Young Bess (13 page)

‘I know all about the Pope.’

‘—more about whores then.’ But he found it safer to step off the subject, for Edward took his position as Supreme Head of the English Church very seriously. So he talked to him of his other duties as King. He ought to go on board the splendid ships that his father and grandfather had built, and tell the sailors that he would build more, to down the Spaniards and
conquer the New World beyond the Western Ocean. All true Englishmen were growing sick and tired of sitting at home, watching the smoke of their firesides, now that they no longer went out in every generation to fight in the wars in France. Agincourt was now only an old song –

and England had shrunk from a Continental Empire to a little island (and only half of that). But a fine navy might still make her a world power.

And Edward ought to go hunting and hawking and prepare to lead his armies in the field; in Hungary a man did not count himself a man unless he were on a horse.

‘Yet the Turks beat them at Mohacs,’ Edward interpolated – odious child, he knew everything; but his uncle had a better answer this time.

‘And well I know why, as Master Gunner of England, who am seeing to it that it shall never happen to an English army. The Turks were the first to use this stinking new artillery in full force, and the finest chivalry in Europe went down before it. It happened once, it will happen again, but not to us while
I’m
in command of the Ordnance – if I have the right backing.’

‘
I’ll
back you,’ said the child, suddenly lighting into enthusiasm.

‘You’ll be a fine King,’ said Tom, patting the fair head, but again came the petulant jut of Edward’s full under-lip, that so reminded one of his father.

‘I am King now,’ he said.

‘You ought to be more of one. You can’t always be tied to your Uncle Ned’s leading-strings, you know, and he’s a bit of an old woman, far too old for you anyway.’

The under-lip stuck out further in a ferocious pout. ‘I wish he were dead,’ it said.

This was going further than Ned’s brother had dreamt of. Edward saw his uncle’s astonishment, sucked in his lip so that his mouth became a tiny red button, and repeated with cold, considered obstinacy, ‘It would be better if he died.’

It was too much for the hardy buccaneer, who had only been tentatively feeling his way to the suggestion of a joint guardianship with his brother, and now felt a slight shiver at this ‘sweet gentle child’, as everybody called him.

He told his wife that he was a little monster, whereat his Cathy indignantly told him that he did not understand children and that it was all because Edward had been taken away from her own motherly care. Tom scoffed at the notion that he did not understand his nephew; anyway, the boy understood
him
and what he wanted, which was the important thing. Edward was going to write out a list of his complaints against his Uncle Somerset, and sign it with the royal signature, telling exactly what he felt about being kept so strictly in hand and so short of cash, and so entirely unsuitably for a great King who had just had his tenth birthday. Tom was going to read it out at that autumn’s Parliament, ‘And,’ said he, ‘if they don’t do as I want about it, then by God’s teeth I’ll make it the blackest Parliament ever known in England!’

Even Cathy was startled into alarm and begged him not to oppose his brother so openly; but he only laughed at her fears;
and then, before the scheme was ripe, the Protector, Duke of Somerset, came home from Scotland in the autumn, a conquering hero, his position greatly strengthened by his having won a tremendous victory at some place with the absurd name of Pinkie. The soldiers said it was really his second-in-command, John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, who won it. In any case, everybody said that this time the Scots would certainly never be able to lift their heads again; though a few seemed to remember much the same thing being said five years ago after the battle of Solway; and some old croakers went so far as to remember that there had been even more reason to say it over thirty years ago, after Flodden.

The conquering hero himself felt his success oddly clouded, though it was only by a dream, which he recounted to his secretary Mr Patten on the morning of the battle as they walked on the ramparts, looking towards Scotland; and told him to write it down, though, as Mr Patten objected, it was only an idle dream.

‘Dreams should not be idle,’ said his master. ‘They should be the busy servants of those statesmen who have the courage to dream wisely.’

So the secretary shrugged imperceptibly and noted down how the Protector had dreamt of his triumphant return to Court after the campaign, and the hearty thanks expressed to him by the King and all the country: ‘but yet he thought he had done nothing at all in this voyage – which, when he considered the King’s Highness’ great costs and great travail of the great men and soldiers all to have been done in vain, the very care and shamefast abashment of the thing did waken him out of his dream.’

