The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers

by Margaret George

  I’ll serve another master, I threatened Him. In all the legends, this would have been sufficient to have called forth the Dark Presence. At once the Prince of Darkness (or one of his lesser demons) would have appeared in my chamber, contract in hand. It would have specified terms: so many days, so many years, in exchange for one (1) immortal soul of the High and Mighty Prince, Henry VIII of England, Wales, and France, as signed below....

  But no one came. There was no puff of smoke, no sulphurous fumes. That angered me, too.

  So you are as unreliable as the other one, I sneered to myself. The least you could do is have a reception for me. I gave grand ones whenever I signed a treaty with a foreign power. You are cheap as well as evil.

  I would serve no master, then, but myself. I would hit out and destroy; I would indulge every whim and appetite that raised itself. I wanted to destroy, to pull down all the ugly rottenness around me. If there was no good left in the world, there was a surfeit of bad, and I would spend myself on it. Not in the name of God—that betrayer, that assassin—but in my own name: King Henry VIII.

  LXXXI

  I ordered an end to the mourning which I had imposed on the court even through Christmas. (Would that grieve God? Good!)

  I began to confer with Cromwell again. Many things were afoot: the bishops had completed their “interpretation” of the Ten Articles of Faith to Establish Christian Quietness, all set forth in a volume called The Bishops’ Book, designed to answer laymen’s questions; it awaited my endorsement. A number of greater monasteries had offered their surrenders: Whalley, Jervaulx, Kirkstead, and Lewes. Rich prizes. I should love to see them demolished. I wanted to hear the groan of the stones being pulled out of their sockets, and the crash of stained-glass windows hitting the ground to explode in multicoloured shards. I wanted to see the “miracle” statues, with their hidden wires and water-filled reservoirs, pitched onto a roaring fire made from monastic choir-stalls and embroidered vestments.

  In addition, I was being courted by the Continental powers. It seemed I was an eligible bachelor again, and a rich one at that. Cromwell begged me to “consider the matter and frame it to your most noble heart.”

  I would never marry again. But for amusement I would look at the portraits. It was sport to order others to perform. “I cannot marry without knowing their appearance. The matter touches me too near my person,” I explained.

  I dispatched Hans Holbein, More’s former painter who had done a passable job on Jane’s portrait, to the Continent to take portraits of Christina of Denmark and Anne of Lorraine. That should take months.

  I began to order banquets and celebrations. My appetite had returned, and fearsomely. Before, I had cared about my appearance. When I was young, it was important to me that the English King be more awesome than the French monarch. Then, I cared that Katherine, Anne, and Jane should find me desirable, handsome. Now there was no reason not to eat, to steep myself in pleasures of the palate. What else was left to me?

  When the fish course came round, I no longer abstained from eels (a notably fatty fish). When the meat. Whand lamb. I drank flagons of wine at every meal, so that they passed in a haze of pleasure. I ate all desserts and even called for sweetmeats in my chamber in mid-afternoon. I had no other pleasure but eating. Riding and hunting were taken away from me; there were no women and all the things that go with them: dancing, fetes, musical evenings. But there was food—marvellous, unbridled food.

  WILL:

  Now I understand. This was Henry’s “Nero” period, when he behaved cruelly and erratically, and from which (unfortunately) much of his reputation is derived. (How unfair, that eighteen months should eclipse almost forty years!) He grew fat. As one eyewitness described him: “The King has grown so marvellously excessive in eating and drinking that three of the largest men in the Kingdom could fit inside his doublet.”

  His beautiful features expanded and swelled, until his eyes were like little raisins set in a red mass of dough, and his strong neck became enruffed in a series of fat-rings.

  He behaved grossly, and uncharacteristically: belching at banquets, eating with his fingers and throwing bones over his shoulder, yawning if he were bored; leaving betimes at entertainments and audiences, insulting ambassadors and councillors, making obscene, scatological jokes; and—most uncharacteristic of all—committing sacrilege. He threw his crucifix in the fireplace and pulled up the Virgin’s skirts and spat on her, before likewise consigning her to the flames.

