Young Bess (12 page)

‘And what is it you’re writing? Your first love-letter, I’ll be bound, to make you so smug! Come, confess, which of the pages have you seduced?’

He looked over her shoulder, but she had put her hands over the paper; he pulled them away, the inkstand overturned, she shrieked in indignation, snatching up the precious letter, and he chased her round the room for it. Catherine came running at her cries and scolded them both like a pair of naughty children, and the Admiral defended himself, saying he had got to supervise their ward’s conduct and how could he, if she carried on a clandestine correspondence with the grooms?

‘I don’t!’ shrieked Bess. ‘The letter’s to my sister Mary.’

‘Tell that to the Beef-eaters! Would anyone write to your sister Mary grinning all over their face? Let’s see what merry jests you’ve put in it!’

‘No, no, the jest’s to me only. No one else can see it. No one
shall
see it. Give it back, give it me!’

She was chasing him now, for he’d snatched the paper out of her hand and was holding it at arm’s length above his head far out of her reach while he dodged round the furniture and finally behind the Queen, darting out first on one side of her, then the other, while Bess put her arms round her stepmother’s plump little figure to try and catch him behind it.

‘Ouch! You’re squeezing me to death between you,’ Catherine gasped out, laughing. ‘Stop teasing the child and give her back her letter.’

‘Read it yourself then first, Cathy, or I’ll not be responsible!’

‘No,
no
!’ shouted Bess, stamping her foot in a real rage by now. ‘She’s
not
to, nor you. It’s my letter. Give it back.’

He fluttered it above her head, making her jump for it like a dog; at last he let her snatch it from him and she fled from the room clasping it to her breast. He turned to Catherine, suddenly dropping his fooling.

‘Is it safe to let her send it without our reading it? We’ve got to be careful with Mary – so has Bess. It’s a ticklish position.’

‘Dear heart,’ said Catherine, smiling at him as though he were a cross between God and her imbecile child, ‘I’d trust Bess to deal with a ticklish position rather better than yourself!’

Bess, reading her letter in the beautiful flowing handwriting that her tutors had taught her, would have concurred. She had pretended entire agreement with her ‘very dear sister’ while refusing to do anything she asked; shared her ‘just grief in seeing the ashes or rather the scarcely cold body of the King our father so shamefully dishonoured’ by their stepmother’s marriage. (Yes it would have been awkward if Catherine had read that! though she would have understood why Bess had to write it.)

And now came the cream of the jest, though, as she had just said, for herself alone: ‘I cannot express to you how much affliction I suffered when I was first informed of this marriage.’ (True enough that, in all conscience! No wonder
she had grinned as she wrote in amused appreciation of her insincere candour.) Sincerity broke in also when she wrote of the Queen’s ‘so great affection and so many kind offices’ to herself, but these were advanced only in excuse for Bess having to ‘use much tact in manoeuvring with her for fear of appearing ungrateful for her benefits’. It was the nearest she dared get to reminding Mary that she, too, owed her stepmother gratitude for her kindness.

But she did manage with consummate aplomb to warn her ‘dearest sister’ (why did that look so much more affectionate when it came in the middle of a letter?) of the folly of ‘running heavy risk of making our own lot much worse than it is; at least, so I think. We have to deal with too powerful a party, who have got all authority into their hands, while we, deprived of power, cut a very poor figure at Court,’ – a pathetic picture of two royal Cinderellas that made its writer, in the midst of a whirl of festivities, chuckle happily.

And here Bess did make a bad slip, carried away by her own worldly advice to the woman of over thirty. ‘I think, then,’ she wrote, ‘that the best course we can take is that of dissimulation… If our silence does us no honour, at least it will not draw down upon us such disasters as our
lamentations
might induce.’

The letter was a perfect piece of diplomacy – if only it had been addressed to the right person. But a letter is a joint affair, depending almost as much upon its reader as its writer. The determined honesty, the loathing of compromise, that Mary had inherited from her mother, without any of her mother’s tact, made her quite incapable of taking warning from Bess’s reminders of the harm her protests might do to herself.

