Young Bess (4 page)

Was it because he had already got rid of three wives out of six for the King, and might be required to get rid of a fourth? The notion came to her on a sudden heartstop of dismay as
she realised what prompted it, for she could hear her father’s and stepmother’s voices – arguing! How could the Queen be such a goose? ‘Whichever goose roasts’ – the King always said he liked nothing so well as a good theological argument; that he liked women to be intelligent – but surely anyone would know that he only liked an argument when he got the better of it; and however intelligent a woman might be, she must be less so than himself. Queen Catherine was arguing the case for translating the Bible into English; Henry was shouting that, in consequence, ‘that precious jewel, the Word of God, was being disputed, sung, and jangled in every alehouse and tavern,’ which showed how he was getting the worst of it, for he was only quoting from his last speech in Parliament, since he could not think of a fresher answer.

Catherine evidently began to get some sense of her danger, for without any crude change of subject she adroitly introduced some flattery on the great and beneficial changes Henry had made in England’s religion. But that wouldn’t do; couldn’t she see that the King had never wanted to introduce any changes in religion, that he was as ardent and conservative a Papist as anybody – with this one exception, that he alone was to be Pope.

And behind all Bess’s anxiety was the terrifying fact that the Queen’s friend, Lady Anne Askew, had been arrested for denouncing the Mass, and had been tortured in the Tower more than once. Was it an attempt to make her implicate the Queen? Whatever happened, Catherine must not plead the cause of her friend now – let her be tortured, racked, burnt, but if the name of Anne Askew were mentioned now, it would be the death-knell of Catherine Parr.

It didn’t look as though Catherine would get the chance to mention it, for Henry was doing all the talking now, watching her out of the corner of a hot, intemperate eye while he threw out some ominous chaff: ‘So you’ve become a learned doctor, have you, Kate? You’re here to instruct us, we take it, not to be instructed or directed by us?’

Kate quickly protested, but, unheeding, he began to roll his great head and mutter, ‘That’s a pretty business when women turn clerics; a fine comfort for me in my old age, to be taught by my wife!’

It was going to happen – it was happening now – nothing could stop it. Bess shut her lips tight to keep from screaming aloud. Could nothing else happen to prevent it? Why couldn’t the French sail up
now
and attack? More fervently than any stout fellow of Norfolk, she prayed silently for a sight of their foes. ‘Oh God, let them come and invade England
now
, quick!’

‘Anne Askew!’ The fatal name had been spoken, it crashed on the air like the crack of thunder. But it was not the Queen who had uttered it; it was the King, accusing her of having sent the condemned woman money and promises of help, of having received heretical books from her in times past, of – would the next word be – ‘Treason!’?

Bess opened her lips and screamed.

They all turned towards her, hurried towards her, cried out what was the matter. Now she would have to find an answer. Had she twisted her foot? Seen a mermaid or a sea-serpent? She would only be scolded and sent below, and the King’s rage increased by so momentary an interruption. She screamed again, on a high note of childish excitement, and pointed:
‘The French! Their ships – far out to sea – coming up like clouds!’

So intense was the conviction in her voice that for an instant they believed her. Then, as no confirmation came from the crow’s nest, they said she must have imagined it and taken the white clouds on the horizon for the sails of the French fleet. Her best retreat would be to look childishly stupid and sulky, admit she had been frightened, perhaps even shed a few tears. But she decided to brazen it out. ‘I
did
see the ships – for a moment. They’ve disappeared now. Perhaps they saw us and sailed away.’

Henry’s infantile eyebrows puckered in his vast face. His just anger had been interrupted by this false alarm, and now surged back, redoubled. ‘The girl’s lying!’ he roared. ‘The French have been reported miles away. She could never have seen them.’

He looked at his daughter and saw her mother’s face, the big forehead, the clever bright eyes, the silly little rosebud of a mouth that had smiled so sweetly at him – and at others. ‘Take the little bastard away!’ he shouted,

But at that moment Elizabeth had one of those stupendous strokes of luck that were enough to accuse her as well as her mother of witchcraft.

A shout came ringing over the sea and was echoed by another. The alarm had been raised in good earnest, the French fleet sighted, sailing straight towards Portsmouth.

