The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers (6 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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I think there persisted a feeling at the time that England was not a country in the civilized sense of the word. We were perceived as backward, remote, and barbarous—the latter because of our horrible dynastic wars, which had been going on since living memory. We were not truly wild, like the Scots or the Irish, but we were not yet an integral part of the rest of Europe.
Everything took so long to reach us. When I was ten, that is, around the year 1500, glass windows in common dwellings were almost unheard of. No bluff, common Englishman would use a fork (or had even seen one), would wear anything but wool, would eat anything but the traditional “three B’s”: beer, bread, and beef. There were no rugs on the stone floors, nothing but dirty rushes where people spit and threw scraps. Even the King dined on a collapsible trestle table, and only women in childbirth could expect to have a pillow. This while Italian princes lived in open, sunlit villas, worked on inlaid marble tables, and sampled a variety of fine dishes.
The Renaissance, the New Learning—those were but foreign terms to us, and anything foreign was suspect. Our great lords still tried to keep their own private armies of retainers, long after the princes of Europe had begun concentrating all military power in their own hands. Music, even at court, consisted of a small band of poor musicians playing outdated tunes on outdated instruments. Parliament was summoned only in order to raise money for the King, and then, often as not, the people refused to pay up. European ambassadors regarded a posting here as going into exile, where they would have to endure privations and exist among a baffling, unruly people. They prayed to endure until they could be rewarded by being sent to a “real” court.
Of course, the common people would come out and gape whenever the English King would go from one palace to another. To them we were grand. They knew no better; but foreigners did. They used to mock the King and all our shabby, awkward, unfashionable grandeurs.
At ten, of course, I did not know all this, but I sensed it. I saw how reluctant the Spanish were actually to send their daughter here, in spite of the signed treaties promising to do so. I saw that the French King or the Holy Roman Emperor never met Father, never came to his court or invited him to theirs. I saw that the ambassadors who were here seemed to be old and badly dressed, and that some countries sent no ambassadors at all.
It would be different in Arthur’s reign, I hoped. I wanted him to be that old Arthur come again—to be a mighty King, so filled with honour and strength and a sort of shining that it would change everything. As I was trying desperately to shape myself for a churchman, I saw his reign as bringing a new Golden Age Katherine had been stalemated once again.
“No. She’s to arrive this autumn. And we’re to be married right after. I know the Spanish prize horsemanship. Katherine’s own mother rode into battle when she was with child! I—well, I—”
“You don’t want to fall off in front of Katherine,” I finished. “But, Arthur, you’ve ridden for years, had innumerable teachers. What can I do that they could not?” You hate horses and have no feel for them, I thought to myself, and no teacher can make up for that.
“I don’t know,” he said miserably. “But if only—”
“I’ll try to help you,” I said. “But if you aren’t a good horseman, why don’t you avoid horses in front of Katherine? Do something else. Sing. Dance.”
“I can’t sing, and I’m a clumsy dancer,” he said, his face set. “You can sing, and you can dance, but I can’t.”
“Recite verse, then.”
“I hate verse.”
What can you do, then? I wondered. “Then you must let others make fools of themselves dancing and singing and reciting, and look on with amusement.”
“And there’s something else! The—the wedding night!” His voice sounded higher than usual.
“Oh.
That,
I said nonchalantly, trying to appear wise.
He smiled wanly. “At least I can’t ask your help in that,” he attempted to joke—a joke that was to haunt me, literally, for years.
So it was to happen at last. Arthur was to be married straightway, and the Spanish Princess was already en route to England. The voyage would take two months at least. But she was coming! And there would be a royal wedding and festivities, after years of nothing. Father would be forced to spend money as all the eyes of Europe would be focused on the English Court, watching and judging. There must be great banquets and elaborate allegorical arches and statues and pageants in the streets to celebrate the marriage, and the public conduits would have to run with red and white wine all day. (Already my confessor had pointed out that I had an inordinate fascination for the glitter and pomp of this world, as he put it.) Most important to me, I would have new clothes.
I hated Father’s miserliness. I hated being in moth-eaten cloaks and wearing shirts whose worn sleeves ended halfway to my wrists. I was now just as tall as Arthur, yet I was put into the clothes of someone many sizes smaller. When I bent, the breeches cut into my backside; when I reached, the shoulders strained.
“You’re your grandfather all over,” Nurse Luke kept saying. She could not see how I winced at that. “He was outsized, and you will be, too. He was six feet and four inches.”
“Handsome, too.” I could not resist that.
“Yes,” she said tartly. “Perhaps too much so, for his own good.”
“One can never be too handsome for one’s own good,” I teased.
“No?
He
was. Anyway, handsomeness is wasted on a priest. If you—a perfect bride for Arthur.
I heard her voice before I saw her, and it was a low voice, and sweet, not scolding and shrewish. Then she emerged in her dressing gown, her hair still unarranged and free of any headdress; it fell, in thick, golden-brown waves, over her shoulders.
She was beautiful—like a maiden in the
Morte d’Arthur,
like the fair Elaine, the lovely Enid. Or Andromeda, chained to a rock, awaiting rescue by Perseus in the myth I had been dutifully translating. All the heroines of literature came to life for me as I stared at Katherine.
What can I say? I loved her, then and there. Doubtless you will say I was only a boy, a ten-year-old boy, and that I had not even spoken to her, and that it was therefore impossible for me to love her. But I did. I did! I loved her with a sudden burst of devotion that took me quite by surprise. I stood gaping at her, gripped by yet another unknown emotion: intense jealousy of Arthur, who would have her for himself.
And now the betrothal ceremony must be arranged. I was to represent Arthur and be his proxy in the ceremony promising them to one another, and I thought I could not bear it.
 