But the warning she did take was of Bess herself, that inscrutably smiling girl, just on fourteen, who could so complacently accept it ‘if our silence do us no honour’; who could so cynically plan, ‘the best course we can take is that of dissimulation’.

And Mary would remember that warning to the end of her life.

Young Edward, not content with writing good advice and assurances of his patronage to his elders, and terse demands for cash to be slipped under carpets, also kept a Journal.

It was Mr Cheke’s idea, and it gave him a pleasing sense of importance to write it, sitting at his little desk which was covered with black velvet, so as not to show the inkstains (an economical notion of the Duchess); it contained fascinating inner compartments and secret drawers where he could store his treasures; some buttons of agate and gold, some strange new instruments that showed the signs of the zodiac and the movements of the stars (Edward liked stars); a cormorant’s egg which Barnaby had brought him from the Donegal cliffs; and half a dozen dog collars of red and white leather, a present from Cuthbert Vaughan, his Master of the Dogs.

There he sat in ‘the Kynge’s secret studie’ at Westminster, the only place where he could feel himself in undisputed command of a kingdom, looking out on the busy river and on the further shore the gardens and towers of Lambeth Palace where Archbishop Cranmer sat writing, just as busily as himself, at the new English Prayer Book, that staggering innovation that was to make a new religion, a new England, and all the great men in the land would contribute something
to it; Edward would himself. Already his only title for it was ‘the Book of my proceedings’.

Meanwhile he wrote his Journal. And on the same page as his account of the ‘great preparation mad to goe into Scotland’ by the Lord Protector and other great nobles, to carry out King Henry’s dying wishes to have the Scots finally and thoroughly smashed, he put the briefest of records of his uncle Tom Seymour’s marriage to the Queen, ‘with wich mariag’ (spelling was not yet stabilised, especially Edward’s) ‘the Lord Protectour was much offended’.

But as the Scottish campaign was carrying the Lord Protector away from this domestic scene of action, he had at first to leave hostilities to that keen lieutenant, his wife. The Duchess instantly attacked with full batteries of abuse which did not spare even that national monument the late King.

‘Did not King Henry marry Catherine Parr in his doting days, when he had brought himself so low by his lust and cruelty that no lady that stood on her honour would venture on him?’ Whereas she herself was not only the wife of the Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector of England, but the great-great-granddaughter, on her mother’s side, of the tenth son of Edward III. It was nothing to her that the progeny of that enormous family would soon make it quite difficult for any gentry
not
to be descended from Edward III; she looked on herself as the one and only Plantagenet, and it was a gross personal insult that she should have to bear the train of the Queen Dowager who was really only Catherine Parr, a nobody, ‘now casting herself for support on a younger brother. If Master Admiral teach his wife no better manners, I am she that will.’

And that Impossible She proceeded to teach her new
sister-in
-law manners by jostling her in the doorway at State functions and fairly stampeding out of the room so as to take precedence of her and avoid bearing her train. ‘Exceeding violent’ was the verdict of the astonished witnesses, and, in the opinion of one sly observer, this business of the Queen’s train was kicking up so much dust that it might well end in smothering both their husbands.

For Tom could also be exceeding violent; he swore with loud and terrible oaths that ‘no one should speak ill of the Queen, or he would take his fist to the ears of those who did, from the lowest to the highest.’ Which gave to many a reasonable hope of seeing him box the Duchess’s ears, or perhaps even the Duke’s.

The Court was beginning to take sides, and furiously. Nearly everybody there was finding the Duchess’s ‘many imperfections intolerable, her pride monstrous’. Ned Seymour had always been an almost oppressively upright and conscientious man; but no one could trust a man ruled by such a wife, and many said that in his quieter way he was becoming almost as bad. He had set aside the conditions of the late King’s will almost before the breath was out of his body and taken his supreme power by a
coup d’etat
; he was destroying churches, even parts of St Paul’s, to build himself Somerset House – the churches did not matter, they were fair game and everyone was doing it, but St Paul’s was more than a church, it was the City, it was London itself; and Somerset House was more than a house, it was a palace bigger than anybody else, even a King, had ever had.

