The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers (76 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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CIV
I
promised myself that I would not test God by repeatedly checking during the long hours of darkness. But when the first light broke through the iridescent frost covering the windows, that would be a Sign.
The first light broke, and I raised my voice. Silence.
Now I was truly frightened. I needed my voice restored; this was an emergency. It was not for myself I needed it, but for England. Still, God did not heed.
And if He did not heed now ...
Mid-morning. Brandon appeared. He looked old, I thought. How detached we are in observing the aging of our contemporaries, as if we were somehow exempt from the same process, or as if it were applied unequally, and our poor friend got a double dose, whereas we ourselves got off lightly.
I had already prepared a list of questions, which I handed to him. His baggy eyes skimmed over them quickly.
“Yes, there are more rebels. That is what this morning’s dispatch said. Of course, it is four days old ... the roads this time of year ...” He shook his head. “All told, they are still fewer than five hundred. They are playing an old tune, Your Grace. Those who wished to dance to it already did their jig during the Pilgrimage. And afterward—in chains and in the gibbet.”
Still, they have enough recruits to begin again,
I thought. A never-ending supply of malcontents, traitorGrace?” A simple request.
I nodded. Kill the thing now. Pluck the plant up, roots and all. And this was supposed to be the place where I must venture forth, taking my Queen. Suddenly I was ferociously hungry to see this mysterious area, the North, which bred mists and rebels in equal quantity.
“Shall I use the utmost force?”
Shall I kill swiftly and brutally?
I nodded. The softer way was often, in the long run, the crueller.
He bowed and took his leave.
Brandon. I could rely on him. For half a century now, or almost that, he had been my right arm. But when he failed, as my voice had—what then?
The frost on my windowpanes was melting as the sun rose higher. The days had lengthened noticeably since Christmas, although not enough to put winter to rout. And in the North it would be bitter, icy, and locked in darkness and cold until April. Brandon, the old soldier, would have difficulty penetrating the area. Curses upon the ungracious traitors, to call out my dearest friend, whom as King I could not spare from England’s service.
I began to scratch off the obscuring frost with my fingernail. I felt impaired all round, but this one thing I could correct. I could at least see out of my window.
It needed a cloth to wipe away the frost-shavings and watery melt. “A cloth,” I muttered, and the page stuck one in my hand. I wiped vigorously at the messy pane, until it glistened free and showed me the white world outside as clear as though I were seeing it through my unobstructed eye.
“Ah,” I said. Then I started.
I had spoken, and been heard. My voice was freed.
“Thank you,” I said quite naturally to the page. He nodded. “ ’Tis lovely.” I could hear my own voice, as if it were another’s. “You may go now.” He bowed and obeyed.
Alone, I blinked in stunned excitement. It was back, my voice was back. I crossed myself and whispered, “Thank You. You have answered my prayers.” I crossed over to my prie-dieu and looked up at Jesus on the cross. I looked directly into his eyes, and they seemed to smile at me.
Why had God capriciously decided to restore my voice over such an unimportant command? A cloth to wipe off a frosty window: he had loosened my voice for that.
God frightened me. I understood Him so much less than I had always thought I understood Him.
The page told everyone that I had spoken, and I was soon dislodged from my praying station.
Now that I was able-bodied again, my councillors presented me with all the ugly details of the northern rebellion. The traitorous statements—“the King is the Devil’s agent”; “the King is an Anabaptist”; “the King is haunted by the souls of the monks he killed”—bordered on the blasphemous. What sort of people did I rule?
“I have an evil people to rule!” I shouted in answer to myself. “An unhappy people who harbour sedition in their hearts.” I looked round at all the smug faces surrounding me. What of them? What secret malice lay in
their
hearts? “I’ll soon make them so poor they’ll nedience!” And you, too, I thought. Any one of you youngsters, if your youth and health give you fancy ideas, I’ll put a stop to
that.
It’s Brandon and I who are in control, the old soldiers who know how to rule.
“They’ll die for their treason, and we’ll go up in the summer to comfort their widows. The grass won’t even have grown on their graves yet! But their sons will welcome us with adulation, whatever else lies coiled in their secret hearts. They’ll—”
“Your Majesty!” Dr. Butts entered and looked betrayed. His royal patient was up off the sickbed and behaving as normal. “I had heard of your recovery. Why did you not send for me?” He looked hurt. I had insulted him by calling upon him in my need, clutching to him in fear, and then jettisoning him once I recovered. As men do to God.
“I apologize,” I said. “Come, let us be alone.” The others took their leave, with relief.
“I could hear your voice halfway down the gallery,” he admonished me.
“God restored me.”
“So it would seem. And in full volume. Is it wise to run a horse at full gallop who has lain ill and languished in his stall a fortnight? Gradual, and by degrees—that is the way to sound health.”
He checked my throat, my chest, my leg. The wound had all but disappeared. Drained and healed over, it looked so inculpable and innocuous. The rotten traitor! Traitor no less than my northern subjects!
“Your heart started up suddenly,” he said in alarm. “You must avoid exciting thoughts.” He put away his listening tube. And smiled. “But I must say, the Lord in His mercy appears to have healed you.”
With a few more instructions regarding my food, drink, and rest, he was gone. I was free of my body-bondage once more.
