Young Bess (2 page)

‘And what was that?’

The royal procession was well past now.

‘Oh, there was a flounder in the sea that promised the poor fisherman three wishes, and his wife made him go down night after night to ask them, though the wind rose and the waves roared and at the last he had to bellow through the storm:

For she made him ask first to be King, and then Pope, and then God.’

Catherine shook her head, but the little face remained as blankly innocent as a baby’s. You could not even see that she was frightened, but she was. (‘Dear God, have I gone too far this time again? No, not this time, not with nice soft
Pussy-Cat
Purr. She’ll see no further than’s good for me – or her.’)

The two were great friends. Elizabeth had a pretty knack with stepmothers. The four that she had known had all been fond of her, one after the other; she had written letters to them in French, Italian and Latin, and this present one made as much a companion of her as if she were grown up. They read French and Latin together, and with little Edward, so much younger than Elizabeth but already the cleverest of the family, and with Mary, so much older, but, in Elizabeth’s opinion at any rate, so much the stupidest. Catherine Parr, a born homemaker, was in fact succeeding almost miraculously in
making a real home for the King’s three ill-assorted children by different mothers.

Family life was a difficult affair with a father who had repudiated two of his six wives, beheaded two others, and bastardised both his daughters; yet Catherine managed to bring to it some sense of coherence and even security. She rescued Edward on the one hand from being utterly overlaid by tutors; and on the other, instead of discouraging Mary from reading in bed at night as did everyone else because it was bad for her very weak eyes, she suggested her translating Erasmus’s Latin treatises. The poor girl, no longer a girl, badly needed other occupation than fussing over her clothes and other people’s babies, and it might flick her pride to read in Udall’s preface the praises of modern learning in ‘gentlewomen who, instead of vain communication about the moon shining in the water, use grave and substantial talk in Greek or Latin.’

There had been no such need to flick little Bess’s mental energy into action. Last New Year’s Day the child had given her latest stepmother a present of a prose translation she had made herself of a very long religious poem by the present Queen Marguerite of Navarre, sister to King François I, that brilliantly learned and witty lady. Yet she could perpetrate the ‘Mirrour of a Guilty Sowle,’ which ran, or rather limped, to a hundred and twenty-eight pages of the Princess Elizabeth’s childish but beautifully clear and regular handwriting, and of Queen Marguerite’s edifying sentiments expressed in a profusion of confused dullness. But no one could doubt the suitability of the little girl’s choice; it would never have done to present a new stepmother with a translation of one of the
merry and improper stories in Marguerite’s
Heptameron
. Nor were learning and propriety the only qualities displayed in the gift; Elizabeth had made the canvas binding of the book and embroidered it with gold and silver braid and silken pansies, purple and yellow, and one tiny green leaf; it was the part she had most enjoyed doing – at first; though she got tired of it long before the end, and the stitches went straggly.

She liked to make her own presents, and had always insisted on her own choice in them. At six years old she had flatly refused to give her baby brother Edward any of the jewels or elaborate ornaments that were offered to her as suitable gifts for his second birthday; no, she would have none of them, though tempted momentarily by a bush of rosemary covered with gold spangles, which, however, on reflection she decided to keep for herself. And she carried out her determination of making the baby a cambric shirt.

A small girl so practical and independent was wasted in a royal household, the women decided; Bess was clearly cut out to be a good wife and mother in a poor household with a host of children. But Bess did not agree, though she did not say so. Even at six years old she had become something of an adept at not saying things, though she could not always keep it up, for she was also an adept at pert answers. And nothing could alter her quick and imperious temper, which had shown itself so masterfully before she was quite three years old that her distracted governess had written long garrulous letters to the Lords of the Council about the difficulty of controlling ‘my lady’s’ princely demands for the same wines and meats that her grown-up companions were having at table. Bess’s state had been far from princely then; her clothes were all
outgrown and there were no new ones for her; she had been sent away into the country with no provision made for her, and her governess at her wits’ end as to how to clothe and feed her.

Yet only a very short time before, her father had tossed her up in his arms, and crowds of gorgeous strangers had thronged round her, uttered ecstatic little cries at the sight of her, bowed down to her and pressed glittering toys into her hands.

