But thank heaven there was no more time for thinking. Edward had to be dressed in his best clothes and ride in state through the city to the royal Palace of the Tower, where all new Kings had to stay for the few weeks before they were crowned. And as soon as he had ridden off on his white pony, looking very small and solemn among all the attendant nobles, the Queen pounced upon Bess, and carried her off with her, with hardly any preparation or packing, to the Manor House at Chelsea, which King Henry had had built as a nursery for his children and then presented to Queen Catherine.
Oh the relief of getting there! Catherine and Bess hugged each other and ran straight out into the garden to see if there were an early snowdrop – ‘after all, it will be February and spring tomorrow!’ said Catherine, on such a note of ecstasy that you would have thought she had been longing for the spring all her life – as indeed she had.
At Whitehall, the King’s body lay in state. Bishop Gardiner had a hot encounter with Lord Oxford’s company of players, who were going to act a grand new play at this unsuitable moment; he advised a solemn dirge instead, and finally had to appeal to the Justice of the Peace, swearing that if he couldn’t prevent the play he would at least stop people from coming to see it.
The players in revenge chalked on the walls of his palace:
‘As Gardiner such he is,
He spoils so all our plants
That justice withers, mercy dies,
And we wronged by their wants.
A priest only in weeds
And barren all his seeds.’
But they had to give in, grumbling, illogically that if only Old Hal were alive he’d be the first to tell them to go on with the play. Much he’d have cared for a solemn dirge! What bluff King Hal liked was a good show with plenty of dancing and jolly songs, and a fine performer he’d been in them himself when he was younger; so all the older players reminded each other, shaking their heads over their mugs of ale and complaining that nothing would be the same now Old Hal was dead. There’d never be another King like him – a bit hasty maybe, chopped off heads like cabbage stalks when he’d a mind to – but they were generally the nobles’ heads, mark that, and no doubt they deserved it. He kept those proud bullies in their place, made them kneel when they addressed him as ‘Majesty’, a grand new title for a King, but the common people always found him as jolly and friendly to talk to as one of themselves, and almost as easy to get the chance to talk to too – you only had to step out beside his horse when he went riding and pull off your cap, and he’d rein in and chat with you as though you’d known him all your life.
Pity he couldn’t have lived till the young one was in the saddle, instead of their having one of these new jumped-up nobles as Protector, a strange new-fangled title, though very old men like Martin Whitehead, who was kept in the Company to work the fireworks in the jaws of the Hell-fire dragon, could remember the time when there had been a Protector before in England. For that was what Crookback called himself for a few weeks before he called himself King Richard III – until he got killed by Old Hal’s father.
And at the Crookback’s name they all said ‘A-ah’ and took a deeper drink, for which they had to pay, although this very day the Protector had led the little King in a grand procession through the city and everybody had turned out to cheer them and run along beside their horses up Tower Hill. But not a drop of free drink did the Protector order for them, and no pipes of wine were laid in the streets; he rode along beside his nephew, looking very fine and noble but cold as a statue, and harried-looking too; he might take all he could get, but he’d never get any pleasure of it, nor would anyone else.
‘Old Hal would have given us a drink,’ grumbled the young ones as they turned away in disappointment: ‘Young Hal gave us a drink,’ mumbled the old ones, remembering that golden youth riding in triumph to the Tower, and added, ‘God rest his soul!’ with more feeling than Bishop Gardiner, whose sonorous voice was saying daily masses for his dead master, while his indignant mind absorbed the discovery that he had been cut out of his Will.
Seven other bishops assisted him in his thankless office, and Archbishop Cranmer was present though he would not celebrate High Mass, which showed the way the wind blew and that the new Government would now go all out for the new austerity in worship. But until the old King was buried, his masses had to be said, and they went on for a fortnight in Whitehall Chapel, where the King’s body lay in state, and all day the nobles and gentry filed past it, and the ladies of the Court sat up in a separate gallery to pray.
