The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers (75 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
is
it, Clinton?” I cut off his inferior poetical ramblings. “Is there something I need g at the floor. I wanted to be alone; I did not want to be alone. There was only one person for such a mood—Will.
“You have sent for me?”
I scarce was able to look up. “Yes. I need you.” I had never spoken those words before to any man.
“I am here. What troubles you?”
I told him, then. How death had me and those I loved by the throat. How I felt his very fingers on my windpipe, until I scarce could breathe. I named those he had already claimed, and those he was even now in the process of possessing.
“I feel him, too,” admitted Will. “Of late I have had to note that there is something chronically wrong with my body. I never have the whole functioning of it any longer. There is always something I must favour, some part I am waiting to have healed. It is disheartening. We are not what once we were. But that is not a signal that death is at hand. Merely that we are being granted a long life. Deaths of those we love en route are also signs we are being spared. Philosophers who discuss the possibility of long life always say that old people long to die, because they are so lonely, having outlived everyone they have had links with. Why is that? Why are they lonely? There are as many people about as in their youth. But the ability to form strong links apparently ceases after a certain age. Affinity arises in youth, and, if we are lucky, endures through to old age.”
I nodded. Brandon. More. My sister Mary. Bessie. Will himself. But Catherine, my sweet Catherine ... her I loved, and that was a new thing. I was still capable of forming bonds. I was not past that stage.
Just as suddenly my unhappy mood was gone, and this melancholy talk annoyed me. I did not think, then, to trace the source of my reactions. I had grieved because Bessie, the love of my youth, was dying, but became indignant when Will suggested that my capacity for loving and being loved was being exhausted. You see, there was the problem of Catherine Howard, and fitting her into all this.
CI
O
nly a few hours later I lay on the silken sheets of the great royal bed, toying with Catherine. I had drawn the embroidered gold-threaded curtains about us, until we could play at being in a tent on the plains of France. Candlelight leapt up and down in the errant drafts of air seeping under the bed-drapes, but that made it all the more eerie and otherworldly, a playhouse for adults....
Catherine giggled as I touched her throat. I traced its curves and hollows, finding the skin slippery and moist. How was that possible in the dry days of winter?
“For New Year’s I was given a cream from Syria,” she said, as if reading my thoughts. “It was compounded of substances we have not here in England.”
From Syria? “Who has been to Syria?” I could not help enquiring. No one traded openly with the Infidels these days.
“Francis Dereham,” she laughed. “He was a pirate in the Irish Sea for a time. Pirates ‘trade’ with everyone.”
I frowned.
“My cousin,” she whispered, tickling my ear with her tongue. “You rsickbed in January; lingered, hacking, through February and March; died in April.
Suddenly it was very important that I talk to someone. I called.
No sound came.
My throat was swollen, blocked up from disuse. I cleared it, rattling all the membranes.
Now!
I called.
Silence.
I was dumb! God had taken away my speech.
I strained all my muscles. Still, silence.
I was so stunned there was nothing for it but to fall back limply onto the pillows.
It could not be permanent. It must be some laggard part of my healing. When first I had fallen, I could not move my hands. Now I could. This dumbness, too, must fade. It
must.
The fire exploded with sparks and hissing. Then it subsided into sighing. Like a woman, I thought.
But what had happened? There had been the morning, getting dressed. Then the seizure, the paralysis, the fall. My nose crunching. I put out a hand and touched my nose. It was heavily bandaged, with two wooden supports down each side. I had broken it, then.
Why had I pitched forward? What malady had seized me? I threw all my will and might behind my throat, and called again. Silence.
I had been struck dumb. Like John the Baptist’s father, Zacharias. Why? God never acted without reason. Zacharias had been struck dumb because he had argued with the angel Gabriel, when the angel came to announce the Good News.
My Scriptures were in their customary place, and I sought them out, turning to the portion about Zacharias.
Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John.
And Zacharias said unto the angel, Whereby shall I know this? for I am an old man, and my wife well stricken in years.
And the angel answering said unto him, I am Gabriel, that stand in the presence of God;
And behold, thou shalt be dumb, and not able to speak, until the day that these things shall be performed, because thou believest not my words, which shall be fulfilled in this season.
Had I, too, received a messenger or a sign, and refused to believe?
No. There had been no sign, no message. Of that I was certain. I would welcome a conversation with God, or his angel. All my life I had awaited it. But He had never spoken directly to me.
The door creaked open. Someone was checking on the royal patient. I made gestures for him to come forward. It was a page. I mimicked writing motions.
The lad looked clean frightened out of his skin. Perhaps, after all, they
had
expected me to die.
Dr. Butts followed, looking grave and curious. He carried his leather pouch, crammed with potions and flasks. He sat down on a footstool bean may own. The seasons. Sleep. Dreams. Memories. Music. Then I thought of specific things
about
those things. I imagined one leaf on one tree, saw it through its entire life, from its swelling as a bud, to its sticky pale green unfoldings, to its flat, dark, dusty prime in high summer.
As I did this, first with the leaf and then with other things, I entered a sort of trance. I began to talk to God directly, yearning to open everything to Him, because only then could I be united with Him, only then could He reach into whatever was diseased in me and heal it. My speech was wordless, if that is possible for you to understand. I gave myself to God as nakedly as little Edward gave himself up to his nurse every evening, and with the same complete abandon.
I felt an odd bliss, a peaceful ecstasy. My eyes were closed—or were they open? I was not in any worldly place.
My answer came, too, but in wordless form. This palpable sense of peace meant that complete surrender was what God required of me: to continue to give myself to Him without reservation, as I had just done. It would take learning, but those moments would have to come more and more frequently. God would keep me dumb until I had learned to pray with my mind and whole being, rather than just with my lips.
CIII
W
hilst I waited to be led further into this rich and baffling relationship with God, my earthly body must needs lie on the fur-warmed couch and endure the wait. It must be beguiled, for earthly hours are long to our earthly clay, even though they pass in a trance for the mystic.
Evening was coming on when Timothy Scarisbrick, a chamber-groom, entered with a tray of food for me. Where was Culpepper, I wondered, open every a woman. “This is a diatonic harp, gut-strung. We use it either alone, in single lines of melody, or else in what we call Cerdd Dant, where we sing poetry in counterpoint to the harp.” He swirled a bit in preparing himself to play.
“We have, in Ireland, special triads.” He began plucking the harp-strings, so sweetly that they seemed to caress the air.
“Three things that are always ready in a decent man’s house: beer, a bath, a good fire.
“Three smiles that are worse than griefs: the smile of snow melting, the smile of your wife when another man has been with her, the smile of a mastiff about to spring.
“Three doors by which falsehood enters: anger in stating the case, shaky information, evidence from bad memory.
“Three times when speech is better than silence: when urging a king to battle, when reciting a well-turned line of poetry, when giving due praise.
“Three scarcities that are better than abundance: a scarcity of fancy talk, a scarcity of cows in a small pasture, a scarcity of friends around the beer.”
I liked it not. It was gloomy; there was something ominous even about the “happy” triads. I shook my head.
He shrugged, clearly not understanding why I did not want more of it.
He struck a chord and began a new poem.
“Lovely whore, though,
Lovely, lovely whore
Slept with Conn,
Slept with Niall,
Slept with Brian,
Slept with Rory.
”Slide then,
The long slide.
“Of course it shows. ”
What peculiar sentiments the Irish had! Why would they celebrate a whore in verse and achingly poignant melody?
I smiled. The music was exquisite, that I acknowledged. I nodded vigourously, so that he might play on.
From his harp came a sparkling sigh, a whispered wave of beauty.
“Ebb tide has come for me:
My life drifts downward
Like a retreating sea
With no tidal return.
 
