The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [265]
But the Almighty had other ideas, did He not? Little Edward, Henry’s pride: his reign was like a shadow, insubstantial and quickly over....
And all their machinations and arrangements went down like dust, and they had to flee before Mary, Queen Mary, the Catholic angel of vengeance.
Now need I set it down, what Henry’s death and interment were.
The King died on January twenty-eighth, 1547, at two o’clock in the morning. He had been quite ill since autumn, and by mid-January ” They began ransacking the chests, the boxes, the coffers.
I remembered the journal. It was of no use to them but to desecrate. But where had he put it? The last I had seen it, it was at his desk....
Feathers were flying. They were ripping open the mattress underneath him, searching for the will. Cranmer begged them to stop.
“If he’d left the will in a proper place, we’d have no need of this,” they replied. “But no! Like the madman he was, he hid it even from his own Council—”
I slid open the hidden desktop, and there the journal lay, right in plain view. I took it out.
“What is that, fool?” Tom Seymour wrenched it from my hands. Upon seeing the tiny handwriting, he lost interest. He could scarcely read.
“My poetry,” I said. “Ideas for poems I hope to write, upon retirement.” A journal would interest them, threaten them. Poetry would bore them, and be safe. Henry Howard knew that, as he had attacked King Henry under the guise of writing about the Assyrian king Sardanapalus (“... with foul desire/And filthy lusts that stained his regal heart ... Who scarce the name of manhood did retain ... I saw a royal throne ... Where wrong was set/That bloody beast, that drank the guiltless blood”).
“Fah!” He tossed it back. “Begone. No one wants you now. It’s our day, the day of the Seymours, the day I’ve waited for since my stupid sister married that rotten, evil hulk of a King.” He grinned and repeated the last sentence in the dead King’s face—the face to which he had always been unctuous and simpering in life. Now I, too, began to see the red in Thomas’s eyes, which the King had recognized in his “madness.”
I walked out of the death-chamber, the journal tucked beneath my arm. Outside in the adjoining Privy Chamber the remainder of the councillors and courtiers waited to hear the word, to know where the King’s soul lingered. No, in truth, they cared not where his soul was, but only where his will and his gold and his heir were.
Nonetheless it was a good reign, and beyond the courtiers, the realm grieved his going. He had done well by everyone but himself.
CXXXII
I fled down the corridors, seeking only to escape the clutching hands and covetous faces of the self-seekers now gathered around the dead King’s apartments. I found my own quarters and made my way to a pallet without lighting a candle, lest anyone see the light and come to question me.
When dawn came, I awoke and found that the great palace of Whitehall was still, hushed—pausing for death. The supplicants and mourners had departed, the watchers had gone to bed; the sun was not yet up. Death held sway; Death ruled the realm.
Where had the scramblers for the will gone? Had they found it? What did it say? Had they scampered off to proclaim the news? Or did they hold it fast, like a cardplayer with a losing hand—hoping for deliverance, for some “rearrangement”? Were they themselves working to bring about that rearrangement?
I came up to the royal apartments. I had to knock now; there was no friendly King to let me in. The head of the Yeomen of the Guard grabbed me and searched me.
“What madman woul1; I asked, more in wonder than in anger.
“There are those who seek to desecrate the royal corpse,” he said. “In the past hour I found burning-oils and even silver stakes amongst those who have sought to enter; knives and heart-removing devices. Some of these are witches—how else could they have known the King lay dead? For it has