Young Bess (20 page)

But Tom only howled in exasperated boredom. He said that a lot of long words didn’t alter facts; that Ned thought he could make the Devil himself sound respectable by speaking of his ‘extreme measures’; that the Scots ought not to object to having their people slaughtered, their wives ravished in their sight, their fields burnt, their churches, towns and villages razed to the ground, as long as he left the words ‘English Sovereignty’ out of his peace terms; that in all his life Ned had never grasped a single fact – only words, words, words.

The argument, as so often happens in the inconsequence of family quarrels, wandered far afield in a furious comparison of the ‘ordered and disciplined’ German rulers in Hungary with the dispossessed Magyar nobles who, having been left no other means of subsistence, would swoop down from their mountain fortresses on the market-place and carry off goods or, better, someone for ransom – preferably a Jew, for that was worth a bag of ducats where even a rich merchant would only fetch a reasonable sum. Good fellows, those Robber Knights, and no one in the world so handy with horseflesh.

Tom, glowing with nostalgic appreciation, wondered whether it wouldn’t be a good plan to kidnap his royal nephew and ransom him for his own Protectorship of him. It was a bright notion and would be thought nothing of in
Hungary, but here in England everyone was so conventional.

He swung off to visit his nephew and consider him from the point of view of this possibility. He found Edward ruffled as an angry kitten because Mary had written to him (on the eternal vexed question of having the Mass in her household) that ‘although he was of great understanding, yet experience would teach him more yet’; an elder-sister touch far more irritating than the friendly equal arguing and wrangling between him and Bess. He showed his uncle with some pride his prompt retort to Mary that
she
‘might have something to learn, and no one was too old for that!’

But what chiefly infuriated him was that the German Emperor, her mother’s nephew, was throwing out hints that if Mary were not allowed her own way, he would withdraw his Ambassador.

‘Just because he is her first cousin and was once betrothed to her, how dare he think that gives him any right to interfere with
me
? I’d have declared war on him by now, only my Uncle Somerset is such a slug and won’t set about it.’

Tom heartily encouraged him to ‘pull the Emperor’s nose’ – in spite of the fact that he had always said it was a shame to bother the Princess Mary about her private worship, and that ‘Live and let live’ was the only sound course in religion. He disliked the Reformers, if anything, rather more than the priests; he complained that they made far more fuss about religion in their determination to prove themselves in the right; in fact, he had only joined them for professional purposes, since it was politically necessary to be on their side, and also because, like the rest of the nobles, he had made a good thing out of the plunder of the Church lands and property.

But questions of consistency never troubled him. It was enough that his brother was letting in an advance guard of the Emperor’s troops, that the Emperor wanted to interfere in England as he had done practically everywhere on the Continent, and worst of all, that he was the Princess Mary’s first cousin.

‘The Hapsburgs don’t need to fight – they marry. They’ve got a hold over half Europe by that, and they’ll get it here if we don’t look out. Peaceful penetration – allies in the family – paid troops to fight our battles and act as spies in our country! Show him you won’t stand any of it.’

‘I will,’ said Edward, squaring his elbows and clenching his inky fist round his pen as he bent over his black velvet desk to write a belligerent letter to the terrible Charles V, Imperator Mundi.

Tom, standing behind his chair, suddenly swept him up out of it, tossed him up in his arms just as though he were a baby, and hugged him. ‘You’re the living spit of your mother – just Jane’s prim little determined air!’

‘Put me down!’ exclaimed the King in a squeak of astonished indignation. ‘I’m like my father – they all say so.’

‘Oh, you’re old Harry’s own, sure enough, a chip off the old block. By Christ’s soul, you’ll make a King to match himself, and not all these canting snivelling book-learned old women shall keep you from it! I’ll get you away from them, never fear.’

‘Put me
down
!’

At last Tom heard him, put him down and knelt to him with exaggerated deference, humbly craving his dread Sire’s pardon for his familiar treatment of him. Edward pulled
down his waistcoat, smoothed his hair, and said in aggrieved tones, ‘Now I shall have to get it brushed again.’

It wasn’t until he had left that Tom remembered the prime motive of his visit, which was to consider his nephew’s kidnapping.

Well, that could come later.