“I am the Hag of Beare,
Five petticoats I used to wear,
Today, gaunt with poverty,
I hunt for rags to cover me.
 
“Girls nowadays
Dream only of money—
When we were young
We cared more for our men.
 
“But I bless my King who gave—
Balanced briefly on time’s wave—
Largesse of speedy chariots
And champion thoroughbreds.
 
“These arms, now bony, thin
And useless to younger men,
Once caressed with skill
The>Wha
“Why should I care?
Many’s the bright scarf
Adorned my hair in the days
When I drank with the gentry.
 
“So God be praised
That I misspent my days!
Whether the plunge be bold
Or timid, the blood runs cold.
 
“But my cloak is mottled with age—
No, I’m beginning to dote—
It’s only grey hair straggling
Over my skin like a lichened oak.
 
“And my right eye has been taken away
As down-payment on heaven’s estate;
Likewise the ray in the left
That I may grope to heaven’s gate.
 
“And I, who feasted royally
By candlelight, now pray
In this darkened oratory.
Instead of heady mead
 
“And wine, high on the bench
With kings, I sup whey
In a nest of hags.
God pity me!
 
“Alas, I cannot
Again sail youth’s sea;
The days of my beauty
Are departed, and desire spent.
 
“I hear the fierce cry of the wave
Whipped by the wintry wind.
No one will visit me today
Neither nobleman nor slave.
 
“Flood tide
And the e>
When all one has to do is lie abed, one quickly loses the normal rhythm of the day, the one that governs everyday life. There is a great wisdom in the orderly arrangement of the hours and the daily passage of light and dark. An invalid can rearrange those units to suit himself, like a child playing with blocks, and he soon makes a jumble of it.
So I lay awake half the night, because I had had no occupation during the day to exercise and tax me. “Christ prayed all night,” it says in the Bible. I tried to do so, but fell into that eerie suspended consciousness that bordered on rapture, communing with the Holy Spirit and then waking, or gliding into full awareness, as the dawn stirrings began in the adjoining chamber. By the time Culpepper had appeared with my newly warmed bedjacket, and the beaming young Scarisbrick approached my bedside, grinning, with the laden tray of breakfast food, I was already sleepy, worn out from my night of wrestling with the angel, so to speak. When other men’s blood was stirring, mine was settling. 0 cursed life, an invalid’s! No wonder they never mend.
Culpepper was busy and preoccupied. He brought in my clothes, he attended to all my needs, but in a rattled, distracted way. Once he brought a delicately embossed leather envelope to hold all the correspondence from our ambassadors abroad, made with marvellous flaps and pockets, with. a special container for wax and the Royal Stamp. He had designed and commissioned it.
I grasped his arm and nodded thanks. I hated this dumbness. Even though I knew it was—must be!—temporary.
 
Catherine came in directly after Mass, which she attended daily at eight. She had a devout soul, which, like most physically attractive people, she attempted to hide, as if it were a shame, or would cause others to regard her differently. In the young, that is of paramount importance.
But when she came to me, directly after receiving her Maker, she glowed with a beauty beyond the worldly, could she but know it. I smiled at her, reached up and touched her cheek. The evening previous (when the wood was burning and my body settled), I always wrote out a little letter to her, telling her of my thoughts, my love for her, and my observations on her beauty. Each morning she gladly received it, blushing. And each morning (or was it my imagination, my thwarted, lusty imagination?) she seemed more highly coloured, more skittish.
Thus I pretended to be the patient patient. In truth, I longed to throw off my furs and blankets and take my place once again in the councils of men. How long, 0 Lord, how long?
Whilst I languished, of course I was visited. Will came in regularly to amuse me. Council members called to appraise me of their complaints. It was indeed the New Men versus the traditionalists these days. Churchmen came to read lists of appointments to me for approval. There were many places to be filled. I busied myself filling in those empty lines.
It was all very neat and ordered. When my churning head wished for sleep, my attendants pulled the draperies and converted the chamber into soft night. The sun was barred from my presence like a prattling child. But that ordained a sleepless night to follow. 0 Lord, how long?
Note that I did not practise upon my throat-instrument every few hours, hoping to find it restored. Each time I blew upon it, I was rewarded with a resounding silence.
The Book of Common Prayer, he meant to call it, although he was bogged down within its windings.
“There’s an uprising,” Cranmer said, in child’s English. “In Lincolnshire.”
I gestured for him to continue. “It seems some desperate men conspired to meet at Pomfret Fair,” he apologized. As though it were his fault! “There are many wretched men in the North, their needs unanswered—”
How many?
was all I cared to know. I asked, in my throat, but nothing came. Angrily I grabbed a pen and paper and repeated myself in writing. How cumbersome it is to have to rely on these manual means of communication!
“Three hundred or so. But the reports are garbled. Hourly they change.”
And others may join them, I added to myself. There is a nest up there, a nest of malcontents. With the Scots sitting like a crown on their heads.
I flailed about, anger overtaking me. I beat on my pillows, and tore them with my teeth. I was helpless, helpless—a prisoner of my own body! Furiously, I beat even on it. Take this, I thought as I raised both fists up high and brought them down on my thigh. The muscles shifted underneath like stirring dogs. I opened my throat to roar, and demanded that it obey. No sound came forth.
Defeated, I wrote Cranmer instructions: 1.
Find out their leaders. 2. Send Suffolk to me. 3. Begin preparations for possible action against them.
He bowed and was gone. I lay back, feeling like Prometheus in chains. In our day, the voice-box has more power than muscles. And mine was bound, enchained.

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