Young Bess

by Margaret Irwin

  But God would protect him, God was a marvellous man, the birds were singing their mating songs high and glad through the sunny window, and Catherine felt no fears as her quill pen scratched on; and behind her her stepdaughter sat on her low stool with her face cupped in her long hands, and listened to that scratching and the songs of the mating birds and wondered whether, if she had been a woman grown, Tom Seymour would have deserted his loving Catherine for herself.

  The weeks were short at Chelsea, and elsewhere. Everything seemed to move twice as quick now the old King was dead and men dared to put their plans into action as fast as the changes in nature. The spring rushed on, the flowers rushed on, the birds picked off the heads of the crocuses, but the daffodils shot up in their place, the birds built nests, and the nobles houses.

  Edward Seymour decided that as Lord Protector and Duke of Somerset he must have a London palace worthy of himself, and pulled down the north aisle of St Paul’s Cathedral (which contained the elder Holbein’s pictures of the Dance of Death), the Priory of St John of Jerusalem at Clerkenwell, and a couple of Inns of Court, all in order to furnish space and materials for Somerset House.

  So of course his brother Tom was not going to be outdone in the housing matter, which had hitherto given him no concern, for he had always preferred to live in lodgings when in London, changing them frequently, but always taking his adoring old mother to keep house for him wherever he moved. But now he too decided that his dignity as Lord Sudley and Lord High Admiral demanded a fine house in his name, though characteristically he could not wait to build one. His brother for once was really sensible and pleasant about it, for ‘good old Ned’ promptly turned a bishop out of his house and confiscated the best part of his property, so that Tom should have a huge mansion all ready to hand, with stables, tennis-courts and bowling-greens in the Strand, orchards and meadows and terraced gardens leading down to the river, and call it Seymour Place. He was already installed in it a fortnight after the proclamation of Henry’s death, and the whole vast place was humming with activity and gaiety, banquets, sports and water-parties.

  Spring was in the air; even tutors and bishops, even vice-chancellors, even archbishops, bore testimony to it, and with them half the clergy. Bishop Parker, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, rode off to get married to the young woman who had waited patiently for him for seven years. For Cranmer had at once pushed forward Parliament’s edict to legalise matrimony for the clergy, and produced his German Frau in the open, to everyone’s rather malicious curiosity. It was extraordinary how difficult it was to avoid references to packing-cases in her presence. Tom Seymour did not try; he at once asked her what she thought of that little box of a palace at Lambeth.

  Curates and parish priests all over the country were rushing to get married, but the results were not always as happy as the bridegrooms, for their parishioners frequently sent in complaints of their choice: that these new young wives were either too frivolous and got their husbands into debt, or else they poked their noses into the affairs of the parish, in which they should have no business. Finally it was decided to pass another edict, declaring that all clergymen’s prospective wives should first have to be passed as suitable by a bishop and two Justices of the Peace.

  It was well they had not also to be approved by the Duchess, for her antagonism to poor John Cheke’s new wife would have lost him his place as the King’s tutor had he not written letters that fairly crawled in apology for her, both to the Duke of Somerset and his exigeant lady.

  Among all these mating and nesting plans, those of Tom Seymour, both for himself and others, threatened more upheaval than those of all the clergy. For a boy-King’s uncle who married the Queen Dowager of England would form a great counter royal house which might well bring about another civil war. His elder brother had already taken on a practically royal authority, given himself powers to act independently of the Council’s advice, used the royal ‘we’ even in his private correspondence, and alarmed everybody by his presumption in addressing the new French King as ‘Brother’. (For Foxnose François died at the end of that March, having been as much dashed by Henry’s death as Henry had been by François’ dying illness; the lifelong rivalry had ended without either of them finally succeeding in getting the better of the other.)

  Somerset House and Seymour Place already looked like dividing not only half London but all England between them. ‘You must go warily,’ Queen Catherine told Tom Seymour, who wagged his finger against his fine nose and promised he would be as wily as the serpent and as gentle as the dove – which gave her more amusement than hope.

