Brandon, pulling out the one paper that mattered and handing it to me.

  I grasped it and let my eyes run like a leaping child to find the requisite signature, down far at the bottom: Anna, Princess of Cleves.

  “Christ be praised!” I muttered.

  Only then did I think to offer them stools to sit upon, and some nourishment. It had been a gruelling day for them as well as for me. Gratefully they seated themselves and held out their dusty hands for bowls of water to wash them. A page performed the duty.

  “The Queen—Lady Anne—had a hard time of it,” spoke Wyatt in a hushed voice, as his hands were being dried.

  It was to be expected. After all, she loved me, and had assumed she would remain Queen of England forever. “Yes, I pity her,” I said. And I did. I knew what it was to suffer unrequited love, or to be deprived of a station in life to which one felt called.

  “She fainted when she saw us appear round the hedge to her garden,” said Brandon.

  Fainted? Could it be? No, absurd! She was no Virgin Mary, to bring forth without knowing a man. Where had my fancies taken me? She had done it out of love, out of desperate love.

  “Poor lady,” I murmured.

  “She thought we had come with her death warrant,” continued Brandon. “She thought to be arrested, tried, and then executed.”

  I chuckled contemptuously.

  “She was clear frightened, Your Grace. You had shown your disfavour and lack of consent from the start, then sent her away without you. She is no fool. I am sure she is well acquainted with the course of behaviour you took with Anne Boleyn. The withdrawal, the disfavour—all was being repeated.”

  “Save that she had no lovers!” I shrieked, turning round. “Save that she was no witch! Save that she did not plan my death! Small differences, would you not agree?”

  “Aye, aye,” murmured Wyatt.

  “By all that’s in heaven, yea,” echoed Brandon. “She revived promptly,” he added.

  Her strong constitution would see to that, yes. “She seemed delighted with the agreement, and the terms. In half an hour she changed into the gayest maiden I had beheld in a season.”

  Gay? Delighted? To lose me as a husband? I remembered Katherine’s agony, her insistence on keeping me as her spouse.

  “She sent you this token.” Brandon took out a velvet pouch and produced her gold wedding band.

  “Well, well,” was all I could say. Anne had agreed. I had won.

  I gestured toward the darkened window. “Tomorrow I’ll sendOatlands, just a high-ceilinged chamber on the second storey, hung with hunting trophies. Stags’ heads and boars’ heads stared at us with their glass eyes.

  Catherine and I sat side by side and laughed at everything. We laughed at Brandon when he stood up, cup in hand, and made a solemn toast about matrimony. He himself had been married four times, and had been one of the chamberers on my wedding-night public bedding with Katherine. It all seemed to come together now, all was one. We laughed, and we touched. And touched. O sweet Jesu! That touch!

  We smiled at Cranmer’s gentle well-wishes. (And touched.) We clapped at the Lady Mary’s. (And touched, under the table, lest she see.) We bowed gravely at little Edward’s. He spoke three words in Latin, memorized for the occasion. And all the while the sun was lowering, making shadows on the rows in the grain fields outside. At
last it set, but the interminable summer twilight lingered on and on, until I longed to order it to disappear.

  At long last it grew dark enough in the feasting chamber for candles to be lit, then torches. It was time for our guests to take their leave, and so they did, with kisses and well-wishes. There was to be no ceremonial bedding this time. Like any wool merchant or soldier, I was free to take my bride to my bed unaided.

  It was a new bed, purchased from a local magistrate in the nearby village of Weybridge. He had commissioned it from a London artisan, meant it for a grand guest chamber he had had in mind for a manor that never came about. It was of good English oak and agreeably carved, and quite large, in aping the nobility. It stood now in the royal Retiring Chamber, its great four-posts scraping against the sloping ceiling.

  I led my sweet Catherine into the chamber, closing the snug, dark door behind me. It was passably dark in there, and the one lighted candle on the wooden chest danced in the billowing summer air. Two dormer windows gave out on the ripening fields. I made to close them. Catherine stopped me, putting her soft hand on my arm.

