The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers (62 page)

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

Authors: Margaret George

BOOK: The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers
8.85Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
It was certainly true, what the Kentish man said, “If the King knew his subjects’ true feeling, it would make his heart quake.” The sample I did hear, did just that. My own unsettled and miserable state, from the beginning of my Great Matter to its end, had transferred itself to them. My new contentment would also transfer itself, but it would take time.
I had lost my son, but I would cheat the Witch of claiming my daughter as well. Under Cromwell’s threats to drop her suit, and Chapuys’s advice, and the Emperor’s final lack of commitment to her cause, Mary gave in. She copied out the “suggested” letter, provided by Cromwell, in which she admitted her mother’s marriage to me was incestuous, in which she renounced all allegiance to the Pope and acknowledged me as the Supreme Head of the Church in England, and her spiritual as well as her temporal father. When I received the letter, I thanked God for it. Now all was clear for our reconciliation. I would have Mary back again; I would have my little girl!
Theologians call the parable of the Prodigal Son the sweetest yet strongest story in the Bible. Now I knew how that father had felt. Or was I being presumptuous? I would read the parable over in the new translation that would soon be issued under my patronage.
Already it was nicknamed “the Great Bible” for its size. The recently promulgated “Ten Articles of Faith” required for believers in the—
wy!
—Church of England specified that each church should have a Bible in English, and Miles Coverdale’s translation was being used for the purpose. Originally it was to be printed in France, for their presses were larger than ours, but the English churchmen had run afoul of the French Inquisitor-General and had had to transfer their entire printing operation to England. The copy I consulted was one of the advance ones, sent for my inspection. One necessary change: Anne’s name on the dedication page, as Queen, must be replaced by Jane’s, as was being done elsewhere in stone and wood carvings.
I turned to Luke, Chapter fifteen, verse ten.
Likewise I say unto you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth.
Or one person who realizes that he is
not
a sinner.
And he said, A certain man had two sons.
To have hoped so fully, so that the thing seemed so assured . . . now this second death. God teases us on the rack of expectations; the earthly ones we construct as implements of torture are poor imitations of His own.
The door opened. I was no longer looking at it, and so Mary was fully in the room before I saw her. And then she seemed a vision.
A tiny young woman—that was my “little girl,” She was short, and that made her seem young, belied her true age.
“Father.” Her voice was low, gruff. It seemed an odd thing to issue from her throat.
Before I could reply, she flung herself down at my feet and began reciting, in that near-growling voice, “I, most humbly lying at your feet to perceive your gracious clemency, my merciful, passionate, and most blessed father, Supreme Head of the Church of England....” The words were all stuck end-to-end as she admitted her mother’s marriage incestuous, abandoned her allegiance to Rome, and acknowledged my claims of overlordship of the Church of England.
I bent down and pulled her gently up, hugged her to me. Her head came only up to my chest.
“Mary, daughter. You need say no more. Thank you for coming back to me.”
At once she began to cry, and I knew she wept for her “betrayal” of her dead mother. But to go on living is no betrayal. I said nothing and let her cry. But oh! my heart sang to have her back . . . back from both Katherine and Anne. God be thanked that they were both dead. Their deaths freed me from my past, and my mistakes.
“You are welcome here at court,” I finally said. “Come, the Queen wishes to see you again.”
“Queen Jane was always kind,” she said, in a low monotone.
Jane had come to court when Katherine was already isolated and beginning her stubborn martyrdom. The self-seekers had followed Anne’s rising star. But Jane had remained with Katherine and befriended Mary, who was only seven years younger. (Jane had been born the same year I became King.)
Together we walked from my inmost private room and out into the common chamber. I requested that the Queen come straightway. While we waited, Mary and I stood together awkwardly. I no longer felt elated, but almost uncomfortable with a grown woman who was a stranger but also my daughter. Would Jane never come and relieve this tension?
Jane, Jane, help me, as you always do....
Jane appeared, at the far end of the chamber, and came swiftly toward Mary, arms outstretched, a great natural smile on her face.
“Mary, Mary!” she cried, genuine welcome in her voice.
Mary tried to kneel, but Jane embraced her instead. “I have so longed for this day,” said Jane. “Now my happiness is complete.” She held out her other arm to me and locked us all together, turning the water of awkwardness into the wine of ease, against all odds.
LXXVIII
Edward the Confessor. Pilgrims had come from far away to see it, and had addressed their most fervent prayers to it. It was a glass vial containing drops of the Virgin’s milk—miraculous help for barren women.
Cromwell’s inspectors had found it to be a fraud, refilled regularly with ground Dover chalk dissolved in thin olive oil. The slightly yellow tint gave it an authentic look of antiquity.
The monks at that particular shrine had made a tidy living from exhibiting their precious “relic.”
“Disgraceful,” I said, but more in sadness than in anger.
I turned to the next confiscation. This was a marble Virgin that wept “real tears” and could be petitioned (with money) to share one’s own sufferings. I turned it around. There was a small line behind the head, indicating an opening of some sort. I pressed upon the neck, and the stone piece moved outward. I prized it out, and found the head to be hollow. There was a porous container inside to be filled with salt water that oozed through the minute ducts leading to the Virgin’s eyes at just the proper rate. It was an ingenious contraption. And it only had to be refilled once a week.
All across the land there were similar versions of these famous hoaxes. They could not be maintained without the conspiracy of corrupt monks. How could one profess himself a follower of Christ and yet practise the same trickery as the priests of Isis or the Canaanites?
