Young Bess

by Margaret Irwin

  ‘I thought my father ruled more absolutely than any King has dared do here for generations.’ Bess spoke eagerly, snatching at this generous chance that Catherine had given to get both their minds away from her present disgrace.

  Catherine was indeed determined she should think of the future rather than the present. Her conviction of what that future would be had come to her long since. ‘But don’t you be the little fool I was when my future was told me as a child,’ she said, with a gallant effort at her old gaiety. ‘For when a fortune-teller told me I should one day sit on a throne and wear a crown, I refused to do any more sewing, for my hands, I said, were reserved for royal actions – and well slapped I got for it.’

  ‘But it came true,’ said Bess. ‘The future is already written for those who can read it in the stars.’ She yearned to consult an astrologer, but even in this unguarded moment of relief knew she would be scolded for saying so. But Catherine saw her wish clear enough; she leant forward and took her hands, speaking again with an urgency that sounded rather desperate even to herself, for why should she have to say everything now at this moment, as though there would never be another chance to do so? And suddenly it came into her mind that there might never be one, and that she loved as her own child this girl who had given her more bitter agony of heart than ever her cruel father had done; and that that love mattered more to both of them, and would last when the agony had long since passed away.

  ‘The future is written,’ she said, ‘but it’s in our hands to blot it if we will. The future is for you to make, as you will. The people of England will never keep a wanton for their Queen. They hated your mother as one; it may have been unjustly, but whether so or not, that hate brought her downfall. Their love will bring you greater strength than any army. Treasure it as you would your life, for it will be your life. Why do you cry?’

  ‘You speak so strangely – it’s as though we were never to meet again.’

  ‘I did not mean to frighten you. We shall meet again – yes, of course we shall. But how can one count on anything as certain among “the changes and chances of this mortal life” – have you heard that phrase of the Archbishop’s? He should be one of our famous poets, yet no man will know what share was his in this Book of Common Prayer – common to all England, its writers unnamed, with all the holy beauty of their words in common.’

  But what was the use of her going on about old yellow-faced Mumpsy-mouse and his precious book, when she had spoken as though they might never meet again, as though she might die? ‘I cannot bear it,’ sobbed Bess, crying as Catherine had never seen her do, ‘to go away, and you ill, and it is all my own fault.’

  ‘Not all,’ said Catherine sadly.

  That obscure and sudden disease, the sweating sickness, was killing off people within a few days of their getting it. Edward’s tutor, Mr Cheke, had recovered, but Bess’s tutor, Mr Grindal, had caught it and died, and there was all the question of a new tutor for her. Her repentant mood did not lead her to any meek acceptance of her guardians’ choice; she flatly refused to learn from the Oxford scholar whom both Catherine and the Admiral wished to appoint. Oxford was old-fashioned, behind the times; all the Princess Mary’s tutors had come from Oxford; and Bess insisted on a Cambridge man.

  Mr Roger Ascham had been Greek reader at St John’s, had set all Cambridge reading and acting Greek plays; he had been Mr Cheke’s favourite pupil and supported his theory of modern Greek pronunciation, which was denounced at Oxford as rabidly as heresy. Greek was in itself a kind of heresy; religious reformers based their authority on the newly discovered Greek texts and manuscripts; and this rage for the New Learning had all the excitement of revolt against the tedious old Latin that the monks had used and everyone was tired of.

  If you read Greek you were not only clever, you were modern, you were advanced, you were in the fashion.

  And Bess was as determined to flaunt the New Learning as new clothes; she would have this coming Cambridge man, and nobody else. She had already started a correspondence with him, in Latin of course. He was as eager for the post of her tutor as herself. He pulled wires, he wrote charming letters to Mrs Ashley and sent her a silver pen of exquisite Italian workmanship. In the end, as usual, Bess got her way.

  This triumph gave a fillip to her departure and took away a little from the uncomfortable sense of being sent off in disgrace. Catherine had done her best to avoid that; but she was deep in love, ill, and frightened, and could not always control her temper. It would flash out at moments in little subacid remarks, and then she would be sorry and try to make up for it, and that made it worse.

  And Tom had gone off on one of his frequent sudden expeditions to some island or other – Wight or Lundy or the Scillies – murmuring mysterious boasts in his beard: ‘Easy to run down the office of Lord Admiral as a show-title, but I tell you it means something. I’ve now got the rule over a good sort of ships and men. It’s a good thing to have the rule of men,’ he had added, glowering rather belligerently at his household of women and little girls, and off he had gone without even saying goodbye to Bess. But it was certainly easier with Catherine when he had gone.

  Before he came back, Bess too was gone, in the week after Whitsun, riding off down the sun-baked rutted white lanes with the dust rising in clouds under her pony’s hoofs and powdering the round pink faces of the campion on the hedges, swirling up over the white clusters of heavy-scented may, up, up, as though to chase the larks that soared, shrilling their songs into the blue sky.

  It was good to be riding away from disgrace and scoldings, however gentle; yes, and even from the Admiral and the storms he brewed. All her life lay before her on this springtime journey. Anything might happen. She might run away with Barney, and Edward would make him Lord of Ireland, and she would wear a green kirtle and coat of cloth of gold, such as her mother had so nearly done, in a painted palace built of clay and timber where on winter nights one could hear the howling of wolves on the wind.