There was a winter’s evening when she was just two and a half years old (she always remembered it, though people said she could only have remembered hearing of it) when that enormous figure, not nearly as stout as now but seeming even taller, and dressed from top to toe in yellow satin like a monstrous giant toad, hoisted her up on to a vast padded shoulder, where she clutched at the white feather in his flat cap, and carried her round at that dizzy height, showing her off to everybody, shouting, ‘Thank God the old harridan is dead! Here is your future Queen – Elizabeth!’ And all the courtiers shouted back, and the dark crowds in the street below the window where he stood with her, in a terrifying exciting roar, ‘God save the King! God save the Princess Elizabeth!’

‘The old harridan’ was her father’s first wife and her
half-sister
Mary’s mother, Queen Katherine of Aragon, that noble Spanish princess who had been hounded to death at last by her husband’s six-year persecution. That was at the end of January, and by the following May Bess’s mother too was dead, her head cut off by her father’s orders; and by the next morning he was wedded to Jane Seymour.

Bess did not know that at the time, only that she went away into the country, that there were no more crowds nor shouting for her, that her clothes grew shabby and uncomfortably small for her, and no one was in the least excited or pleased to see her.

so the children sang, playing on the see-saw on the village green, but she was not allowed to play with them either. The time of neglect and poverty passed; she went up again, though never to the dizzying height of her first two and a half years; she went back to Court, where, however, a new baby, a tiny boy, was now the centre of all the swaying, bowing crowds, carried aloft on that towering shoulder.

It was he now whom the giant King would dandle and toss in his arms by the hour together, and stand at a window showing him to the crowds below; and their roars would surge up in rugged waves of sound, ‘God save King Hal!’ ‘God save the Prince!’ ‘Long live Prince Edward!’

The baby’s mother, Jane Seymour, was not there. She had died in giving birth to him – ‘my poor little Jane,’ the King said occasionally with a sob.

He did not seem to like Bess now, he was odd and uncomfortable with her; sometimes she would catch him looking at her with a strange intent gaze, and then when she looked back he would turn away and talk to someone else. And he never again called her Elizabeth, but only Young Bess, which should have sounded more affectionate, but did not.
Long afterwards she guessed that he had ceased to feel her worthy of the name, for he had bestowed it on her in memory of his mother, that gracious and beloved princess, last of the royal Plantagenets, who had given him his most legitimate claim to the throne.

But at the time Bess only knew that she must be very good and quiet and not thrust herself forward. Her half-sister Mary, a grown-up woman, said: ‘It is your turn now to learn to be silent, as I have done.’

She said it on a note of acid triumph, for she had been forced to agree to the Act of Parliament that declared her mother’s marriage illegal and herself illegitimate, forced to acknowledge this baby sister’s prior right to the throne over herself, to let her take public precedence to her everywhere, and even to serve as maid-of-honour to her. That had been when Elizabeth was ‘up, up, up’; now she too had been bastardised and was ‘down, down, down,’ where Mary had been for many years now. She looked cowed and dull. She was a good woman and did not seek to revenge herself on her small half-sister for the agonies and humiliations she had had to suffer on her behalf; instead she tried hard to be kind to her, but Bess knew she did not like her.

The King talked about finding a new mother for his poor motherless children, and then something opened in Mary’s dull face: in one instant it had shut again, but in that instant Bess felt she had seen into hell.

It was not so easy a task by now to find a new Queen for England. The foreign princesses were growing wary. A Danish one said that if she had two heads she would be delighted to lay one at the English King’s disposal; a French one, tall and
stately, of the House of Guise, was told that Henry wished for her as he was so big himself, he needed a big wife; and she replied, ‘Ah, but my neck is small.’ And Mary of Guise had the effrontery to marry his nephew instead, that young whippersnapper King James V of Scotland. Then Tom Cromwell, the ‘best of his servants,’ engineered a German Protestant alliance and a marriage with the Bavarian princess, Anne of Cleves, whose portrait was very pretty, but not, Bess decided, as quick and chic and merry-looking as that of her own mother, Anne.