Elizabeth was disappointed in her first invasion. She had thought they would stay on the flagship, that she would have a first-hand experience of a sea-fight, that somehow she would manage to dress up as a sailor and save Tom Seymour’s life. Then for once he would take her seriously, he would take her hand, and look deep into her eyes and say – what
would
he say?

It didn’t matter, for it didn’t happen, none of it happened.

That glittering July sea and the proud ships floating over it all vanished like sea-spray as far as the royal family party were concerned; in no time they all bustled off the flagship and on to a very fast pinnace and made for the shore and then inland. It was not Bess’s idea of the way to take an invasion. She had seen her father ride off to the French wars last year, in a suit of armour that two slight young men could easily have got into together, and hoisted on to an enormous
dapple-grey
Dutch stallion, seventeen hands high, with white feathered hoofs and flowing white mane and a little angry red eye, not unlike his rider’s. They had needed no army behind them, she had thought, to strike terror into the foe.

But now – was this the way he had fought when he got there? She was told that Kings and Queens must not adventure
their persons like common soldiers and sailors. She was not convinced. She told Tom Seymour with a sniff that the flagship had better be re-christened ‘The Great Hurry’!

He scrutinised her narrowly. ‘How could you, on deck, have seen the French fleet before any lookout in the crow’s nest had seen it?’

‘I don’t know. My eyes are better than theirs, I suppose.’

‘Even your bright eyes couldn’t see them before they came up over the edge of the horizon. Haven’t your tutors taught you that the world is round?’

‘Then they must be wrong, and the world is flat.’

‘So that’s flat. You’d shape the whole world differently to suit yourself!’

‘Why not? My father does.’

‘You’re his daughter, no doubt about that!’ he chuckled.

‘
I’d
have stayed and seen the fight,’ said Bess. ‘I’d not have let the French land on the Isle of Wight.’

But the French accomplished nothing by that; they soon had to take to their ships again, and after a short engagement were driven back out to sea. The fortune-tellers were now saying they had known all along that this was not the invasion England had to fear; her real danger, worse than any she had faced since the Normans landed, would not come for more than forty years, in the summer when there would be four noughts in the date, for an 8 is a double nought, one on top of the other, so the year ’88 would be quadruply unlucky. Bess asked why the unlucky noughts shouldn’t be for the invaders. ‘Anyway it’s naught to me,’ she said, for who cared what would happen more than forty years hence, when she would be an old woman, if indeed she could bear to live as
long as then? And anyway there could be small danger from foreign ships since the great French Armada had such poor success; everyone was boasting of England’s security behind her sea-walls; a blunt fellow even said as much to the Emperor Charles V in Spain, and his son, that cold, formal youth, Prince Philip.

‘Young Cheese-face,’ Henry still persisted in calling the Emperor, the nephew of his first wife, ever since Charles’s visit to England, to be betrothed to the Princess Mary, then a pretty child of six, who had not shared her father’s view of her prospective bridegroom’s long pale face and wedge-shaped chin, very like a slab of cheese. She had given an ardent
hero-worship
to her cousin, the young monarch on whose lands, her mother had told her, the sun never set; and who, still more important, was a very devout Christian. But the betrothal came to nothing; all that was over twenty years ago, and now the Emperor Charles was mobilising against the Protestant princes in his Empire, so that, in spite of his confidence in England’s splendid isolation, Henry was finding orthodoxy advisable, and the Queen’s broadmindedness untimely. (Besides, she had not borne him an heir. ‘Impossible! she is so virtuous!’ said the wags.) So Anne Askew was burnt for denouncing the Mass; though the following month Henry tried to get the King of France to join with him in abolishing it. Bess found politics difficult to understand. Anyway, they were now at peace with France, and the King spoke so beautifully on charity and concord to his Parliament that they all wept.

But Parliamentarians’ tears, and the King’s charity and concord, did not lessen Bess’s anxiety one jot, and there came
a moment in the garden when the confirmation of it stared her in the face, stared up at her from the path, a sickly white paper scrawled with black writing which told her at one glance that the King had finally given over his faithfully devoted wife to the power of the beast. It was an indictment of Catherine Parr, and Henry had set his name to it.

No sooner had Bess seen it than the Chancellor Wriothesley, who had been Chancellor Cromwell’s secretary and helped work his fall, came hurrying back between the clipped yew hedges.

