Duplicity comes in many forms from malignant to benign, and most varieties were conceived by rulers and politicians from ancient times. I have reached the stage where, encountering now some of our leaders on TV or radio or making portentous statements anywhere, I find myself thinking, I do not actually or implicitly believe anything this man/woman is telling me.
Alison Weir in her recent and very detailed account of the fall of Queen Anne Boleyn, describes what happened on 8 June 1536. Henry VIII showed up at Parliament for the opening. He had already deployed the brightest legal luminaries in the realm to find him a way to divorce his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, and this had been done. The grounds were consanguinity (she was the widow of Henry’s brother), and her failure to produce a son who could survive 16th century neo-natal care.
Then Henry, having been married briefly to Anne Boleyn, and still not having a son, decided he needed to get rid of her in favour of Jane Seymour, with whom he was now besotted. Cromwell had come to the rescue, and found so-called evidence that Anne had been adulterous all around the court, even with her own brother. Tricky -- in times like theirs, and ours, marked by hypocrisy and galloping paranoia. She was convicted of high treason and sentenced to death. Henry decided to be “kind”, and decreed that she would not be burned at the stake, or beheaded by an axeman, but swiftly decapitated by a swordsman brought over from France for the purpose. Within a few days Henry was married to Jane Seymour.
Now we come to the opening of Parliament. Lord Chancellor Audley made a speech to the King and to both houses. This included reading out the King’s Speech in which Henry plunged into serious damage limitation. Alison Weir reports how Henry publicly lamented that, having been disappointed in his first two marriages, he had been obliged, for the welfare of his realm, to enter upon a third, “a personal sacrifice not required of any ordinary man”.
At this the Lord Chancellor paused, and asked, “What man in middle life would not this deter from marrying a third time? Yet this, our most excellent Prince, not in any carnal concupiscence, but at the humble entreaty of his nobility, again condescended to contract matrimony, and hath, on the humble petition of the nobility, taken to himself a wife this time whose age and fine form give promise of issue.” Audley thanked the King for his selflessness and the care he had shown for his subjects.
This is what public office and power seem to do to people. Of course there are occasional shining exceptions. I do not know how I would have conducted myself had I ever been given high office and power. Over the years I have learned too much about my own inner frailty ever to be sure. I never learned how to carry on regardless, simply riding over the debris I have created and emerging again, as so many do. St Benedict has important teaching about personal humility which would be entirely lost on today’s achievers and all who set goals as though their personal attainment is the meaning of life and the universe.
Unless we discover and adopt a better way, such as Benedict teaches, or others such as the Dalai Lama, we are doomed to wars and destruction, paranoia and the collapse of hope, bombs, disease and starvation, injustice and brutality -- all of which, more or less, is what is happening now.
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