The Journal Wk. 26
The Mirror and the Light: Vile Blood II
‘The burden of kingship,’ he says, ‘no man can imagine it. All my life, to be a prince: to be observed to be a prince; all eyes to be set on me; to be an exemplar of virtue, of discretion, of excellence in learning; to have a mind young and vigorous yet as wise as Solomon; to take pleasure in what others have designed for my pleasure, or be thought ungrateful; to discipline all my appetites, to unmake myself as a man in order to make myself as king…’
You think of the prince as living on an exalted plane, finer and higher than other men. But perhaps Gregory has a point: is a prince even human? If you add him up, does the total make a man? He is made of shards and broken fragments of the past, of prophecies and of the dreams of his ancestral line. The tides of history break inside him, their current threatens to carry him away. His blood is not his own, but ancient blood. His dreams are not his own, but the dreams of all England: the dark forest, deserted heath; the stir in the leaves, the dragon's footprint; the hand breaking the waters of a lake. His forefathers interrupt his sleep to castigate, to warn, to shake their heads in mute disappointment. At a prince's coronation, God transfigures him, his human faults falling away, his human capacities increased; but that burst of light has to last him. That instant's transfusion of grace must sustain him for thirty years, forty years, for the rest of his mortal life.
The Mirror and the Light, 363, 373
The king is not himself, owns nothing of himself
For all eyes lie on him and feast
On prophecies and parts.
This his face, his father had,
And these his words, his grandsire spoke;
These his dreams are none of his,
They lie in the land, and at their ends
Voices he knows not lay their claim –
This my king, my son, my servant,
This my shining glass, my throne,
This my mirror and my light.
This his blood is royal water
Which turns to gold and silver in the sun;
To fear the king is as it should be
For as he wears the crown, he fears himself.
How to love that
Which being man
Should be loved
Must be loved
Yet no man at all –
Divine beast
Dream-haunted
Majesty,
All-beloved.
The Journal is a section where I post weekly poems responding to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy. Here’s last week’s edition:
