The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers (51 page)

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Over his shoulder was a whip. But no ordinary whip. I recognized it as the “discipline”: a small metal ring with five chains suspended from it, each chain ending in a hook. As I watched, he beat himself with it, slowly, rhythmically, reciting all the while, “It is for You, Lord, for You. Let my imagination and my memory be effaced. For You, Lord, for You.”
He rocked back and forth on his knees, thrashing himself and chanting.
His entire upper body was cut and bleeding. There were slashes all over his back. But they were superimposed on flesh that was already irritated and infected. Yellow pustules were scattered like the blooming of evil little flowerets all over his chest and back, and his whole skin was bright red. There was not an inch of unmarked skin on his upper trunk.
“Forgive me, Lord, that my sufferings do not approach Yours,” he intoned. “I will increase them, so as to please You.” Then he picked up the “discipline” again, and began to flog himself. He gasped with each fivefold lash, yet continued. Blood oozed from the new-created gashes down to his waist, where it dribbled to the floor.
“I cannot begin to appreciate Your sufferings, O Lord,” he murmured. “This as yet feels like pleasure.” He whipped himself until his shoulders were completely raw and laid open. “It is not enough!” he cried, flinging himself forward, prostrate upon the ground. “I cannot go the full length. Only give me strength.”
There was no crucifix before him, yet he seemed to see it.
His hand—twitching now, but obedient to his will—reached out and grasped the “discipline” once more. He held it out at arm’s length, then flicked ore,” he murmured, as though in a trance. The whip hit him full in the face again. I feared for his eyes. “More, O Jesus.” Another lash. The blood was swelling now like a spring stream, running down his neck.
Suddenly he flung himself prostrate before his inner vision again. “Enough? But, O Lord, I would do so much more ... give You so much more! ”
He lay motionless for long moments, then eventually pulled himself to his knees.
“As You wish, Lord,” he repeated, and crawled toward a dark garment lying nearby. He began pulling it on, and as he did so, he screamed in pain.
“As You will, Lord!”
He continued to draw it down. But it stopped at his waist, and was sleeveless. A hair shirt. I knew then what had caused the hideous, tormented redness of his delicate skin, and brought about the boils and infections. The ends of the horsehairs—tied, to be prickly and blunt—worked their way into the skin of the wearer within a few hours. Hair shirts were woven and constructed thus, to torment the flesh of the wearer.
Worn on top of fresh lashings and scourgings—what agony would it inflict? Too little for More and his torturing God, evidently.
Now he was fastening a linen shirt over his hair shirt. Did he wear the hair shirt always? Every day? For how long had he worn it? I would never know the answers to those questions, as More would never give them, and I could never ask them.
But I knew the answer to my own tormenting question. More would seek the full punishment of the law as yet another “discipline.” And I would, perforce, be the one chosen to administer it.
I hated him in that moment—hated him for making me his scourge. That was all I had been all along: his scourge, his temptation, his test. I was not a man to him, but an abstract trial, a representation of one of his confounded Platonic ideas. He had never seen me at all, but only the symbol he had chosen to assign to me.
I despised him. He was a blind fool, taking living beings and recasting them in the image of his abstract honour.
Farewell, More, I bade him silently. May you enjoy the “discipline” you have chosen. Remember always that it is
your
discipline, not mine. For I would keep you with me, veil mine own eyes, imagine that you were as I would cast you in
my
own imagination....
 
