The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [178]
He wrote a mocking, threatening letter to Charles and Francis when they signed a ten-year truce and peace treaty. He called Francis “that quivering husk of a disease-eaten fruit-tree” and Charles a “degenerate, balloon-jawed descendent of a baboon” and said their “feeble union, undertaken under false pretences and for preposterous aims, would bring forth a strange fruit of hideous appearance, pustule-ridden and smeared with excrement, with a hollow but rotten interior.”
When Pope Paul III published, publicly, his excommunication of Henry VIII and called for a Holy War against him (as earlier Popes had called for a Crusade against the Turk) Henry laughed uproariously (while wolfing down grouse and woodcock, a dozen altogether) and muttered, “If that Judas-serpent should slither from out his homosexual den of pleasure”—a great wipe of his mouth—“he should find a great shoe, yea, a leather boot, ready to stamp him and make his guts issue from out of his lying, double-tongued mouth.” Then a belch, given with a great flourish.
He cared for nothing. He abandoned music (unlike Nero, he did not fiddle while the monasteries burned); all sport was neglected; he never attended Mass, except when required to. He had become a great, slobbering, vicious hulk.
I avoided him as much as possible, and he called for me seldom. I was one of the pleasures for which he had lost delight.
HENRY VIII:
The Bishops’ Book was published, and instead of quieting controversy, it sparked it. Because I myself had not authored it, people assumed that it was not authoritative, that further changes in doctrine were possible. The reformers knew exactly where they hoped to see the ark of the Church of Eng looting and destruction, all under the guise of religion. At first they had trembled to see their relics taken from their little local shrines and consigned to bonfires. Then, delight in the bonfire itself began to consume them. There is something so deeply satisfying about destroying, trampling, killing.... And soon the people themselves outdid the royal commissioners in seizing the relics and desecrating them.
The townsfolk of Maidstone took the ancient Rood of Boxley and reviled it in the marketplace; those at Kirkstall burnt the girdle of Saint Bernard, looked to as helpful in childbirth, and tore up the wimple of Saint Ethelred, used to cure sore throats.
But these were insignificant relics and lacklustre shrines. What the common people did on their level, I would do on mine. I would make a great show of dismantling and utterly destroying the three most ancient, sacred shrines and pilgrimage-centres in England: that of Saint Cuthbert in Durham, that of Our Lady of Walsingham, and, most sacrosanct (and jewel-bedecked) of all, Saint Thomas à Becket’s in Canterbury.
Saint? The man was a saint as Thomas More was a saint, as Bishop Fisher was a saint! They were all nothing but filthy and abominable traitors and rebels against their King! Becket had won, in his day, simply because the Pope had managed to intimidate his weak King.
That was in his day. But there was no reason why . . . yes, none whatsoever . . . a man can be brought to trial long after the crime . . . and he must stand for it....
“Dismantle the entire Becket shrine,” I ordered my workmen, carefully chosen for both their skill and their honesty. “The gold I want in reinforced wooden carts. The jewels, inventoried and sorted, transported in locked coffers. As for the inner coffin, once you have removed the gold plate covering it, leave it as is. Oh, unfasten the lid, but do not open it.” I explained myself no further.
After