 
By the time Brandon reached Cambridge, word came that the rebellion had burnt out, having consumed its own fuel. There was no need for him to apply the stern measure of the law, and so he returned by Easter, when spring was breaking on the court.
CV
S
pring and Easter were enveloped, for me, in a web of preparations for our northern progress. As the grass brightened and exploded in green, and the bare branches of every tree and bush suddenly turned into feathery brushes, it was hard to believe that there were places in the realm of England where winter still held the land and reigned. Children shrieked and played out of doors—I could hear them from the opened casements—at marbles, skip-rope, and pace-egging, where they cracked their Easter eggs together. Their cries rose lean and eager, like a wild animal kept too long indoors and now celebrating its freedom. Before nightfall there would be skinned knees and lost scarves. That, too, was part of the celebration.
By day I studied dispatches and made up orderly lists of supplies and courtiers for the journey. There was so much protocol to be observed. There must, of course, be a striking difference between how the remnants of the traitorous rebels were recerestored to health, as if those horrible days in March had never occurred. The leg was behaving itself I handed her the rose, the unique, commissioned rose.
“Yes?” She took it without looking and smiled, still eagerly.
“You hold it.”
Only then did she examine the rose, exclaim over it. When I explained its symbolism, she wept.
CVI
D
eparture day was to be July first. God thought otherwise and sent deluges from the skies. All told, it was three weeks before the rains stopped and the roads dried sufficiently to permit travel. That gave the Scots extra time to decide how to respond to my invitation to a parley, and gave us longer to ready the great abbey hall of St. Mary’s in York to receive them.
I shall not recount the long journey in tedious detail. With so many of us travelling—there were one thousand retainers, officers, and companions—our lodging was of the greatest importance. Even the wealthiest nobles did not have accommodations for so great a company, so we provided two hundred of our own luxurious tents to make up the difference. Yes, the journey itself, the protocol, the lodgings, the obligatory entertainments (which should be renamed “borements”) were dull. But the countryside!
Oh, why had I not seen all of England before? I was captivated by the landscape itself, yes. But more by the people. Each population retained the stamp of its origin and past. As we travelled northward, the people became taller and fairer. On the border of Norfolk, their eyes were as blue as a clear October day, almost to a person. “Dane blood,” said Dr. Butts, who made a hobby of studying this sort of thing. “This is the side of England where the Danes settled, where Norsemen raided. From the Danes you get the blue eyes, from the raiders the red hair.” He pointed to a fiery-haired lad perched on a market cross to glimpse us as we passed. “Sweet child, to bear the marks of such a brutal past.”
They talked differently, too. At times I could not make out certain words in the courteous little speeches the locals gave us.
As we passed farther north, settlements fell away and we rode through longer and longer stretches of forest. The days lengthened, too. Twilight seemed almost as long as the afternoon.
“The farther north, the longer the day,” said Wyatt, who was fascinated by oddities of geography. “At the highest latitudes, as in very northern Scotland and the Orkney and Shetland Isles, there is no night at all in June. Just a sort of purple twilight.”
Wilder and wilder it became. There was so much game that after the first novelty of it, we did not bother to hunt. Besides, the surrounding forest was so dark and extensive it seemed unwise to chase far into it. We were near Robin Hood territory, and now the sheriff of Nottingham’s reluctance to pursue Robin Hood and his merrie men into the fastness of Sherwood made perfect sense. I would have let the outlaw roam, too.
Lincolnshire, which I had once called “one of the most brute and beastly shires of the whole realm,” was the beginning of the territory of traitors. It had taken us forty days to reach it from London, travelling at our slow ceremonial pace, it was so remote. Small wonder Lincolnshiremen considered themselves beyond our grasp, a feudal kingdom of their owoss I said lamely. “I shall await him. In the meantime, the ceremony distinguishing between the traitors and the true subjects must be carried out.” I was not looking forward to this, but rgarent size="3">As I approached the door to her apartments, a dark shape rose from a chair nearby, and glided toward me.
A spirit ...
or at first I thought so. I was infected by the wild strangeness of this whole region. For it was a face I had thought never to see again: Jane Boleyn, George Boleyn’s wife. She who had betrayed her own husband and testified against him at that sordid time of Anne’s downfall.
“Why, Jane—” I whispered.
“Your Majesty.” She bowed low. It was truly she.
She stood. A hood of the new fashion framed her face, but otherwise it was the same. An ugly face, with a long, bulbous nose and dark, shining, feral eyes too close on either side.
It seemed that she was guarding the doors. But there were yeomen for that. It must be my own imagination, I remember thinking then.
I tapped on the door, and Jane reached out a hand as if to restrain me. There was no response within; everyone must be dead asleep. Perhaps my Catherine was, as well? I produced the proper key (for we always carried our chamber locks with us to protect us from assassins who might have procured a key to the built-in lock), but Jane stayed my hand.
“The Queen sleeps,” she said. “She asked me to keep watch in the outer chambers, lest she be disturbed.”
“I will not disturb her,” I assured her. “I will sleep on a pallet at her bed-foot, if need be. Her presence will aid me to sleep.”
“Very well.” She nodded stiffly.
The key worked well enough, but the door was barred from the inside as well. I could see the metal rod passing across the door-crack, and a great coffer pressed against the doors. I could not gain entrance without causing a great commotion.

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