The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers (66 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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What brilliant scarlet silks! From Flanders? A new dye process? What depth of satin—like a rich topaz! And now the measurements ... he laughed nervously ... the thin tape measure whipped out, a pale snake. Waist: fifty-one inches.
All gaiety gone for an instant. Fifty-one
inches?
Had I gained fourteen inches in my waist? In only four years?
I confronted the mirror set up to one side of me, and looked—truly looked—at myself for the first time since Jane’s death. My first impression was of a great white whale. No! And the ripples in the figure—were they entirely of fat or merely the uneven surface of the metal? I was so stunned I was able to put it just this baldly to myself.
A red thing appeared behind the whale, its surface equally wavy. So it was the fault of the mirror after all.
I turned to see Thomas Culpepper standing behind me, a greedy look on his face. “Ah, Thomas,” I said. “I should have known you could scent expensive fabric all the way through the door of the King’s inner chamber. Yes, you may choose something.”
I was fond of the lad, and since he had replaced Henry Norris as the man who attended upon me in my Retiring Chamber, I was not embarrassed to have him see me thus undressed. I knew all
his
secrets—yes, even the sordid business about his meddling with the gamekeeper’s wife, and his attack on her rescuers. Shameful!
“Oh?” A grin spread across his handsome face. He never refused favours.
“An early present to one of my groomsmen,” I said. “I am being measured for my wedding clothes.”
“The wedding will be a public one?” He looked surprised. “I thought—”
“Why ever not?”
“Just that your previous marriage to Queen Jane was so private, quiet.”
And the one to Anne Boleyn even more so! I knew what he meant: with your matrimonial history, Sire, is it seemly to make a public show for the
fourth?
“I shall do as I please!” I roared, reading his mind and answering it. “So you think people will laugh at me? They’ll think me an old fool, is that it?”
He looked annoyed, not frightened. But then, his problem lay in lack of prudence, not lack of courage. “No, Your Grace.”
“You think I can’t afford it?” I couldn’t, not very well. Where
had
that monastic money gone, so quickly? On the coastal defences, much of it.
He smiled his dazzling smile. “Only that it will take place in deep winter —hardly a fitting time for great outdoor rejever lad. As nimble with his tongue as with his sword ... and his member. The latter two got him into trouble, and the former rescued him time and again.
“Oh, go choose something.” I cuffed him on the back of the head, and put back on my dressing robe. “Make the waist forty-nine inches,” I told the tailor. No need to yield to the inevitable yet. A wedding doublet of fifty-one inches? Not for King Henry VIII!
Culpepper held up a garnet-coloured velvet, as rich as a gem of King Solomon’s. But it did not suit his colouring. It made him look consumptive and too long indoors. “No,” I said.
Still he persisted in studying it. “There is one it would well become,” he finally said.
“A lady?”
“Aye. My cousin Catherine. She is orphaned and has little.”
Culpepper was not noted for his charitable spirit, so I suspected he meant to seduce her, using the velvet as a bait. “How touching.” I did not offer the luscious stuff he craved. “Come, choose something.”
The lingering lust on his face was replaced by the original greed. He chose cloth-of-gold, patterned with scarlet threads running crosswise. It would make him appear golden and shining all over, a god of youth.
Envy tore through me.
As you are now, so once was I....
My bulky figure glistened back at me from the mirror.
As I am now, so shall you be....
I finished the lines with fierce satisfaction. Preen and prance and love your cloth-of-gold looks now, my lad, they can’t last, they never do. I kept mine longer than any man has a right to, but they’re gone and there’s no bringing them back. Damn you! You don’t believe I was once magnificent, do you? Wolsey, Katherine, they would tell you, but they’re dead....
“Enjoy it, Culpepper,” I said, indicating the material.