‘A paper!’ he panted, ‘a scrap of paper – has Your Highness seen it?’

Bess shook her head, lifting wide blue eyes to his, and pointing at what she had apparently all this time been staring – a butterfly that had perched on her bright shoe, mistaking it for a flower.

‘Oh, you have disturbed him!’ she exclaimed reproachfully as it flew away. ‘A paper, did you say? Is it important?’

Mr Wriothesley had already stuffed it into his sleeve, violently cursing the tailors who could not invent any safer receptacle in men’s clothes, while women went hung round with pockets.

He departed as fast as, or rather faster than courtesy permitted; a beast padding away in his soft broad velvet slippers, and the little slits of satin over the toes like claws in the sunlight, Bess thought, standing there stock still until he disappeared.

The garden was all still round her, cut into sunlight and sharp shadows, and the bees hummed loud, or was it the blood throbbing in her ears?

Then, with a glance to right and left of her, she picked up her skirts and ran, ran into the Palace to her stepmother and gasped out what she had seen.

Catherine Parr sat stunned; she neither moved nor spoke nor wept. Bess despaired. No silent grief would move the King. At last, through blue lips, Catherine moaned, ‘What shall I do? What shall I do?’

Bess told her.

‘You must cry, cry, cry, and loud; so that he’ll hear, so that he can’t hear anything else. Do it in the room next his. Shriek. Be hysterical, mad. Go on for hours and hours and hours.’

Catherine did. A clamour of weeping and howling next door disturbed the King; he sent to stop it, but it went on; he sent to ask the reason for it, and was told the Queen was distressed because she feared she had displeased him.

That brought him himself; he told her he could not bear her to cry, which was true, especially after three hours. But he spoke kindly; he got her to stop; then, after a little more comforting, he went on with their last theological argument. But the mouse avoided the cat’s paw this time; his wife would not discuss religion; she referred it and all other questions to his omnipotent wisdom; if she had ever seemed to do otherwise, it had only been to pass the time and take his mind off his bad leg.

‘Then, sweetheart, we are perfect friends again!’ said Henry; and the Chancellor was sent packing with a flood of abuse when he called about the Queen’s arrest. There was no arrest. The crisis had passed, and Henry yawned, when he did not swear at his bad leg. Perfect friendship is not as stimulating as discussion.

Life was growing dull and depressing. Old enemies were dying, and that is often worse than the death of old friends. Martin Luther died, far away in Germany. When Henry was a brilliant young man he had written a theological treatise confuting Luther’s heresies, and the low fellow had replied with his usual bad taste. ‘Squire Harry wishes to be God,’ wrote the miner’s son, ‘and do what he pleases.’

The Pope, on the other hand, had shown his appreciation by giving Henry his title ‘Defender of the Faith’: ‘F.D.’ He thought of putting it on all the coins of his realm. Now there was no one to confute – except the Pope, whose latest title for him was the ‘Son of Perdition and Satan.’

Worse even than Luther’s death, they said François I of France was dying. Ever since he could remember, Henry had been an envious rival, a frequent foe, an occasional boon companion of Foxnose François. It was impossible to imagine life without this peppery stimulus.

Worse still, François was three years younger than Henry, was as tall and strong, had lived as well (though it was doubtful whether he or any other man had ever eaten as much), and yet here he was, petering out, surely long before his appointed span of years, like a feeble old man, a premature death’s-head warning at the feast of life. For if life were not still a feast, what was it? Luther was dead, François might be dying, and he wasn’t feeling very well himself; but thank God there was still good eating and drinking, and not all his doctors could keep him from it, especially when it came to the Christmas and Twelfth Night feasts.

All the Royal Family were together for these festivals, and most of the cousins too, with one notable and, to Henry,
infuriating omission. The Queen of Scots, four years old this December, was still absent from the hospitable board of her great-uncle who had offered his only son in betrothal to this fatherless brat, Queen of such a beggarly kingdom that his Ambassador had nearly burst out laughing at the poverty of the baby’s coronation in Stirling.