Worst of all, the fellow would make speeches; beautiful
speeches, which nobody could make head or tail of; speeches about liberty and freedom of speech for all men, about religious toleration and free discussion as the best way to settle all problems, and not merely of religion either. He had not only repealed all the laws against heresy but most of those against treason too; a man might now even impugn the Royal Supremacy in speech, though not in writing. It was plain asking for trouble and rebellion, and as if this were not enough, he was actually going against his own class, encouraging discontent among the common people, for that was what would come of his taking their side against their landlords in his attempts to give them back their common lands. For centuries they had been allowed to graze their sheep and cattle on them, but they had now been enclosed for the use of the big landowners, who were bristling like hedgehogs at the idea of giving them back to the people.

Let him try out his fool notions on religion if he must; but property, that was another matter, that was sacred.

And now here he was doing his youngest brother out of the property that was rightly, even legally, his and his wife Catherine’s. A fellow that could trick his younger brother out of his own, that showed you what the fellow was really like.

For in the midst of all these mutterings and growlings was heard that magnificent voice of Tom Seymour.

‘My brother is wondrous hot in helping every man to his right, save me! He makes a great matter of preventing my having the Queen’s jewels, which you see by the whole opinion of the lawyers ought to belong to me, and all under pretence that he would not the King should lose so much – as if it were a loss to the King to let me have mine own!’

Even the Queen’s wedding ring had been robbed from her, he told Fowler as he sat drinking in the privy buttery; and Mr Fowler sighed piously and said (or said afterwards that he said), ‘Alas, my lord, that ever jewels or muck of this world should make you begin a new matter between my Lord Protector and you!’ At which my lord roared for his boots and rode away.

And his wife Catherine, who had been so careless of the ‘muck of this world’ when she had fled the Palace of Whitehall in those haunted days of last January, was now as eager and indignant about the jewels as he. To her they were no capricious gift of King Henry’s doting days, but her just wages for three and a half years’ devoted service as his
sick-nurse
, a job that few women would indeed have willingly ventured on.

And it was not only the jewels, and not only King Henry’s gifts. Catherine’s favourite country manor of Fasterne had been grabbed by methods even more flagrant. The Protector, or again his Duchess, had without its owner’s consent, coolly installed a tenant in it who paid the bare minimum of rent (and presently ceased doing even that) and refused even to allow her to graze her cattle in its park, so that she had to pay farmers for their pasturage – and this at the same time that the Protector was proposing to reform the grievance of the enclosures and to give the grazing lands back to the people! Charity, or rather justice, should begin at home, said Tom loudly; and even his gentle Cathy wrote to her husband that it was lucky his elder brother was away at the moment, ‘for else I believe I should have bitten him’.

But she fully intended to utter all her rage against the
Protector to him in front of the King, ‘if you do not give me advice to the contrary,’ – as if it were likely Tom should ever give her such advice! Now that she was married to him she was so deep in love that she was coming to rely utterly on him in all matters, with the abandonment of a woman entirely happy and satisfied for the first time in thirty-five years and four marriages. Any doubts she had ever felt as to his perfect moderation in temper or judgment had been cast to the winds; she was now young for the first time, young and foolish, glorying in feeling so and in looking up to the finest man in England as her arbiter in all things.

Others did not altogether endorse her opinion; that of the more discriminating of his fellows was that ‘the Lord Sudley was fierce in courage, courtly in fashion, in personage stately, in voice magnificent, but somewhat empty in matter.’

But he was extremely popular with them; they agreed that his little wife, after all she had been through, deserved her luck, for it was plain that they were really lovers. And if all the world loves a lover, it also loves a younger son, who has to make his own way in the world, as Tom had done triumphantly, and no thanks to his elder brother. And now that that supremely fortunate elder brother was actually trying to hinder him, it was not only base, it was unnatural.