The King’s widow, the Dowager Queen Catherine, came up to Whitehall from Chelsea, and at first she brought the Princess Elizabeth with her to the Chapel, in her purple mourning, holding her new pomander firmly to her nose. It contained a dried orange stuck with cloves and impregnated with other perfumes; the watch set in the filigree case also served its purpose since she could watch the time without seeming to do so.
But she quickly discovered that she had a cold, and did not come again before the coffin was moved in the middle of February to its burial at Windsor. She made up for her remissness by a very stilted letter in condolence in beautiful handwriting to her young brother, which tied itself up in such tortuous expressions that she herself could not quite make out what she had meant to say; but they greatly impressed Edward, who wrote back compliments on the elegance of his ‘most dear sister’s’ style. He added that there was evidently ‘very little need of my consoling you’ and ‘I perceive you think of our father’s death with a calm mind,’ which made his most dear sister give a rather lary eye at the paper. Such common paper too! Was Edward Seymour going to be a skinflint guardian?
Bess liked being at Chelsea better than anywhere else. The house was a pleasant, fair-sized mansion, with no pretensions to a palace, built in the modern fashion of red brick with chimneys and turrets clustering together, and plenty of tall windows so that the rooms were filled with light and one could watch the endless busy movement of the boats sailing up and down the river and hear the cries of the watermen. She felt safe and snug as a kitten being looked after by two motherly cats: her stepmother, Pussy-Cat Purr, and her governess, or rather her lady-nurse, Cat Ashley, whom her royal charge regrettably called Ash-Cat, a nickname which it must be admitted suited Mrs Ashley, a thin sallow woman with a casual strolling air and a roving eye always ready to twinkle with entertainment over any scraps of news she might pick up, and they were many.
She told her charge, sitting in the window-seat looking out on the river, something of what she had heard at Whitehall of King Henry’s last hours, how he had stared into the shadowy corners of the room and muttered ‘Monks! Monks!’ But none knew whether in remorse at having turned them out of their monasteries, or because at the eleventh hour he had wished in vain for their ministrations. And at the end, when he had lost consciousness and none had thought to see him move even a finger nor hear him speak ever again, he had started up in bed so that all were amazed at his strength, and cried out in a clear voice, ‘Nan Bullen’ – ‘Nan Bullen’ – ‘Nan Bullen.’
‘Yes, three times he called her, and his eyes wide open, staring as if he saw her there, standing before him, and that’s the only time he’s ever said her name since – since—’ and Cat Ashley’s eager voice broke on a sob.
Mr Ashley was related to the Bullens, and his wife, dazzled from the first by that lively, go-ahead, essentially modern family, had been as devoted to Nan as she now was to her daughter.
Now at last it was safe to speak of her, now that King Henry, having spoken, had died.
And after his funeral, followed by a procession four miles long, had left for Windsor, Cat Ashley picked up a grisly tale of the coffin having burst the night before the burial and how the plumbers had to come and solder it up again; and this she knew for a fact, for one of them was engaged to her own chambermaid, but of course it was kept quiet, and scarcely any knew of it who attended the magnificent ceremonial next day when Bishop Gardiner preached his most moving sermon on
‘the loss to both the high and low of our most good and gracious King’. ‘As well he might,’ the Ash-Cat declared, her twinkling black eyes rolling round at Bess, ‘seeing that it’s meant the loss of all his hopes from the Will!’
Bess sat hugging her knees, staring at the rain-scuds flying down the river from the west, feeling very grown-up to be told so many things that she knew she should not be told. But one of them startled her worse than even the horrifying tale of the coffin, and that was when Cat Ashley, pulling a long purple thread through some mourning garment she was making for her, said lightly, ‘It’s my belief your stepmother will be a widow for even fewer days this time than the last. She must make haste with all her mourning clothes if they’re to be ready before she’s ordering her wedding dress for the Admiral.’
Bess’s knees went taut as whipcord in her grasp. If she did not hold on to them tight she would be springing up to fly at the Ash-Cat, shake her and scream that she was a liar.
