VIII

King.

PART THREE:
Lift Up Your Heads
     
     
     

 
♦  ♦  ♦  I   ♦  ♦  ♦
     
     
    The embroidery on the cushion presses dints into my forehead. My breath, with nowhere to go, blows hot against my cheeks. I am lying on my face. My arms are spread wide, in the shape of a cross. The singing of the choir echoes up to the stone vaulting. And the Holy Ghost is descending from heaven and infusing me with divine grace. Right now.
    Above me, the space is huge – an expanse of empty air, where drifts of incense float through beams of coloured light. The windows are bright as candied fruit, the great stone columns of the nave solid as the trunks of giant trees. The whole cathedral seems to me a golden cavernous glade.
    It is Midsummer’s Day. Catherine, my wife of two weeks – my proper wife, this time – is kneeling behind me, shining in white damask cloth-of-gold. We are here at Westminster Abbey for our anointing and coronation. Here, in the very same place where Henry V was crowned.
    At last the singing stops. Silence. There is shuffling to my right. Coughing. Somewhere distant, a low murmuring rumble. I get up, light-headed, and walk forward a short way, to face the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham. A team of bishops step up to unlace my shirt. I can feel the nervousness rising off them like steam. Then they fall back, job done, and I kneel.
    Warham takes the eagle-shaped golden flask and anoints me with holy oil – on my hands, on my chest, on my back and head. The liquid is cold. I feel a streak of it running down between my shoulder blades. The Abbot of Westminster, moving awkwardly in his stiff robes, dabs me dry – the cloth he uses, blotched now with patches of God’s grace, will be burned later; a stray trace of holy oil at large in the world is a dangerous thing.
    It can transform a man into a divine creature.
    Later, no longer merely a seventeen-year-old youth myself, but a holy creature, an anointed king, a god-on-earth, I sit on my throne on the specially built stage before the altar. They have dressed me now in layer after layer of robes, the outer ones reaching to my feet, heavy with jewels and gold. They have brought me spurs blessed on the altar, and the ceremonial sword with which I am charged to defend the Church. On my head they have placed the ancient crown of St Edward, its jewels representing the graces God has today bestowed upon me, by which I am to rule: wisdom, understanding, counsel, strength, cunning, pity and fear.
    Remade now as king, I lead Catherine back down the nave, through a crush of my gorgeously dressed subjects: the dukes and duchesses, the earls and countesses, the barons and lords and the merely rich. In my heavy robes and heavier crown it is a slow walk, steady and swinging, like in a dream.
    Nearing the end of the nave we can hear the cathedral bells booming far above us. Then the great west doors open like the side of a mountain and we step out into summer sunlight and a wall of sound.
    The air reverberates with the pealing of the bells, echoing weirdly so that the sound seems to come from the houses opposite. Caps hurtle, spinning, into the air above a sea of faces that fills the cathedral yard. The people are clapping and yelling, chanting my name. I raise one hand to them, grinning; the cheer becomes deafening.
    Then I turn to my wife, this beautiful vision in white and gold, her shining auburn hair hanging loose, her crown – with its delicate spikes of fleur-de-lys – choked with sapphires and rubies and clusters of pearls. Her dress is embroidered with our emblems: my Tudor rose and her own pomegranate, a symbol of fertility. She is smiling. Her fingers lie softly on my outstretched, gloved right hand; I lift them to my lips. Her nails, I notice, are no longer bitten.
    ♦   ♦   ♦
     
    My grandmother, attending the coronation in robes almost as sumptuous as ours, mutters darkly that some adversity will follow. It does – for her. The celebration banquet leaves her with agonising stomach gripes; five days later she is dead.

 
♦  ♦  ♦  II   ♦  ♦  ♦
     
     
    “The Abbot of Fécamp, Your Grace,” announces Compton. “Envoy of His Most Christian Majesty, King Louis of France.”
    I have been examining a miniature siege engine carved out of wood – a scale model made from my own design – holding it up between thumb and forefinger; I spy the ambassador through it: a portly figure in a black cassock, waiting