The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [100]
Meanwhile, the ménage à trois was growing ever more unbearable. On hunting trips and progresses I must be with Katherine, leaving Anne behind. Yet at York Place—Wolsey’s vacated London palace—Anne and I lived without Katherine, as there were no Queen’s quarters there, it being a former ecclesiastical dwelling. There Anne and I could pretend she was my wife and Queen; she could preside over banquets and entertainments by my side. But by next day, it would be over. There was always some ambassadorial reception for which I must repair to Westminster and the stolid Katherine.
The aggravating situation reached its peak during the summer of 1531. It was nruly happolsey had called his “secret” tribunal to hear my case, and two since the ill-fated legatine court with Campeggio and Wolsey. I had just reached my fortieth birthday and was feeling more than usually melancholy about it. I had begotten my first child at eighteen; yet here I was, forty and without a legitimate heir.
The summer months were to be spent at Windsor. Katherine seemed determined to dog my footsteps. If I went to the garden to walk alone, she followed, a bulky black figure in the bright sunshine. If I walked the gallery during a sudden thundershower, when rain fell like javelins on the hollyhocks and roses beneath the windows, I could be sure that she would appear from a door and walk behind me, like a detached shadow.
Not only did she attempt to attach herself to me like the sticky substance glaziers use to hold glass onto leaded panes, she also tried to keep Anne away from me by forcing her to play cards hour after hour. As long as Anne had to sit and play ruff-and-honours with Katherine, she could not walk with me by the river or in the garden. All the time Katherine maintained an outward sweetness; all the time she was writing treasonous letters to the Pope and Emperor. Only once did she reveal her true feelings toward Anne. During one of their interminable card games, Anne happened to hold a king.
Katherine said, “You have good hap to stop at a king, Lady Anne. But you are not like the others. You will have all, or none.”
This could not go on. I could bear no more. The very sight of Katherine made me shake with suppressed anger. I knew I had to leave, and the only way to do so was simply—to do so.
I told Anne to make herself ready, and that we would leave early in the morning for a hunting expedition and progress.
That night I felt an immense sense of freedom and exhilaration. One by one I was cutting the ties that bound me to a dead past and made me helpless and angry—Wolsey, the Pope, Katherine. Eagerly, I packed for the progress.
WILL:
Henry has been accused of cowardice for his habit of never seeing his so-called victim after he had made up his mind to rid himself of that person. He sneaked out of Windsor Castle at dawn without ever telling Katherine good-bye; he avoided seeing Wolsey at the end; he stalked away from the May Day joust when Anne dropped a handkerchief to someone Henry thought had been her lover, and never saw her again; he refused to see Catherine Howard or Cromwell after he learned of their “crimes.”
But knowing the man as I did, I think it was rather prudence that made him act as he did. Both Katherine and Wolsey repeatedly said that if they could have had just an hour in his presence they could have persuaded him to change his mind. Well, he knew that and chose to absent himself, lest he falter. At bottom, he was rather sentimental and easily moved. Yet he knew what he must do, painful as it might be, and did not want to be dissuaded.
HENRY VIII:
It was July, and even the dawn was warm. I had been dressed for what seemed like hours, and as I stood in the courtyard ready for the horses to be brought out, I waited for the sky to lighten—and for Anne to appear. Eventually she did, wearing a grey h reclike me, she had slept well.
The small party—just myself, Anne, her brother George and cousin Francis Bryan, and five grooms—left the cobbled courtyard as the sky began to lighten in the