The Autobiography of Henry 8

by Margaret George

  “We have, in Ireland, special triads.” He began plucking the harp-strings, so sweetly that they seemed to caress the air.

  “Three things that are always ready in a decent man’s house: beer, a bath, a good fire.

  “Three smiles that are worse than griefs: the smile of snow melting, the smile of your wife when another man has been with her, the smile of a mastiff about to spring.

  “Three doors by which falsehood enters: anger in stating the case, shaky information, evidence from bad memory.

  “Three times when speech is better than silence: when urging a king to battle, when reciting a well-turned line of poetry, when giving due praise.

  “Three scarcities that are better than abundance: a scarcity of fancy talk, a scarcity of cows in a small pasture, a scarcity of friends around the beer.”

  I liked it not. It was gloomy; there was something ominous even about the “happy” triads. I shook my head.

  He shrugged, clearly not understanding why I did not want more of it.

  He struck a chord and began a new poem.

  “Lovely whore, though,

  Lovely, lovely whore

  Slept with Conn,

  Slept with Niall,

  Slept with Brian,

  Slept with Rory.

  ”Slide then,

  The long slide.

  “Of course it shows. ”

  What peculiar sentiments the Irish had! Why would they celebrate a whore in verse and achingly poignant melody?

  I smiled. The music was exquisite, that I acknowledged. I nodded vigourously, so that he might play on.

  From his harp came a sparkling sigh, a whispered wave of beauty.

  “Ebb tide has come for me:

  My life drifts downward

  Like a retreating sea

  With no tidal return.

  “I am the Hag of Beare,

  Five petticoats I used to wear,

  Today, gaunt with poverty,

  I hunt for rags to cover me.

  “Girls nowadays

  Dream only of money—

  When we were young

  We cared more for our men.

  “But I bless my King who gave—

  Balanced briefly on time’s wave—

  Largesse of speedy chariots

  And champion thoroughbreds.

  “These arms, now bony, thin

  And useless to younger men,

  Once caressed with skill

  The>Wha

  “Why should I care?

  Many’s the bright scarf

  Adorned my hair in the days

  When I drank with the gentry.

  “So God be praised

  That I misspent my days!

  Whether the plunge be bold

  Or timid, the blood runs cold.

  “But my cloak is mottled with age—

  No, I’m beginning to dote—

  It’s only grey hair straggling

  Over my skin like a lichened oak.

  “And my right eye has been taken away

  As down-payment on heaven’s estate;

  Likewise the ray in the left

  That I may grope to heaven’s gate.

  “And I, who feasted royally

  By candlelight, now pray

  In this darkened oratory.

  Instead of heady mead

  “And wine, high on the bench

  With kings, I sup whey

  In a nest of hags.

  God pity me!

  “Alas, I cannot

  Again sail youth’s sea;

  The days of my beauty

  Are departed, and desire spent.

  “I hear the fierce cry of the wave

  Whipped by the wintry wind.

  No one will visit me today

  Neither nobleman nor slave.

  “Flood tide

  And the e>

  When all one has to do is lie abed, one quickly loses the normal rhythm of the day, the one that governs everyday life. There is a great wisdom in the orderly arrangement of the hours and the daily passage of light and dark. An invalid can rearrange those units to suit himself, like a child playing with blocks, and he soon makes a jumble of it.

  So I lay awake half the night, because I had had no occupation during the day to exercise and tax me. “Christ prayed all night,” it says in the Bible. I tried to do so, but fell into that eerie suspended consciousness that bordered on rapture, communing with the Holy Spirit and then waking, or gliding into full awareness, as the dawn stirrings began in the adjoining chamber. By the time Culpepper had appeared with my newly warmed bedjacket, and the beaming young Scarisbrick approached my bedside, grinning, with the laden tray of breakfast food, I was already sleepy, worn out from my night of wrestling with the angel, so to speak. When other men’s blood was stirring, mine was settling. 0 cursed life, an invalid’s! No wonder they never mend.

  Culpepper was busy and preoccupied. He brought in my clothes, he attended to all my needs, but in a rattled, distracted way. Once he brought a delicately embossed leather envelope to hold all the correspondence from our ambassadors abroad, made with marvellous flaps and pockets, with. a special container for wax and the Royal Stamp. He had designed and commissioned it.

  I grasped his arm and nodded thanks. I hated this dumbness. Even though I knew it was—must be!—temporary.

  Catherine came in directly after Mass, which she attended daily at eight. She had a devout soul, which, like most physically attractive people, she attempted to hide, as if it were a shame, or would cause others to regard her differently. In the young, that is of paramount importance.

  But when she came to me, directly after receiving her Maker, she glowed with a beauty beyond the worldly, could she but know it. I smiled at her, reached up and touched her cheek. The evening previous (when the wood was burning and my body settled), I always wrote out a little letter to her, telling her of my thoughts, my love for her, and my observations on her beauty. Each morning she gladly received it, blushing. And each morning (or was it my imagination, my thwarted, lusty imagination?) she seemed more highly coloured, more skittish.