  He wrote a mocking, threatening letter to Charles and Francis when they signed a ten-year truce and peace treaty. He called Francis “that quivering husk of a disease-eaten fruit-tree” and Charles a “degenerate, balloon-jawed descendent of a baboon” and said their “feeble union, undertaken under false pretences and for preposterous aims, would bring forth a strange fruit of hideous appearance, pustule-ridden and smeared with excrement, with a hollow but rotten interior.”

  When Pope Paul III published, publicly, his excommunication of Henry VIII and called for a Holy War against him (as earlier Popes had called for a Crusade against the Turk) Henry laughed uproariously (while wolfing down grouse and woodcock, a dozen altogether) and muttered, “If that Judas-serpent should slither from out his homosexual den of pleasure”—a great wipe of his mouth—“he should find a great shoe, yea, a leather boot, ready to stamp him and make his guts issue from out of his lying, double-tongued mouth.” Then a belch, given with a great flourish.

  He cared for nothing. He abandoned music (unlike Nero, he did not fiddle while the monasteries burned); all sport was neglected; he never attended Mass, except when required to. He had become a great, slobbering, vicious hulk.

  I avoided him as much as possible, and he called for me seldom. I was one of the pleasures for which he had lost delight.

  HENRY VIII:

  The Bishops’ Book was published, and instead of quieting controversy, it sparked it. Because I myself had not authored it, people assumed that it was not authoritative, that further changes in doctrine were possible. The reformers knew exactly where they hoped to see the ark of the Church of Eng looting and destruction, all under the guise of religion. At first they had trembled to see their relics taken from their little local shrines and consigned to bonfires. Then, delight in the bonfire itself began to consume them. There is something so deeply satisfying about destroying, trampling, killing.... And soon the people themselves outdid the royal commissioners in seizing the relics and desecrating them.

  The townsfolk of Maidstone took the ancient Rood of Boxley and reviled it in the marketplace; those at Kirkstall burnt the girdle of Saint Bernard, looked to as helpful in childbirth, and tore up the wimple of Saint Ethelred, used to cure sore throats.

  But these were insignificant relics and lacklustre shrines. What the common people did on their level, I would do on mine. I would make a great show of dismantling and utterly destroying the three most ancient, sacred shrines and pilgrimage-centres in England: that of Saint Cuthbert in Durham, that of Our Lady of Walsingham, and, most sacrosanct (and jewel-bedecked) of all, Saint Thomas à Becket’s in Canterbury.

  Saint? The man was a saint as Thomas More was a saint, as Bishop Fisher was a saint! They were all nothing but filthy and abominable traitors and rebels against their King! Becket had won, in his day, simply because the Pope had managed to intimidate his weak King.

  That was in his day. But there was no reason why . . . yes, none whatsoever . . . a man can be brought to trial long after the crime . . . and he must stand for it....

  “Dismantle the entire Becket shrine,” I ordered my workmen, carefully chosen for both their skill and their honesty. “The gold I want in reinforced wooden carts. The jewels, inventoried and sorted, transported in locked coffers. As for the inner coffin, once you have removed the gold plate covering it, leave it as is. Oh, unfasten the lid, but do not open it.” I explained myself no further.

  After they had departed for Canterbury, I sat down and began to draft an unusual summons to m
y Privy Councillors and the ranking members of Convocation.

  We stood on the Opus Alexandrinum, the Roman-inspired pavement of intricately inlaid coloured marble that surrounded Becket’s tomb behind the high altar of Canterbury Cathedral. There were some forty of us, all told—from the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, Thomas Cranmer, and all his lesser bishops, to my Vice-Regent for Spiritual Affairs, Cromwell, and his Council subordinates.

  They surrounded the iron chest, resting on its pink marble arcaded base, that housed the “sacred” remains of Thomas à Becket. The painted wooden lid was loosened and ready to be lifted.

  The shrine was bare, otherwise. The canopy of gold netting which had sagged with the weight of pilgrims’ offerings—brooches, rings, jewels—had been emptied. The gold plate had been carted away, in twenty-six groaning wagons. Upon my finger glowed the “Regale de France”—a ruby which Louis VII of France had presented when he came to seek the saint’s help for a sick child. I had had it made into a fine ring, set round with sapphires, diamonds, and emeralds “recovered” from the golden canopy. I called it my “Becket ring.”

  “My dear councillors and spiritual advisors,” I said, in a soft voice. It carried well in the small area. The acoustics were good. “We are here to try an accursed traitor. Since the defendant could not safely mak2;a ned the trial here.”

  I looked about. Cromwell had the proper expression of normalcy on his face. The rest looked frightened, bewildered, or uncomfortable.

  I nodded to the serjeant-at-arms. “You may call the defendant.”

  “Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, come into the court.”

  I gave another signal, and four royal guards stepped up to the coffin and removed the wooden lid. At that, a silence gripped our party.

  I must set an example for them. I approached the dark cavity of the iron box and peered within.

  As I did so, I felt suspense, dread of what I might see, what might happen....

  Nothing happened, and it was difficult to see inside, in the gloom. I called for a taper and thrust it right into the coffin itself.

  There were rotted ecclesiastical vestments swathing a crumbling skeleton. Its mitre had fallen away, revealing a skull with a thin slice taken off its top. Dust and dirt lay an inch thick on the bottom. How did it come to be inside a sealed coffin? I wondered irrelevantly.

  “You may view the accused,” I said, motioning to my councillors. They filed by, peering into the sarcophagus, lit by the single taper inside. One by one they returned to their places.

  When all were silent and waiting, I continued, “The accused, Thomas à Becket, must answer to the following charges.” I unrolled a lettered parchment. “One: to the crime of defying and humiliating his King, Henry II of England and Angevin. Two: to the crime of masquerading as a saint.”

  I turned to Cromwell. “You may present the Crown’s evidence against the defendant.”

  Oh, how I enjoyed it: the delicious recounting of the ungrateful traitor’s behaviour, knowing all the while the final outcome. The crushing of one’s enemies . . . the Israelites had known that supreme pleasure, had celebrated it even in the Psalms. King David seemed to have had enemies aplenty, and he had been shameless in asking the Lord to do them in.

  “A lowly man, Becket, who, gaining the confidence and friendship of the King of England, used that as means to advance his own power,” read Cromwell. “Not being content with ingratiating himself with the King and being granted familiarities far above his station, he coveted the Chancellorship and obtained that, then lusted after the Archbishopric and obtained that. He lusted after the power of the Church, and once he was endowed with all he desired, he had no further use for the King. So he turned against him, defied his laws, obstructed his decrees, and trafficked with his sworn enemy, the King of France.”

  These charges were discussed, as a courtesy to legal niceties. Then I called for the verdict.

  “For maliciously misusing the King’s affection for his own worldly gain: guilty or no?”

  A mumbled response. “Guilty.”

  “For masquerading as a saint: guilty or no?”

  “Guilty.”

  “For gross ingratitude to his sovereign: guilty or no?”

  “Guilty!” Theirow Ied, guilty on all counts as charged. Guilty as an errant traitor to your divinely appointed sovereign lord. Guilty in that your death was untruly called martyrdom, being canonized by the Bishop of Rome, because you had been a champion to the usurped authority and a bearer of the iniquity of the clergy. There appears nothing in your life and exterior behaviour whereby you should be called a saint, but rather esteemed to have been a rebel and traitor to your prince.”

  I took a deep breath in the rarefied air of the opened shrine, before continuing.

  “The sentence is this: in future you are to be called only Bishop Becket, and all mention of you in books of Common Prayer, lists of saints, and so forth, are to be stricken out.

  “And we hereby condemn you to be burnt as a traitor, and your ashes scattered.”

  I nodded to my unquestioning, obedient guards, who came forward, bent over the coffin, and began enfolding the bones within their robes of office. While we watched, they transferred the lumpy bundle—with a corner of the mitre protruding—to a new wooden chest, which they carried away.