  “On this my wedding night,” she said, “I would not be shut up and closed, as in a tomb. I would have a little breath of heaven, of the world beyond.”

  “Whatever you wish,” I said. The windows remained open, and the grain-perfumed air came in, along with the cries of labourers and travellers on the road below.

  I wish I could tell exactly what happened in the next few hours. I said thus-and-so. She said thus-and-so. We did thus-and-so. Yet although my senses were fully alert (no wine for either of us that night), I became so transported by her very presence that everything was altered, and I cannot separate one action from another.

  It makes me angry that it is so. These were precious hours to me, hours that must now stand after all the nasty tide has swept in against them, and yet I cannot remember! I cannot remember cold details, only my own feelings, which were as strong as Hercules, but formless.

  I was with her. I possessed her. She was mine. The very touch of her hand was a gift. A gift which felt simultaneously natural and precious beyond thought. The ordinary me, the true Henry, was not worthy of such a gift, but this special Henry was, the Henry I became in her presence.

  All this was entirely natural, was it not? To hold her in my arms, to kiss her lips, to hear those words of endearment gasped out in jerks? The special Henry, the Henry and endowed with extraordinary graces (this Henry who was both me and not me, stranger and ever-known) —he felt at ease in this bliss, this homecoming.

  I know she responded, created the Henry of whom I speak. In the fleeting moments in which I existed as this extraordinary Henry, I felt I was ever thus: not fading, not temporary. I was bold with her, taking her to bed as this Henry wished. We did not remove all our clothes, so anxious were we to consummate our union and join as one. We left our upper bodies completely clothed, and our lower bodies, naked, sought one another. It happened so quickly, so completely, that the twilight had not faded altogether before our first union was done.

  What a contrast was there: our lower selves still fused together in heat and sweat, and enfolded together, whilst our upper bodies touched not at all, save through layers and layers of linen and velvet and jewels.

  We rolled away. But no self-consciousness yet: no, none.

  I finally spoke, softly. “You are different from my fantasies.”

  “How so?”

  “I never thought you would know, so quickly, what it was you wanted.”

  “Are you disappointed?” she said sadly. “Because I did not feign reluctance, as a virgin is expected to?”

  “No, no,” I assured her. But did I speak true?

  “I meant to. But the truth is, my desire took hold and I had no will or power to restrain it.” Did she speak true?

  “Nor I.” I leaned over and kissed her gently. The jewel-encrusted doublet I still wore restricted my movement, reminded me of its presence. “It is time to undress,” I said softly.

  Together we unbuttoned and unclasped the bindings of one another’s garments. Then, although naked, we did not look directly at one another, but wrapped ourselves up in the bleached and scented linen sheets and began to talk, like children huddled together.

  The talk was awkward, when the bodies had not been. I longed to speak of all my feelings, but sensed that was wrong. Catherine had recovered herself, and began chattering away in a high voice.

  “... and then the most stinking groom in the Duchess’s stables, he made gestures toward me. Naturally I was sickened: he was repulsive. How could he ever have thought I would respond? I told my aunt the Duchess....”

  Why was she sullying our time together, our first union, with these tales of men who had wanted her and whom she had refused? It made me angry, it hurt me. Yet I let her go on, tried to join in, in a jolly fashion.

  From thence she went on about the most inane subjects. Her Howard cousins, Culpepper and Henry the Earl of Surrey; a book she had seen Mary Howard reading; a tale told the Duchess by a returning pilgrim from Jerusalem.

  It was all entertaining, witty—and impersonal. Why did she choose to speak of these things on this sacred night? Was it just nervous chatter, the chatter of a maid who feared the unknown? Yet she did not appear afraid or frightened or shaken in the least. Rather she appeared self-possessed, soothing.

  I did not understand. I only felt disappointed, somehow. Not in the lovema">Then she suddenly broke off her words and turned to me, flinging her arms around me. “Now I would be the bridegroom,” she murmured, pressing me on my back, positioning me just so, lowering herself upon me. As she felt me inside her, she leaned back: pulling, pushing, straining. I saw her fair white body, slim and yet big-breasted, in the candlelight, arching away from mine. Her lips were parted, and her chin jutted out. A mass of hair enveloped her, touched even my loins, tickling them. She worked, grunted, cried out. But I felt little. I could not lose myself, although her woman-parts engulfed me, seemed to suck me in. She fell forward, a sheen of sweat upon her back.

