The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [145]
One thing cancelled out the other—did it not? There could be no gains without payments. And these things were my payment for Anne.
The rain hissed at me.
Do your worst, I dared it. Do your worst, and I shall yet prevail.
I badly needed to make a summer progress about the realm, to reassure my people and to take readings on their minds. Yet, because of Anne’s pregnancy, I dared not risk her travelling, even in the comparative comfort of a litter, at this time; and I myself would stay with her, watching over her and taking care of her.
She was difficult during this pregnancy, hard to please. She had fancies, one of which was that as long as Katherine and Mary lived, she could not bear a living son. She needed music to soothe her, and therefore Mark Smeaton mus221; She needed entertainments to amuse her, and therefore I brought the Oxford players to court, and bade them write and perform some “fantastical history of times past,” so as to entertain the Queen.
They did so, writing a history of Dr. Faustus and performing it most grandiosely, with red-tinted smoke and demons dragging the damned Faustus down to hell. Anne was delighted with it and showed lively interest in the red smoke and sudden apparitions of the Devil, since she had attempted a similar effect in “Cardinal Wolsey Descending to Hell.” Hell always interested people from an artistic standpoint.
She exhibited none of the behaviour I had come to expect from a pregnant woman: the happiness, the contentment, the interest in the coming child. She was restless and self-absorbed, with glittering, feverish eyes. Yet that was of no moment, as long as the child was healthy. Anne was like no other woman in the world; her pregnancy was as singular and disturbing as she herself.
The cursed rain kept up all through the remainder of the summer. There were occasional fair days, as if to tease us, like a beautiful woman who has no intention of yielding her favours but continues to make promises. The first grain crop was now ruined, and the flooding of the fields made it impossible for a second to be sown. This winter there would be hardship at the least and starvation at the worst.
The people had stepped up their visits to shrines, imploring Our Lady, Thomas a Becket, and all the others to hear them. The monasteries reaped a tidy profit from all this, as Crum never failed to remind me. I had allowed him to appoint inspectors to compile records of the assets and holdings of all the clergy in England, to be summarized in a Valor Ecclesiasticus. They had fanned out eagerly over the realm to get their information.
Crum liked the fact that offerings were pouring into the shrines’ coffers all across the land. I found it ominous. More’s head had disappeared from London Bridge. Who had taken it, and why? Were they setting up a shrine to him, too?
I had no one to confide these apprehensions to. Crum was not a man to tolerate apprehensions, either in himself or in others. He would discuss only the realities of a situation, not its intangibles. Cranmer, close as I was to him in many ways, had so many apprehensions himself that I did not wish to encourage them.
As for Anne, she had isolated herself completely in that court world where she whiled away her time. What happened beyond the doors of the Queen’s apartments was not of the remotest interest to her. As her spirits alternated between high-pitched nervousness and melancholia, I let her suit herself. Anything to keep her happy and to protect the pregnancy. Except dancing, which was too vigorous. I forbade her to dance.
Thus it was with stunned disbelief that I beheld her dancing with great abandon late one evening after she had ostensibly retired. We had had supper together, a quiet one, as I had