Young Bess (3 page)

And the months went on passing and Cat gave no sign of bearing a child.

But on the whole he was in a sunny humour, so much so that he quite forgot his awkwardness with Bess and treated her once again as his especial favourite, so that the child came under his wayward, extraordinary spell, and saw how it worked on others; they might be baffled, thwarted, exasperated, even terrified or loathing, but, when he chose, they could not resist him. Nor could Bess. She tingled with triumph when he laughed at her bright answers and quoted them to the Court as remarkable specimens of childish wit. It was a thrilling sport, this answering back; she knew that she must go about it as warily as if ‘offering a coin to an elephant,’ for she could never be sure if the offer would be accepted with a slap of his thigh that sounded as though he were thumping a cushion, and a delighted roar that he would write and tell that to old Foxnose François himself, by God so he would! Or else a sudden terrifying knitting of those infantile eyebrows, a pursing of the little slit of a mouth, a narrow glance like the thrust of a stiletto, and the sharp command to get out of his presence for an impudent little bastard. ‘By God you go too far!’

There came a dreadful day when she went so far that she never came back for a whole year, and never knew what she had said to put him in such a lasting rage. But that was after
he had become indifferent again, sunk in gloom and fat, his cheeks grey and flabby, and had a horrible tendency to burst into tears in front of everybody – for it was after he had had Cat Howard beheaded for adultery.

‘It is no more the time to dance,’ they told Cat when they came to arrest her, and sent away her musicians. They took her to the Tower, the royal palace, fortress, prison, where she had slept before her Coronation, as her cousin Nan Bullen had slept before hers; but this time she went in by the Traitors’ Water Gate, as Nan Bullen had done the second time she went there, and like Cat, left it only for the block.

‘It won’t be hard to find a nickname for me,’ Nan had giggled with desperate gallantry. ‘I shall be called Anne
Sans-Tête
!’ and she had put her hands round her long slender throat and promised the executioner an easy task. ‘They might make ballads of me now,’ she said, ‘but there is no one left to make them now they’ve killed my brother. Oh yes, there is my cousin Tom Wyatt – but he is in the Tower too.’ There had been a vein of wild poetry in Nan herself, a living echo to the art of her brother and cousin.

But the people did not make ballads of her, they did not like her enough. Their legends of her were not pretty; they said she had tried to poison the Princess Mary; that she had a rudimentary sixth finger on her left hand, though so tiny that few ever noticed, and that it was a teat to suckle her devil’s imps who told her how to bewitch the King. In any case, she was an upstart who had worked and schemed and waited for six years to oust the Good Queen Katherine of Aragon and her daughter Mary, the true heir to the throne; she had been hard and sharp and tyrannised over everyone, even the King;
had loved to crack her whip at him and show her power; she had met him at a dance, and a pretty dance she had led him ever since – so they said when, for her too, it was no more the time to dance.

She had been unpopular, and that was the real reason she died; and her daughter knew this by the time her gay,
kind-hearted
cousin Cat Howard met the same fate, while still in her teens.

Bess was eight when this happened; nine when she offended her father and was sent away from Court; ten when she returned again at the entreaty of yet another stepmother, another Queen Cat, no wild heedless kitten this time, but her motherly Pussy-Cat Purr, as Bess instantly called her.

Would this one stay? Bess passionately hoped so. She had stayed two whole years by now, a record in the child’s experience. She never flirted with anyone else, she was wise and kind and tactful, but could anyone ever be tactful enough with the King? She had found that she herself could not; and Bess had a good opinion, and with reason, of her own tact. And Queen Catherine had given no sign of bearing him an heir, and everyone hoped for a baby Duke of York to follow the little Prince of Wales – ‘in case.’ It was the lack of direct male heirs to the throne that had torn and ruined the country with the Wars of the Roses in the last century. To secure the Succession, Bess knew this to be the one unswerving purpose behind her father’s murderous philanderings.

She had noticed the sudden hush, the shiver of excited apprehension that seized the gay rollicking girls of the Court when the King’s gaze fell on one of them a trifle longer and more weightily than it was wont, ‘Was the King about to seek
a new wife?’ The whisper would run like wildfire through the Court, and following it in the minds of all, though unspoken – how soon would yet another Queen be told that ‘it was no more the time to dance’?