She kept silent. Cat Ashley, disappointed in her lack of interest, said, ‘Well, and I thought you would be pleased. He’d be your step-stepfather then, and your guardian as like as not.’
‘I don’t want him as a stepfather,’ said Bess, loosening her grip on her knees with a jerk. ‘I don’t believe the Queen wants him as a husband either. Why should she?’
It was a good move, for Mrs Ashley at once poured out a protesting flood of all the reasons, among them some very flattering to the Admiral, which Bess heard with little painful stabs of pleasure – the finest man in England, so handsome, tall and splendid in his bearing, with none of his brother’s cold stateliness but all the more imposing just because he didn’t trouble about it; there was a careless magnificence about him, like that of a man born to be King. Fierce as a lion in battle, yet as merry as a schoolboy, and that grand voice of his, it would put courage into a mouse.
‘But the Queen – isn’t she rather old for him?’
‘That she’s not, at just thirty-four, and he a year or two older, though they neither of them look it. Besides – this had to be a secret while your father lived – I don’t know that I’d better even now—’
‘Now, my Ash-Cat, hand up your titbit; I’ll never stop twisting your tail till you do.’
Bess had seized Ashley’s little finger and was pulling it round and round. Laughing and jerking her hand away, Ashley disgorged the titbit; Catherine Parr and Tom Seymour had been privately betrothed before her marriage to the King. When he signified his choice of her as his sixth wife, there was nothing for her to do but to give up Tom, for to have married him against the royal will would have only meant utter ruin and probably death for them both. She had been a faithful wife and devoted nurse to Henry for three and a half years, and he had been the third elderly widower she had had to marry.
Now at last she was free to take her own choice and still young and pretty enough to enjoy it. She had already been having some confidential meetings with the Admiral in London even before the funeral – though that was all quite correct and above-board, since he had been a member of King Henry’s household and was now one of the Council of Regency, and had many things to discuss with her about her royal charges. ‘But depend upon it, they’ve found time to discuss their own affairs too, and what I say is, the sooner the merrier: she’s a sweet kind creature and deserves her luck, and I wish it with all my heart – don’t you too, my Lady Bess?’ she added, suddenly surprised by the child’s grave silence.
But Bess, having got all she wanted out of Ashley, was quick to assume a reproving air. ‘It’s a serious matter,’ she said, ‘and you oughtn’t to talk of it, Ashley. Oh, to me, yes,’ she put in quickly, at Ashley’s indignant movement – besides, she might want Ashley to talk again. ‘But not to anyone else. The Council may not approve, and I know Edward Seymour hates his brother—’
‘So do I, and I know why. Jealous!’
‘Jealousy is a dreadful thing,’ said Bess virtuously.
Ashley gave a quick look at the demure face. ‘That’s too good to be true. Are you mocking me, my Lady Mischief?’
‘No, only myself,’ murmured Bess, but went on rapidly, ‘At the least, they’d make a horrible scandal if it were talked about so soon after the King’s death.’
‘Talk? I talk! It was only to please Your Highness, and I’ve found you are to be trusted. You can be sure I would never talk to anyone else, never, on any dangerous matter.’
‘Can I, Cat? Can I?’ She said it slowly, reflectively, and those clear, light-coloured eyes of hers seemed to Cat to be looking right through her. Was it a child who spoke and looked thus? It was more like some ageless Sibyl.
Cat had flushed to the roots of her hair; she took her young mistress’s hand in both of hers and said, as though she were giving the oath of fealty, ‘I swear to Your Highness, you can be sure of me.’
Bess leapt up, flicked Ashley on the nose, cried, ‘Silly old Ash-Cat, what are you so solemn about? Look! the shower is over and the sun’s come out!’ and dashed into the garden.
CHAPTER FIVE
It was a large and charming garden, enclosed within its high red brick wall that was only ten years old, but already mellowed to a warm rosy hue, and had small fruit trees splayed against it. Some old trees and shrubs had been allowed to remain, though they interrupted the symmetry of the formal rectangular flowerbeds and knot gardens and paths edged with box hedges a few inches high. In the wall at the far end was set a postern gate which opened on to the reedy marshy fields, bare of hedges but with outcrops of scrub and forest, that spread away into a blue distance of low wooded hills, the heights of Highgate and Hampstead.