They all liked the little Queen and they liked Tom, even if he did brag and wag his beard a bit – in fact, all the more for doing so; he was so wildly, gloriously indiscreet, generous not only with his money and his sumptuous entertaining, his royal banquets, his gaming parties and water parties and sports of every kind, but also with himself, talking so freely and openly without any shadow of suspicion or even caution of his
hearers, taking them all for granted as his friends, certain that they would feel just as he did about the wrongs he had to endure from his brother, and quite reckless lest such talk might lay up occasion for yet worse wrongs. And, however angry, he was never tedious nor doleful, would shrug it off with a laugh and ‘Oh well, “more was lost on Mohacs’ field,” as they still say in Hungary!’

The common people too adored him. Every time he went out they roared for him as they had done for King Hal when at the height of his popularity, and there were many who said he was more like that King when young than the pale little Prince ever showed a sign of becoming – as kingly, and with a finer beauty than even that giant had once worn; and the hearty carefree laugh that rang out from him as he scattered coins among the crowd sounded in all older ears as the echo of that great laugh of Bluff King Hal in his golden youth.

Free with his money he was, like Hal, and saw to it that the conduits ran wine in the Strand when he gave some grand show at his house there – which was more than his elder brother did, for all that he called himself the Protector. Solemn as a judge
he
was; he might talk big about reform, but reforms never did anybody much good, there was always a catch somewhere, and the rich managed to make themselves richer by them while the poor came off worse than before. A lot of fine talk cost him nothing, and did nothing for anyone else; hot air never warmed anybody – but what everyone could see and hear for themselves was that he was busy feathering his own nest, with hundreds of workmen hammering all day at that vast new house to be called by his name.

Altogether, Tom had good reason to be pleased with the way things were going. The Protector went up to Scotland at the head of his army and left his younger brother as his Lieutenant-General in charge of the South Ports, and this gave him more scope. Which he used rather mysteriously when he went to dislodge a notorious pirate called Jack Thompson who had seized the Scilly Isles, and came back apparently well satisfied although he had not dislodged him. Was it because he had agreed to share the swag with Mr Thompson?

His friends chuckled and said they always knew Tom was a born buccaneer; but agreed it looked serious when he protected pirates even in the Admiralty Courts, and complaints began to come in from foreign Powers of the loss of their ships.

He was playing with fire, too, among papers, hunting up all the old records he could find to prove that when a boy-King had two uncles, one of them should be Protector of the Realm and the other the Governor of the King’s Person. There was no doubt that the King himself would eagerly welcome it. ‘If only he were five or six years older!’ Tom would exclaim, ‘then it would all be plain sailing.’ Still, he had got the boy eating out of his hand, eating up a lot of cash certainly, but it should pay good interest.

In his brother’s absence he now had more chance to see him by himself, though they still had to resort to the underhand tricks of truant schoolboys to get in touch, but that too was all to the good, since it was breeding in Edward a contained fury of discontent against his present guardians. Nor did it seem to be only self-interest that bound the child to his younger uncle; he was obviously dazzled by him and would stare, almost awed, when he heard his jolly laugh, as at
something so alien to his cold restricted life that he did not know how to meet it.

For his stepmother his feelings were simpler and more certain; for four years she had taken the place of the mother he had never known, and as naturally and lovingly as if she were indeed his mother. He missed her badly, and deeply resented that he was still being kept apart from her except for the briefest of formal visits. Even when she stayed at St James’s Palace and he at Whitehall within a stone’s throw, he found he could only write to her although ‘I was so near to you and expected to see you every day’.

But the Admiral promised he would make it all come right. The Admiral said it was ridiculous that he should have to sit at his books all day. A King ought to be a good fellow, and mix with other good fellows – ‘Look at your father, he was hail-fellow-well-met with everyone at sight and it served him a deal better than writing treaties against Luther and getting dubbed Defender of the Faith by the Pope,’ – an unfortunate example, for the small face beneath him at once looked huffy and his nephew hastened to say that
he
was writing a comedy against the Pope, called ‘The Whore of Babylon’.

‘Very sound, very sound,’ said his uncle, ‘though you’d do it better later when you know more about—’