  “Ah,” she murmured, a bubble of saliva forming, and bursting, on her plump lips. Her arms trailed out on either side like those of a drunkard upon a board. Lasciviously she pulled up her left leg, disengaging our private parts. She came away from me with a great sucking noise and a trail of moisture. The drops landed on my belly: small, round, gleaming, and oily. I watched them as they formed, like little pearls.

  She gave an animal sigh of contentment.

  “It must take a great deal to keep you satisfied,” I finally murmured. The drops on my flesh flattened and trickled off, and I felt cold. Outside there was no light. The brief summer dark had taken hold.

  XCIV

  During the remainder of that unusually hot summer, I fluctuated between two poles of feeling. One part of me rejoiced in Catherine, in my new wife, and basked in her beauty and unrestrained sensuality. She said things I had never thought to hear a woman say. “I dreamed last night of your man-sword, and how it felt inside me, and I could not sleep, for both the memories and the expectations.” “The way you move is sinful, and takes me away in thought at embarrassing times. Today when the French ambassador stood before me, all I could think of was the way we had screamed out together at midnight last.” Now I myself would never be able to see Castillon, the French ambassador, without remembering Catherine’s midnight ecstasies.

  On the other hand, it happened again and again—she did not react, did not feel, turned a solemn moment into a trite jest. When I said, “It has never been so good, never in my life,” she replied offhandedly, “Oh, it must have been good with the Princess of Aragon, with my cousin Boleyn, with Queen Jane—for there are Princess Mary and Princess Elizabeth and Prince Edward.” Smile. Laugh. When I told her of how I loved her, she murmured, “It is carnal only, Henry, pure carnality. I know not else why we find ourselves thus.” Giggle. “Have you done this often?” Smirk. And ever: “Tell me, what do you think I—?” Do. Think. Look like. Sh
e never tired of hearing how she appeared. Once, when she came upon me writing some music for the virginal, she asked, “Are you writing a tune of our love?” She assumed I was —that she should be my subject and muse and fixation. The fact that it was so was no surprise, no gift. She claimed it as a personal victory, lugged it home with her as the hunters had done the stag and boar heads decorating our wedding-lodge manor.

  She was a child, I reminded myself. Children open their presents on the spot. I knew it, and yet I expected more. Or less. I hated her bragging and her strutting. Yet I longed for her kisses and enthusiasms. And her sweet flesh. We remained at royal country manors throughout the summerted, reborn, and reshaped.

  When the time came for the summer progress to end, I found I had no desire to return to London and immerse myself in affairs of the realm, to read over the rolls of the shires and the tax compilations. There was the horrid task of sorting through Cromwell’s records, and this I did not care to do at all. I knew they would be orderly and not difficult to survey. But, oh! to touch them, and see that handwriting. It would be as if he himself stood grinning at my shoulder.

  Day by day I was increasing in strength and endurance, both out of doors and between the sheets with Catherine. It was only October. What need to break it all off now? I could return to London, unite my private travelling Privy Council with the London-bound lot, transact essential business in a fortnight, and rejoin Catherine for a long, slow autumn. Then there would be the Christmas revels, and after that, I could return to life as it commonly was.

  Or life as it was meant to be. The realm was quiet, at long last, after the murmurings and belligerence at the start of my Great Matter; after the outright rebellion against the closing of the monasteries; after the plots and counter-plots and treachery that went abroad in the realm, masquerading as “conscience” (Thomas More), the restoration of the “old order” (Cardinal Pole), the bringing about of the “new order” (Cromwell); after outside threats and sword-shakings (the Pope and his toady the Emperor, until at last their pawn, Mary, disappointed them by coming over to my side). Oh, it was all over at last, and I was weary, weary. I had fought so many years. Now a golden haze of satiation lay on the land I had harried so, and I would luxuriate in it.