The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [162]
“As for my brother and those others who are unjustly condemned, I would willingly suffer many deaths to deliver them; but since I see it so pleases the King, I shall willingly accompany them in death, with this assurance, that I shall lead an endless life with them in peace.
“I beg you, good people, pray for me.”
She rises wearily, and Kingston leads her out of the Hall and back to her imprisonment.
Her uncle is crying openly">The charges are read. They consist of the incest and adultery with his sister, the Queen. He denies it. Of plotting the King’s death. He denies it. Of implying that he is the father of the Princess Elizabeth.
At this he smirks and keeps silent, raising one eyebrow mockingly.
A last charge, written on paper, is presented to the peers, then shown to Lord Rochford; it is forbidden to speak the charges aloud before the people. The information has been supplied by Rochford’s own wife, Jane.
“Ah, yes,” George Boleyn says loudly, and reads the paper word for word. ‘My sister Queen Anne has told me that the King is impotent. He no longer has either vigour or virtue in his private parts.’” He laughs, jarringly. Cromwell protests, scolding like an angry jaybird. Boleyn smiles, saying, ”But I will not create suspicion in a manner likely to prejudice the issue the King might have from a second marriage.”
In one sentence, the King is now the accused. The next marriage has been mentioned, the unspoken thing the people are wondering about. Is it true the King has already chosen a successor? Could it be that all this is arranged merely to facilitate a new marriage?
But Cromwell has a higher trump: yet another statement by Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford. She swears that there is an incestuous relationship between her husband and his sister the Queen. The “accursed secret,” known heretofore only to herself, she must in conscience reveal.
Now the accuser is discredited by his own wife, shown for the foul thing he is.
The twenty-six peers pronounce him guilty, and the Duke reads the sentence:
“You shall now go again to the Tower from whence you came, and be drawn from the said Tower of London through the City of London, there to be hanged and then, being alive, cut down—and then your members cut off and your bowels taken out of your body and burnt before you, and then your head cut off and your body divided into four pieces, and your head and body to be set at such places as the King shall assign. ”
A cruel hush descended on London after the trials, a breath-holding until the executions. Those who passed by the Tower could hear hammering, and knew the scaffolds were being reassembled, dragged out of storage where they had lain since More’s execution last summer.
It was said that the King passed these spring nights on his barge, courting Jane, and that the sound of music and the glow of lanterns carried across the water. They said he was rowed back and forth under the shadow of the Tower. They said a great deal of nonsense, but it made a striking story and painted a picture of the King as a satyr. The truth is that he went out on his barge only once, and not to “the shadow of the Tower,” but to visit Jane at Nicholas Carew’s house on the Thames.
LXXIV
HENRY VIII:
It was over, then. The trial was over and the Witch had not escaped her just sentence. Crum reported it all to me—even, sadly, the personal attacks on me. I was not affected by that; my only fear was that somehow, even yet, Anne w>To be burnt or beheaded at the King’s pleasure—I remembered her horror of fire. Would it not be revenge for my “pleasure” to inflict that on her? For her to meet her death, bound and screaming, for her flesh to be roasted, her blood boiled in her veins? I could smell the charred flesh, the stench of her hair aflame....
But I could not. I could