  Thus I pretended to be the patient patient. In truth, I longed to throw off my furs and blankets and take my place once again in the councils of men. How long, 0 Lord, how long?

  Whilst I languished, of course I was visited. Will came in regularly to amuse me. Council members called to appraise me of their complaints. It was indeed the New Men versus the traditionalists these days. Churchmen came to read lists of appointments to me for approval. There were many places to be filled. I busied myself filling in those empty lines.

  It was all very neat and ordered. When my churning head wished for sleep, my attendants pulled the draperies and converted the chamber into soft night. The sun was barred from my presence like a prattling child. But that ordained a sleepless night to follow. 0 Lord, how long?

  Note that I did not practise upon my throat-instrument every few hours, hoping to find it restored. Each time I blew upon it, I was rewarded with a resounding silence.

  The Book of Common Prayer, he meant to call it, although he was bogged down within its windings.

  “There’s an uprising,” Cranmer said, in child’s English. “In Lincolnshire.”

  I gestured for him to continue. “It seems some desperate men conspired to meet at Pomfret Fair,” he apologized. As though it were his fault! “There are many wretched men in the North, their needs unanswered—”

  How many? was all I cared to know. I asked, in my throat, but nothing came. Angrily I grabbed a pen and paper and repeated myself in writing. How cumbersome it is to have to rely on these manual means of communication!

  “Three hundred or so. But the reports are garbled. Hourly they change.”

  And others may join them, I added to myself. There is a nest up there, a nest of malcontents. With the Scots sitting like a crown on their heads.

  I flailed about, anger overtaking me. I beat on my pillows, and tore them with my tee
th. I was helpless, helpless—a prisoner of my own body! Furiously, I beat even on it. Take this, I thought as I raised both fists up high and brought them down on my thigh. The muscles shifted underneath like stirring dogs. I opened my throat to roar, and demanded that it obey. No sound came forth.

  Defeated, I wrote Cranmer instructions: 1. Find out their leaders. 2. Send Suffolk to me. 3. Begin preparations for possible action against them. He bowed and was gone. I lay back, feeling like Prometheus in chains. In our day, the voice-box has more power than muscles. And mine was bound, enchained.

  CIV

  I promised myself that I would not test God by repeatedly checking during the long hours of darkness. But when the first light broke through the iridescent frost covering the windows, that would be a Sign.

  The first light broke, and I raised my voice. Silence.

  Now I was truly frightened. I needed my voice restored; this was an emergency. It was not for myself I needed it, but for England. Still, God did not heed. And if He did not heed now ...

  Mid-morning. Brandon appeared. He looked old, I thought. How detached we are in observing the aging of our contemporaries, as if we were somehow exempt from the same process, or as if it were applied unequally, and our poor friend got a double dose, whereas we ourselves got off lightly.

  I had already prepared a list of questions, which I handed to him. His baggy eyes skimmed over them quickly.

  “Yes, there are more rebels. That is what this morning’s dispatch said. Of course, it is four days old ... the roads this time of year ...” He shook his head. “All told, they are still fewer than five hundred. They are playing an old tune, Your Grace. Those who wished to dance to it already did their jig during the Pilgrimage. And afterward—in chains and in the gibbet.”

  Still, they have enough recruits to begin again, I thought. A never-ending supply of malcontents, traitorGrace?” A simple request.

  I nodded. Kill the thing now. Pluck the plant up, roots and all. And this was supposed to be the place where I must venture forth, taking my Queen. Suddenly I was ferociously hungry to see this mysterious area, the North, which bred mists and rebels in equal quantity.

  “Shall I use the utmost force?” Shall I kill swiftly and brutally?

  I nodded. The softer way was often, in the long run, the crueller.

  He bowed and took his leave.

  Brandon. I could rely on him. For half a century now, or almost that, he had been my right arm. But when he failed, as my voice had—what then?

  The frost on my windowpanes was melting as the sun rose higher. The days had lengthened noticeably since Christmas, although not enough to put winter to rout. And in the North it would be bitter, icy, and locked in darkness and cold until April. Brandon, the old soldier, would have difficulty penetrating the area. Curses upon the ungracious traitors, to call out my dearest friend, whom as King I could not spare from England’s service.

  I began to scratch off the obscuring frost with my fingernail. I felt impaired all round, but this one thing I could correct. I could at least see out of my window.

  It needed a cloth to wipe away the frost-shavings and watery melt. “A cloth,” I muttered, and the page stuck one in my hand. I wiped vigorously at the messy pane, until it glistened free and showed me the white world outside as clear as though I were seeing it through my unobstructed eye.

  “Ah,” I said. Then I started.

  I had spoken, and been heard. My voice was freed.

  “Thank you,” I said quite naturally to the page. He nodded. “ ’Tis lovely.” I could hear my own voice, as if it were another’s. “You may go now.” He bowed and obeyed.

  Alone, I blinked in stunned excitement. It was back, my voice was back. I crossed myself and whispered, “Thank You. You have answered my prayers.” I crossed over to my prie-dieu and looked up at Jesus on the cross. I looked directly into his eyes, and they seemed to smile at me.