The Good Duke sat looking down his long nose at the letter, in Latin, of King Edward of England to the Emperor of the World. There were three mistakes in the syntax. It was time young Barnaby was whipped again. It was the only thing that had any real effect on Edward. He made a note of it and leant across the table to stick it in a stand.

His eye fell on his last letter from his brother Henry at Wolf Hall.

‘Further ye sent us downe such a lewde company of Frenchmen masons as I never sawe the lyke. I assure you they be the worst condicyoned people that ever I sawe and the dronkenest; for they will drynke more in one day than 3 dayes wages will come to, and then lye lyke beasts on the flore not able to stande. They are well nigh XXXs in debt for beer, victuals and other borrowed money. Praying you that I may be most hartely commendyed—’ but here the Duke’s eye instinctively averted from the fateful word ‘bedfellowe’.

What a welter of things he had to see to, and all himself, for no one else ever did them properly. Was it even worth the trouble, all this accumulation of vast estates which he never had time to ride over – of palaces spreading over the earth,
towering to the sky, which he might never live even to see finished?

But this would never do. He made a shuddering guess at what his Duchess would say if she had heard his thought. He was not building for himself (nothing that he did was for himself) but for his son – and hers. Not for his eldest son, by Katrine Fillol;
he
had already been dispossessed of his birthright and his younger stepbrother was to inherit his father’s titles and estates. The Good Duke did not care to think of that.

It was narrow to consider one’s own flesh and blood, or even one’s own countrymen, as of prime importance. His public prayer to the Defender of All Nations showed a new and nobler view. And he had given practical testimony to it by opening a settlement of Flemish weavers, exiled for their religious beliefs, on his own estates at Glastonbury; the Somerset Weavers they were called, after him, a lasting tribute to his tolerance and foresight.

He took long views, in private as well as public matters. It was a fine instinct that made him take his pleasure, not in momentary self-indulgence, but in planting great trees that he would never see full-grown, in building palaces such as Somerset House that would dominate the untidy huddle of London’s wooden buildings like an eagle brooding over a nest of sparrows.

The only idle moments he knew were those in which he stood watching his workmen, as busy as a swarm of ants, at work on that enormous ant-heap. He even sometimes watched them during sermon-time. The new Scottish preacher, Mr John Knox, whom he had imported as the latest
of the Royal Chaplains, had actually dared raise complaints about it.

But then Mr Knox raised complaints about everything. His first sermon at Court had been a frenzied diatribe against the iniquity of kneeling at Communion. The Archbishop thought it went too far. The Duke had appointed him for his Protestant zeal, to which he had earlier testified by his share in the murder of Cardinal Beton in Scotland. King Henry had rewarded that deed with good money; but the French had imprisoned him in their galleys for it. You would have thought that after two years as a galley-slave the man would be pleased with the post of King’s Chaplain in the now most firmly Protestant country in Europe. But he spent most of his time in bitter quarrels with his fellow-Reformers, with half the Court officials, and even, when he could, with his new patron the Protector. It was plain he could bear no authority but his own. Yet the Duke hesitated to get rid of him. The fellow was a powerful preacher. He had a vein of shrill nagging invective that was all the more telling because of its feminine quality – in fact, it had something in common with the Duchess’s.

‘What do you think of the new Chaplain – John Knox?’ he demanded abruptly of John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, who had just entered, twirling a minute nosegay of single clove pinks, lad’s love and balm of Gilead, in a slender silver
flower-holder
.

‘Neither grateful nor pleasable,’ replied the Earl promptly. He strolled over to the window and looked out. ‘Besides,’ he added over his shoulder, ‘he called me Achitophel in his last sermon.’

The Duke exclaimed ‘Tsa!’ so violently that it sounded like an oath. ‘It’s sheer blasphemy to use the Bible as a
stalking-horse
for opposition to the Government!’

‘He’ll always be in opposition to any Government.’

‘Yes. He’s best as a revolutionary agent. I might send him later into Scotland to stir up revolt against the Government there.’

‘Must it be later?’