  But he was being more wily than she knew. One proof of it, though not to her guileless eyes, was that little Lady Jane Grey came to stay at Seymour Place with her tutors and her servants and her personal possessions, in charge of Tom Seymour and his mother. Catherine was delighted, for this would mean her having the charge of Jane’s tuition as soon as she was openly married to Tom; the child was far from happy at home; the country air of Chelsea with the sea-breezes coming up the river, and the companionship of her gay playfellow Elizabeth, would do her a world of good. In fact, Jane had already grown a whole new crop of freckles in her first week at Seymour Place, and her small nose was quite covered by them, so much more time did she spend out of doors.

  Jane’s freckles were not Tom Seymour’s prime motive; nor, when Catherine demanded with ingenuous admiration how he had managed to persuade Jane’s parents, did he confide to her that he had paid Jane’s impecunious father a lump sum down of £2,000 as an extra inducement to place his daughter in Tom’s care.

  And he had bigger bait than that to offer: the opportunity and influence he would have as Edward’s favourite uncle to push forward a match for him with Jane Grey. The Protector might succeed at any moment in marrying the boy either to his own daughter Janet or to the little Queen of Scots; nobody was sure which he favoured most; he was indeed not quite sure himself, for his desire for England’s peace and prosperity and unity with Scotland was sometimes almost as strong as, sometimes even stronger than his desire for his own personal advancement.

  So, as Tom was quick to point out to Jane’s anxious father, with the odds against them on not only one but a pair of fillies for the matrimonial stakes, they must move quickly to get Jane into the running. He would work it with the boy, he could do anything with him, he told Henry Grey, a nervous pallid little man, overshadowed by his stout Grey mare, the hard-eyed, hard-riding Lady Frances, with the red hardening to purple in her fat cheeks (King Henry’s niece, so that it was she who gave Jane her claim to the throne, and never let her husband forget it). He trotted along in the terraced gardens by the river in vain effort to keep step with the Lord High Admiral’s long strides, and peered up at the wagging point of his burnished beard, at the gay blue eyes, and warmed himself in the ringing confidence of that great voice; while Tom, looking down at the thin moustaches, the long nose and absurdly high collar, longed to tell his fellow-conspirator that he looked like a seedy mule peering over a wall.

  The Admiral’s first step was to introduce a valuable servant of his own, not inappropriately named Mr Fowler, into the King’s household, and was pleased to hear that Edward often asked about him and when Fowler thought he could see him. Fowler, under instructions, asked if the King didn’t think it strange that his younger uncle had never married. Edward, not having thought, did not answer. Fowler then asked if he would like him to marry.

  ‘Oh, very much,’ was the bored reply as he tried to tie his spaniel’s ears over the top of its head.

  Well, then, to whom?

  ‘Anne of Cleves,’ said Edward automatically. It was always a safe answer.

  The spaniel yelped. So did Mr Fowler, almost. ‘Your royal father called her a Flanders mare,’ he said reproachfully.

  ‘What’s wrong with a Flanders mare? I wish I had one. I’m tired of ponies.’ Then an impish gleam came into his eyes and he swung round from the spaniel, who at once leapt up for more teasing. ‘No,
d’you know what? I wish he’d marry my sister Mary and get her away from her old Mass.’ And he gave a shrill crow of unaccustomed laughter that suddenly robbed him of his chill bewildered royalty and turned him into a mischievous schoolboy.

  ‘Poor brat!’ Tom exclaimed in a burst of pitying affection when he heard of it. ‘I’ll make him laugh when I get at him!’ He could do anything with his nephew – if he could get at him. But that was the difficulty. Edward was being kept at his lessons harder than he had ever been kept before. Even when he was not at them, the Protector or one of his most trusted intimates was always with him; his own sisters could hardly ever see him by himself, and to Elizabeth, on one of the very rare occasions when they managed to give his guardians the slip, he burst out in fretful annoyance that he was scarcely ever alone for as much as half a quarter of an hour. And this particular occasion was won only by a glorious adventure.