What could be the point in noting such moonshine, thought Mr Patten, when it had been directly followed by his winning a stupendous victory in which he had killed thousands of the enemy, laid waste their country and destroyed their harvest; and his troops, mainly hired mercenaries from Germany and Spain, had kindled such furious hatred among the Scots that there was no hope of their accepting his very reasonable and conciliatory offer of peace and union.

He omitted all King Henry’s arrogant claim to Scotland as a vassal state, and based it only on an equal union through marriage of her Queen and England’s King, with Free Trade between the countries, and both England and Scotland to be renamed together with Wales as Great Britain; an island empire ‘having the sea for a wall, mutual love for a garrison, and no need in peace to be ashamed, or in war to be afraid of any worldly power.’

Which put it beautifully; but, as Tom said, it wasn’t much use to preach mutual love when you’d let loose the German
landsknechts
and Spanish ruffians under the Italian
condottiere
Malatesta to loot and rape, burn and murder through the countryside. With their aid he’d won the war but lost the peace, for Scotland was more determined than ever to get their little Queen over in safety to France and betroth her to the Dauphin before she should be captured by force and taken to England. A French fleet had been known to have been hovering off the Scottish shores this summer; now they would have to wait for the spring, since no good seaman would trust so precious a freight to the dangers of a voyage between St Simon’s and St Jude’s Day and Candlemas, when
storms were at their worst, and by seaman’s law no ships should then sail the Northern Seas. But they were only biding their time, and then Scotland would be driven deeper into the arms of France than ever before, and England would have to face the prospect of encirclement on south, north and west by France, and by French armies in Scotland, with Ireland as a third base for invasion, easy to capture from Scotland – the very danger that Somerset had recognised and striven so hard to avoid.

It was his fate to have to work by force when he would far rather use persuasion. He tried to use it now, and set in train an immense invasion of another sort – to wit, thousands of religious leaflets and hundreds of Bibles in English, printed in Geneva. For he saw clearly that Scotland could only be united to England if she shared her new Reformed Religion, and that this was the best lever to use against her alliance with Roman Catholic France.

Another propaganda weapon lay in the prisoners he had taken, who were to buy their freedom, also pensions and promises of important marriages, by undertaking to work for English interests in Scotland. The Scots Lord Chancellor himself was one of these, the Earl of Huntly, a fat, talkative fellow who thought he ruled Scotland; and the fickle flimsy Fair Earl of Bothwell, tall and stooping rather from his slight shoulders, very vain of his delicate colouring that betokened consumption, and of his wavering blue eyes. He insisted on marriage to either of the Princesses, Mary or Elizabeth (he hadn’t seen either and didn’t mind which) as his price; and was fobbed off instead with the usual promise of Anne of Cleves – a promise that nobody, least of all the lady in
question, intended to keep. The Fair Lord Francis had a wife at home (and a schoolboy son, James, as dark as he himself was fair), but he had just managed to divorce her, having had the intention of marrying his own Queen-Regent, the mother of the little Queen of Scots. A royal marriage was evidently his
idée fixe
.

The citizens of London wanted to express their loyal gratitude to the victorious Duke of Somerset by giving him a triumphal procession through the city, but this he modestly refused – to their annoyance, for if one had the expense of a war, one might as well have the fun of it. But the eldest Seymour’s lonely spirit was too aloof to see how a gorgeous spectacle and free drinks running in the gutters would enhance his popularity – just as he never saw that his modesty was first credited as parsimony, and then hypocrisy; for he now placed himself in Parliament on a throne high up and apart from all the other lords, to their intense exasperation.

If
this
were modesty, give them Old Harry’s pride! Their offended dignity was only aggravated by his piety, for in his prayer at the opening of Parliament he spoke of himself as ‘called by Providence to rule’ – but Providence never offered him that upper seat!

The newly self-made Duke then complained of his parvenu Council as a lot of ‘lords sprung from the dunghill’; after that, a good many of them said they would prefer Tom as Protector. And Somerset put the final edge on Tom’s own grievances against him by writing him a long and solemn letter urging him ‘to receive poor men’s complaints, that find themselves injured or grieved, for it is our duty and office so to do’.

