Young Bess

by Margaret Irwin

  Henry had made endless use of ‘Good Ned’, had worked him to death and barely grunted his appreciation.

  But he would stand anything from Tom. When privately betrothed to their sister Jane (with Nan Bullen still alive), he had proudly told them how she was working the tapestry pictures for their nuptial bed-curtains herself, and Tom had asked with that impudent cock of his eyebrow, ‘What’s the subject? Bathsheba?’

  That would have been the end of any other man. Yet the King had still liked Tom best.

  And always their mother had loved him best, her precious youngest boy, the mother’s spoilt darling, and had taken his side in the furious quarrels of his boyhood (the Wolf Cubs at Wolf Hall the neighbours had called them); and when their father was away, told Ned he must take care of his little brother and be like a father to him, which was impossible and unfair, for she never told Tom to treat him with the respect due to a father, or even to a so much elder brother. She never backed up his authority for all she kept saying, ‘You’re so much older and wiser, dear Ned’; she only said that to coax him into pulling Tom out of his scrapes; it was all he was there for.

  And Tom himself thought it quite enough reward to clap him on the shoulder with that insufferably jolly air and say, ‘Good old Ned, I knew you’d always stand by me.’

  Yes, he’d always stood by him; he supposed he would always have to, even now, even though Tom was now deliberately working against him, undermining his authority, disloyal to the core, imperilling all these disinterested, far-sighted schemes of his – any one of which was worth a deal more than that young Tom Fool.

  Yet all were imperilled by this braggart, this farceur, this unnatural brother, whom he had got to try and get out of the trouble he was making for himself, as though that, and that alone, were his perpetual job in life.

  He would not think of that. He would think of his plans for the future of the people, which would, which should go forward, in spite of the devil, or private profit, self-love, money, and such-like devil’s instruments – yes, and in spite of Tom.

  So he tried to think of all he was doing for the people, and of what he must do next; but always he kept seeing that raw foggy night in his boyhood when he and Tom had been out shooting birds in the Forest of Savernake with their crossbows. They had lost their way in the sudden thick mist, and had met a wild boar face to face and he had struck up Tom’s bow just in time to prevent the young ass stinging it up with an arrow. And he had driven off the boar and at last found their way and brought them both safely home. And as they came near Wolf Hall their little mother came flitting out of the broad lighted doorway like a frightened bird, and down into the dark towards them, crying, ‘Tom! Tom! Is he there? Is he safe?’

  She had thanked and praised him afterwards, explained that she had asked first for Tom ‘because, you see, Ned, he is such a little boy.’ But it made no odds: she had not cried out for him; and that raw foggy night had struck a chill damp on his spirit ever since.

  The stifling smelly mist from the river was creeping into the room, dulling the light. How long had he been pacing up and down, doing nothing?

  His restless eye, roving over the floor, caught sight of a small white object. It was a tight paper ball. He remembered now that Dudley had scribbled something on a scrap of paper which he had been crumpling in his hand as he talked, and must have dropped. He picked it up, smoothed it out, saw a rough drawing of a gargoyle head, and some lines of verse. He read:

  ‘Observe; ’tis the mild Idealists

  Who plan our social Revolutions;

  Then come the brutal Realists

  And turn them into – Executions!

  And, first and foremost on their lists,

  Appear the mild Idealists!!’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  So the Duke went up to Scotland with his German troops and without his brother, and people said that for a fighter like Tom to choose to stay at home with a sick wife at this juncture looked extremely sinister, and his friends warned him to become ‘a new sort of man, for the world began to talk very unfavourably of him, both for his slothfulness to serve and his greediness to get.’

  The joke of it to Tom was that for once, in the burning August heat, he was really eager to escape from the stifling smelly town, and to ride back to Gloucestershire through cornfields splashed with scarlet poppies, back to the cool gardens of Sudley, where for the moment all his care was to cheer and hearten his Cathy and plan with her the nurseries for their child.

  He had hung her room, where the baby would be born, with new tapestries showing the story of Daphne; even the wet-nurse’s bed was to be decorated with gay colours ‘to please the babe.’ The day nursery led out of it, all ready furnished even to the minute chair of state upholstered in cloth of gold where the baby should receive his first visitors when he was old enough to sit on a chair at all.

  Jane Grey helped with all the preparations in grave delight, and Bess nearly cried with envy when she heard of them, to think that Jane was there and not herself. However badly she had behaved, Catherine had always liked her best, she was certain, and would rather have her there now than her good little cousin.

  And her other little cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, now five and a half years old, had eluded all the efforts of the English fleet to capture her, and arrived in France, where the King and his wife, Queen Catherine de Medici, and, far more important, his maîtresse en titre, Diane de Poictiers, all declared her the loveliest child they had ever seen, and treated her publicly as the prospective bride of their small son, the Dauphin. So she would be Queen of France some day as well as Queen of Scotland – a very convenient base for her French armies to undertake their long-planned invasion of England.

  For Bess never forgot for long that summer day on board her father’s flagship when the French Armada, three hundred strong, was sighted sailing towards Portsmouth.

