The Autobiography Of Henry VIII Page 3

  And that was fitting, as Father had determined that I must be a priest when I grew up. Arthur would be King. I, the second son, must be a churchman, expending my energies in God’s service, not in usurping my brother’s position. So, from the age of four, I received churchly training from a series of sad-eyed priests.

  But even so, it was good to be a prince. It was good for elusive reasons I find almost impossible to set down. For the history of the thing, if you will. To be a prince was to be—special. To know when you read the story of Edward the Confessor or Richard the Lionheart that you had a mystic blood-bond with them. That was all. But enough. Enough for me as I memorized reams of Latin prayers. I had the blood of kings! True, it was hidden beneath the shabby clothes, and would never be passed on, but it was there nevertheless—a fire to warm myself against.

  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 had been so presumptuous as by 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 to this day. The eldest, Edward, was called the Black Prince. (Why I do not know, although I believe it was from the liveries his retainers customarily wore. He was a great warrior.) He died before his father, and thus his son, Edward’s grandson, came to the throne as Richard II.

  Now Edward’s other sons were William, who died young; Lionel, Duke of Clarence, from whence ultimately sprang the House of York; John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, progenitor of the House of that name; Edmund, Duke of York (later the heirs of Clarence and Edmund married, uniting those claims), and finally Thomas of Woodstock, ancestor of the Duke of Buckingham.

  It happened thus: Henry, son of John of Gaunt, deposed his cousin Richard II and was crowned Henry IV. His son was Henry V, who married the Queen Catherine Valois, who afterwards married Owen Tudor.

  Does this confuse you? I assure you that in my youth these tangled ancestral webs were known as today one might know the words of a popular ballad or the sequence of the Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Christ. They loomed over our lives, forcing us to take roles on either side; roles that led directly to fortune . . . or to death.

  But Henry V’s son, crowned in Paris as Henry VI, King of both England and France, could not hold his inheritance. As he grew older, he proved to be inept and half mad.

  When the anointed king is weak, there are others who imagine themselves strong. Thus was born the Yorkist cause.

  There is a legend that the wars began when Richard Plantagenet (later Duke of York) met with his companions and rivals Somerset, Warwick, and Suffolk in the Temple Gardens. Richard plucked a white rose from one bush, symbolizing descent from Lionel, third son of Edward III, and bade his sympathizers join him; Warwick, of the powerful northern Neville family, also took a white rose. Somerset and Suffolk picked the red, lining themselves up with the claims of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, fourth son. Then they prophesied that this would expand to encompass the whole realm.

  It is a pretty story; whether it be true or not I do not know. Yet it is true that within a few years hundreds of people died fighting for either the White Rose or the Red.

  Henry VI was deposed, ultimately, by that brave son of the Yorkists, later Edward IV. He fought thirteen pitched battles and 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. Yet my great-grandfather was fighting against him, aided by my great-uncle, Jasper Tudor. They were crushed, and Owen was captured after the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross in 1461. He was executed—by Edward’s orders—in the marketplace of Hereford. Until the axeman appeared to do his office, Owen could not believe he would actually die. The headsman ripped off the collar of Owen’s doublet, and then he knew. He looked about and said, “That head shall lie in the stock that was wont to lie on Queen Catherine’s lap.” Afterwards a madwoman came and took his head and set a hundred candles burning about it.

  I tell this so that when I recount that Owen’s eldest son, Edmund, married Margaret Beaufort, thirteen-year-old heiress to the claims of the House of Lancaster, you will not imagine they lived quietly. The battles raged all about them. Edmund escaped from all these cares by dying at the age of twenty-six, leaving his wife great with child. That child was my father, born when his mother was but fourteen. It was January 28, 1457.

  WILL SOMERS:

  Seeing this date chilled me. It was also on January 28 that Henry VIII died. In 1547—the reversal of the numbers—it is like a parenthesis. The father born, the son dying. . . . Yet I do not believe in such things. I leave them for Welshmen and the like.

  HENRY VIII:

  She named him Henry, a royal Lancastrian name
. Yet at that time he was by no means an important heir, merely a remote figure in the overall confusing fabric. This in spite of being the grandson of a queen (on his father’s side) and the great-great-great-grandson of a king (on his mother’s). But as the battles went on, those with higher claims to the throne were killed (Henry VI’s only son, Edward, and Richard, Duke of York), and each battle advanced Henry Tudor closer to the throne. In the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471, every male Lancaster was destroyed, save Henry Tudor. And he fled to Brittany with his uncle Jasper.