  Why had God capriciously decided to restore my voice over such an unimportant command? A cloth to wipe off a frosty window: he had loosened my voice for that.

  God frightened me. I understood Him so much less than I had always thought I understood Him.

  The page told everyone that I had spoken, and I was soon dislodged from my praying station.

  Now that I was able-bodied again, my councillors presented me with all the ugly details of the northern rebellion. The traitorous statements—“the King is the Devil’s agent”; “the King is an Anabaptist”; “the King is haunted by the souls of the monks he killed”—bordered on the blasphemous. What sort of people did I rule?

  “I have an evil people to rule!” I shouted in answer to myself. “An unhappy people who harbour sedition in their hearts.” I looked round at all the smug faces surrounding me. What of them? What secret malice lay in their hearts? “I’ll soon make them so poor they’ll nedience!” And you, too, I thought. Any one of you youngsters, if your youth and health give you fancy ideas, I’ll put a stop to that. It’s Brandon and I who are in control, the old soldiers who know how to rule.

  “They’ll die for their treason, and we’ll go up in the summer to comfort their widows. The grass won’t even have grown on their graves yet! But their sons will welcome us with adulation, whatever else lies coiled in their secret hearts. They’ll—”

  “Your Majesty!” Dr. Butts entered and looked betrayed. His royal patient was up off the sickbed and behaving as normal. “I had heard of your recovery. Why did you not send for me?” He looked hurt. I had insulted him by calling upon him in my need, clutching to him in fear, and then jettisoning him once I recovered. As men do to God.

  “I apologize,” I said. “Come, let us be alone.” The others took their leave, with relief.

  “I could hear your voice halfway down the gallery,” he admonished me.

  “God restored me.”

  “So it would seem. And in full volume. Is it wise to run a horse at full gallop who has lain ill and languished in his stall a fortnight? Gradual, and by degrees—that is the way to sound health.”

  He checked my throat, my chest, my leg. The wound had all but disappeared. Drained and healed over, it looked so inculpable and innocuous. The rotten traitor! Traitor no less than my northern subjects!

  “Your heart started up suddenly,” he said in alarm. “You must avoid exciting thoughts.” He put away his listening tube. And smiled. “But I must say, the Lord in His mercy appears to have healed you.”

  With a few more instructions regarding my food, drink, and rest, he was gone. I was free of my body-bondage once more.

  By the time Brandon reached Cambridge, word came that the rebellion had burnt out, having consumed its own fuel. There was no need for him to apply the stern measure of the law, and so he returned by Easter, when spring was breaking on the court.

  CV

  Spring and Easter were enveloped, for me, in a web of preparations for our northern progress. As the grass brightened and exploded in green, and the bare branches of every tree and bush suddenly turned into feathery brushes, it was hard to believe that there were places in the realm of England where winter still held the land and reigned. Children shrieked and played out of doors—I could hear them from the opened casements—at marbles, skip-rope, and pace-egging, where they cracked their Easter eggs together. Their cries rose lean and eager, like a wild animal kept too long indoors and now celebrating its freedom. Before nightfall there would be skinned knees and lost scarves. That, too, was part of the celebration.

  By day I studied dispatches and made up orderly lists of supplies and courtiers for the journey. There was so much protocol to be observed. There must, of course, be a striking difference between how the remnants of the traitorous rebels were recerestored to health, as if those horrible days in March had never occurred. The leg was behaving itself I handed her the rose, the unique, commissioned rose.

  “Yes?” She took it without looking and smiled, still eagerly.

  “You hold it.”

  Only then did
she examine the rose, exclaim over it. When I explained its symbolism, she wept.

  CVI

  Departure day was to be July first. God thought otherwise and sent deluges from the skies. All told, it was three weeks before the rains stopped and the roads dried sufficiently to permit travel. That gave the Scots extra time to decide how to respond to my invitation to a parley, and gave us longer to ready the great abbey hall of St. Mary’s in York to receive them.

  I shall not recount the long journey in tedious detail. With so many of us travelling—there were one thousand retainers, officers, and companions—our lodging was of the greatest importance. Even the wealthiest nobles did not have accommodations for so great a company, so we provided two hundred of our own luxurious tents to make up the difference. Yes, the journey itself, the protocol, the lodgings, the obligatory entertainments (which should be renamed “borements”) were dull. But the countryside!

  Oh, why had I not seen all of England before? I was captivated by the landscape itself, yes. But more by the people. Each population retained the stamp of its origin and past. As we travelled northward, the people became taller and fairer. On the border of Norfolk, their eyes were as blue as a clear October day, almost to a person. “Dane blood,” said Dr. Butts, who made a hobby of studying this sort of thing. “This is the side of England where the Danes settled, where Norsemen raided. From the Danes you get the blue eyes, from the raiders the red hair.” He pointed to a fiery-haired lad perched on a market cross to glimpse us as we passed. “Sweet child, to bear the marks of such a brutal past.”

  They talked differently, too. At times I could not make out certain words in the courteous little speeches the locals gave us.

  As we passed farther north, settlements fell away and we rode through longer and longer stretches of forest. The days lengthened, too. Twilight seemed almost as long as the afternoon.