The Private Life of the Diary by Sally Bayley
Author:Sally Bayley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unbound
Published: 2016-04-15T00:00:00+00:00
The House of Secret Scribblers
The house where I grew up was a den of secret scribblers. Everyone was at it, especially my aunt, who kept a secret notebook under her bed. We all knew it was there but none of us was allowed to go near it. My auntâs journal was protected by a force-field. We knew that if we went near it weâd be zapped.
My aunt kept a journal because she believed that what she had to say, what she knew, was extraordinary. She was storing up important secrets, as important as those Cardinal Wolsey went around with in the sixteenth century: Cardinal Wolsey was her hero. âWolseyâ she called him as though he were her pet. âCome, Wolsey, come ⦠come here, Wolsey!â She pored over his picture in the book on Tudor history borrowed from the library. She traced the bulky shape of his outline. Late at night she whispered to him all the secrets she couldnât tell anyone else.
We studied Cardinal Wolsey at school. In the famous painting the cardinal is a bloated turkey; a mountain of flesh floating beneath a ballooning red gown. He clutches a roll of paper in his hand and lifts two fingers in front of him as though he were summoning servants. Cardinal Wolsey is always summoning someone, like my aunt is always summoning my grandmother. He is the most important person in the whole of England. When I look at his face I think it is smug and full of secrets, underneath those folds of soft pink paper for cheeks and a chin.
Cardinal Wolsey is the Kingâs Lord Chancellor and he carries the Great Seal under his arm; inside that seal (which makes him the second only in the kingdom to Henry VIII) he carries all the gossip from the court back to his private chamber in his Very Large House at Hampton Court. There he scribbles in his journal all the negative thoughts he has on the marriage between King Henry and Anne Boleyn. He doesnât like Anne Boleyn but he has to keep that to himself. Anne Boleyn suspects that he is against her but Henry doesnât; not for a long time, not until it was too late.
Wolsey knows how to guard secrets. My aunt said Wolsey was an evil man but she liked him all the same because he had âcharismaâ, which meant he possessed an irresistible charm. His influence spread far and wide: at Whitehall and York Palace and Hampton Court and in Rome with the Pope and then at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, where he tried to improve relations between Henry and Francis, the King of France. Cardinal Wolsey charmed everybody with his fluently rehearsed French and his shower of gifts, until his devious machinations came to light, triggering his downfall.
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