  A heavy feeling came upon the company, far heavier than when Becket’s remains were physically present. We could all hear the neat clicks of the guardsmen’s heels as they marched down the long length of the nave with their casket.

  “There were, as I said, twenty-six cartloads of gold festooning the abomination that housed Becket’s miserable remains. I think an eighth-cartload for each of you who helped examine the justice of the matter would be most appropriate,” I said.

  Thus I dismissed them. Even enriched as they were, there was no buoyancy in them as they took their leave and melted away into the gloom of the cathedral.

  Only Cromwell remained, directly across from the emptied sarcophagus.

  “Old bones smell ugly,” I finally said. “I would expect a fresh corpse to stink, or a waterlogged body. But this was clean, and dry.” I shook my head, wonderingly. The peculiar odour—of centuries of packaged, brooding death —was stronger than ever.

  “It is done,” I said cheerfully, waving my hand—the one with the Becket ring on it.

  Speak, Crum. Say something to banish the odd feeling I have inside ... a feeling I have not felt since ... I know not....

  “Your Grace, this must end,” Cromwell said soberly. The taper lit only part of his face, but his words were chiselled and clear.

  They said what I knew already.

  “I understand that this was but a political gesture, made to give a little sport to the dull proceedings of dismantling and inventorying the vulgar, Papalist shrines,” he continued, putting the most flattering interpretation on it. “I understand it, but I fear it will be misunderstood by the people and exploited by your enemies. You are aware, Your Grace, that many already question your sanity? Your actions of late have played directly into the hands of your sworn enemies. It is you who are a traitor to yourself. For the law defines treason as ‘giving aid and comfort to the enemy’ and that is what you have been doing —by your lack of self-control, by your actions that are open to unkind, even malicious interpretations. Forgive me, Your Grace—” The boldness of his words now frightened him.

  He had no way of knowing that it had all gone flat, that I was weary of my rebellion and bored with my schoolboyish howl against God, Who seemed—most humiliating of all—not to have taken much notice of it. Certainly He had not responded in any observable way.

  LXXXIII

  What had the past year of unthinking, pain-filled rampage gained me? I was forced to take a fearless look and confront the results.

  I was certainly richer, from the plunder and seizure of the monastic property and shrines. Abbey plate and jewels and manuscripts and vestments now adorned my palaces, and I was buyin
g the loyalty and support of the gentlemen to whom I sold or leased the abbey lands, making sure they had a vested interest in preventing a return to the Papal fold. There was nothing like property and money to sway a man’s political leanings.

  I was isolated in the larger world. In company with Job, I could lament, For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me. The Pope had called for a war upon me, and lo! a miracle had occurred. Francis and Charles had actually made peace with one another, signed a truce, and loomed as allies against me.

  My gleeful rage against the signs and relics of Popery, my allowance of the loosely worded (and interpreted) Ten Articles of Faith to Establish Christian Quietness had caused the Protestants to gain a pernicious foothold in England, and they were now trying to subvert my Church.

  My orgy of self-pitying eating and drinking had expanded me beyond all recognition. I was obese, repulsive to look upon.

  I had multiplied my troubles and problems. I had solved none and created new ones.

  For several months I did nothing. I made few appearances, and those were restrained and circumspect. I passed no new laws and made no pronouncements. I reversed my eating habits, becoming as abstemious as a desert hermit, and found to my horror that the fat on me was firmly entrenched and did not obediently melt away at my command.

  To check the dangerous foreign situation that had arisen, I decided to use monastic money to finance the construction of a chain of fortresses and defences all across the southern coastline, stretching from Sandown in the East to Pendennis in the West. I employed a Bohemian engineer, Stephen von Haschenperg, to design these castles, which would be constructed on new principles, allowing for the latest advances in cannon warfare. It would disappoint those who hoped that the monastic wealth might be used to found hospitals, colleges, schools. I was disappointed myself. But there can be no higher learning, no institutions of mercy, unless a country is at peace and not ravaged by her enemies.