Pastime with good company
I love and shall until I die.
Grudge who lust, but none deny,
So God be pleased, thus he will I;
For my pastance,
Hunt, sing and dance;
My heart is set
All goodly sport
For my comfort:
Who shall me let?
song written by King Henry VIII of England
Divorced, Beheaded, Died,
Divorced, Beheaded, Survived.
traditional English rhyme about his wives
Every man thinks his home is his castle.
My king had many castles, a palace in the city, a couple in the country,
royal gardens, royal land, royal this, and royal that.
My Tudor husband had all these and Tudor Roses, but
no Tudor room was wholly his possession.
When I looked at him, I saw his whole life. I saw the man.
I saw the man who invented the male mid-life crisis and the Christian divorce,
the spurned lover, the reckless lover, the insensitive lout,
the tennis ace, the jouster, the lute strummer, the astronomer,
the prideful theologian, the false moralist, the young poet,
the warrior, the strategist, the brother, the son, the father,
the monarch, and more, so much more,
the so much more that I saw from nearby,
the so much more that made our history less than simple,
the so much more that made me see he had no home but me.
But, Henry's houses were never my home.
They were haunted by the signatures of more famous queens,
two other Catherines, two Annes, and a Jane;
women remembered by name.
I am known as the last word of a schoolbook rhyme.
I am known as the last word of a mnemonic device.
My legacy, my mark, my memory is survival.
I would rather have slept on a couch than in his bed.
Every night filled with restless images of women
whose flannel sheets wrapped soft around my shoulders;
whose heads danced legless lambadas beneath my sleeping eyelids.
Embroidered Catherines gilded the cool satin lining of my regal robes,
yet I never knew if the thread spelled or misspelled my name,
or if the needlework was the herald stamp of Kitty Howard or Kate of Aragon.
When he chose me, I rubbed the garnets around my neck, and somberly said that
I would rather have been his loyal mistress than his wife.
But, he chose me. I had no choice. (How would I have chosen if I could?)
On the way to breakfast through the corridors of Hampton Court,
I passed tapestries of unicorns and fruit bearing trees and wondered (silent)
which Anne delighted at virgin fauna and which Anne favored heavy flora.
I had no taste for heady fancy or agriculture, and neither did my Henry.
No romantic knick-knacks or notions of shining armor and pedestals.
No one needed to tell me that this was not Camelot.
No last minute Lancelot could save a queen here.
We had both been married before.
Ours were modern, not mythic, times.
The king I wedded was a giant old man I watched with kindness and caution.
My King Henry, my third husband, was a cantankerous Hank,
a Hank with gout and waning appetites;
years on from Kate's Enrique or Annie B's Henri,
more troubled than Jane Seymour's Harry,
more menacing than the Heinrich met by Anne of Cleves,
more distant than Kitty's Hal.
At Bridewell Palace, my daily toilet was never private.
Holbein's pretty portrait of the flat-chested "Flemish mare"
kept me company while I squatted over the chamber pot.
Above the wash basin, hung a pair of boar bristle brushes stamped Henry and Jane;
no sense in removing hers, half a set still recalled the whole.
Above the mirror where I unknotted the coarse kinks in my hair,
hung an oval portrait of a dear wife with silken chestnut tresses
whose breathing lips last rested on an executioner's block.
On the shelves of the Queen's Library, near my Latin lessons,
were books in Spanish, French, and German; three tongues I had not mastered.
On the dressing table in the Queen's Chamber were chests of
fabulous jewels, rare scents, face paints, wig powders, and
other adornments which I feared to use.
By right these were this queen's possessions, but I never claimed ownership.
I never wanted to wear another woman's spectre.
I never asked for more than conversation. (What sixth wife would have dared?)
I laughed with him, read to him, watched him sleep, and soothed his fevers.
I taught poetry to Shakespeare's queen.
I wiped his royal heirs' royal runny noses.
I made up my character with my mother's pearls, a bowl of rose water,
a kohl stick, and a rouge pot. Plain ivory combs held back my hair.
These were mine, the safer, simpler choices.
And so, I survived.