The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [138]
Katherine. As I selected my rings from an octagonal inlaid Spanish box, I thought of Katherine. She had refused the Oath, as I had expected. But her manner of doing so was to barricade herself in her rooms at Buckden and refuse to admit Brandon or to speak to him and his commissioners. He waited two days in her Great Hall for her to emerge so he could apprehend her and force her answer.
When he ascertained that she had a cook, provisions, and her confessor locked up with her, he knew she would not come out for six months, would perhaps even starve herself to death in there and call herself a martyr for it. Her confessor would give her last rites and send her soul right up to heaven. In disgust, he left, after dismissing the rest of her servants and carrying off her furniture. The townspeople reviled him and threatened his life even for that. An ugly mob, they surrounded the house and harassed my commissioners, waving their stupid pitchforks and hoes.
That was enough. I needed no Anne to urge me to end this childish, stubborn, and aggravating behaviour of Katherine’s. Brandon could do nothing, but I was King. I ordered her removed immediately to the gloomy fortified manor of Kimbolton, and put under house arrest. Henceforth she would have two “keepers,” Sir Edmund Bedingfield and Sir Edward Chamberlayn, loyal to me. She would live in total isolation, with no visitors and no correspondence permitted her. She was now politically dead.
But even there, she found a way to be contumacious. She refused to speak to anyone who did not address her as Queen. Since there were only fifteen who did—her confessor, her physician, her apothecary, her “master of the rooms,” two grooms of the chamber, three maids of honour, and six menial servants—she shut herself up with them and would not set her foot beyond her own doorsill out into the “contaminated” parts of issight her bed. I wanted her as seldom before. I wanted to tear away her silver-gossamer veil, penetrate to that guarded chamber of hers, violate her strange, solitary, private eroticism. Anne, Anne ...
LXII
I needed to remember those silver moments when I faced the hard, ugly fact that Thomas More had spent the winter months of 1534—35 in the Tower, along with Bishop Fisher (confined shortly thereafter). They were lodged in the more “comfortable” parts of the Tower, not in the dungeons below, where a dozen or so recalcitrant monks languished in darkness and deep chill, chained and helpless.
Only three orders of monks had defied the Royal Supremacy and refused to take the Oath: the Franciscan Observants, a group of highly devout and visible “preaching” friars; the Carthusians, an order that stressed individual discipline and prayer, and was less a monastery than a collective group of hermits (this was the order that More had almost joined, naturally); and the Bridgettine order at Syon.
The Observants I had a special fondness for. Their main chapel at Greenwich was where I had first been married, to Katherine, and where both Mary and Elizabeth had been christened. I knew them to be good and holy men. But their order stressed preaching. It was here that I had been denounced as “Ahab” by the Friar Peto.
The Observants were vocal, and their preaching and pronouncements carried great weight not only in England, but also abroad. It was my duty to silence them, and silence them I did. In August, 1534, there were seven houses of Observants, with two hundred friars. By December there were none. By refusing to submit to the Royal Supremacy, they ceased to exist as an order in England. They were scattered and their houses closed. That was that.
The Carthusians