The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [71]
These were my labours by day. By night they were of another nature entirely.
As I have said, I brought Sir Thomas Boleyn’s daughter Mary back from France, where she had evidently served under Francis—in a minor capacity, for he had a regular mistress already, Jeanne le Coq, a lawyer’s wife. In Richmond Palace I established a French suite of rooms (where Father had kept his wardrobe!). “I would explore France further,” I said, “and experience those aspects of living in which France is said to excel.” Mary must have the accoutrements necessary to duplicate her feats with Francis. She would duplicate, I would surpass. Yes, I carried my rivalry with him even this far....
The walls of the rooms were hung with tapestries depicting not Biblical scenes, but classical ones. French furniture was copied by my cabinetmakers, and the mirroite was like crossing the Channel.
Mary awaited me on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, our assigned time. That in itself was French. The assignation. For the French prided themselves on their logic and rationality, and confined their lovemaking to prearranged trysts. One would think that would diminish the pleasure, but by divorcing pleasure from passion, it both heightened it and lightened it.
All their positions had been catalogued and named, like their ballet steps. How pastel, how artistic they sounded; how far removed from anything to do with sweat, groaning, or fear.
In France, so it seemed, the ancient, natural way of copulation had been entirely abandoned. Everything was from the rear or from the side. The moment of culmination they turned to poetry: la petite mort, the little death. Not, as in English, the moment of truth, the great anguish.
Mary led me trippingly through these exercises. “The position for a King who has had a tiring day of Council meetings,” she whispered as she demonstrated one method.
“Was it Francis’s favourite?” Sharing this woman with him, engaging in exactly the same acts in exactly the same body, was quiveringly arousing. “Did he do this—and this—and this—after his meetings?”
Expertly Mary swam under me, bringing herself to la petite mort several times in succession, as if to avoid answering. That was another French fashion—no amoureuse worthy of the name was satisfied with only one petite mort. No, there must be a series, the more of them the better.
“What of Francis?” I kept whispering.
“It was never—he was never—” she murmured obligingly. “He was smaller than you.”
Such exercises and flattery were only the beginning of her artful repertoire. There were many other things that decency does not permit me to record, even here.
But in carrying pleasure to its furthest bounds, I exhausted pleasure. It grew to a surfeit. (As Bishop Fisher had predicted in his famous sermon: “First, the joys and pleasures of this life, be they never so great, yet they have a weariness and disgust adjoined to them. There is no meat or drink so delicate, so pleasant, so delectable, but if a man or woman be long accustomed therewith, he shall have at length a weariness of them.....”)
All this while I was labouring in the theological thickets to complete my Assertio Septem Sacramentorum. I found a curious similarity between my two endeavours, in that preciousness ultimately kills all vitality in its subject. Theological hair-splitting and over-refined lovemaking techniques are cousins, bleeding their respective victims dry.
XXX
At length the book was finished. It was two hundred and fifty pages, all in Latin. I was pleased with it. Only then did I show it to anyone else, so that I was in effect presenting them with a fait accompli. (See how very French I had become; I thought in French phrases even beyond the bounds of pleasure.) It was to Thomas More and Wolsey and John Longland, Bishop of Linck. He held it three weeks past the time the others kept it. I knew then