But when the new bride arrived, and all the Court went to meet her with the King (Bess, now six years old, by the side of her twenty-five-year-old sister, Mary), then everybody saw with a shock that the bride was not pretty at all. Fat ‘Crum’ was bustling about with a staff in his hand, sweating with energy and anxiety – ‘just like a post boy,’ Tom Seymour whispered wickedly, though Bess thought him much more like a panting ox. He acted as interpreter between the King and the large raw-boned German princess, who beamed effusively and said ‘Ya, Ya,’ for she was as stupid as she was plain, she could speak no language but her own, to the shocked amazement of Bess, who had never heard of a princess who couldn’t speak at least six languages including Greek and Latin. Crum remarked to the King that she looked ‘very queenly,’ but he did it timidly, ‘as though he were offering a coin to an elephant,’ said Tom Seymour.

The elephant rejected it; he shot one red glance at the best of his servants and trumpeted two words: ‘What remedy?’ In six months he had found it; annulled his marriage with Anne, and beheaded Cromwell.

Elizabeth heard of it a month before her seventh birthday, while she was stitching at the shirt for her baby brother. She knew by now that this ox, who could pounce like a tiger, had got her mother beheaded, after making her Queen; and now he was beheaded himself. ‘Here we go down, down down.’

Anne of Cleves lived on in England; she said she would ‘always be a sister’ to Henry, she was kind and friendly to his daughters, and she did not even mind (perhaps she was relieved) when he married Cat Howard, an enchanting creature not quite eighteen.

Mary was cold and haughty to Cat, a flighty girl, seven years younger than herself, who had scrambled up to womanhood in the careless modern fashion among a host of boys and girls as wild and reckless as herself. She said Cat was of inferior rank and not at all fitted to be their father’s wife. In her scorn of Cat, Bess could see what this daughter of the Spanish kings had felt for Bess’s mother, Nan Bullen, whose family had lately started to spell their name Boleyn to make it sound grander. They were relations of the Howards – but of far less noble stock, and Nan was the granddaughter of a mercer and Lord Mayor of London, as Mary once blurted out to the child when provoked by her to one of her hysterical rages.

It was perhaps the worst shock to her self-esteem that Bess had received in her childhood. There was no disgrace in having some of your family executed; it was a thing that might happen to anybody, and frequently did; and under the Tudors, the more noble the family, the more likely it was to happen. But a mercer, a Lord Mayor! She flung an inkpot at Mary, called her a liar, and rushed screaming with fury to her
beloved governess, Mrs Ashley, who soothed her with reminders of her mother’s Howard uncle, the great Duke of Norfolk, of one of the oldest families in the kingdom. But Bess was not impressed; she thought her great-uncle Norfolk a vulgar old man who said very rude things, and she had heard that he was always ready to do the King’s dirty work for him; this she imagined to be something to do with cleaning his horse or his boots when on an expedition together.

Mrs Ashley was worrying about something more important; Bess must be very careful never to quarrel with her half-sister, the Lady Mary, ‘for one never knows – And she had good reason to hate your mother, Queen Anne, who was, God forgive her, very unkind to her and to her poor mother, Katherine of Aragon – and
she
was a saint if ever there was one.’

Bess said mutinously, ‘Well, I’d rather have a witch for my mother than a saint – and an Englishwoman than a Spaniard – and anyway, why should Mary turn up her nose at Cat Howard?’

She adored the lovely warm impulsive creature, the Rose without a Thorn the King called her, who insisted on giving Bess the place of honour next herself, as she was her cousin. She brought gaiety into all their lives; she coaxed the King with such endearments as ‘her little pig,’ for he was growing very stout; but, determined to defy it, he rose at five or six and rode and went hunting and hawking with her every day and often all day, sometimes tiring out nine or ten horses in a single hunt. King François’s sister, the fascinating Marguerite, kept asking flatteringly but tactlessly for his portrait, and he
hoped to give Holbein a chance to show how young he’d grown in body as well as heart – but alas he was still ‘marvellously excessive in drinking and eating’, so people noticed; and also that he often held quite different opinions in the morning from those he held after dinner.