  She might run even further westward, sailing for months towards the sunset, towards the strange lands that had lain there undiscovered since the beginning of time and now were newly opened to them. The Admiral sometimes spoke in his wild half-joking way of ousting the Spaniards there and founding an empire of his own – and then his eyes had rested on her, and she knew now that when he saw himself as its King he had thought of her as its Queen. Why hadn’t she known it at the time? Not even when he told her once that she wore the sunset in her hair and the barbaric gold of the Incas!

  She drew in her breath sharply at the memory, then jerked herself awake from her daydreams. Anything might happen, but these things would not happen.

  But no, what might really happen was that she would be Queen of England.

  She had flatly refused to sit in the stuffy coach with Cat Ashley, declaring its jolting made her sick. But there was another reason beside her enjoyment in the ride, and that was the strange new pride thrilling up in her, that she was riding through the country, showing herself to the people, her people – so she had believed, and now Catherine had said they might be one day.

  At the least, she could smile and flourish her whip as they ran from their fields and barns and cottage-doors to stare at the young Princess Elizabeth riding by in her white dress with the sunlight on her hair; at the most, she could find some pretext to stop and talk with them, pretended her pony’s shoe was loose, or that she wanted a drink of new milk from the pail that some sturdy bare-armed girl was carrying home (‘How enchanting to be a milkmaid!’ she said, while the girl’s shy glances told her how enchanting she would find it to be a princess).

  Her escort found it impossible to hurry her through the little country towns, especially if a market were going on, or a travelling fair; then she must buy this or watch that; it was all they could do to stop her getting her fortune told, and always she would talk with any and everybody, however unsuitable. ‘Why not, if my father did, and he was King of England?’

  Old men told her that
it would never be a merry England again till they heard the church bells ringing through the day and night at the hours of prayer, reminding the sick and sorry that they could always go up to the kindly monks for a bite and sup. Bess listened sympathetically to them; as also to the young men on the extreme left of Reform, who insisted that God Himself should be abolished; and that the country would never be right till ruled by ‘communistic law’.

  But what everybody told her, and far more eagerly than matters of religion or politics, was that in spite of the new laws wages were sinking, since men would work for next to nothing to avoid unemployment; prices were rising, for, though fixed in name, one could always pass something under the counter; and that for all the money you spent you only got rotten imitation goods – leather falsely curried and tanned; ‘feather’ beds stuffed with rubbish; and even, worst of all, beer made without true malt.

  Things were bad, but they might be worse, and one mustn’t grumble, said they, grumbling hard, but generally finding something they could make a joke of.

  This, and the dogged courage of their patience, made her feel akin to them, though she did not recognise it, only that she was interested and pleased, especially in that they liked her.

  She saw a rabble of beggars, alarming as a troop of marauding robbers – which indeed they were; her escort closed in round her, church bells clashed out a warning, and the gates of the little country town she had just left clanged to against them.

  ‘Hark, hark, the dogs do bark,

  The beggars are coming to town.’

  She saw a little boy led by a chain, and a man with an iron ring round his neck and the letter S branded on his forehead to show that he was his master’s slave for ever, to be sold or bequeathed at his will; for the new law against unemployment had made it legal for vagabonds and their children to be sold into slavery. This then was what lay behind the cheerful remark ‘might be worse’.

  A chill fell on all her high spirits; she rode under the great oaks of Hatfield Park knowing suddenly, irrevocably, that she must not love Tom, nor Tom her, that she was going away where she would not hear his jolly laugh nor deep teasing voice, nor look up at the swaggering shoulders and catch his mocking glance, that had lately grown heavy with desire as he looked at her.

  How could she, even half in fun, as a game of ‘Let’s pretend’, have imagined herself with the boy Barney in his remote and savage island? If she could not love Tom, she would never love anybody else, never, never.

  But she must not love Tom, and, almost worse than this, she might not have her Pussy-Cat Purr’s loving tenderness round her any more.

  Nonsense, Catherine had said, of course she would see her again, and very soon; wait till her child was born, and then everything would be the same as before. But would it? Bess could not quite believe it. She too had had her glimpse, though she tried not to recognise it, into what was written in the stars.

  In this sudden depression at the end of her long ride she sat down to write her departed-guest letter, giving thanks for the manifold kindnesses received from her late hostess. With an unusual and pathetic humility she assured Catherine that ‘Although I answered little, I weighed it all the more deeply when you said you would warn me of all evil that you should hear of me. For if you had not a good opinion of me, you would not have offered friendship to me that way at all. But what may I more say than thank God for providing such friends to me?’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The new tutor was a success, especially in his pupil’s opinion. At thirty-three, Roger Ascham was one of the foremost Greek scholars of the day, but he was by no means only a scholar; he was an accomplished musician, and a keen and knowledgeable sportsman. Bess remembered her father’s pleasure in the Treatise on Archery which the young Cambridge don had published and presented to King Henry shortly before his death; it was in English, which showed his originality and freedom from pedantry; in fact, he valued the writing of good English prose as highly as that of Greek or Latin, and foretold a magnificent future for it. The new Bible, the new prayers in the churches, showed, as the poets had already shown, what the English language could do. But it must not stay only in the pulpit, nor in poetry; it must come down into the world and express the common life and simple pleasures of humanity – yes, not only of the science of the long bow, that backbone of England, but of such lesser sports as cock-fighting. And his mild brown eyes glowed as he sketched his plans to the Princess for a Book of the Cockpit which should be his best offering to English sport and prose.

