The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers (93 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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Only the voices in my head, the annoying visions, have proved a problem. Occasionally I have done things I could not remember, but always I have rectified them as soon as possible, and no harm has been done.
Oh, yes—there was that fool who just recently (yesterday, or was it longer ago?) asked me what my earliest memory was. I was cross with him. I must send for him and make it up. Those sorts of things, those tidying-up things, occupy me much of late. Yet majesty must always be gracious.
It is time-consuming, making up for the voices in the head. But they are growing less, and then I will have more time to attend to the things dear to my heart. I have waited all my life to do so. At last it is almost at hand. O, to be just a man!
CXXXI
WILL:
 
And there it ends, just as the King himself did, some few days later. King Henry VIII died when he was fifty-six years old, in the thirty-eighth year of his reign, expecting to live and reign much longer.
He was never the same after Brandon’s death. Despite the brave words in his journal, he was melancholy and ill—either in body or in spirit—ibr most of the time remaining to him.
The things to of succession, yet remained illegitimate—a neat bit of legal juggling by their father to increase their rights and desirability as wives without compromising his belief that he had never been legally wed to their mothers. He loved those daughters, and wanted them to have as full and happy lives as possible. (A love sparsely returned on their parts. If the unnatural act reputed to Queen Mary is true, then indeed King Lear was well served by Goneril and Regan in comparison. To curse and desecrate her father’s skeleton ... !)
As to the French, the Scots, the Emperor, the Pope—well, as you know, Francis died directly after Henry, although he rallied long enough to send a teasing, insulting note to his fond old rival before both expired. The Emperor resigned his crowns, the Netherlands one in 1555, the Spanish one in 1556, and retired to a Spanish monastery. The Pope finally led his General Council at Trent, which hardened, rather than softened, the position of the Catholic Church against the Reformers. A battle line was drawn, and the Church seemed ready to fight rather than compromise. Why, it was almost as if she had principles!
The Scots actually show signs of succumbing to the Reformed faith, which would change the entire character of their realm, in relation to both England and the Continent (requiring them to find some Scriptural excuse for their money-grubbing). It is true that Mary Queen of Scots adheres to the Old Faith; but increasingly she is at odds with her Council and countrymen and isolated in this matter of religion, so that she has to import foreigners, Italians and French and such, to buoy her up in her faith. A surprising turn of events, would you not agree—although you hold that the Lord directs the Protestant victory?
As for the King’s will: what a troublesome document that turned out to be! He used it to control his councillors, waving it over their heads like a schoolmaster with a whip. Do this, and (perhaps) I shall instate you: do not, and you shall (probably) be omitted from my will. He kept it in a secret place, amending it constantly (oh! he was old: only old men act so!), tut-tutting over it. The price he paid for this old man‘s—and tyrant’s—luxury was that upon his death it was unsigned, almost undiscovered, and questionably legal.
Those constant games that he played with his courtiers led them to play games with him. Hide the document—hide the news. Dangle me—and I dangle you. Divide and rule—unite and outsmart. The last few months were so Byzantine I felt that Suleiman would have been perfectly at home amongst us. Intrigues, flatterers, panderers, betrayers all stalked the corridors and Long Gallery at Whitehall, where the King lay fighting the Angel of Death. Factions in the Privy Council waited to seize power, sure that they could trounce their adversaries. When the old King was dead, when the breath was out of him at last ... then they would move, sweep into power.
But the Almighty had other ideas, did He not? Little Edward, Henry’s pride: his reign was like a shadow, insubstantial and quickly over....
And all their machinations and arrangements went down like dust, and they had to flee before Mary, Queen Mary, the Catholic angel of vengeance.
Now need I set it down, what Henry’s death and interment were.
The King died on January twenty-eighth, 1547, at two o’clock in the morning. He had been quite ill since autumn, and by mid-January ” They began ransacking the chests, the boxes, the coffers.
I remembered the journal. It was of no use to them but to desecrate. But where had he put it? The last I had seen it, it was at his desk....
Feathers were flying. They were ripping open the mattress underneath him, searching for the will. Cranmer begged them to stop.
“If he’d left the will in a proper place, we’d have no need of this,” they replied. “But no! Like the madman he was, he hid it even from his own Council—”
I slid open the hidden desktop, and there the journal lay, right in plain view. I took it out.
“What is that, fool?” Tom Seymour wrenched it from my hands. Upon seeing the tiny handwriting, he lost interest. He could scarcely read.