  She had been allowed to come and see him, but an excuse had been found to prevent Queen Catherine coming too to visit her stepson as she had wished, and Mrs Ashley was in attendance on her. The two children conversed solemnly in front of her and a couple of under-tutors (not Mr Cheke) and a major-domo of the Protector’s. Then Elizabeth showed off for a bit in Latin, and Edward first matched her easily in it, then branched off into Greek, at which she fell rather behind and made an attempt to catch up in Hebrew, but again the honours were easy, so she shot into Italian, wherein she was really fluent and Edward far behind. The tutors, applauding her, excused themselves for the King’s backwardness by declaring that they had nothing to do with his Italian lessons and made no pretence themselves of proficiency in the language.

  On this assurance Bess slipped in a sentence or two in a ‘little language’ that they had long ago made up together out of a mixture of baby-talk, private slang and Latin or Italian-sounding endings to the words. It would not carry them far, but enough for her to ask him if they could not talk alone, and for him to tell her that he might manage it with his fellows if she would get rid of Mrs Ashley. He then said in English that he would like a game of shuttlecock with her, and they went out into the courtyards at the back of the Palace. He would not play in the closed-in tennis-courts; it was a lovely evening and he wanted to be out of doors. On the way there Bess had whispered to Mrs Ashley, who now said she had a cold and must not dawdle about in the raw evening air and went indoors. The major-domo had not come out, and the tutors walked up and down discussing the scandalous innovation of the modern pronunciation of Greek which Mr Cheke, as Greek professor at Cambridge, was bent on introducing. It was said that Archbishop Cranmer backed him up – that showed what excesses Reform could lead to!

  Suddenly Edward drove the shuttlecock far over their heads into a tree, and then found it was the only one he had brought.

  ‘Fetch me more,’ he shouted to the tutors, who began to call to a page who was passing, but Edward stamped his foot and roared, ‘Fetch them yourselves! You’d have done it fast enough for my father.’

  That sent them scurrying, each trying to outrun the other, and as they whisked out at one end of the courtyard Edward seized Bess’s hand and ran out at the other, into a yard where there was a mountainous woodpile. He clambered over it, she followed unquestioning, and into a hollow that had been cleared among the logs, where they squatted down completely hidden.

  ‘I’ve come here once or twice with Barney,’ he told her. Young Barnaby (Barney at home) Fitzpatrick, three or four years older than Edward, was the son of an Irish peer, Lord Ossory; he had left the wild hills of Donegal some years before and become Edward’s favourite school- and play-fellow, and on rare occasions his whipping-boy. The gay coolness and lack of resentment with which the Irish boy took the beatings that were beneath the dignity of his royal master seemed to Edward the perfect example of knightly valour and endurance; it was entirely fitting that Barnaby should have been chosen to bear the banner of King Arthur, riding in a black coat, as one of the nine youthful henchmen at King Henry’s funeral.

  ‘I hope Barney won’t mind my showing this place to you,’ he continued rather doubtfully, to Bess’s surprise, for he was not wont to be so careful of the feelings of others, ‘but anyway I am glad you made me think of it. I am sick of being treated like a baby—’

  ‘Like a prisoner,’ said Bess.

  He shot her a quick look. ‘So it is. Let them wait, that’s all. I’ll show them something when I’m really King.’

  ‘You’re that now. Look how you sent those Peeping Toms packing. It was just like our father.’

  He flushed with pleasure. The ogre for whom even Edward had felt some fear and repulsion as well as unwilling fascination was already becoming a legend, a symbol for superb power. ‘You think I’ll ever be like him?’ he asked wistfully.

  ‘Not as fat, I hope!’ she laughed.

  ‘Hush! Someone might come near enough to hear you. Oh Bess, it’s good to hear you laugh again.’

  ‘Why, at Chelsea we are always laughing, and so would you if you were there. Why shouldn’t you be allowed to see your own sister?’

  ‘Or my stepmother or my own uncle?’ he capped her, with an indignant wriggle that had disastrous consequences, for a bole in the wood caught and tore his beautiful silk trunk-hose, but they neither of them bothered about that.