  He was full of praise for Bess’s own writing, the simplicity and directness she could command when she chose, letting the style grow out of the subject. Unfortunately she was apt to forget this when anxious to write brilliantly, and would never quite believe him when he told her that good style knew no tricks.

  He encouraged her dancing and music, which previous tutors had condemned as a waste of time, played and sang duets with her, taught her to shoot with the long bow as her father had taught her mother; and of course, when she discovered from Mrs Ashley that Nan Bullen had had a special shooting-costume made for her, she had to have one too and a saucy green hat with feathers and long elegant shooting-gloves. He told her of cockfighting matches and dicing parties at Cambridge in which he had so nearly made his fortune, but managed instead to lose all his spare cash. All this was surprising in so learned and gentle a scholar, but was very far from meaning that lessons were neglected.

  She worked at Greek with him in the mornings and at Latin in the afternoons, on his system of double translation, turning the originals into English and then back into Greek and Latin; she even worked a little at what he called, rather contemptuously, ‘Euclid’s pricks and lines’, since mathematics were also fashionable, though they could never, he assured her, be of the same value to human intelligence as the classics. And he was enchanted with her skill and speed and the fiery intentness of her concentration. Bess collected compliments on her brains as greedily as her mother had done those on her charms. Not but what she would have liked those too. But that would come.

  There were encouraging signs of it even now, when Mr Ascham sought to inflame her with his own passion for this new world of ancient Greece, to which her own nature was, he suggested, as much akin as if she were a nymph or goddess born anew from that shadowless tireless dawn of the world, with the dew of that dawn still glistening on her brow, and the spear of the huntress Diana poised in her hand. Indeed, the fancy sometimes affected him almost with fear, as he watched her across the study table, her face, intent and pale in the bright aureole of her hair, lighting suddenly into a smile that was not of any christened soul, but inscrutably aware of her strange power.

  So had he seen a marble goddess smile, made by a man who had never heard of Christ.

  In excuse for these pagan fancies he would remind himself and tell his pupil that the world was coming out of its old dark cramped preoccupation with Heaven and Hell, with the Earth wedged unalterably between them; that Copernicus had proved the Earth to be no longer the centre of the universe but one of a myriad stars circling round the sun, ‘like courtiers round their Sovereign,’ said he, thinking of a vast red face and a hot hand that had slapped him on the back, and a mighty voice saying his treatise on archery had scored a bull’s eye! ‘And as they will circle round your royal father’s daughter, should Divine Providence ever place you on the throne.’

  Bess’s smile was certainly pagan now. It was all very well for an upstart Protector to make a modest claim for Providence putting him in power, but when she got there she would know what to thank for it – her father’s blood and her own wits.

  At present those last were well occupied, and she herself content to stay quiet and work, but not as her cousin Jane was working with her grave young tutor Mr Aylmer, a scholar of the conventional pattern and no sportsman, for the sheer disinterested love of abstract learning. For Bess never lost sight of the aim and object for which she worked: to make herself as fit to be on the throne
of England as ever her learned young brother would be.

  And in the meantime Mr Ascham’s admiration (was it perhaps, sometimes something more? She had caught him looking at her rather oddly across the study table) was a faint compensation for the Admiral’s exciting companionship; it served to pass the time, and it provided her with useful counter-thrusts against Cat Ashley.

  That much-tried governess was not unnaturally in a twitter of nerves at their expulsion from Catherine’s household, and the construction that might be put on it; she was for ever warning Bess against making eyes at men, against making pert answers, against a score of new-found faults in her behaviour.

  Never before had Mrs Ashley seen so clearly, in watching her charge, that her mother had not been a lady. What was it that Queen Nan had said when Cat Ashley was going to see the Princess Mary? ‘Give her a box on the ears now and then for the cursed bastard she is!’

  No, much as she had admired her husband’s cousin, even in her flashes of dangerous temper, Mrs Ashley could not but reflect on looking back through the years that that had not been the remark of a lady.

  ‘How can you hope to be Queen’, (the girl had let that out) ‘when you chatter with every stable-boy and take no care of your dignity?’

  ‘Mr Ascham says my dignity and gentleness are wonderful.’

  Or – ‘Women should be modest and remember their weakness. They can’t be the equal of man.’

  ‘They can, and I am. Mr Ascham says my mind has no womanly weakness, and my perseverance is equal to a man’s.’

  Mrs Ashley began to think her silver pen rather dearly bought. At this rate there would soon be no holding her young mistress. It was clear that she had captivated her new tutor as she had the last, and the greater the scholar, the less his sense.