She watched her stepmother with a solicitude that was positively maternal; she was watching her so now, on the deck of the royal flagship, as they walked up and down in the wake of Great Harry. The men were talking of the danger of invasion – a nice safe subject, she considered; one could hardly go wrong over that. In fact, it put all the men in a good humour, as usual. Her magnificent Howard cousin, the young Earl of Surrey, the soldier-poet, blazing in scarlet from head to foot, was saying in his cool insolent drawl that all the men between sixteen and sixty had been called up along the coasts, and could be called out at an hour’s notice; his father, the Duke of Norfolk, that lean old wolf, was snapping his jaws in a hungry grin as he told how all his stout fellows of Norfolk had sent a deputation to him begging him that ‘if the French come, for God’s sake bring us between the sea and them that we may fight them before they get back to their ships.’ God’s body, that was the spirit!

Tom Seymour said it was sheer folly of the French to bring galleys from Marseilles, and barges – they would all be boarded as easily as jumping off a log. At which Edward Seymour drily remarked that they had three hundred tall ships as well.

Tom flung back his head and shouted with laughter, ‘D’you think I’d forgotten their tall ships? They’d no reason to forget ours when I sailed slap through their blockade and
revictualled
our garrison at Boulogne under their noses.’

‘Braggart!’ muttered Edward, and for an instant the two brothers looked daggers at each other; but just then the King’s voice boomed out like a foghorn:

‘We whipped them by land and sea last year, and by God we’ll do it again.’

Certainly an invasion was the best thing to talk about. And next to that, the Scots. The King had beaten them last year too. But the Scots were not quite so good, for they would not stay beaten. He (or rather Norfolk) had smashed their whole nation years ago at Flodden, where his brother-in- law, King James IV, had got killed together with most of his nobles; he had smashed them again about a couple of years ago at Solway Moss when his nephew, young King James V, died of a broken heart from his defeat; and since then Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, had destroyed Melrose Abbey and Dryburgh, and 7 monasteries, 5 market towns, 243 villages, 13 mills and 3 hospitals in one district alone. But still the unspeakable villains would not stay smashed; though ruled only by James’s French widow, Mary of Guise, that very same tall lady who had had the effrontery to refuse King Henry’s offer of marriage with an unseemly joke about the smallness of her neck, and to prefer his red-headed rascal of a nephew to himself. She was now refusing his offers of marriage for her infant daughter Mary to his little son Edward, or rather (for she would have agreed to the marriage without his conditions) she was refusing to send her baby away from her to be brought up at the English Court under the charge of her great-uncle who had caused the death of that baby’s father and grandfather; such ungrateful, unnatural, unwomanly behaviour made Henry purple with rage every time he issued
orders to his armies to raze Edinburgh and all the Border cities to the ground, exterminate every man, woman and child in them, and above all seize the person of the infant Queen of Scots. But she had not yet been caught, although she had had to be hurried away into lonely mountain fastnesses to escape. It was early to begin adventure, very early to be a queen, almost as soon as she was born. Elizabeth felt a thrill of envy for the tiny mountain princess whose mother was guarding her so indomitably.

Here came the gentle Archbishop Cranmer, his heavy sagging cheeks more yellow even than usual, for he had just been seasick. Bess detested his soft voice and nervous eyes, even as her mother had done. He had helped Nan Bullen to the Crown, but done nothing to hinder her from the block; his ‘former good opinion of her prompted him to think her innocent,’ so he wrote to the King; but then ‘his knowledge of the King’s prudence and justice induced him to think her guilty.’ Such balanced casuistry had echoed down the years, even to Nan’s little daughter.

Henry flung out a great wave of charm at the Archbishop’s approach, and a padded arm like a silken bolster round his shoulder, sweeping him in his stride ahead of the others.

‘Aha, my chaplain, I’ve news for you. I know now who is the greatest heretic in Kent!’

The Archbishop’s eyes seemed to bolt out of his head like a startled rabbit’s. For an instant Bess thought he was going to be sick again, on the royal sleeve. And no wonder, for Henry, watching him sideways with some amusement out of the poached eyes set flat on his cheeks, was twitting him with his own words; had he, or had he not, burst out to his Chapter at
Canterbury, ‘You will not leave your old Mumpsimuses, but I’ll make you repent it!’