But there was one bit of news from Scotland that had put Henry in high good humour; the new Scots leaders of the Reformed Religion had at last succeeded in murdering the great Cardinal Beton, the right-hand man of the French Queen-Dowager, the Regent of Scotland. Henry had been giving advance payment for this work for years; now at last, in his palace of Greenwich just before Christmas, he heard from the murderers’ own lips how they had stabbed the enemy of Christ as he sat in his chair, and hung his body over the wall of his castle at St Andrews.

Henry, as he made his final payments, reflected that it had been well worth the money. Much as he disliked these ‘ministers of the true religion,’ they would work for Scotland’s alliance with England against the age-old Franco-Scottish alliance favoured by Cardinal Beton and his Regent of Scotland, that damned obstinate, suspicious-minded Frenchwoman who would not entrust her little daughter to his tender avuncular care.

Edward, now nine years old, a pretty boy with smooth flaxen hair, did not want to be betrothed to a baby. He would rather, if he had to have a cousin, marry the Lady Jane Grey, a year older than himself, though much smaller, who often helped him with his lessons. But Jane in her turn thought him more suited to one of her little sisters. She was undergoing a
rather solemn adoration for Elizabeth, so much older, by three years, than herself, and wearing her cleverness with so gay and insouciant an air.

Jane was King Henry’s great-niece, standing in the same relationship to him as the baby Queen of Scots. For Henry had had two sisters, the Tudor Roses they were called when in the splendour of their sumptuous white and red, their blue eyes and golden hair. The elder, the Princess Margaret, had married that strange, beautiful tortured creature, James IV of Scotland, and made a few gallant efforts, but only briefly, to live up to it. When he was killed on Flodden Field, her son, James V, was a year old; when he in his turn died
broken-hearted
from defeat by the English, his daughter Mary had become Queen of Scots at five days old.

Henry had been much fonder of his younger sister, Mary Rose, who was lovelier and merrier than Margaret, and did not grow too fat like her; nor did she plague him with long tearful letters and demands for money. For all that, he had made Mary Rose, at eighteen, marry the invalid old French King Louis XII instead of the man of her choice. But Mary had the Tudor way of getting what she wanted; in a few months she had danced the adoring old Frenchman into his grave, avoided the proposals of his young successor, François I, and married her beefy English duke.

Her granddaughter Jane Grey had inherited none of the glowing colours and bouncing vitality of the two Tudor Roses; she was tiny and pale, with some fair freckles on her straight little nose, which her mother unavailingly scrubbed with all sorts of concoctions, but they remained, with something of Jane’s own persistency. Her eyes and forehead
gave promise of a certain grave beauty, and beneath it an unexpected force of character.

Her younger sisters, Catherine and Mary, were so small that their mother was afraid they might be dwarfs.

Taking Elizabeth’s hand before the banquet, Jane whispered as demurely as if she was saying grace, that thank God her parents were away, for it was hell when they were at home. Many children might think it dashing and modern to refer to their parents’ company as hell; not so Jane, that best of all good little girls. Elizabeth was as startled as if a mouse had sworn. ‘The creep-mice’ was her name for the three little Grey cousins; could this one be a shrew-mouse? She looked down at the meek little face under its smoothly parted hair, and saw it set and tense.

‘Your mother is very strict, isn’t she?’ Bess whispered back sympathetically.

‘She never stops scolding, pinching, and slapping me. However hard I work, it makes no odds. You are lucky to have only a stepmother.’

And a murderously inclined father? Yes, on the whole Bess thought she was, since he forgot about her for long spaces together, whereas Jane’s mother never forgot her eldest daughter; in fact, the Countess of Suffolk never stopped thinking; it was a mistake. The Grey mare, Tom Seymour called her, and said she stood two hands higher than her little weak mule of a husband – also broader, for she had the Tudor tendency to fat, and hunted like fury to escape it, and not, like her uncle, King Henry, for love of the sport. But nothing that she did would be for its own sake. She rode ambition harder than any horse, and had great plans for Jane, that was
evident. No doubt she had determined to marry Jane to Edward and make her Queen of England, thought Bess with a sharp twinge of exasperation that she had not been born a boy. For then she would be King before Edward or Mary, who had been put back into the Succession, after Edward, a year ago; and then, too, her mother would not have been beheaded, ‘and
she
would not have slapped and pinched me, especially if I had been a boy.’