Young Bess (30 page)

From this haunted pleasure palace on the river his little son rode away at midnight, frail as a feather on his pony, and coughing fretfully in the dark dank October fog. He had to
ride all the way to Windsor – for his safety, the Protector said, though of that Edward was sceptical. It seemed to be entirely for his uncle’s safety.

There at Windsor the Earl of Warwick found him, more disgruntled and becolded than ever.

‘I bight as well be in prison,’ he said; ‘there are do galleries here or gardens to play in.’

Dudley took him out of prison. He gave him his friends to play with again, especially Barney. He gave him sports and Christmas parties and mummings, he took him hunting and shooting and made him feel that soon he would be a man among men. The boy was delighted at the change; he flung himself into sports and exercises – with rather too sudden energy in fact for his delicate physique; and sometimes even cut his church attendance so that the Court preacher was disgusted to find himself preaching to an empty royal chair.

But still that nasty cough, that Edward had caught on the long cold night-ride to Windsor, hung on. Dudley told him not to bother about it, he would soon shake it off, as he had at last shaken off his oppressive guardian uncle.

For the Duke of Somerset was no longer the Protector. Dudley, now created Duke of Northumberland, reigned in his stead.

The Seymours’ mother, the poet Skelton’s Mistress Margery Wentworth, the ‘flower of goodlihead,’ died only a few months after Tom’s death. It was decided not to give her a royal funeral. This was done in order to insult the Duke of Somerset’s mother; nobody seemed to notice that it also insulted the King’s grandmother – not even the King. He did not even record her death in his Journal. And the Duke
himself took it meekly, as he took most things now; people said he was a changed man since his brother’s death, not now in his increased nervous irritability but in his broken spirit.

There was enough, without remorse, to break it, for he had to stand by and watch the utter ruin of all his hopes of social and economic reform, of liberty and religious tolerance, destroyed by the greedy tyranny of Dudley and the new landlords. He had lost not only the power, but much of the will to act. But whether he acted or not, he was naturally the focus point of any opposition to the new rule. And the common people, who had been shocked by his executing his own brother, could now consider that he had paid for it in his swift downfall from power, and remember that the Good Duke had been on their side. So were they now on his side. But they had no power; it was all in the hands of the rich, who were on the side of Dudley, a sensible fellow, especially in his sense of property. And Dudley had the sense to see that an
ex-Protector
was a danger. Even if he didn’t do anything, he was always stirring up the people with his talk of liberty.

To secure his position, Dudley had to strike again, this time to kill. And so, less than two years after Tom Seymour was beheaded, his brother Ned laid down his head on the same block. There was a trial of him on some flimsy charges; he was accused, rather oddly, of trying to secure his position against possible enemies; and of plotting against Dudley, even as Dudley had plotted against him. Dudley himself dared not call this ‘treason.’ But it made no odds. From the first it was clear that the Duke would share the fate to which he had sent his brother.

He met it very differently. Tom died like a tiger, Ned like a gentleman. He behaved perfectly throughout, thanked the
Council on his knees for having given him the open trial that he had denied his brother – though indeed it was only the show of justice that was granted him, for the House had been carefully packed. And he made a beautiful before-execution speech which moved all the watching crowds to a passion of pity, both for him and for themselves.

They surged forward; a deep muttering growl rose and thickened the air. He had them in his sway in this hour of death as he had never had them in his life. They knew now whatever his faults, crimes even, he had taken thought for them, had wished them well; as none had done of the pack of greedy wolves who were now pulling him down. He had but to lift his hand in sign to them and they would rescue him.

But he did not do it. Why should he give the signal that would lead many of them to their deaths, in order to escape his own? It was little he had been able to do for them, prevented by the greed and ambition of others; but also by his own. ‘Let me alone’ – yes, alone to die – ‘for I am not better than my fathers.’

And he did not even remember in that hour that he had at least wished to be better.

Jan
. 22. ‘The Duke of Somerset had his head cut off upon Tower Hill between eight and nine this morning,’ wrote King Edward briskly in his Journal.