LXXXV
I
t was time to talk to Crum. Crum, who had evidently never known a human passion, and so could never mourn its passing. Jolly, sensible Crum. Lately I had come to envy him, had come to believe that I had been cursed in the nature I had—always yearning, always feeling, always hurting. I wondered what it must be like to go through life as Crum, taking things only as they are, neither less nor more. Well, his sensible head would help me choose the Queen’s new household.
“It has been a long time since a brand-new household was set up,” he observed. “The seven years between Your Grace’s mother’s death and Queen Katherine’s Coronation were the last long period England was without a Queen.” He tactfully did not state the obvious: that for a long time I had had two Queens simultaneously, and my widowerhood after Anne’s death had lasted exactly one day. Probably he thought nothing of it, made no moral judgment. A rare man, Crum.
“Today I have a new palace to offer her, one no Queen has ever set foot in—Nonsuch. I would assure that the Queen’s royal apartments be readied in time to receive my bride in January.”
“We must make the assignments for her English servitors,” Crum said. “She brings only ten Flemish ont>
Approaching the grey stones, now sleek with ice, I felt my heart pounding so loudly it sounded, in my ears, like the beating of a falcon’s wings, just as he leaves the wrist. Be quiet, be quiet, be calm ... no, do not! Soar all you like, my sweeting.
Into the castle, past the stunned guards. All was quiet, most of the castle empty, drained into the Great Hall, where everyone was gathered on this second day of 1540, drinking, talking. I bade my party join them, and forbade anyone to follow me as I sought out the Lady Anne. They obeyed.
Now I made my way to the great Privy Chamber, wherein Anne was presumed to be, the passage leading up to the door so dark that I had to grope along, feeling as if I were participating in a masque, in an intricately staged New Year’s entertainment, as I had done so many times before.
The hard iron of the chamber door was unyielding, stiff. I wrenched it, and it shrieked, like a witch’s cry, and the door swung slowly, slowly open. I felt the hairs on my scalp rising, tingling, with the suspense of that groaning, sliding door....
Her dress was of cloth-of-gold. Magnificent! Her back was to me, as she gazed out the tiny, slitted window onto the white landscape below.
“Anne!” I cried.
She jumped, then jerked round. I could see nothing of her, as the light was coming from directly behind her. She made no sound beyond a horrified gasp of terror.
My long brown woollen cloak! I had forgotten to remove it, and now stood before her dressed like a highwayman. No wonder she feared me—feared for her life. I ripped it off me and stood before her, in my golden and green robes of state.
“Anne!” I cried in joy. “It is I, King Henry!”
She screamed, then clapped her hands over her mouth.
“Herr steh mir bei! Wie in aller Welt—
!”
She did not recognize me. “I am Henry, the King!” I repeated.
A woman came scurrying in from the adjoining chamber, along with a guard. The guard, whose face looked young but who had the body of an old hog, bowed. Then he jabbered something in the ugliest language I had ever heard. It sounded like the rumblings of a bowel. Anne replied in the same medium. Then the guard stammered, “For-gif ze Lady, King Henry, a-bot she zhot you vere a grrooom, a horse-master.”
Now the Lady Anne had bowed before me, and I saw that her entire head was enveloped in a grotesque hat of some sort, with stiff wings and many folds, a madman’s kite. She stood up, and only then did I realize how gigantic she was. A female Goliath. And, in turning to me—
Her face was repulsive! It was as brown as a mummy’s, and covered all over with pits and smallpox scars. It was uglier than the faces of freaks exhibited at country fairs, the Monkey Woman, the Crocodile Maid, it was sickening—
A spray of spittle landed on my face.
It
was speaking, and in that language that was no language, but a series of grunts and gas-churnings. Her breath was foul, it was a nightmare, this could not be happening!
I backed out of the chamber, feeling for the door behind me, slamming it shut, leaning against it. I felt nausea fighting its way up in my throat, the acrid stench of it, but I fought it down. As the sickness receded, so did the nger: anger so cold and yet so hot I had never felt its like before.
