The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [47]
In truth, I was not far wrong. Upon birth, the infant Prince had been assigned his own household staff. He had his clerk of the signet, his serjeant of arms, and three chaplains, as well as a carver, a cellarman, and a baker—for his entertaining. He even had a special room set aside at Westminster for his future Council Chamber.
I was playing near my house in the muddy main street when my fantasy world was shattered.
“The Prince is dead,” Rob said, wiping his nose in the raw weather. Rob was an outsized boy who lived three houses away from me. I remember that the tip of his nose was bright red and his cheeks blotched.
“What?” I said, forgetting to kick the leather-covered ball.
“I said he’s dead. The new Prince.” Rob quickly took advantage of my pause to capture the ball for himself.
“What?” I broke up the game by trailing after him, demanding, “What?” over and over.
“I said he’s dead. What’s the matter? Are you deaf?” Rob planted his stocky legs in the mud and glared at me. I noticed that his hands had chilblains. There was red oozing between the cracks of his fingerjoints as well.
“Why?”
It was a fine answer—the very one that haunted the King himself, I was to learn years later.
The King gave his son a funeral that stinted nothing. The hearse alone was bedecked with a thousand pounds of candles. Prince Henry, aged fifty-two days, was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey—where the shouts from the nearby celebratory tournaments had rung against the stones only nine days earlier.
Curiously, Henry records the death in an almost Roman, stoic fashion, as if he confused the mood of the masque with the real event. It was most uncharacteristic of him, who was usually so vocal in his outrage.
XIX
HENRY VIII:
But the next morning I had no thoughts for the people or what they would do with the pieces of my clothes, nor did I care. The next morning I had to make funeral arrangements; for Prince Henry had died in his crib even while the play was being enacted. My Hercules had not been able to overcome the serpents (sent by whom?—for we do not believe in Juno) that sought to take his breath.
If he had lived, he would be thirty-five today.
It was here the split began between Katherine and myself. Her grieving took the form of submission, of prostrating herself before the will of God, of devoting herself to His demands, in the form of prayer life and observances. She joined the Third Order of St. Francis, a branch of that discipline for those still in “the world.” But it enjoined the wearing of a coarse habit beneath one’s regular clothes, as well as rigorous fasting and long hours of prayer. Although its adherents remained physically in “the world,” in spirit they began to dwell elsewhere.
I, on the other hand, turned outward. I looked into that inward-turning funnel of spiritual exercises that Katherine had flung herself into, and it frightened and repelled me. It was actions I understood—clean, precise, compelling actions—and it was here I must lose myself ... or find myself and, in so doing, restore myself to God’s favour. I had not been perfect enough in my deeds; I had not gone to war in person against Christ’s (and England’s) enemies.
Wolsey aided me, here when I most needed him. Despite his office as a priest, it was actions that he, too, understood best: the world of men, not of the spirit. And what was the world of men that was spread out before us, like a box of sweetmeats with its top flipped open?
The Holy League—the Pope’s alliance against the French—waited to welcome England into it. His Holiness had drawn up a document recognizing me as rightful King of France, once I had vanquished Paris. Maximilian, the Holy Roman Emperor, stood ready to serve in the field beside me.
I would take my place on the Continental stage, to pursue England’s lost dream of conquering France in its entirety.