Parliament had passed the Act of Suppression of the Lesser Monasteries. The Act began: “Forasmuch as manifest sin, vicious, carnal, and abominable living is daily used among the small abbeys . . .” It was based on the reports that at Garadon there were five homosexuals, “one with ten boys”; that at Selby one of the monks had had sexual relations “with five or six married women” who had come to seek benefit from the Abbey’s “Virgin Girdle,” which protected one in childbirth; that at Warter, Brother Jackson was “guilty of incest with a nun,” and that at Calder, one Matthew Ponsonby “showed peculiar depravity.” At Bath Priory—where the prior had tried to buy Cromwell off by sending him a leash of Irish wolfhounds—monks were “more corrupt than any others in vices with both sexes.” At Lewes, the prior had “eight whores” and the place was a “very whorehouse and unnatural vices are here, especially the sub-prior, as appears by the confession of a fair young monk.”
One by one the houses were being closed. Those monks who had a true calling were being transferred to larger, stricter houses. The rest were to leave and find their livelihood elsewhere. Their monastic property was to be sold and the proceeds to revert to the Crown. The relics were being sent here, for my inspection. It was an unhappy task.
Monasticism had begun as a pure flowering of spiritualism. The great founder of communal Christian living (for until then there had been only desert-living Christian hermits) was Saint Benedict. He thought it better for men to live with other men, and gathered together hermits and wrote instructions, called the Rule, by which they could actually increase their spiritualism by living in a community governed by holy rules. In his view, a man should best divide his time between prayer, study, and manual work.
In time, other interpretations of his Rule prevailed. The Cistercians stressed manual labor and apartness from civilizalisasted eight months and even the summers were grey and raw, leading Northumberland men to claim they had “two winters—a white one and a green one.”
Since ancient times these peripheral lands had gone their own way, little connected to anything further south. A few great warrior families—the Percys, the Nevilles, the Stanleys—had claimed overlordship of these dreary, cruel wastes, and through them, the Crown had demanded obeisance. But these people knew nothing of me, and I nothing of them. The only touch of love and softness they had ever known was through the great Cistercian monasteries: Fountains, Rievaulx, Jervaulx, Kirkstall. There they could stumble in following a snowstorm and find warmth, food, shelter. There, and only there, could travellers stay the night in safety. There they could be taught to read and write, if they so desired.
Now rumour reached them that their abbeys were to be closed. They had heard, distantly, that ties with Rome were broken. For them, the Church—through Rome—was their one distinction, their one blessing, that set them apart from their wild neighbours even further north. Word had reached them that the newly independent “Church of England” had set forth its beliefs in a statement of Ten Articles that leaned toward Lutheranism and dropped four of the seven Holy Sacraments.
This was the aforementioned Ten Articles of Faith to Establish Christian Quietness, a statement of doctrine drawn up by my bishops in hopes of doing exactly that. The recent changes had so confused the laity that I had thought some clarification of beliefs was in order.
The resulting Ten Articles were a magnificent compromise between the traditionalists and the reformists. Like all compromises, it evidently satisfied no one of either persuasion and unduly alarmed both factions.
The northerners heard, also, in a distorted and distant way, that commoners had replaced noblemen in the King’s Council. They had always been served well by “their” noblemen, and feared for themselves without their guardians. But more than anything else they feared change. Like the slow-growing trees in their region—which took three or four years to attain the one year’s growth of a similar tree in southern England—they were unable to respond quickly to climactic changes. The plant that grew from their soil was the Pilgrimage of Grace.
A pilgrimage was what they called it, but a rebellion was what it was. It broke out in spots, like the pox, all over Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. Eventually the mass coalesced into a great pustule—some forty thousand strong —in the area of the middle of Yorkshire. I did not pop the pustule directly —that would have made too great a splatter—but lanced it and let it drain away and dry up.
So much for metaphor. Now let me set down, in summary, exactly what happened in those autumn months of 1536.
I had sent my commissioners north to supervise the suppression of the small monasteries, as stipulated in the Act of Parliament. The first resistance they met was in the hamlet of Hexham, in Northumberland. There an armed mob of monks and townspeople chased them out.
Next, a spontaneous revolt arose in Lincolnshire. The rebels surrounded the castle of Kyme, where Bessie Blount and her new husband, Edward, Lord Curt, where I met with him at Christmas.
 
Thus ended the so-called Pilgrimage of Grace—neither a pilgrimage nor imbued with grace. But it did alert me to the deep-seated affection for the monasteries and the “Olde Religion” in my far-flung territories. When I met with Aske, one of his requests—and a reasonable one, too—was that I show myself to them, so that they might know me as well as my southern subjects, and that I agree to hold Jane’s Coronation at York. It was a pleasant thought, and would make Jane’s crowning altogether different from Anne’s.
In the end, though, the rebellion in the North failed because it had only the common people’s loyalty, not that of the great lords of the North: the Nevilles and Percys; the Earls of Derby, Shrewsbury, and Rutland. These looked at the magnificent Cistercian monasteries and realized the properties could be theirs, if they but supported my policy. And they were right.
 

Other books

The Good Provider by Debra Salonen
The Christmas Spirit by Patricia Wynn
Nights at the Alexandra by William Trevor
The Refuge Song by Francesca Haig
The Line Up by Otto Penzler
Love On The Line by Kimberly Kincaid
The Fix 2 by K'wan
Twin Temptations by Carol Lynne