Before he could come upon me, I was out the door and into the free cold air, then back to my own chamber. When I awoke again it was mid-morning, and the sun was cheerful.
“Good morrow, Your Grace,” said More, at breakfast. “I trust you slept well.”
“Indeed,” I said. “As well as you.”
“Then did you pass the night calmly,” he said. “For never have I slept a fairer sleep.”
The smile was remote.
“May you sleep many another such,” I replied.
LX
I
t was May Eve, and I lay at Oxford. I had come to inspect Wol-sey Therefore I gave my blessings to the nuptials and arranged that the wedding should take place at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor.
It was not to be a state affair, even though Fitzroy’s titles gave him formidable rank as a peer of England: Duke of Richmond and Somerset, Lord Warden of the Marches, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and Lord High Admiral of England, Wales, Ireland, Normandy, Gascony, and Aquitaine. It was not to be a state affair simply because to do such a thing, at the very time that the Oath of Succession was being administered, would be to focus undue attention upon yet another claimant to the succession. The issue was heated enough already when loyalties were pulled between two females, Mary and Elizabeth. Reminding everyone of a comely royal lad of marriageable age was not politic.
He
was
comely. I was proud of him, proud of his Tudor looks and his sensitivity and regal bearing.
And still another reason was that Anne did not care to be reminded of my living son, since she had not given me one of her own. That Bessie had was a continual insult to her.
It puzzled me then, why Anne had not. It was not for lack of coupling, or for lack of joy in our bed. Since I had returned from my “pilgrimage,” there had been no more of that earlier trouble. Our bodies spoke even sometimes when our words could not bridge the gap between us—by that I mean the gap that separates each individual from any other. Nonetheless we were son-less. The Princess Elizabeth was a year old now, thriving at Hatfield House, attended by her sister Mary, who insisted on referring to Anne as “Madam Pembroke” even now. She was as stubborn as Katherine....
Katherine. As I selected my rings from an octagonal inlaid Spanish box, I thought of Katherine. She had refused the Oath, as I had expected. But her manner of doing so was to barricade herself in her rooms at Buckden and refuse to admit Brandon or to speak to him and his commissioners. He waited two days in her Great Hall for her to emerge so he could apprehend her and force her answer.
When he ascertained that she had a cook, provisions, and her confessor locked up with her, he knew she would not come out for six months, would perhaps even starve herself to death in there and call herself a martyr for it. Her confessor would give her last rites and send her soul right up to heaven. In disgust, he left, after dismissing the rest of her servants and carrying off her furniture. The townspeople reviled him and threatened his life even for that. An ugly mob, they surrounded the house and harassed my commissioners, waving their stupid pitchforks and hoes.
That was enough. I needed no Anne to urge me to end this childish, stubborn, and aggravating behaviour of Katherine’s. Brandon could do nothing, but I was King. I ordered her removed immediately to the gloomy fortified manor of Kimbolton, and put under house arrest. Henceforth she would have two “keepers,” Sir Edmund Bedingfield and Sir Edward Chamberlayn, loyal to me. She would live in total isolation, with no visitors and no correspondence permitted her. She was now politically dead.
But even there, she found a way to be contumacious. She refused to speak to anyone who did not address her as Queen. Since there were only fifteen who did—her confessor, her physician, her apothecary, her “master of the rooms,” two grooms of the chamber, three maids of honour, and six menial servants—she shut herself up with them and would not set her foot beyond her own doorsill out into the “contaminated” parts of issight her bed. I wanted her as seldom before. I wanted to tear away her silver-gossamer veil, penetrate to that guarded chamber of hers, violate her strange, solitary, private eroticism. Anne, Anne ...
LXII
I
needed to remember those silver moments when I faced the hard, ugly fact that Thomas More had spent the winter months of 1534—35 in the Tower, along with Bishop Fisher (confined shortly thereafter). They were lodged in the more “comfortable” parts of the Tower, not in the dungeons below, where a dozen or so recalcitrant monks languished in darkness and deep chill, chained and helpless.
Only three orders of monks had defied the Royal Supremacy and refused to take the Oath: the Franciscan Observants, a group of highly devout and visible “preaching” friars; the Carthusians, an order that stressed individual discipline and prayer, and was less a monastery than a collective group of hermits (this was the order that More had almost joined, naturally); and the Bridgettine order at Syon.
The Observants I had a special fondness for. Their main chapel at Greenwich was where I had first been married, to Katherine, and where both Mary and Elizabeth had been christened. I knew them to be good and holy men. But their order stressed preaching. It was here that I had been denounced as “Ahab” by the Friar Peto.
The Observants were vocal, and their preaching and pronouncements carried great weight not only in England, but also abroad. It was my duty to silence them, and silence them I did. In August, 1534, there were seven houses of Observants, with two hundred friars. By December there were none. By refusing to submit to the Royal Supremacy, they ceased to exist as an order in England. They were scattered and their houses closed. That was that.
The Carthusians were another matter. They insisted on obstructing the earthly agents of both God and their divinely appointed King. They fought, argued, and threw up annoying barriers in every way possible—like their heroine, Katherine. How alike they were! What similar spirit infused them!
Both of them met the same fate: imprisonment and isolation.
The Bridgettines, a “double” order of both monks and nuns, had only one house, at Syon, near Richmond. Richard Reynolds, their scholarly prior, was proving as stubborn as Katherine.
The rest of the realm had taken the Oath. Even More’s household had taken it. My commissioners had returned from the North with their listings, and there were no names subscribed on the refusal list.
My rebellion had succeeded. My defiance of the Pope, of my false marriage with Katherine, had been accepted, sworn to as a law of the land. The astounding thing was not that it had been possible, but that there had been so few resisters. Doom-sayers and ill-wishers had predicted that Englishmen, the Pope, and Francis and Charles would never tolerate such an affront. Yet the Englishmen had acquiesced, the Pope had yet to order a Holy War against me, and for all that, Francis and Charles had yet to obey. A great company of “yets.” In the meantime I reigned supreme, and honoured Anne as Queen, and forced others to do likewise.
I prayed daily that More and Fisher would repent and come to swear the Oath. They were not senseless men, and surely the Holy Spirit would talk with them, convince them.
“He refused to attend my Coronation,” she said spitefully, “and made up that insulting parable about losing his virginity by so doing.” She rolled her eyes heavenward and pointed her hands together in a Gothic spire.
I laughed. “He is a man from another time,” I said. “He is fifty-seven years old; when he was born, my grandfather was King. He thinks in those terms.”
“I am pleased, then, that you have outgrown him. That world is
passé.”
“Passé.
Always French with you, my courtesan!” I reached out to enfold her in my arms.
“But it
is passé,”
she laughed, sliding away. “He pledges his troth to something that has died. Beautiful as it may be, it died. And
I
did not kill it!” She looked agitated.
We were in her winter sitting-parlor at Richmond. In Katherine’s day, this very chamber had been hung with Biblical tapestries and fitted with prayer-niches. Now the windows were naked, giving out onto magnificent views of the frozen Thames below.
People were sporting on its surface. There were young lads with bones strapped to their shoes, sliding about, playing all sorts of games. There were others swatting stones back and forth with sticks. The figures all looked black, their sticks and legs making them appear as insects.
“I did not kill that world!” she repeated. “Any more than these gamesters killed summer.”
“Yet you sport upon its surface, and that seems to be a desecration,” I said. “To some.”
“To More and his like!” She turned to me, her black eyes hard and gleaming. “You will not permit those slanderers to live?” she asked. “For if they live, they insult me daily by their existence.”
“Unless they change, they will not live,” I said. It was not a promise but a fact. One that I deplored and prayed would soften and give way to something else, something more ... malleable.
“Good,” she said. “I was afraid that a softened version of the Oath might yet be offered to them.”
In the privacy of my midnight chamber I had framed a version of the Oath that encompassed only Parliament’s enactment and left the Pope and his dispensation untouched. I had thought to offer it to More and Fisher. But I had never worded it to my own satisfaction. How could she know of it?

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