The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers (43 page)

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Authors: Margaret George

BOOK: The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers
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This is how Satan rules—by separating us.
But nothing can separate us from the love of God, Saint Paul says.
Nothing save despair.
Despair, then, is Satan’s handmaiden.
Holy Thursday. Following the Last Supper, Christ washed the feet of the disciples, saying, “If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me.” Now, as Kings of England had done time out of mind before me, I must wash the feet of beggars-as many beggars as I am yloning around them in wonder. They are barefoot, not because they have removed their shoes, but because they have no shoes to remove....
I kneel before the first man, representing the first year of my life. He is old, scrawny like a diseased fowl, and his feet are callused and hard as claws. I pour the warm, rose-scented water over them, dry them gently with a new linen towel.
The next man has festering sores all over his feet. The greenish pus runs into the water, clouding it in its silver basin. I beckon to Norris to bring a clean basin for the next man. It takes over an hour until the last man’s feet are washed.
During all this, I do not feel a thing. Except shame that I feel nothing.
 
Good Friday. Fasting all day, shut up in our smallest, plainest room. No one at court is allowed to speak to anyone else, to smile, to sing, to eat, to wear anything but black. Even the church bells’ metal clappers are replaced by wooden ones, to make dull, muffled sounds. A single piece of meat is left out on the table to grow maggoty and remind us of the corruption that awaits us all.
Three o’clock-the Hour of Death, the Hour of Satan. The Temple veil is rent in half, and we are given over to the power of darkness.
And then I felt it—felt its cold hand gripping me. And what had been pretence, form, play-acting, became real. I felt the power of the Devil, felt him in my very bowels. And God was far away, and the ceremonies did nothing to recall Him. Powerless, powerless ...
 
All in the Abbey again, huddled together, a flock of black crows. Now Cranmer unveiled the great crucifix in three stages, chanting sorrowfully, “Behold the wood of the Cross, on which hung the Salvation of the World.”
We knelt and answered, “Come, let us adore!”
The cross was placed reverently upon a cushion on the altar steps. Cranmer crept toward it on his knees, then kissed it and prostrated himself on the flagstones before it.
Now I must follow. I was frightened, frightened at my presumption and arrogance. I had meant to use this ceremony for political show, to reassure people of my innocence of any wrongdoing in appointing Cranmer Archbishop. Now I trembled at the implications of approaching the altar of God for such reasons. Would He strike me down, as He had done other rulers who had mocked Him in His very house?
I began the crawl up the cold stones to the altar steps. My hands were shaking.
“Mercy,” I heard my voice whispering. “Mercy, 0 God! Forgive me.” Closer and closer I came. My heart was pounding so rapidly I felt myself go dizzy. He would wait until I presumed to touch the sacred cross itself before He struck me.
Now!
I reached out and grasped the wood, clinging to it like a rock. I felt strength, power surge through it to me, fill me with peace, dazzling peace.
I breathed out. Peace. I had always thought peace was the absence of fear, the absence of pain or sorrow. Now I knew peace was a thing in itself, a presence that had its own shape, that displaced all other feelings.
I laid my forehead on the holy wood, pressing it hard as if that would bwidth="1em">
“He is risen!”
The silver trumpets blared, the candles blazed into light all over the Abbey.
“Bestow the kiss of peace!” commanded Cranmer.
Everyone stirred as faces were turned toward neighbours and the cheek-kiss was given.
Then the traditional Mass of the Resurrection began. Nothing was omitted—from the procession of newly baptized Christians in their white robes to the public renunciation of the Devil and all his works and all his ways. Let anyone dare to challenge my Church, I thought smugly, to say everything was not intact!
Now the solemn part began, the sacred mysteries of the Canon: the Offering, the Consecration, and the Communion, followed by the commemoration of the living ... “that it may please Thee to keep and strengthen Thy servant Anne, our most gracious Queen; that it may please Thee to be her defender and keeper, giving her the victory over all her enemies, we beseech Thee—”
There was a scraping and movement in the back, which grew louder and made Cranmer halt in his chanting.
People were leaving.
I turned and stared. It could not be. But it was. And not just a few recalcitrants, but row upon row. They turned, looked mournfully up toward the altar where Cranmer stood, then filed out through the great Abbey doors.
They refused to pray for Anne as Queen, or even to remain in a building where others did so!
I stood, stunned, unable to believe what I had just seen-the spontaneous public rejection of Anne. Such a thing I had never even considered. I had seen the Pope and the Emperor and some conservative Northern lords, like the Earl of Derby, Lord Darcy, Lord Hussey, the great Marcher lords, Katherine’s partisans, as Anne’s enemies. But the common people! She was one of them. How could they reject her?
Katherine must have paid these people! Her sneaking little monkey of an ambassador, Chapuys, was behind this insulting display. Well, I would have him brought before me and punished.
In the meantime, there was this interminable Mass to endure—this Mass, so long awaited, now so ruinous. Beside me, Anne was still. I could feel her anger; it had a shape of its own.
 