Tom’s roar of rage as he read it brought his household running to hear his blasphemously and indecently expressed opinion of an elder brother who had never helped him to anything, but withheld his wife’s possessions, down to her wedding ring, and then lectured him on brotherly duty to his neighbour!

His furious laughter went rolling and roaring through the house; he kicked a chair across the hall and picked up another and broke it in his hands; he swore he would go and see our Pulpit Ned on the instant and ram his canting letter down his throat; he would ask him how he had the face to talk about the Rights or Wrongs of the poor, when he had done his own son and heir out of his inheritance and was now cheating his own brother out of his goods; he was an unnatural father and an unnatural brother, in fact there was nothing natural about him, and he accused his own mother, as she came tottering and quavering down the stairs, of having conceived him of the Devil.

A birdlike little old lady, usually spry and dapper as a water-wagtail, Lady Seymour now twittered about the hall, fluttering her hands and uttering disconsolate chirps such as ‘Now, now, now!’ ‘Another quarrel!’ ‘Not again!’ ‘Always fighting as boys, I thought they’d kill each other, and now, now—’

His wife sobbed, the servants peeped awestruck round doorways, Bess took a gallery seat at the top of the stairs to watch the row, and little Jane Grey peeped over her shoulder and wondered if all grown-ups were mad.

The quarrel raged its way into the Protector’s palace, and as usual it took the Protector some time to understand what
Tom was making all this noise about. He had been meaning himself to get in first with his own grievances.

His nervous eyebrows went fidgeting half-way up the furrowed dome of his forehead as he complained how he had to cut short his campaign in Scotland to hurry home and enquire into all manner of disturbing reports of his brother. Surely the welfare of the State mattered more than petty personal affairs, women’s toys, trinkets.

What was this about the Lord High Admiral countenancing piracy? It had even been suggested that he meant to establish a naval base for himself in the Scilly Isles.

But here the Admiral blew away the suggestion like a gale at sea.

‘Piracy, pooh! The pirates of today are the pioneers of tomorrow. You’ll see! England will owe more to her pirates than to her Protectors.’

The Protector hastily abandoned pirates. Tom had been unsettling the King’s mind, taking him out hunting when he should have been at his lessons, thrusting himself into his favour—

‘God’s blood, and isn’t he my nephew as much as yours? Why should you have the right to work the poor little brat to death at his books when his head’s spinning so that he can hardly see? I’ll swear you don’t even know that his eyes are weak and have to be bathed with Mother Jack’s foul mixtures—’ (The Protector didn’t; nor did the Admiral till his wife had told him.) ‘Suit you finely to have a blind King, so that you can carry on your Protection – God save the mark!’

The younger brother shouted; the elder compressed his
lips; the Duchess swept in and told Master Admiral what she thought of younger brothers and their wives, and the Admiral told her what he thought of her; the Protector slid away to compose a prayer to ‘the Granter of all peace and quietness, the Defender of all Nations, who has willed all men to be accounted as our neighbours, and commanded us to love them as ourselves; and not to hate our enemies, but rather to wish them, yea and also to do them good if we can…to give unto all men a speedy wearisomeness of all war, hostility and enmity…and grant in Thy days Thy great gift of unity’.

It was perhaps the most moving and perfect prayer ever addressed on behalf of a conquered enemy, for it was a prayer for Union with Scotland; but, for once, ‘petty personal affairs’ may have also tinged those austere desires for the welfare of the State.

The brothers’ quarrel was patched up somehow, as it had to be to avoid a hideous open scandal. The Lord High Admiral’s income was increased by
£
800 a year; and then the Duke of Somerset settled down with a sigh of relief to the enormous but congenial burden of the reform of religion and organisation of the Church as an efficient branch of the Civil Service; the direction of all England’s foreign diplomatic correspondence (with only two secretaries to help him); the supervising of every meeting of the Council and of Parliament; and a host of far-reaching but not always practicable schemes for the freedom of speech and the Press, and for social reforms to check the rise in prices and the debasement of the currency, to stop land-grabbing by the New Rich and unemployment of the poor; he even had a Court of
Requests set up in his own house so that the humblest suppliant who came to complain of any wrong or oppression might get the ear of the great Duke himself, the Good Duke, as the poor now called him.