  Henry VI was done to death in the Tower that same year. The Yorkists did it. It was a mercy: Henry VI was, perhaps, a saint, but he was not meant to be King. His poem,

  Kingdoms are but cares

  State is devoid of stay

  Riches are ready snares

  And hasten to decay,

  proves that. A Yorkist sword released him from the cares of his kingdom, and I cannot but say they did him a good office.

  But my father’s tale is also long to tell: there is nothing simple in these histories. Father went into exile, crossing the Channel to Brittany, where the good Duke Francis welcomed him—for a fee. Edward IV pursued him, tried to have him abducted and murdered. Father outsmarted him—Edward was stupid—and outlived him, watching and waiting in Brittany as Edward’s cruel brother, Richard, usurped the throne and did away with Edward’s sons Edward V and Richard, Duke of York. They say he had them smothered as they slept, and buried them somewhere in the Tower.

  Many men smarted under Richard’s rule and fell away, joining Father in Brittany until he had a court in exile. And in England there was such discontent that rebellious subjects invited Father to come and claim the throne.

  He tried first in 1484; but fortune was against him, and Richard caught and executed his principal supporter, the Duke of Buckingham. The next year things were again ready, and Father dared not wait longer, lest what support he had erode. He set sail and landed in Wales with an army of only two thousand men, against a known ten thousand for Richard III.

  What compelled him to do this? I know the story well, yet I also know Father: cautious to the point of inaction, suspicious, slow to decisions. Still, at the age of twenty-eight he risked everything—his life as well—on what looked to be a hopeless venture. Two thousand men against ten thousand.

  He was greeted wildly in Wales, and men flocked to join him, swelling his ranks to five thousand, still only half the number of Richard’s forces. Still he pressed on through the August-yellow fields, until at last they met a few miles from Leicester, at a field called Bosworth.

  There was fierce fighting, and in the end some of Richard’s men held back. Without them the battle was lost. Richard was slain, hacked in a dozen places by his own lost supporters as he sought to attack Father himself.

  They say the crown flew off Richard’s head in the heat of battle and landed in a gorse bush and that Father took it from there and placed it upon his own head amidst cries of “King Henry! King Henry!” I doubt the truth of this, but it is just the sort of story that is repeated and eventually believed. People like simple stories and will twist even the profound into something plain and reassuring. They like to believe that one becomes king by a Sign, and not by anything as inconclusive or confusing as a mêlée. Hence, the crown in the bush.

  In fact, it was not simple at all. Despite the battle and the crown in the divinely placed bush, there remained many recalcitrant people who simply would not accept Henry Tudor as King. True it was that he had royal blood, and had made the late Yorkist King’s daughter his wife, but diehard Yorkists were not so easily placated. They wanted a genuine Yorkist on the throne, or no one. Thus the treasons began.

  There were no Yorkists left, but the traitors would resurrect the smothered sons of Edward IV (my mother’s brothers). They did not dare to “discover” the eldest, Edward; even they were not that bold. Richard, the younger, was their choice. Each coterie of traitors found a ready supply of yellow-haired boys willing to impersonate him.

  The first was Lambert Simnel. The Irish crowned him as Richard IV. Father was amused and tolerant. After crushing the uprising in the Battle of Stoke in 1487, he appointed the erstwhile King a cook in the royal kitchens. Working before the hot ovens rapidly deflated his royal demeanour.

  The next, Perkin Warbeck, was less amusing. The Scots hailed him and provided him with a highborn wife. Father executed him.

  And yet the uprisings went on. There was a bottomless well of traitors and malcontents. No matter what Father did, there were always dissatisfied groups somewhere, plotting for his overthrow.

  In the end it made him bitter. I can see that now, and understand it. They had taken his youth (“Ever since I was five years old I have been either a prisoner or a fugitive,” he once said), and even after he had supposedly won his right to peace, they would not let him be. They meant to drive him from the throne, or into his grave.

  Father married his archenemy’s daughter. He hated Edward IV, yet he had made a solemn vow in Rennes Cathedral that should his invasion of England be successful, he would wed Elizabeth, Edward’s daughter.

  Why? Simply because she was the heiress to the Yorkist claims, as he was of the Lancastrian. He had never even seen her and knew nothing about her person. She could have been crook-backed or squint-eyed or pockmarked. Yet marrying her would end the wars. That was all he cared about.