Alone in our royal apartments that night, she screamed with fury. It was past two in the morning, and by this time I had thought to be drifting off into a sleep of paradise—in Anne’s arms, feeling her kisses and murmurs of endearments and pretty thanks for all the dangers I had braved to make her Queen, to have brought her to this moment.
But this moment had turned, like so much else in our lives, into an experience of pain and sorrow, of humiliation and frustration.
“I hate them!” she shrieked for the tenth time. “I shall be revenged on them!” Then, to me: “Why did you not stop them? Why did you stand there like a ploughboy?”
“I was as stunned as one,” I muttered.
“You should have rounded them up and had them questioned!”
Rem">ont size="3">Was it then that the unbidden thought exploded inside my head, past the barriers of desire and obsession?
This is the behaviour of a commoner, not a Queen. Common she was born, common she remains. She is not the stuff of royalty.
Immediately my love for her intercepted the thought, wrestled it to the ground, and deprived it of its liberty.
“They are long since asleep in their beds. We could not find out who they were, even if we wanted. Forget it.” I myself intended to question Chapuys, but privately. “There is always a stir at a change. Even spring brings sadness of a sort.”
I patted the bed, for which I still had hopes. “Come to bed, sweetheart. Let me make love to my Queen.”
But I was as useless with her as I had been that other time, and I slept not at all the rest of that evil night.
Were we cursed? Side by side we lay, each pretending to sleep, while those words ran like rats through our brains.
XLIX
I
t had happened all over the land. In church after church, when the prayer naming Anne as Queen had been read, people either fell silent or left the Mass. They spoke as loudly as the madman who had run about the streets the previous summer, yelling, “We’ll no Nan Bullen!”; as forcibly as the crowd who had pursued Anne and tried to stone her; as angrily as the Ahabpreaching friar.
Now, for the first time, I had doubts about Anne’s Coronation. Anne had coveted it, and I had promised it. But what if the people rejected her as wholeheartedly on that day? How much worse that would be than no Coronation at all.
What could I do to prevent it? I could not physically silence every Londoner; there were more than a hundred thousand of them. Nor could I silence them with money. The Royal Treasury was almost empty, and the Coronation would require every spare pound. Behind the golden garments and sumptuous dinners of state, the Crown was in urgent need of money. Toward the latter end, I conferred with Master Cromwell.
He reminded me of the deplorable moral state of the monasteries, where corruption existed side by side with immense wealth. “The sight of it must surely strike sorrow into the bosom of Our Lord,” he said piously. He asked permission to send a group of commissioners to visit and report on each religious house, and promised to have a summary of their findings in my hands within a year. “Then you may judge for yourself,” he said, “whether they should be allowed to remain open.”
Of course, closing them would mean acquiring their assets for the Crown, since it was now forbidden by Act of Parliament to send ecclesiastical income to Rome.
As for Cranmer, he moved swiftly to fulfil his duties. By mid-May he called and presided over a small ecclesiastical court, discreetly held at Dunstable, some distance from London, but near enough to Katherine that she could have appeared, as she was requested to do. Naturally she did not recognize Cranmer’s authority and so ignored the little hearing that found our prior marriage to be no marriage at all, and also (conveniently) pronounced my present marriage to Anne valid.
Now we could proceed with the Coronation, which would fall on Whitsunday, a holy day in itself. I prayed that that would help sanctify it in the mind of the people. I tried not to betray my own anxiety to Anne, who had awaited this dh="1em">
The people around us packed their food and gear to return home. I bade them farewell.
“ ’Twas lovely,” they said, a trifle sadly. There was a thud as they stowed another item.
“You sound sad,” I ventured.
“Aye. She was so lovely.” They cast off. “I think—” Their voices were lost in the heave of the water and the noise of sails. I turned to our host and to Will.
“ ’Tis time we returned to our home as well.”
“Indeed,” the boatman said. I settled myself and waited for the short journey back to the common Greenwich quay. Even in small things today, it was a pleasure to give up control to someone else, to sit back and dream.
Dream I did, the setting sun on my eyelids. I dreamt of Anne in a great Egyptian barge, Anne as Pharaoh’s wife, Anne as—Potiphar’s wife.
 
At the Tower that night, Anne was feverishly gay. “Did you see it? What did the onlookers say?” she kept asking, never satisfied with my replies. “The dragon-he was magnificent. Did I tell you he spewed fire right up to my feet? One of my shoes was singed—”
“Hush,” I said. “Calm yourself.”
All around us rose the babble of excited voices. Eighteen young men were preparing for their all-night vigil prior to their ordination on the morrow as Knights of the Bath. The rest of the court was feasting in the hall of the White Tower. And everywhere there were flowers—garlands and petals covered every stone. Bits of broken glass glinted; the boom of the cannons had shattered many windowpanes. Over all this confusion floated string-music.
“Walk with me,” she said. “I need the night air.”
Gladly I took her hand. “Your cheeks are flaming,” I said.
Outside, the White Tower seemed to glow in the luminous May twilight.
“Ah!” She let out a long, shuddering sigh. Then, suddenly, “What of More?”
A jab in my heart. “I sent him twenty pounds to buy himself a new gown for the Coronation. He has not returned it.”
This seemed to satisfy her. “And Mary?”
A second jab in the same place. “My sister lies very ill at Westhorpe.”
“She has always hated me!”
That was true. Mary had begged me not to persist in this “folly” with Anne. She might as well have requested the rain to halt in its falling halfway to earth. “That is not why she is ill,” I stated flatly.
“I insist that she come and pay homage to me as soon as she recovers.”
Her pettiness marred the night, and its glory fled for me. But we walked on in silence for another few moments. Then Anne suddenly wished to go to the little Tower chapel to pray.
“No!” I stopped her. “Not in St. John’s Chapel. It is-it is where the Knights are preparing to keep vigil all night.” It was also where my mother had lain on her funeral bier, surrounded by thousands of tapers, thirty years ago. I would not have Anne pray there b
“But I must pray!” she insisted. Her face looked strained and eager and more vulnerable than I had ever seen it. It also looked different.
“You shall pray,” I said. “But in the little chapel elsewhere on the grounds. St. Peter-ad-Vincula.”
“Is the Sacrament reserved there?”
“Always.”
I guided her to the little stone structure, standing lonely and dark on the far edge of the night’s warm noises and light. She hesitated.

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