‘Old Mumpsimuses,’ the King pointed out, was not the way an archbishop ought to refer to the ancient holy forms of religion; it was small wonder that the Chapter had retaliated by sending out an accusation of heresy against him and his chaplains. And from the very sleeve that was now enfolding the victim’s neck in the affectionate grip of a grizzly bear Henry produced the paper of the accusation, while in a jocular aside he reminded his friend that three heretics had lately been burnt alive on Windsor Green: ‘And what do you say to that, my old Mumpsimus?’

Cranmer had so much to say that the King quickly cut him short, and Norfolk seized his chance to cut in. He shared Bess’s feelings about the Archbishop. Cat Howard had been Norfolk’s niece as well as Nan Bullen, he had worked for her marriage to the King as hard as he knew. And then that sneaking Lutheran fellow, who had picked up a wife in Germany, as well as a lot of these poisonous new revolutionary notions, had gone and destroyed all his work by getting poor Cat beheaded, just as Nan had been, and the whole family had shared in the disgrace for a time.

‘For my part,’ he growled virtuously, ‘I never read the Scriptures and never will. It was merry in England before this new learning came up, but now every ploughboy thinks he’s as good as the priest – and maybe he is, seeing what some priests are!’

He glared at the Archbishop, who weakly averted his gaze. Henry, cocking an amused little gooseberry eye at Norfolk, called out, ‘Paws off there! Down – good dog, down! You got
your teeth into a Cardinal when you shogged off Wolsey – must you worry an Archbishop too?’

‘God’s body, Your Majesty, I only meant that I wish everything were just the same as it used to be in the good old days. New ideas indeed!’ His glare had swivelled round on to Edward Seymour, who was of the advanced party and eager for reform in politics as well as religion. ‘New ideas – and a brand-new peer to lead ’em! All this fine talk of the rights of the people – rank revolution, that’s all it amounts to,’ he snarled at Seymour, but the King clapped a hand on his shoulder.

‘No more of that now, or you’ll be giving us one of your Council speeches till we all get lost in your thirdlys and fourthlys.’ He turned to his anxiously waiting Archbishop, but only to deal him some heavyhanded chaff about his wife. Was it true that Cranmer had had her smuggled from Germany into England in a packing-case which some careless porter had placed upside down, so that she had had to scream to be rescued? ‘There’s a fine tale of a wife tails up! Well, well, I owe a couple or so of my wives to your services, so no doubt you think I should wink at yours, but it’s a big wink that will cover an archbishop’s wife boarded up in a box. Old Wolsey had as fine a mistress as money could buy, but that was all correct and above-board – not under the boards!’

Cranmer became incoherent in his denials and protestations; he would not dream of evading the law against married clergy, he had never seen his wife since he came to England to be Archbishop – at least, not, not—

‘Not in a packing-case, hey? Or did you send her packing?’

Like some huge cat with a shivering mouse, he played with
the terrified little man, enjoying his discomfiture and the roars of laughter from Norfolk and the others. Just as Cranmer was certain that the blow would fall on him both for heresy and illegal matrimony, Henry suddenly returned to the former charge and rumbled out, ‘That little matter of your Chapter’s complaints is easily handled. I’ll appoint a commission to examine the charges – and put you at the head of it!
And
help you with the answers. I’ve not forgotten my theology. That will cook their goose for them. So whichever goose roasts, it won’t be you.’

His hearty friendliness made Cranmer almost blubber with thankfulness; it made his small daughter grow thoughtful. The Queen was still with the two men, though Henry had outstripped the rest of the company, but he had beckoned her on, so he must wish her to hear this conversation. Bess they did not notice; she was, indeed, at some distance and looking out to sea as though absorbed in the other ships, but her sharp ears had been listening acutely. Why was her father so kind to old Mumpsimus? (Yes, that was the perfect name for him and his meek bag face – a mouse with the mumps!) Henry had, as it happened, a warm and affectionate respect for Cranmer’s disinterested love of learning and his lack of ambition, but as these qualities did not appeal to Bess, she discounted them. And the King had been angry enough, so she had heard, when he had first received the accusation of his Archbishop’s toying with heresy. But then someone had said Cranmer was too useful for the King to lose him. How useful?