The Earl’s voice was low and pleasant; it sounded always as though he were smiling, though he did not in fact often smile. His hair and slight fringe of beard were cut very short, his moustaches very thin in a curved pencilled line. He did not look in the least like a famous soldier, but a fastidious dandy; his clothes of exquisite simplicity, almost monastic in style, no jewels, not even a ring; his delicate eyebrows and fine eyes fixed in a cool stare that held a hint of mockery.

Nor did the new Earl look like one of the ‘Lords sprung from the dunghill’, as the new Duke had unkindly stigmatised him and his fellows. As a matter of fact, his remote ancestry was rather more illustrious than the Duke’s; and his air of patrician calm would never lead one to suppose that his father, Edmund Dudley, had been a clever shady lawyer who made a lot of money for King Henry’s father by hunting up obsolete old laws and imposing huge fines on all who were, quite unconsciously, breaking them. Henry VIII, on coming to the throne as a bright lad of eighteen, had promptly executed him, as a popularity measure; but there was no ill feeling about it. Edmund’s son, John Dudley, had risen steadily at Court; Henry had a high opinion of his ability, created him Viscount Lisle, appointed him Lord High Admiral, and
nominated him as one of the Lords of the Council of Regency for his son. On the King’s death, when most people moved one up, John Dudley was created Earl of Warwick and handed over his post as Lord High Admiral to Tom Seymour, then Admiral of the Fleet.

He was by far the most important figure on the Council after Somerset, and had managed the Scottish campaign rather better than he, but the Duke felt no uneasiness on that score; he had long ago labelled him in his mind as an old friend, and his labels were apt to remain unchanged.

But he was annoyed by the fellow’s idle air; here he was lounging into his room, apparently only to sniff at his posy and remark on the stifling August heat and the stinking steam of the vapours exhaled by the river that wound like a decaying dragon below the open windows. With a curious glee in his gentle voice he called Somerset’s attention to the oily glitter on old Thames’ dark scales, too sluggish for ripples, a slimy pewter colour under the thunder-grey of the sky.

‘Look at the old serpent gliding down to Tower Bridge and Traitors’ Gate,’ he said, ‘so rotten that she is phosphorescent, and faugh!’ He twiddled the miniature bouquet at his nose, ‘Yet she’s swallowed finer bodies than yours or mine, and will swallow more yet, that old serpent.’

The Good Duke flung down his pen. ‘Your fancies may be poetic,’ he rapped out in the tone of an irritable schoolmaster, ‘but I have no time for them. Can you not see that I am engaged on business of the State?’

Dudley flicked a glance across the writing-table; it came to rest on the note Somerset had just written and stuck up in the stand before him ‘Barnaby to be whipped.’

A slow bluish flush crept up above the Good Duke’s beard. ‘The King’s learning,’ he said, ‘is the prime business of the State. We can’t have him writing to foreign princes with mistakes in his Latin syntax.’

He tossed Edward’s letter over to Dudley, who read it with an eyebrow up. ‘We can’t have him writing to foreign princes with declarations of war either,’ he remarked softly.

‘Oh –
that
! I shall tear it up, naturally.’

‘Then why trouble about the syntax?’

The Good Duke groaned. It was impossible to explain a principle. Nobody but himself was capable of understanding one.

He curtly offered his visitor a seat, in the manner of one who has made up his mind to endure interruption, and demanded the reason for it.

‘An unwelcome one, I fear,’ said the suave voice by the window. ‘The House of Commons has just thrown out your Act against the Enclosures of the common lands.’

The Protector was silent. Then he reached for his copy of his Proclamation on the Enclosures and began to read it out. John Dudley sat down. He had heard it before. The pitiful complaints of His Majesty’s poor subjects left him cold. In what far Eden had they not complained?

‘“In time past,”’ read the Protector, ‘“ten, twenty, yes and in some places a hundred or two hundred Christian people have inhabited and kept household, to the replenishing and fulfilling of His Majesty’s realm with faithful subjects for its defence, where now there is nothing kept but sheep and bullocks. All that land which heretofore was tilled and occupied with so many men is now gotten by insatiable
greediness of mind unto one or two men’s hands and scarcely dwelt upon with one poor shepherd. Men are eaten up and devoured and driven from their houses by sheep and bullocks.”’

‘Not original,’ murmured Dudley. ‘Sir Thomas More wrote back in the ’twenties that sheep are eating men.’