Earlier he had entered all the charges against his eldest uncle with considerable satisfaction, especially his ‘following his own opinion and doing all by his authority.’

He had shown indifference over his Uncle Tom’s fate; this time it was an active animosity, for the Duke’s execution was
both suggested and warranted under Edward’s own hand. The whirligig of time had brought a strange revenge for King Edward V and his brother, the two small princes murdered by their uncle in the Tower, whose fate King Henry had remembered with dread for his own son.

Edward VI, nearly seventy years later, brought about the death of his two uncles.

It did not weigh on him. At a shooting-match shortly after, when Dudley shouted, ‘Good shot, my liege!’ the boy brightly answered, ‘Not as good as yours, when you shot off my Uncle Somerset’s head.’

He was painted standing with his legs rather apart, both thumbs in his belt and the fingers of one hand resting on his dagger, in exactly the same stance as his father, with the same argumentative stare, the same thrust of the dogmatic under-lip. This conscious likeness between the slight boy and his tremendous sire gave amusement to many, but also some alarm.

He was enjoying life: the matches and tourneys that his new guardian arranged to dispel any ‘dampy thoughts’ about his former guardian’s fall (but after that
shooting-match
Dudley realised he need not have worried); the visit of the little Queen of Scots’ mother, the stately and gracious Queen Dowager, whom Mr Knox in his rugged fashion called ‘an old cow,’ and Edward with schoolboy wit amplified it to the Dow Cow. He showed off his music and dancing to her, and, which he enjoyed still more, his performance on horseback at Prisoners’ Base and Running at the Ring, and in shooting, where he was able to record proudly that though he lost at Rounds he won at Rovers.

To Barney he wrote gleefully of musters of a thousand
men-at-arms, ‘so horsed as was never seen. We think you shall see in France none like.’

For now that his little King seemed free at last to enjoy life and apparent health, Barney too had felt free to follow his ambition and go to France. Edward had generously done his utmost for him in this, got him appointed as one of the French King’s Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, and made up for his absence by writing him long eager letters into which he put far more of himself than into his Journal.

To Barney indeed he showed what he had never done to anyone else, an affection that could rise to sympathetic imagination. For while Barney went to the French wars, Edward went a delightful royal progress round the country, staying at the houses of his chief nobles, fêted, entertained with dancing and sports and hunting, and ‘whereas you have been occupied in killing your enemies, in long marches in extreme heat, in sore skirmishings, we have been occupied in killing of wild beasts, in pleasant journeys, in good fare, in viewing of fair countries…and goodly houses where we were marvellously – yea rather excessively – banquetted!’

And Barney wrote back about Romish processions with crosses and banners in Paris, and street rows between French and English soldiers; and soothed Edward’s anxiety for his morals by promising that ‘as for the avoiding of the company of ladies, I will assure your Highness I will not come into their company unless I do wait upon the French King’; and always ended, ‘Other news have I none.

The meanest and most obligest of your subjects,

B
ARNABY
F
ITZPATRICK
.’

Then the young man got a letter from the boy more reassuring than any other, in the casual cheerful pluck with which Edward dismissed a recent illness: ‘We have been a little troubled with smallpox which has prevented us from writing; but now we have shaken that quite away.’

But it was his death-knell. It left him weakened; his persistent cough, that ill legacy from his last ride with his Uncle Somerset, had come back worse than ever; it got no better as summer came on, and it was evident that he was gravely ill. Barney instantly threw up his promising career abroad to hurry back to him.

He found the fifteen-year-old boy, who had had to give up his new-found triumphs in sport, indomitably interested in all the recent marvels of scientific discovery. He had been studying the cause of comets and rainbows; he showed Barney his geographic and astronomic instruments, the magnetic needle and astrolobe which had been explained to him by old Sebastian Cabot, the Emperor’s Pilot-Major of the Indies.

Once again Edward was not going to be outdone by the Emperor; he proposed to make Cabot the Grand Pilot of England.

