The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [122]
A fortnight later, as I sat having my freshly scissored beard combed with a rosemary branch, Norris handed me a thick letter from Mary. It was weighted down with seals, including that of Princess of Wales, which she no longer had the right to use. A bad beginning.
The letter was blunt. She refused to come and serve at Hatfield House, and as for the “Princess,” she knew of no Princess save herself in England; but if it pleased me, she would acknowledge Elizabeth as “sister” in the same way she did Henry Fitzroy, Bessie’s bastard, as “brother.” My mention of the Queen drew the “puzzled” response that she would welcome the help of Madam Pembroke in reuniting her with her mother, Queen Katherine.
I flung it down. Stubborn fool! What was I to do with her? I needed her. I needed her to cooperate—
No. That was not it. The truth was that I needed her; I needed her as a father needs a daughter. I had loved her too long to crush those feelings now, try as I would. I remembered her as a child, as the pretty baby in the jewelled cap, being betrothed to the Dauphin; as the joyful child playing on the virginal for me. How she had laughed, and how we had taken turns on the keyboard ... and then, the changes in her face and form as one day I looked at her and realized, with a jolt, that she was beginning to make the transition into womanhood.
Proudly she had gone to Ludlow Castle to practise for the court life she would lead, out from under my shadow. And at her leaving, I had felt the same pang of coming loss that any parent does. Not so soon, my little one, not so soon.... But I had Anne by then, and my love-madness to blunt what it meant to be losing Mary. And like every parent, I thought, there’s Christmas, she’ll be back for that.... How was I to know that she would never come back? There was an emptiness there that no Anne, no son, and certainly no Elizabeth could ever fill.
I picked up the parchment with the harsh, stilted words of my estranged daughter. Had it hurt her as much to write them as it hurt me to read them?
Anne’s recovery took place overnight. It seemed, even then, unnaturally swift. She informed Cranmer that she was prepared to undergo the ancient ceremony of the “churching of women.”
“Yes, Thomas,” I answered his unspoken question. “We will retain that ceremony. You may proceed with it.”
He looked as if there were a stone in his shoe. “I—I have been studying the origins of this ceremony,” he finally said, “and it appears to me to be pagan. Even its common name, ‘purification of women after childbirth,’ sounds heathen. Would not a ‘thanksgiving of women after childbirth’ be more appropriate to these timations at court by now, and none reflected this change better than the Howards themselves.
The older Howards—Thomas, the Duke of Norfolk, and his mother Agnes, his wife Elizabeth, and all eleven of his siblings—were conservative, stiff, unimaginative Catholics. The men fought and the women served as chatelaines on their great northern estates. That was all they knew, and all they cared to know.
Their offspring, the network of young cousins—Henry, Earl of Surrey, his sister Mary; the Boleyns, and all eight of Edmund Howard’s children—were at best modern and liberal court-creatures, at worst dissolute. The King was left on his own to discover first-hand which were which.
HENRY VIII:
So it was that on the last day of January an odd assortment of pilgrims left Richmond Palace and set out for the shrine of Our Lady of Wrexford.
We turned east, heading into the rising sun, riding along the same route I had taken to London that first morning I had arisen as King of England so long ago. Then