‘Even that tax I put on, of 2d. on every sheep owned, hasn’t stopped it.’

‘You can’t put back the clock. The wool trade’s been going on “in time past” for a long time. And it gave England her wealth.’

‘What’s the use of wealth?’

The Earl of Warwick cocked an ear to listen to the hammering of the hundreds of workmen engaged on the building of Somerset House. The Duke of Somerset heard it too. He tapped nervously on the table as though to cover the sound. The Earl coughed sympathetically.

‘Look at the final result!’ said the Duke. He picked up his Proclamation again. Dudley hastily agreed that the final result was deplorable. Hoping to forestall a renewed reading, he remarked that one result was the shortage of man-power in this Scottish war; but the Duke instantly capped it from the Proclamation, ‘“This realm must be defended against the enemy with force of men, not with flocks of sheep and droves of brute beasts.”’

‘The Italian and German troops make a good substitute,’ soothed Dudley.

The Protector, mindful of his talk with Tom, said curtly, ‘I’ve had quite enough of that.’

‘Let’s hope the Scots will too.’ Dudley got up and added
sympathetically, ‘It has not been a lucky session for all of your Reform measures.’

‘For not one of them! The House of Commons have thrown out my Bills to provide for poor children in each town, and to prevent farmers being unjustly turned out of their own land; while the House of Lords reject my Act to prevent the decay of ploughing and growing of crops. Most important of all, my project for the Reform of the Common Law didn’t even reach a second reading in the Commons. Every one of my schemes to provide for the poor has failed.’

‘You are forgetting your Act of Slavery.’

The Protector’s eyes rolled round at him with the look of a wounded stag.

‘Yes. The only one to be passed unanimously by both Houses! The only way in which Parliament would consent to provide for the unemployed.’ And he began to quote his Slavery Act, by heart.

The Earl pulled a scrap of paper on the table towards him and drew a gargoyle face. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘but there have been slaves here in England before now.’

But the Duke went on quoting. The Earl began to scribble.

The Duke never noticed it. ‘At least,’ he said presently, ‘it only applies to the able-bodied. The Act provides for the aged and impotent by collections in church every Sunday.
They
are not slaves.’

‘They’d be no use,’ said the Earl. In a minute or two this fellow would argue himself round, as usual, into
self-justification
.

But instead, ‘Liberty, liberty!’ cried the Duke in a great voice. ‘Is this to be the end of all my hopes to make England
a land where nothing can be profitable that is not godly and honest; nor nothing godly and honest whereby our neighbours and Christian brethren are harmed? But these fat newly rich fellows in Parliament care nothing for their brethren. Is there indeed one honest man amongst them except myself? And you,’ he remembered to add.

‘Parliament represent the rich. Why should they care about the poor?’

‘Then by Heaven!’ (the Protector had actually made an oath) ‘I will not rest until the poor too are represented. I will reform Parliament so that the yeoman, yes and his labourer, shall find a mouthpiece in it.’

Dudley repressed a shudder of that contemptuous distaste with which one recognises symptoms of an abnormal state of mind. Really, Somerset was becoming a public danger as well as nuisance. Reform always led to revolt. And the fellow was working the Duke himself into a frenzy.

With lips white with rage, the Duke burst out, ‘In spite of the devil, of private profit, self-love, money, and such-like devil’s instruments,
it shall go forward
.’

‘Would you go against your own class?’ Dudley asked in carefully gentle reproof. ‘The new landed gentry are making still stronger distinctions between rich and poor. Even the universities are becoming conscious of rank; they are growing so expensive that the yeomen and labourers can no longer afford to send their sons. Absurd as it may seem, I believe that very soon Oxford and Cambridge, yes, and even Eton, will be only for the sons of gentry. Regrettable, but one can’t put back the clock. Your hopes for the future are really only dreams of the past, when any labourer’s son could get the
learning that is now the privilege of the rich. But we must forget all that and live in the present.’

The Duke sighed heavily. There was no time he liked so little.

‘Whatever makes the past or future predominate over the vulgar present,’ he pronounced, ‘advances us in the dignity of thinking beings.’

Dudley laid a friendly hand on his shoulder. Poor old Somerset, he should have been the celibate Master of some college, a thinker, dreamer, idealist.