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She looked up at me (then, she had looked straight across). “Yes, my Lord. When you were but ten. But already then I sensed that you were—must be—”

She broke off as we reached the doors of the Abbey, where Archbishop Warham waited for us. Just then a great cry went up behind us, and I turned to see the people falling on the white carpet, attackd shears. They would cut out pieces to be saved, to remember the day King Henry VIII was crowned, to be passed on to children and children’s children. (Where are those pieces now, I wonder?) It was a custom, I was told. Still, the sight of those flashing knives ...

Within the Abbey, Katherine and I walked slowly down the great nave, with platforms and seats on either side which had been put up to enable the great lords and noble families present to witness the ceremony. Upon reaching the high altar, we separated, and I went to the ancient, scarred wooden throne-chair which had been used for Coronations for centuries. I remember thinking how crudely carved it was, how rough the wood. Then I took my place in it, and it fitted as though it had been constructed just for me.

The Archbishop faced the people and asked them in a clear, ringing voice whether they would have me for King. They shouted “aye” three times in succession, the last so loud it echoed off the great vault. I wondered (it is strange, the thoughts that come to one during such moments) whether it reached my sleeping family in their private chapel behind the high altar—Father, Mother, my deceased siblings Elizabeth and Edmund and the last baby, all interred there.

But this was a day for the living. Warham anointed me, and the oil was warm and pleasingly scented. Then, after my vows, he placed the heavy, jewel-encrusted crown on my head, and I prayed that I might be worthy of it, might preserve and defend it. When he said Mass, I vowed to do only good for England, upon peril of my immortal soul. I would serve her as a good and perfect knight.

Some theorists say a Coronation is but a ceremony, yet it changed me, subtly and forever: I never forgot those vows.

But shortly afterwards, as I looked back on the two months since my accession, I was surprised at how many changes had crept into my being. In April I had been a frightened seventeen-year-old; now (having had my eighteenth birthday, I considered myself much older) I was a crowned King. And nothing untoward had happened, none of the disasters I had feared: no one had challenged my right to the crown (although I had not taken Father’s advice about executing de la Pole; he was still healthy in the Tower). I had taken command of the Privy Council and the Board of Green Cloth. I had married. When Katherine told me, a month after the Coronation, that she was with child, I laughed outright. It was all so easy, this business of being King. What had I feared?

And through all those days there ran yet another shade of gold: the gold of my Katherine’s hair. Her hair as we spun in dances; her hair flying as we rode across cleared fields and sun-spotted forests; her hair falling over the pillows, her shoulders, my arms, in bed. I was happier than I had ever believed it possible for mortal man to be, so blissfully content I felt it sinful—as indeed it was.

XV

Then it ended—abruptly, as dreams do. It ended the day Wolsey (who had created a de facto position for himself as messenger between me and the Privy Council) came to tell me that “the French emissary had arrived.”

What French emissary? I wondered. Perhaps some catastrophe had overtaken King Louis XII? I mus days of our own Henry V’s virtual conquest of France, they had recovered like a moribund man throwing off the plague. First they gained some little strength and rallied their own forces; then they pushed us back—out of Normandy, out of Aquitaine—until we clung only to Calais and a small neighbouring area. Then they began gobbling up surrounding territory: Burgundy, Brittany. Then, again, their appetite grew ever more ravenous, like that of a recovering plague-man.