The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [139]
Both of them met the same fate: imprisonment and isolation.
The Bridgettines, a “double” order of both monks and nuns, had only one house, at Syon, near Richmond. Richard Reynolds, their scholarly prior, was proving as stubborn as Katherine.
The rest of the realm had taken the Oath. Even More’s household had taken it. My commissioners had returned from the North with their listings, and there were no names subscribed on the refusal list.
My rebellion had succeeded. My defiance of the Pope, of my false marriage with Katherine, had been accepted, sworn to as a law of the land. The astounding thing was not that it had been possible, but that there had been so few resisters. Doom-sayers and ill-wishers had predicted that Englishmen, the Pope, and Francis and Charles would never tolerate such an affront. Yet the Englishmen had acquiesced, the Pope had yet to order a Holy War against me, and for all that, Francis and Charles had yet to obey. A great company of “yets.” In the meantime I reigned supreme, and honoured Anne as Queen, and forced others to do likewise.
I prayed daily that More and Fisher would repent and come to swear the Oath. They were not senseless men, and surely the Holy Spirit would talk with them, convince them.
“He refused to attend my Coronation,” she said spitefully, “and made up that insulting parable about losing his virginity by so doing.” She rolled her eyes heavenward and pointed her hands together in a Gothic spire.
I laughed. “He is a man from another time,” I said. “He is fifty-seven years old; when he was born, my grandfather was King. He thinks in those terms.”
“I am pleased, then, that you have outgrown him. That world is passé.”
“Passé. Always French with you, my courtesan!” I reached out to enfold her in my arms.
“But it is passé,” she laughed, sliding away. “He pledges his troth to something that has died. Beautiful as it may be, it died. And I did not kill it!” She looked agitated.
We were in her winter sitting-parlor at Richmond. In Katherine’s day, this very chamber had been hung with Biblical tapestries and fitted with prayer-niches. Now the windows were naked, giving out onto magnificent views of the frozen Thames below.
People were sporting on its surface. There were young lads with bones strapped to their shoes, sliding about, playing all sorts of games. There were others swatting stones back and forth with sticks. The figures all looked black, their sticks and legs making them appear as insects.
“I did not kill that world!” she repeated. “Any more than these gamesters killed summer.”
“Yet you sport upon its surface, and that seems to be a desecration,” I said. “To some.”
“To More and his like!” She turned to me, her black eyes hard and gleaming. “You will not permit those slanderers to live?” she asked. “For if they live, they insult me daily by their existence.”
“Unless they change, they will not live,” I said. It was not a promise but a fact. One that I deplored and prayed would soften and give way to something else, something more ... malleable.
“Good,” she said. “I was afraid that a softened version of the Oath might yet be offered to them.”
In the privacy of my midnight chamber I had framed a version of the Oath that encompassed only Parliament’s enactment and left the Pope and his dispensation untouched. I had thought to offer it to More and Fisher. But I had never worded it to my own satisfaction. How could she know of it?
“There are no variations in the Oath,” I insisted. This seemed to satisfy her—or did it?
“I know full well you love More!” she burst out. “And I know in what way, and in what manner! In an unnatural manner!”
“Unnatural?” Her cryptic allusions baffled me.
“‘Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind; it is abomination.’ Leviticus, Chapter eighteen, verse twenty-two.