The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [18]
“Ferdinand and Isabella have driven the Moors out, and Spain is Christian once more. They have eight million subjects.”
“Very good, Prince Henry. I believe you have been studying—in between Froissart.” He reached out and cuffed me playfully. “Next we will discuss Ferdinand’s schemes, and the history of the Papacy. Pope Julius is very much a part of all this, you know. He seems to be personally trying to demonstrate Christ’s statement: ‘I came not to bring peace, but a sword.’ Read further in the notes I gave you and read all the dispatches in the red bag. They cover the correspondence during my years in France.” He stood up stiffly. He was pretending we had come to the end of our lesson, but I could tell it was because he was so uncomfortable in that room. The fire was nearly out, and our breath was visible.
“I forgot,” he said. “Tomorrow is St. Martin’s Day, and so there will be no regular lesson.”
That was disappointing. It seemed that whenever we began anything, it was interrupted by the constant procession of saints’ days. There were more than a hundred of them in the year. Why couldn’t the saints be honoured by going to Mass? Why did they require that everyone stop work as well?
“And Your Grace—please tell the Queen how happy I am with her news, and that I am praying for a safe confinement and a fair new Prince.”
He bowed once and hurried out, back toward normal warmth and people. It was no matter; I could not have asked him, even had he stayed. I would never ask my tutor why he knew something I did not. The King had not told me of this, nor had the Queen. Why?
I walked over to the window. The rain had changed to sleet and was pelting against the walls and window. The window was poorly fitted, and small particles of sleet were working their way inside with no hindrance.
The window overlooked not the palace garden, but the ditches and outhouses. I hated all those ugly, straggling things attached to the palace, but especially the open, stinking ditches. When I was King I would have them all covered over. When I was King ...
The driving sleet had already covered the structures, making them white and smooth. But not pretty. They were no more pretty than a skeleton, which could be equally white and smooth.
A violent shiver drove me from the window to the dying fire.
VII
It was true, what Stephen Farr had said. The Queen my mother was with child. She was confined in February, 1503, on Candlemas Day, and delivered not of an heir, but of a stillborn daughter. She died nine days later, on her thirty-seventh birthday.
Even today I must hurry over those facts, state them simply, lest I stumble and—rage? cry? I do not know. Both, perhaps.
There were many days of official mourning, days while the sculptors worked hurriedly to carve the customary funeral effigy that would sit atop her mourning-car. It must be an exact likeness, so that it would appear that she was still alive, clad in her robes and fur, as tn again, must carry this last picture of her in their minds. Last impressions, too, were important. I wanted to tell Farr that.
But I would not see her again. Never, never, never ... And when I saw the wooden image I hated it, because it seemed so alive, and yet it was not. They had done their job well, the carvers. Especially as they had had to work from a death-mask and not from life. But then, she was but thirty-seven, and had not thought to sit for her funeral effigy. No, not that.
I heard the King weeping, late at night. But he never came in to my chamber, never tried to share his sorrow with me. Nor did he acknowledge mine, save for a curt announcement that we were all to attend the funeral.
The day of the funeral was cold and foggy. The sun never shone, but turned the mist blue, as if to drown us in eternal twilight. Torches blazed in the London streets even in midday as the funeral procession wound its way from the Tower to Westminster, to the beat of muffled drums. First came the three hundred yeomen of the guard, then the hearse, a built-up carriage some twenty