The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [268]
By ten in the forenoon, the funeral cortège was on the road, leaving the fouled stones of Syon Chapel to be cleansed.
The people were thicker now; more lined the road as we approached Windsor. But I could not leave the ugly taste of Syon behind, and the malevolence of Catherine, and the eternity of our past deeds. Nothing is ever gone, it seems, and the past does not wash clean like paving stones. Only the good disappears. I have smelt the potpourris made of last summer’s roses, and they are stale and faint. Good evaporates; evil remains and incubates.
The interment at Windsor was a lengthy but simple ceremony. It was almost exactly like Charles Brandon’s, eighteen months previous. Bishop Gardiner, that most Catholic of Henry’s prelates, led the burial service. There was no eulogy. All of Henry’s friends were dead, save myself, and no one invited me to speak.d not used some things for many years, and yet they were mine; I knew them. With other things, the ownership was less certain. But as I labouriously gathered them up, I became aware that there was nothing I owned of my King’s. I had not sought lands or titles, nor would my life have offered jewels or gold an understanding home. But now I was left with nothing I could touch and say, “This was his,” or “This was ours, together.”
I felt so sad over this that I perplexed myself, so bereft that I even shouted at Hal one evening.
“You left me nothing of you! I need something to touch, like an old fond woman! And there is nothing. The vultures have taken everything away, to make an ‘inventory.’ Even your handkerchiefs have been taken!”
And yet, and yet—was not memory always, and exclusively, within one’s head? What good did an object do?
It was a fortnight after the King’s funeral, and I had but one day to vacate the royal apartments at Whitehall. I had gathered my things together, and the bundles were bound and strapped and covered by a canvas. They bulged and jutted in strange ways, the implements of an unorganized lifetime. Tomorrow they would be taken away; my sister had said I could join her household in Kent.
My last night in royal apartments. I should have felt something, should have been able to distil some essence of all these years. But I felt uneasy, unwanted, rather than nostalgic. I was anxious to be on my way, out of this house of death and the past.
For the fortieth time I walked around the bundles, checking the knots. All was within. All ... what had I forgotten? Wearily I bent down to see it, whatever afterthought had been propped up there. Forever, the “afterthoughts” would come trickling in. Now I would have to find room for this, this—
King Henry’s little harp. The one he used when composing.
It had not been here earlier. Had someone brought it? But no one had entry to my chamber. And certainly not within the past half hour, which was the last time I had walked around the bundles, checking the knots.
But there it sat, leaning against my belongings, pressing itself to them.
So love can survive, too. Or something close to it. Consideration and kindness.
In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you.
It must be a very big mansion, to encompass all it does.
Author’s Afterword
My object in writing The Autobiography of Henry VIII was, in the process, to meet Henry VIII in person. In order to do so, I had to become a master spy in some ways. When the object of one’s spying is a historical character, one is privileged to call the spying “research.” My research took the form of doing a great deal of reading—of contemporary accounts of Henry VIII, of which there are luckily a large number, and also of the works of scholars analyzing this material. I also tried to visit the extant sites connected with Henry VIII and to see as many objects owned or handled by him as possible, and to recreate some of his experiences, such as taking the pilgrims’ walk at the shrine