The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [257]
Mary Rose was lost; lost in a moment.
“What happened?” I cried. I had had my head turned toward Mary Carew, had been conversing with her. Yet that had been scarcely two minutes.
“The ship—listed,” said Kate. “It seemed to be pushed over. The balance was bad; it tipped on the instant—”
“But by what?” The wind had been very light.
“It seems—by itself,” she said, confused. “I could see nothing that would have pushed it thus. It was almost like a drunken man, losing his balance. A drunken man falls, not for that he is pushed, but because he is drunk. Thus seemed it with the ship.”
“A ship does not founder upon nothing!”
“This ship did,” she insisted.
“God! God! God!” screamed Mary Carew, seeming to hear her husband’s cries from the lost ship.
“He is safe,” I assured her. “Only those belowdecks will have—will have—” I could not finish. “Those who could jump clear are swimming. I see them now. Rescue boats will pick them up.”
“George cannot swim!” she cried. “He hated water, hated being in it—”
I reached out to hold her, as now I could say nothing to comfort her. Unless the Vice-Admiral were one of the men clinging to the masts, he was lost, if he truly could not swim. Already there were dots surrounding the site of the wreck. Dead men? Or swimmers?
Hysterical, she tried to fling herself over the wall. I pulled her back, and she began to beat on me, pulling at my clothes and clawing at my face.
“Why should you live?” she shrieked. “Why should he”—she pointed at the militia-captain—“and she”—she gestured at Kate—“and even he”—she threw a pebble at a lazy circling gull—“and my George not?”
I gestured to the guards. “Take her away. She is a danger to herself. Confine her.”
Two huge Hampshiremen encircled her and led her away, making a cage of their arms.
I, too, wished to shriek and cry. Mary Rose, with six hundred men, lost. And for no reason, no apparent reason, save—Divine will. God’s finger had reached out and touched my pride, my beautUl8ingiful ship, and sunk her. As punishment? As warning?
The way Kate laid her fingers on my arm, I knew she was thinking the same thing. The masts of the ship pointed at me like the handwriting on Belshazzar’s wall. But what did it say? I could not read it clear. O, I was weary of these hateful, muffled messages from Him....
Great Harry swung about, executing her turn perfectly. The fault lay not in the lack of wind, then, or in the captain’s skill, but in the very design of Mary Rose. But what? She had proved seaworthy for thirty years. What had happened to her now? Truly it was the handwriting....
The nettlesome French galleys provoked Great Harry, emboldened by the shocking sinking of the man-of-war Mary Rose. Now our English row-barges, a counterpart to their galleys, streamed out to engage them. I had thought row-barges, combining both sail and oars, to be transitional vessels that we soon would not need. But here they carried the day, and did what the great warships could not: chased the French away. Now the French fleet lay outside our Solent waters, waiting to pounce.
Night fell, and the action ceased. Our vessels were anchored in the Solent, and the French were around the spit, invisible. The rescue boats had saved thirty-five men from Mary Rose, and they had all been on the open top deck, and swept directly into the sea. They were for the most part seamen, unschooled, superstitious, and hard—unable to describe what had happened to them or their ship. They were of no help at all in reconstructing the tragedy. Sir Gawen Carew, George’s uncle, aboard Matthew Gonnson, had passed near Mary Rose just as she had begun to tack; he claimed that George had cried out, “I have the sort of knaves I cannot rule!