The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers (56 page)

I beg you to speak to the King, and desire him from me to be so charitable as to send his daughter and mine where I am, because if I care for her with my own hands and by the advice of my own and other physicians, and God still pleases to take her from this world, my heart will be at peace, otherwise in great pain. Say to His Highness that there is no need for anyone to nurse her but myself, that I will put her in my own bed in my own chamber and watch with her when needful.

I have recourse to you, knowing that there is no one else in this kingdom who will dare to say to the King, my lord, that which I am asking you to say. I pray God to reward your imm in a costume from Turkey....

The wife of my youth.
She had been the wife of my youth, and in dying she took that with her. Those lost days gleamed now more brightly than ever.

I mourned for the Spanish Princess, angry that her life had been, on the whole, so sad. And now there was no hope for anything better, no last-minute changes. She lay beyond all changes.

What sort of faith did I have, then? Presumably she had passed into another world, where all such considerations were cast aside. She was in glory, clothed in a spiritual body, no longer the Spanish Princess or the crippled, sickly old woman she had changed into, but changed yet again into something glittering and immortal. While her physical body was being cut open and embalmed, the immortal Katherine was long since departed, rewarded beyond anything I could ever have bestowed on her.

So I believed ... so I believed....

 

But if it were not so? If the poor old body was all there was, then what a cruel reward. I wept, alone in my private box in the Chapel Royal, astonished and bewildered at my tears. Did I not believe? Were all my beliefs hollow, worthless? That was what my tears betrayed.

For if the dead are not raised, neither has Christ been raised. It follows also that those who have died within Christ’s fellowship are utterly lost. If it is for this life only that Christ has given us hope, we of all men are most to be pitied.

I should not be weeping for Katherine’s bitter life, if I truly believed that each particle of that bitterness was pleasing to God and was now earning her tenfold of glory and reward.

I was a liar, then, a hypocrite. No, I was a doubter. There was a difference. One was honest and human, the other was not. Even Peter had doubted.

God, most almighty and everlasting, please remove these doubts that burn and torment me far worse than my leg. Remove them, or I cannot go on.

Somewhere I heard a stirring. There was someone else in the chapel, down below. I decided to go. I felt more oppressed and troubled than when I had first sought the silence and darkness. Perhaps it would do for another what it had failed to do for me.

I was halfway down the long gallery when I heard the door open and turned to see a figure stealing away from the chapel. It was Jane Seymour, and she was rubbing her eyes. She walked slowly until she came to a window seat, then sat down. She stared, blinking, at the floor.

I approached her carefully. She looked up at my approach, and her eyes and the tip of her nose were red. She attempted to smile, as if that would render them invisible.

“Mistress Seymour,” I said, settling down—uninvited—beside her. “Can I be of help? Are you troubled?”

“I am troubled,” she admitted. “But you cannot be of help.” She fumbled for a handkerchief.

“Only give me the chance,” I offered, glad of the opportunity to take my mind off Katherine.

“I would leave court,” she blurted out. “As soon as the roads are passable, if Your Majesty would so graciously permit me.”

“But why?”

“I am not mtention the Princess Dowager has received for her ‘good end,’ ” said Anne, loudly. “There is talk of little else but her saintly departing. Already people are directing prayers to her, asking for her intercession. Can you afford to have created another saint? First Fisher, then More—now Katherine?”

I signalled for the musicians to take up their playing again, to drown out this conversation.

“You push me too far,” I said. I wished to choke her for her taunting words.

“It is true,” she answered. “The people
have
canonized Fisher and More, in their hearts—never mind what Rome pronounces—and they are well on their way to doing it with Katherine. You should be dancing with us, to counteract it, not leading them in honouring her! Your own security demands it, regardless of your feelings.”

“Fie! You dress your own evil gloating in political wrappings. Dance, my love, all you wish. Soon the time for your dancing will cease.”

I turned and left her in yellow, as I had first beheld her.

 

The embalmer at Kimbolton, who performed an autopsy on Katherine, submitted a secret report to me. He had found all the internal organs as healthy and normal as possible, “with the exception of the heart, which was quite black and hideous to look at.” He washed it, but it did not change colour; then he cut it open, and inside it was the same.

“Poison,” I said softly. I had known it all along. Anne’s poison. It was that triumph she celebrated at her Yellow Ball. I wondered if the particular poison she had chosen was, indeed, yellow. How like her if it were.

Now only Fitzroy, Mary, and I were left to dispatch. Emboldened by her success, she was foolhardly enough to commit her plans for Mary in a letter to Mrs. Shelton, Mary’s “keeper”: “Go no further. When I shall have a son, as I soon look to have, I know what then will come to her.”

Go no further.
No more poison for now? Mary was safe, then, for the present.