  She never forgot that her father had called the baby Scottish Queen the most dangerous person in Europe; and now that Mary was in France, playing with a still younger baby boy, Bess understood why. And her precocious fear of her was sharpened by childish envy, as of her cousin Jane; for if Jane were safe and happy, cosseted by Catherine and planning baby clothes and nursery furniture with her, Mary was surely the luckiest child in the world, the most important, with a life already as adventurous as a fairytale, and now the spoilt and petted guest of the glittering Court of France.

  But she herself, the eldest of the three cousins, was left out of everything, out of cosy domesticity and thrilling triumph alike; banished, disgraced, and with no one to admire her but Mr Ascham.

  On the last day of August, hot and still and bright, when the Cotswold hills lay as soft and purple as ripe plums in the hazy sunshine, Catherine’s baby was born, and it was a girl.

  The midwife, being the best that money could hire, was the one who had helped the Princess Elizabeth into the world, and had had to break the news of her sex to her expectant sire. Never would she forget the tremendous figure striding up and down the gallery at Greenwich Palace, stopping short at sight of her, swinging round and stiffening taut as a lion crouched to spring, in the suspense of his unspoken question. She had felt her answer freezing on her lips, could hardly herself hear the words she faltered, ‘Your Majesty – a beautiful little – daughter.’

  The bellow of a maddened bull had replied. Yet even that moment, which the midwife had thought her last, had not been as terrifying as the one a little later when the King had stood by his wife’s bedside, looking down at the infant Elizabeth, stood in silence worse than any roar of rage, and said at last in a low and dreadful voice, ‘I see that God does not wish to give me male children.’

  Now it was all to do again. Now it was Tom Seymour, Lord High Admiral, striding up and down the long gallery in that castle of pleasant golden Cotswold stone at Sudley, and to him too a male child had been promised by prophecy, as important to his reckless gamble with ambition as ever it had been to the Tudor dynasty. And to him too went
the now doubly nervous midwife, taught by experience what the disappointed sire was like.

  But there was never any counting on Tom. Yet again the midwife stammered, ‘A beautiful little – daughter.’ But he seemed to have forgotten all about the sex question, he demanded only how the mother and child were doing, and he rushed up to see them as soon as he was allowed; and when he was given a glimpse of the daughter that had as shockingly betrayed his trust in God as ever King Henry’s had done, he was as delighted and proud as if a daughter had been just what he had hoped and prayed for from the beginning.

  He even had to dash off a letter at once to his brother the Protector with a full description of the baby’s beauties and asking him to rejoice with him, quite forgetting that this was just what Somerset and his Duchess were certain to do, since the birth of a mere daughter rendered him so much less dangerous.

  Clearly Ned had been right to call Tom shallow, but what a mercy it was to find him as shallow as this! It thawed the elder brother, who had just finished writing a long and well-deserved lecture, into adding a very kindly postscript, congratulating him on the birth of ‘so pretty a daughter.’

  In his relief he found he could take real pleasure in the latest news from his other brother; in the furzes that Henry had planted in the new hare warren; ‘the wild bore and 500 dere shal be sent next week; there be pasture ynough for them, for the grounde was never so well before-hande yn grasse thys tyme of the yere as yt is nowe.’

  The Duke even pulled a philosophical smile over Henry’s explanation that ‘It was not possible to devyde the bucks from the rascalls, but we wyl put all yn together.’ It was a forester speaking of the difficulty of dividing the full-grown deer from the lean and inferior – but so perhaps God might speak of men.

  And he did not fall into one of his fretful storms of nervous rage with the messenger when he read that the lewd company of Frenchmen ‘be departid and stoln away like themselves’; for his head was full of the old days when he and Henry and Tom used to go hawking in Collingbourne woods and hunting the wild boar in Savernake Forest, and, when the day of reckoning came round, toss a penny for who should pay the necessary fourpence to buy hempen halters to bind their quarry’s legs to a pole and carry him home in triumph.

  ‘Gear may come and gear may go,

  But three brothers again we’ll never be.’

  But they would be. They would leave their womenfolk behind and all three go hunting together as in the old days.

  Brotherly love was once again possible – even between brothers.

  He was so far carried away that he sent a message from his Duchess (there was no need to be too literal in going to get it from her lips) assuring Tom of both their hopes that now his wife had begun so well she would bear him many more children, sons as well as daughters.

  It was a venturesome tempting of Providence. But anything might happen before then.

  It did.

  By the time that letter reached Gloucestershire all Tom’s pride and joy were being dashed to the ground. Catherine had become dangerously ill with puerperal fever. It came on her with such appalling swiftness that it was difficult even for those in attendance on her to grasp what had happened. One moment she was smiling contentedly at her husband’s delight and amusement at this absurdly tiny scrap of flesh that waved its pink fists so helplessly in the air; the next, she was frowning and tossing her head from side to side on the pillow and speaking in a high peevish voice quite unlike her own, speaking things that no one, not even herself, had known she thought.