But I did. Early the next day we stood side by side and recited dull vows in Latin before a priest in her tent. Although Katherine was already fifteen, she was no taller than 1. 1 could turn my eye just a little and meet hers on the same level.
I found her continually looking at me, and it made me uncomfortable. But then I caught her expression and realized what she was seeing. Misled by my early height and thick chest, she looked at the second son and saw what no one else, thus far, had seen: a man. She saw me as a man, and she was the first to do it. And I loved her for that too.
But she was Arthur’s. She would be his wife, and he would be King. I accepted it without question—or so I thought. Can secret wishes, so secret they are not admitted even to the self, come true? Even as I ask the question, I do not want to know the answer.
The wedding was to take place on November fourteenth, and Arthur was expected to produce an heir within a year. The King never said so, but I overheard the jests and jokes among the servants (they always spoke freely in front of me, as if I were already a priest). They all wanted a baby by Christmas of the following year; indeed, they thought it their due.
 
For someone charged with such prodigious responsibilities, Arthur was oddly unenthusiastic. As his wedding day approached, he became more and more listless. He shrank; he dwindled; clearly he did not want to be married. One day he came to my chambers, ostensibly to àsk my help in trying on his new clothes, but in reality to cry and confess he didn’t want it—any of it.
“I don’t want to go through a marriage ceremony before thousands of people,” he said in a tremulous voice, standing before a half-length mirror and looking pensively at his reflection, swathed in his white velvet cape. Three years later, he had finally grown into it.
“Well, you must, that’s all,” I said, grabbing his plumed hat off his head and plopping it on my own, making faces at myself in the mirror. “Think about afterwards.” I knew something about that business—in a confused sort of way.
“That’s the part I
don’t
want to think about,”àr‰2®Š&d, I made my way to a corner where I slumped against the wall. I could feel sweat trickling down my face and back, soaking into my shirt.
“D‘you want yer fortune?” a voice suddenly whispered into my ear. I turned and saw a well-dressed woman standing beside me. But she had an odd expression in her eye, and she leaned over in a conspiratorial manner. “I ain’t supposed to be here. If they find me, I’m gone. But I come to all the royal weddings. I was at the King’s, now”—she jerked her head to indicate Father—“as well as at poor Richard’s; and Edward’s ... aye, not that one, since he married her secretly—if he married her at all, that witch!”
She was talking about my other grandmother, Elizabeth Woodville. Still I sat stiffly and did not say anything.
“So you are not curious?” she said, as if I had wronged her. Slowly she picked herself up and prepared to go elsewhere. As she stood up, one of the King’s guard recognized her.
“That woman!” he choked, hurriedly coming over. “She’s a Welsh fortune-teller! A sorceress!” He apprehended her, hustled her toward the door, and shoved her out. He shook his head apologetically in my direction. “They cluster around like flies! I cannot keep them all out!”
 
That night Arthur took Katherine into his bed. Alone in mine, I thought about what that Welsh woman had said about my grandmother being a witch, to keep myself from thinking what Arthur was—or was not—doing. Strange to think that in years to come that very question was to be debated by scores of learned men.
V
T
he next morning Arthur called for courtiers to attend him in his bedchamber. He demanded cups of wine and was full of boasts about how marriage was thirsty work, and so on. He kept repeating this all day. It was the first thing he said to me as he emerged from his room and saw me. He even attempted a manful chuckle.
 
Arthur and Katherine were at court all during the Christmas holidays, and I found I could not bear to be with them. I sulked and tried to avoid the festivities. This was so unlike me that the Queen eventually sought me out in my secret, solitary spot: an empty room high in the eaves of the palace. I had thought no one knew I went there, but clearly she had noticed.
It was cold there; no fires were ever lit. But I could hear faint music and laughter from the Great Hall below. It was another masque, another dance. I shut my ears against it and looked out the small cobwebbed window, seeing the late-December sun slanting over the Palace grounds, and far beyond. Everything was brown and golden and still. I could see the ships on the Thames, anchored and waiting. Waiting ...
I wished I could be a sailor and live on one of those ships; spend my life on the water, sailing all over the world. Being a prince—the sort of prince I must be—was dull by comparison. I would ... I would start going down to the docks and learning about ships. I would go secretly! That way, Father could say nothing against it. I would disguise myself... and then, when I had become an expert sailor, I would sail away, forget my life here, disappear, become a vagabond prince—have high adventures! They would never know what had become of me; onnterrupted me.

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