I had been duped, betrayed. All those people who had seen her—all those envoys who had met her, who had arranged the marriage—they had known. Known, and said nothing. Known, and deliberately led me into this marriage. They were all in it together—Cromwell, Wotton, the Duke of Cleves, Lord Lisle, and the entire company at Calais. And Holbein! Holbein, who could capture the subtlest facial characteristic with his brush; Holbein, for whom no skin was too fair, no hue of cheek too difficult to reproduce, no jewel too faceted to be perfectly captured and rendered—Holbein had made her
pretty!
I stalked back to the Great Hall, where all the conspirators were gathered. Yes, gathered and drinking their stupid mulled wine and laughing at me. I could hear the laughter. They were all imagining the horrible scene taking place in Lady Anne’s chamber, only to them it was not horrible, but comic. They would pay for this!
“Lord Admiral!” I called from the doorway, and the throng fell silent. The Earl of Southampton turned around, grinning—a grin that wilted.
“Come here!” I ordered, and Fitzwilliam came toward me, a puzzled expression on his face. What a fine actor he was! Better that he should not have been quite so fine.
“Sire?” Just the right note of bewilderment.
“How like you the Lady Anne, Admiral?” I asked softly. “Did you think her so personable, fair, and beautiful, as reported, when you first beheld her at Calais?”
“I take her not for ‘fair,’ but of a ‘brown’ complexion,” he replied—wittily, he assumed.
“How clever you are. I did not know you fenced with conceits and metaphors, along with Wyatt and Surrey.” I glared all about the room. “Is there no one I can trust? I am ashamed of you all, ashamed that you dared to praise her, and reported her—by word and picture!—as winsome. She is a great Flanders mare! And I will not have her, no, I will not be saddled with her, nor ride her, nor hitch her to any conveyance in England!”
Never, never, would I touch her! If the propagators of this cruel comedy thought to see me wed her—assumed I would be meek enough to follow through—they did not know Henry of England! What did they take me for? Francis of France, forced to marry “the Emperor’s mule”?
“Saddle your own horses, and come with me! You shall answer for this at Greenwich.” I would not return to Hampton Court; God, no! Greenwich for business, for unpleasant business. It was at Greenwich that I had married Katherine of Aragon; it was at Greenwich that Anne had borne the useless Princess Elizabeth, and had lost my boy-child. Let Greenwich be the place where the Flemish Mare was turned around and shipped back to the Low Countries to pull her dray!
 
The bitter cold was heightened by the time we got back to Greenwich, as the sun was setting—a small, shrunken, bloody thing—and the sixteen-hour night was beginning. I rode straight up to the gatehouse and passed through, across the great courtyard and right up to the royal entranceway. “Summon Cromwell,” I barked to a page as I strode toward the Privy Council chamber. It was dark and dusty, not having been used these past two months while I kept court at Hampton. Attendants hurriedly brought beeswax taperk chill away. In the meantime we kept our travelling cloaks on. I took my place at the head of the table and waited silently.
Cromwell appeared. Upon entering the chamber he looked astonished. “Your Grace—honoured Council members—” he began, playing for time while he figured out what was occurring, the better to be in control.
“I like her not!” I relieved Cromwell of the mystery, and of the need for preliminaries and niceties. There he stood, the man responsible for all this. My enemy.
“I beg your pardon?”
“The Flanders Mare! The Lady of Cnd now—the wedding attire. When I ordered it, I had allowed every profligate desire to express itself. Each layer of clothing sought to outdo the one just beneath it. Now they were to be fitted together in one blinding ensemble. Culpepper held out the first undergarment, which was of finest China silk, embroidered with white. It was so light it almost floated as he passed it to me; and the sleek feeling as it slid down next to my skin was like a seductive serpent. But the layers after that became heavier and heavier, encrusted with gold thread and gemstones, Oriental pearls and silver of Damascus, until only a man of my breadth and strength could have worn them all.
I have worn armour and I know how heavy that is; but this was its equal. Yet what are gold and jewels but civilian armour?

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