And across this open country, by the single road that led through the village of Chelsea to the Manor, Tom Seymour came riding this windy stormy sunny afternoon in late February.
He saw the bright sails of the boats on the Thames scudding as if on dry land beyond the trees, which were still bare and purple-black, but flushed here and there with the palest glimmer of gold; it might have been the willows budding, or only wet twigs in the sunlight. The square stone tower of the church on the riverbank looked almost white against a blue-black stormcloud, for the sun was shining on it, and the golden weathercock flashed through the tossing branches as if some exotic bird had strayed up-river with the seagulls that squalled and swirled around it, making wheels and arrows of white light.
He came to the new red wall of the Manor garden, dismounted and gave his horse’s bridle to the groom that rode with him, opened the postern gate with a key that he pulled out of a little purse in his belt; and there he stood for a moment, quite still. The formal flowerbeds were glistening with wet earth, but along the borders crocuses pierced them with little flecks of coloured light. Some hazel shrubs dangled their catkins in the wind in a shimmer of faintly yellow tassels, and a blackbird shouted its early song as it balanced itself precariously on the topmost twig of a taller tree, swinging and bowing to the wind. The small stone fishpond reflected the sunlight in a mirror of gold. Round and round its edge a childish figure in purple silk was running, dancing, leaping, tossing a golden ball high into the air, and catching it again. A gleaming cloud of hair blew out from under her cap as she danced, and she shrieked as the wind blew her ball all but into the pond, retrieved it in a wild, sideways leap, and all but fell in herself, laughed on a note that seemed to answer the blackbird’s, and pranced on.
At first glance it was as though one of the crocuses in all its sheen of purple and gold had sprung into human stature and movement. Crocuses and the early song of birds, and a laugh as shrill and wild, and those darting movements, erratic as a dragonfly – what was it they were all bringing back to him? In an instant he had it – an evening in early spring just fourteen years ago, as vivid as if it were this month, and Nan Bullen’s slim form flashing out upon the terrace at Hampton Court, swirling and trailing her bright plumage as she turned from one to another – and then laughed. ‘Lord, how I wish I had an apple!… Such an incredible fierce desire to
eat apples! Do you know what the King says? He says it means I am with child. But I tell him “No!” No, it couldn’t be, no, no, no!’
And again that laugh that had rung on and on in his ears, so that he still seemed at times to hear it, especially on these cold spring evenings so like herself – sudden, harsh, brilliant, changeful.
Thus unceremoniously had the advent of this girl, the Princess Elizabeth, been announced to the world six months before her birth – in a woman’s ‘No’; not meant to be believed.
And here she was herself, dancing on the verge of womanhood, and till this moment he had not perceived it.
Suddenly she saw him standing there, stopped dead, letting her ball fall to the ground, while she stared as if at a ghost, swooped to pick it up in an action like the plunge of a long-legged foal, and then at last advanced slowly towards him.
‘How did you get there?’ she asked, almost in a whisper. ‘The garden was empty, and now – you’ve appeared.’
‘By magic. You were thinking of me, and I obeyed your wishes.’
‘I was not!’ she exclaimed indignantly.
‘No need to toss your head. All those golden catkins on it are tossing hard enough without your help.’
‘I call them lambs’ tails.’ She flung away from him and broke off a couple of their branches. He noticed how abrupt and angular her movements had become again as soon as she ceased to dance, and yet there was still something of that wild grace in them. But what had happened to her manners, and was she angry just because he had startled her? He at once became the magnificent courtier, sweeping his hat to the ground in a low bow.
‘I implore pardon for not recognising Your Highness earlier. I took you for a wood nymph and now I see my mistake. You are a great princess – are you not?’
She swung round to him again, her face flaming.
‘I won’t be mocked,’ she said, ‘I won’t, I won’t!’ and stamped her foot, all the more like a wilful colt.
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