“My poetry,” I said. “Ideas for poems I hope to write, upon retirement.” A journal would interest them, threaten them. Poetry would bore them, and be safe. Henry Howard knew that, as he had attacked King Henry under the guise of writing about the Assyrian king Sardanapalus (“... with foul desire/And filthy lusts that stained his regal heart ... Who scarce the name of manhood did retain ... I saw a royal throne ... Where wrong was set/That bloody beast, that drank the guiltless blood”).
“Fah!” He tossed it back. “Begone. No one wants you now. It’s our day, the day of the Seymours, the day I’ve waited for since my stupid sister married that rotten, evil hulk of a King.” He grinned and repeated the last sentence in the dead King’s face—the face to which he had always been unctuous and simpering in life. Now I, too, began to see the red in Thomas’s eyes, which the King had recognized in his “madness.”
I walked out of the death-chamber, the journal tucked beneath my arm. Outside in the adjoining Privy Chamber the remainder of the councillors and courtiers waited to hear the word, to know where the King’s soul lingered. No, in truth, they cared not where his soul was, but only where his will and his gold and his heir were.
Nonetheless it was a good reign, and beyond the courtiers, the realm grieved his going. He had done well by everyone but himself.
CXXXII
I
fled down the corridors, seeking only to escape the clutching hands and covetous faces of the self-seekers now gathered around the dead King’s apartments. I found my own quarters and made my way to a pallet without lighting a candle, lest anyone see the light and come to question me.
When dawn came, I awoke and found that the great palace of Whitehall was still, hushed—pausing for death. The supplicants and mourners had departed, the watchers had gone to bed; the sun was not yet up. Death held sway; Death ruled the realm.
Where had the scramblers for the will gone? Had they found it? What did it say? Had they scampered off to proclaim the news? Or did they hold it fast, like a cardplayer with a losing hand—hoping for deliverance, for some “rearrangement”? Were they themselves working to bring about that rearrangement?
I came up to the royal apartments. I had to knock now; there was no friendly King to let me in. The head of the Yeomen of the Guard grabbed me and searched me.
“What madman woul1; I asked, more in wonder than in anger.
“There are those who seek to desecrate the royal corpse,” he said. “In the past hour I found burning-oils and even silver stakes amongst those who have sought to enter; knives and heart-removing devices. Some of these are witches—how else could they have known the King lay dead? For it has not yet been announced, lest the French make war against us in our confusion and disarray. The Council meets tonight.”
“To decide what?”
“The details of the funeral. The publication of the will.”
“They found it, then?”
He looked confused. “Why, was it lost?”
That is what they would give out. It was lost. Or the King had not made one. To give them time to alter it. O Jesu, chaos reigned!
“I know naught of wills and councils,” I said, adopting my most wheedling manner. “I seek only to do honour to my lost King. Tell me, where is he?”
“In the Privy Chamber. The chapel is not prepared to receive him. While it is being readied, he must lie in state in his own Privy Chamber.” He waved me in.
They had done something to him in the night: spirited him away, disembowelled him, steeped him in spices and preservatives. Now his corpse lay lapped in Eastern tars and inside a flimsy coffin. It was draped with heavy black velvet palls. The supports underneath it were sagging. No one had been prepared for this eventuality. To “imagine the King’s death” was treason, therefore one could not ready even the most elementary props for it. The coffin supports were inadequate, but no one could replace them beforehand without running afoul of Cromwell’s leftover secret police.
Sun streamed into the chamber. I felt foolish approaching the death-bier. It was all so makeshift, so un-kingly. I had nothing to say here, nothing to do. I had joined the throng of people who only wished to “check up.” I disgusted myself. I left.
Later I was told that “officials” (what officials?) made it more palatable and seemly. The coffin was surrounded by eighty tapers, and there were Masses, obsequies, and continual watches kept by the chaplains and gentlemen of the Privy Chamber.
Outside this well-ordered respect, the realm trembled and soldiers diced for the seamless garment. No, that is really being too cynical. The truth was that offices must be filled and a nine-year-old King “protected” ... especially from his older sisters, who represented substantial claims to the throne in their own right.
 
Here I must digress to comment on the two contradictory deathbed scenes reported by “witnesses,” neither of whom was present at the time. The Protestant version is that King Henry had envisioned a great enlightened state in which the Reformed religion would prevail. In this version, Henry deliberately had Edward brought up by Protestant tutors and entrusted the Protestant cause to Mary’s conscience by calling her to his deathbed and saying, “Be a mother to Edward, for look, he is little yet.” Dying in sanctity, he had commissioned Mary to protect her brother, had cut down the Howards as Catholic weeds that might block Edward’s Gospel sunlight, and had created the Governing Council as a safety device to shelt12;was surrounded by wax tapers, each two feet long, and weighing, in total, a ton. The entire floor and walls of the chapel were covered in black cloth. It was a chapel of exquisite death.

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