  ‘Look,’ he said urgently, ‘the Admiral often goes to visit the Queen at Chelsea, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Oh, once or twice he’s been, think,’ said Bess airily.

  Edward took this very coolly. ‘I expect he goes, and you must see them there, so when next you do, give him this. It’s surer than sending it by Fowler as I’d meant to do. You can read them.’ And he thrust into Bess’s hand two rather crumpled, dirty scraps of paper on which he had scrawled in haste, unlike Edward’s usual tidy writing, except for the upright precise signature, with the flourish like a whip at top of the final ‘d’:

  ‘My Lord, send me per Fowler, as much as you think good. Edward’; and

  ‘My Lord, I thank you and pray you have me commended to the Queen.’

  ‘Better,’ he observed, ‘to send ’em per you.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Oh well,’ he chuckled, ‘I’ve made good use of old Fowler, leaving notes to the Admiral for him to find under the carpet in the dining-room.’

  It struck Bess that it was the Admiral who was making use of Fowler.

  ‘Does he send you money by Fowler?’ she asked, trying not to sound astonished.

  ‘Yes, it was he who thought of it – my Uncle Tom, I mean. Oh, I know it doesn’t seem very kingly,’ and the boy’s fair face went a deep pink, ‘but am I treated like a King? I’ve so little pocket-money, I’ve none to give presents to my servants – not even to Barney when he gets a thrashing for me. Why, do you know what the Admiral said when he heard that, the first time I had a chance to talk to him? He laughed and said, “It’s a very beggarly King you are! Not a penny to play with nor give to your servants!” And he handed me forty pounds straight off.’

  ‘How like him!’ exclaimed Bess, glowing.

  ‘Yes, he’s given me a deal more. And I’ve shown him favour in return. I’ve insisted he shall attend me sometimes at Court, and I’m going to see him when I wish, by myself, and I will not be interrupted.’

  The royal favour seemed of a dubious nature to Bess if his interviews with his uncle were only to produce pocket-money for himself. ‘That will make the Protector jealous of him,’ she said. ‘You may have to stand up for one uncle against the other.’

  ‘I am doing so,’ said Edward magnificently, and suddenly she was struck by the significance of that second bit of scrubby paper. Edward had written a message for the Queen expressly for the Admiral to give her; then had the Admiral confided his secret plan of marriage to the child so as to get his backing for it? It was an odd conspiracy, between a man of thirty-five and a boy of nine and a half. She wished she knew how much Edward knew; but she would at least be on safe ground if she spoke of Queen Catherine’s lov
e for Edward himself, how she missed him, wished she were still supervising his lessons and seeing to it that he did not work too hard. Edward conceded placidly that he knew the Queen was very fond of him; he added that he was very fond of her, and would much rather be with her than his Aunt Anne, the Duchess, who was always saying nasty things about her, and about the Admiral too.

  They had been talking very fast, but now already they heard voices in the distance calling in search of them, and Edward spoke still more quickly, gripping his sister’s knee with his thin little hand. ‘I want Uncle Tom to be my guardian instead of Uncle Edward, and to be Protector too. He’d be a much finer one. Then I could live with him and the Queen when they marry, and do as I like. Why shouldn’t I? I’m the King.’

  ‘When they marry…?’

  ‘Yes, it’s my wish. I told him so and he seemed quite willing. Then I could live with her and him and you, and we’d all be together and I could get rid of Uncle Edward. Don’t you think it a good idea of mine?’

  ‘Very good,’ said Bess rather soberly, ‘if it can be done.’ So the Admiral had been clever enough to make Edward suggest the marriage himself and think it all his own plan!

  He was evidently preening himself as a match-maker. ‘I’ll help them and stand by them. They are sure to try and stop it. How dare they, if I give my consent? Tell her I give it, that I want her to marry him. I’ll write to her when I get the chance.’

  Bess wondered how she could warn him tactfully to be careful. The Admiral did not seem to have done it at all.

  ‘The Protector is very powerful,’ she said.