  As I said, he despised Edward IV. And why not? Edward had tried to have him assassinated. Edward had killed his grandfather Owen. Yet he would marry his daughter. . . . He understood the times. You murdered people, and it was like cultivating a garden: you nipped tender shoots, or the whole trunk, of whatever plant you perceived might be a threat later in the growing season.

  I put a stop to all that. No one is put to death surreptitiously in England now. There are no more pillow-murders or poisonings or midnight stabbings. I count as one of the great achievements of my reign that this barbarism has passed forever.

  But I was speaking of Father’s marriage. Elizabeth, Edward’s daughter, was brought out of sanctuary (where she and her mother had hidden from the ravages of Richard III) and given to him as part of the spoils of war.

  Thus Elizabeth of York married Henry Tudor. Royal artists created an especial emblem for them: the so-called Tudor rose, combining the red of Lancaster with the white of York. Less than a year later they had their sought-for heir: Arthur. They named him thus to avoid all “claimed” names (Henry was Lancastrian, Edward and Richard Yorkist), and to hark back to the legendary King Arthur. That would offend no one while promising fine things.

  Then followed other children. After Arthur, Margaret (named for the King’s mother). Then me. (It was safe to give the third child a partisan name like Henry.) After me, Elizabeth. Then Mary. Then Edmund. Then . . . I cannot recall her name, if indeed she had one. She lived but two days.

  Father was twenty-nine when he married. By the time he was forty there remained to him four living children—two princes and two princesses—and the survival of his new dynasty seemed assured.

  I am told my father was handsome and popular when he first came to the throne. People saw him as an adventurer, and the English always like rogues and heroes. They cheered him. But over the years the cheering faded as he did not respond to it. He was not what they had expected after all. He was not bluff like Edward nor rough and plain as a soldier-king should be. In fact, he was hardly English at all in his thinking, as he had spent most of his life outside the country, or in Wales, which was just as bad. He was suspicious of people, and they sensed it and finally withdrew their affections.

  Here I am describing Father as an historian would, trying to note how he looked and how he ruled. Of course, as a child I saw and understood none of this. Father was a tall, thin man whom I saw but rarely, and never alone. Sometimes he would come to where we—the four children—lived, and pay one of his unannounced visits. We hated those visits. He would walk about like a general inspecting his troops, ca
lling on us for Latin or sums. Usually his mother, Margaret Beaufort, was with him, and she was a tiny woman who always wore black and had a sharp face. By the time I was eight years old, I had reached her height and could look her directly in the eye, although I disliked her eyes. They were bright and black. She always asked the sharpest questions and was most dissatisfied with the answers, because she fancied herself a scholar and had even left her husband for a time to go and live in a convent so that she could read all day.

  It was she who selected our tutors and guided our education. Of course, the best tutors went to Arthur and the second-rank ones served the rest of us. Occasionally I shared some tutors with Arthur. Bernard André taught us both history, and Giles D’Ewes taught us French. And John Skelton, the poet laureate, began by teaching Arthur but later became my own tutor.

  Skelton was a profligate priest, and we liked each other immediately. He wrote coarse satires and had a mistress; I thought him marvellous. Until then I had assumed that to be scholarly, one must be like my grandmother Beaufort. The black, the convent, the books were all linked in my mind. Skelton broke those links. Later, in my own reign, scholarship was freed completely from the convents and monasteries. (And not simply because I closed the monasteries!)

  We studied Latin, of course; French, Italian, mathematics, history, poetry. I received an extra heavy dose of Scriptures, theology, and churchmen, as I was earmarked for the Church. Well, no learning is ever wasted. I made extensive use of the knowledge later, though in a way that would have horrified my pious grandmother and her chosen tutors.

  How we lived: forever moving. Father had—or, rather, the Crown had—eight palaces, and with every change in season, the royal household would move. But we, the King’s children, seldom lived in the same palace as the King and Queen. They preferred us to live in the country, or as near to open fields and clean air as possible. Eltham Palace was an ideal site. It was small and set in green fields, but only three miles from Greenwich and the Thames. It had been built for Edward IV, my pretty grandfather, and was all of stone, with a quiet moat and well-kept gardens. It was too small to house a full court, but was perfect for royal children and our reduced household of cooks and nurses and guards.