The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [4]
II
I should never have begun in such a manner. These jumbled thoughts cannot stand as a passable collection of impressions, let alone a memoir. I must put things in some reasonable order. Wolsey taught me that: always in order.
Have I forgotten so soon?
I began it (I mean this journal) in a vain attempt to soothe myself several weeks ago while suffering yet another attack from my cursed leg. Perhaps I was so distracted by the pain that I was incapable of organizing my thoughts. Yet the pain has passed. Now if I am to do this thing, I must do it properly. I have talked about “Father” and “the King” and “Arthur” without once telling you the King’s name. Nor which ruling family. Nor the time. Inexcusable!
The King was Henry VII, of the House of Tudor. But I must not say “House of Tudor” so grandly, because until Father became King it was not a royal house at all. The Tudors were a Welsh family, and (let us be honest) Welsh adventurers at that, relying rather heavily on romantic adventures of both bed and battle to advance themselves.
I am well aware that Father’s genealogists traced the Tudors to the dawn of British history, had us descended directly from Cadwaller. Yet the first step to our present greatness was taken by Owen Tudor, who was clerk of the wardrobe to Queen Catherine, the widow of Henry V. (Henry V was England’s mightiest military king, having conquered a large portion of France. This was some seventy years before I was born. Every common Englishman knows this now, but will he always?) Henry and the French king’s daughter married for political reasons and had a son: Henry VI, proclaimed King of England and France at the age of nine months. But Henry V’s sudden death left his twenty-one-year-old French widow alone in England.
Owen’s duties were such that he was in constant company with her. He was comely; she was lonely; they wed, secretly. Yes, Catherine (daughter to one king, wife to another, mother of yet a third) polluted—so some say—her royal blood with that of a Welsh rogue. They had two sons, Edmund and Jasper, half-brothers to Henry VI.
But Catherine died in her mid-thirties, and Owen’s sufferance was up. Henry VI’s Protector’s Council ordered “one Owen Tudor the which dwelled with the said Queen Catherine” to appear before them, because “he marriage with the Queen to intermix his blood with the royal race of Kings.” Owen first refused to come, but later came and was imprisoned in Newgate twice, twice escaping. He was elusive and supremely clever. After his second escape he made his way back to Wales.
Once Henry VI came to maturity and discarded his Protector, he treated Owen’s two sons kindly. He created Edmund Earl of Richmond, and Jasper Earl of Pembroke. And Henry VI—poor, mad, sweet thing—even found a proper Lancastrian bride for his half-brother Edmund: Margaret Beaufort.
To recount these histories is like unravelling a thread: one means only to tell one little part, but then another comes in, and another, for they are all part of the same garment—Tudor, Lancaster, York, Plantagenet.
So I must do what I dreaded: go back to Edward III, innocent source of all the late troubles. I say innocent because what king does not wish an abundance of sons? Yet Edward’s troubles, and those of the next generations, stemmed from his very prolificness.
Edward, who was born almost two hundred years before me, had six sons. A blessing? One would have thought so. But in truth they were a curse that echoes d lost none: a military genius.
The strands of all three families were, as I said, interwoven. It is difficult for me to tell of the cruelties visited by one upon the other, as the blood of all now flows in my veins.
Yes, Edward IV was a great fighter. I can take pride in that, as he was my grandfather.