The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [67]
I felt a rough hand on my shoulder, and turned to see the angry face of the building master. He gave me a shove. “Stop talking to my workmen!” He suddenly moved and grabbed the other man by the shoulder. “What was he asking you? Dimensions, designs, secrets?”
“He wanted to know about the hill,” the man said slowly.
“Cursed Frenchman!” The master builder looked around wildly for something to throw at me, and found a large dirt clod. He heaved it in my direction. “Go tell Francis he has no hope of bettering us! Go tell your master that!”
I would learn no more, and I had seen enough. So I left and continued walking in the direction of Ardres, the first town outside the Pale of Calais. From a hill nearby I watched an identical swarm of workmen building similar structures for the French King. I opened my square of cloth and took out my bread and cheese and last year’s softening apple, and ate. I started to laugh at them, but somehow could not. As a child I had promised myself always to answer my own questions and to hold nothing back from myself. Are they not fools? Are they not simpletons? The French King will come, and the English King will come, and then they will go. In ten years they will not even remember the glass in the palace windows. But why should that disturb me?
Because it is wasteful, I answered myself. Because no man should be happy to serve another with no hope of recognition. Because all is temporary, and this reminder of the passing nature of things saddens me.
A blacksmith in my village, reputedly stupid, had once speculated as to why Father’s mare had lost her new shoe so unexpectedly. (I had been sent to complain, as Father suspected shoddy work.) “Well now,” the smith said slowly, “there’s always the reason. And then there’s the real reason.”
I found many reasons for my peevishness and sense of outrage about the royal enclaves being built, but the real one was this: I wanted to be there, and there I could not be.
It would be simplistic to say that my detachment from such things began that day, but certainly I began to distance myself from that world. Everyone wants to feel special in some small way, and mine was to see myself as an aloof observer perched on a wall, watching the parade of human folly—royal and common—passing beneath me. Eventually I convinced myself that I had freely elected that stance.
The day came, in June. The King was arriving, and we must welcome him, every last resident of Calais.
I was there, upon the docks, as my master had directed me. I had dutifully helped him tidy the shop and festoon it properly with Tudor green and white, and flags, and mottoes for the royal visit. For three days street-sweepers had been busy gathering up the trash and offal from the main thoroughfares (it was hoped the King would not take it into his head to go down any others). The populace was anxious to see its King again and to see its Queen for the first time. Deep in everyone’s mind was the (futile) hope that if the French and English Kings met in friendship, the peculiar status of Calais would be resolved and the contradictions of our everyday life disappear.
Henry’s ship came into harbour—a huge bulwark with golden sails. We all gaped at it. A nKing himself appeared on the decks.
It was my third sighting of him. I had seen him twice before, once returning from his French wars, and before that, riding to the Tower.
He is not the same, was my first thought. The figure on deck, heavy in majesty, was not that of the boyish soldier-King I had seen on horseback seven years earlier. He was stolid in a way the other never could have been—fixed, as in a carved figure.
But he is thirty now, I told myself. Thirty and almost fifteen years a king. Time changes men....
He stepped down and strode across the gangplank to the docks. He was wearing clothes that tore one’s heart in envy—beautiful, costly things of gold and velvet and satin. He was robust and handsome as mortal men seldom are. I stood in awe of him, at a moment in time when I beheld human perfection—perfection that