The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [140]
“Anne!” I cried. “This is unseemly! And where did you read the Old Testament?” I asked, irrent?
“It is true, is it not?” She ignored my question. “You have ‘lain down with him’ in the meadows of your mind; sported and frolicked with him there, excluding all others. Craved his approval and love, sought it and cried for it? And now, even now, when he defies you and throws that love back in your face, you seek to mollify and placate him! Your darling must have a special Oath, handmade and tailored and tenderly fashioned by his lover—the King!”
“His lover is not me,” I said.
Pity! ”
“His lover is pain, disguised as Christ.” And he will wed her, with my executioner officiating as priest, I thought.
“Very allegorical,” she sniffed. “But it fails to clarify just how you intend to rescue your beloved from the pit he has diggèd for himself, as the Bible puts it.”
“There are only the regular steps by which to ascend. The Oath, and utter loyalty.”
“No special hand extended from the King? In an allegorical sense?”
“You should know well of allegories! You stage enough of them—insipid, mincing things, but all the same. You as a goddess, surrounded by worshipping fops! Do you enjoy the fawning, the stylized, false verses and compliments? Fie, lady, I outgrew them by the time I was twenty!”
“By then you had been King three years. When I have been Queen three years, perhaps I shall follow suit.”
“No, you shall follow suit now! Lent is soon approaching, and you will cease these ‘entertainments’ for the duration. Do you understand me, Madam?”
“Indeed.” She managed to infuse the word with disdain.
More and more our times together were like this: acrimonious, full of rancour and mistrust, a collapsing of respect. Yet I continued to desire her and crave her presence; I knew not why. She vexed my soul, not comforted it.
During the next few months it became increasingly clear that the refusers of the Oath would have to stand trial. At the end of 1534, Parliament passed another act, the Act of Supremacy, acknowledging my title as Supreme Head on Earth of the Church of England and defining it as treason to “maliciously seek to deprive” me of any of my rightful titles. Now the men in the Tower would have to be judged on that aspect as well.
Bishop Fisher was calm throughout his imprisonment, never seeking any deliverance. The Pope made a belated gesture of support by naming him a Cardinal. But Fisher cared not. He was an old man, an extension, really, of my grandmother Beaufort, never comfortable in the world that had grown up around him since her death. From the beginning of my Great Matter (styled by some “the divorce”), he had taken a stand against me. In the formal hearing of the divorce case at Blackfriars, Warham had presented a list of signatures of all bishops supporting my cause, including Fisher’s.
Fisher had risen in gaunt dignity and said, “That is not my hand or my seal.” Warham had admitted that Fisher’s signature had been “added,” but thers against me—Warham himself, for example. But in the end, alone of all the clergy, Bishop John Fisher stood unconvinced and unswayed.
He was finally brought to trial on June 17, 1535, on a charge of high treason for depriving the King of one of his titles by denying that he was Supreme Head of the Church in England. He admitted that he did not accept me as Supreme Head, but sought to exonerate himself by denying that he had “maliciously” done so. But the verdict came in: guilty, and he should die.
The Carthusian priors of the houses of London, Beauvale (in Nottingham-shire), and Axholme (in Lincolnshire) were hauled up out of the Tower and made to stand trial. Along with them were three stubborn monks from the London house. They all refused, for the last time, to take the Oath. They all tried to say they had never intended their own private thoughts and opinions to be “malicious.” But this failed to convince the examiners. They were sentenced to be hanged, then cut down alive and their entrails pulled out and burnt, and to be drawn and quartered, on May fourth. Reportedly they