‘The New World ought to be English,’ he told Barney indignantly; for it was the Sheriff of Bristol, Richard Ameryk, who’d paid a pension to Sebastian’s father, John Cabot, for his voyages of discovery, and that was why people were calling the place America, and
not
, as foreigners tried to make out, because a wretched ship’s chandler called Amerigo Vespucci had happened to get there too, within a fortnight of old Father Cabot. ‘I’ll publish the whole facts to the world – the exact sums my grandfather told Ameryk to pay him—’

‘Ah, I wouldn’t do that,’ said Barney with a careless glance at the accounts that Edward was flourishing at him from his bed, ‘
£
40, over three years, doesn’t sound much these days for a royal pension!’

The boy gave him a weak thump on the arm. ‘All you Irish are cynics. I can’t help it if my grandfather was a skinflint. My father made up for that. So will I. And I’m showing what
my
discoverers can do to rival the Emperor’s.’

This very day he was sending out three ships under Sir Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor to find a
North-East
passage through the Arctic to Cathay. It would be a voyage through ‘perils of ice, intolerable colds,’ but years ago the merchant Robert Thorne had told King Henry that it was possible, for a man might ‘sail so far that he came at last to the place where there was no night at all, but a continual light and brightness of the sun shining clearly upon the huge and mighty sea.’

‘And,’ said the sick boy, flushing with the triumph of man’s unconquerable spirit, ‘he told my father “there is
no land unhabitable nor sea unnavigable
.”’

He spoke only of Robert Thorne, whom he had not seen. He did not wish to remember his uncle the Lord Admiral and the sunlight flashing on the gold lacing of his coat as he stood there by the window of this very room in the palace of Greenwich, and pointed at the river Thames flowing down below towards the sea; and said, ‘There lies the path of England’s glory. Take it, and you’ll travel far.’

The Admiral had gone, with his great laugh and promise of splendour and power; but the river flowed on.

From its shores a murmur was rising that grew into a
distant roar; it came nearer, louder, ripping out in great tearing gusts of sound, echoing up from the water like a drum.

‘They’re coming downstream. Look out of the windows. Can you see them yet?’ Edward was leaning forward from his pillows.

His old nurse Mother Jack came up and patted them and pressed him back on to them again. ‘There, there now, don’t you get excited. They won’t be here yet. Your Highness will know all about it when they come, the brave fellows, though indeed I think they’d better have stayed at home.’

Barney put his head out of the window, rested his elbows on the sill, and looked upstream, the wind behind him from the sea blowing his hair before his eyes. In the brilliant early summer sunshine the Thames glittered like a diamond ribbon, between its shores that were dark with the swarming crowds thronging to see the start of this wild venture into the terrors of the Outland ocean; where no night was, and rocks of ice as high as mountains and gleaming like sapphire and emerald came drifting down to crush the ships that were no bigger than walnut shells beside them.

Nearer and nearer came the hurly-burly of that mighty cheering as the three ships hove into sight, towed downstream by small boats rowed by mariners in sky-blue cloth. And in answer, more sailors were running up the rigging and shouting till the sky rang with the noise. Now the guns of the Palace were booming out their God-speed to them.

The Courtiers were already clustered on the tops of the towers, the Privy Council had run to the windows of the other rooms in the Palace.

‘Hurrah! hurrah!’ they all shouted, even old Father Russell of the snowy beard, even the douce quiet secretary Mr Cecil. The King was all but sobbing, ‘I
must
see them. It’s my venture. Their chief ship is called after me, the
Edward Bonaventure
.’

Barney carried him to the window; it was terribly easy, his weight was so light. Mother Jack tut-tutted and fussed with blankets, but they stayed there till the crowds had swept shouting on, leaving the river banks green and bare; and in the distance the three ships grew misty on that sparkling river, broadening out towards the sea. They sailed out on it, to discover, not the passage to Cathay but the White Sea, and then Moscow, where the great Tsar Ivan the Terrible waited to do them honour in a long garment of beaten gold with an imperial crown upon his head.

But only one of the three ships, the
Edward Bonaventure
, was to achieve this and return to England.