  For they did not grasp at once that she was delirious when she complained to her husband that he was really wanting her to die, so that he would be free to marry the Princess Elizabeth.

  He did not know how to comfort her, for he soon found that his words could not reach her understanding; he consulted with her friend Lady Tyrwhitt, who was in charge of the sickroom, and as he stood with her in the window, looking anxiously towards the bed, that strained unnatural voice called out, saying he was standing there laughing at her misery, and that he had given her ‘many shrewd taunts.’

  Was this the end of all their joking and playing, all his teasing of her, and her calling him brute and bully in fun – that it should be thus monstrously translated?

  ‘Christ’s soul!’ he cried, ‘I cannot bear it. Cathy, Cathy, my sweet fool, when did I ever want to hurt you?’

  He flung down on the bed beside her and took her in his arms, pushing her hair back from her hot face with furious tender hands, until at last his love communicated itself to her, and she lay quiet.

  Presently she recovered consciousness enough to say that she would make her will, leaving all her lands and money to her husband and ‘wishing that it were a thousand times more in value.’ But she never mentioned the baby on which all her thoughts and hopes had been set for so long; she seemed to have forgotten its very existence; and her ladies shook their heads over this, taking it as a sure symptom of approaching death.

  They were right, for two days later she was dead.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The first Protestant royal funeral took place in England with the Lady Jane Grey as chief female mourner, and Mr Coverdale, the translator of the Bible, to preach the sermon and explain that all the alms and offerings given were not ‘to benefit the dead, but for the poor only’; nor were the prayers and lighted candles for ‘any other intent or purpose than to do honour’ (but no benefit) ‘to the deceased.’

  ‘The new Church,’ said Elizabeth bitterly when she heard of it, ‘deserts her children at the grave.’

  Jane Grey, who was visiting her on her way to her home at Bradgate in Leicestershire, was shocked at her cousin’s attitude. ‘It is illogical and impious,’ she said, ‘to pray for the dead.’

  ‘Would you say that if you yourself were at the point of death?’

  ‘I would, and shall. I shall ask people to pray for me as long as I am still living, but the moment I am dead it would be wrong.’

  Yes, she would hold by that. Whatever Jane said, she would stand by. Bess gave a laugh which startled the younger girl, who had, however, some glimmering of what she was feeling.

  ‘She often wished you were there,’ Jane said. ‘She would rather have had you with her than me, I know. She has left you half her jewels.’

  Bess turned sharply away, and Jane, looking sadly after her, wondered why her cousin could not take her grief in a more Christian spirit. It seemed to make her harsh and mocking.

  Jane had been so looking forward to her comfort and guidance; and Bess had just had her fifteenth birthday, which made her practically a grown-up woman. Jane would not have her twelfth for three weeks yet, but her parents seemed to think that made her one also, for they were saying it was not suitable for her to stay on in the Admiral’s household now that his wife was dead. She thought this absurd, for her great difficulty was to make the Admiral realise she was as old as she was. He still gave her dolls and spoke to her as though she were about six, and when she protested, said it was her own fault for being so small, she grew downwards like a cow’s tail.

  But Bess, instead of agreeing how silly and tiresome Jane’s parents were being, only said that she wasn’t going to answer for the Admiral. And finding her so unsympathetic, Jane could not bring herself to tell her real sorrow; which was that it was the Admiral himself who had sent her away.

  So shocked and stunned had he been by his wife’s death that all his far-reaching plans and ambitions had gone clean out of his head; he would not even keep his household, but talked of dismissing the lot and going right away, he did not know nor care where; and packed Jane straight off home to her parents as though she were a puppy he had tired of training.

  And now Bess said she was lucky to have parents and a home to go to, where she would be safe and be told what to do. Really she must be ill!

  Mrs Ashley also thought her charge’s behaviour odd; the girl had been utterly bewildered and aghast at first at the news of Catherine’s
death, yet seemed even more angry than sorry, and went about with a white face and shut set mouth when she did not fly into sudden and unreasonable rages.

  The Admiral’s servant who brought the news told them of his master’s passionate grief; but Bess showed no sympathy, and when Mrs Ashley told her it would be only right and proper for her to write him a letter of condolence, she flew out at her governess like a spitfire and snapped out, ‘I will not. He doesn’t need it.’

  Mrs Ashley told her she was monstrously unfeeling. What was worse, it looked so marked. Someone from the Princess’s household must write; ‘If Your Grace will not,’ she said in coldly formal remonstrance, ‘then I will.’

  So she did, but when she showed the letter, Her Grace gave it an indifferent glance and said not one word about it, one way or the other.

  Mrs Ashley’s conclusion was that the Princess did not believe in the Admiral’s grief for his wife; perhaps did not wish to believe it.

  ‘Your old husband is free again now,’ she said lightly one evening, when the girl’s fierce tension had for some time relaxed and she had flown suddenly into a wildly silly mood that seemed to welcome chaff and badinage – and whatever she might welcome, Mrs Ashley must try and give. ‘Oh yes,’ she continued, nodding her head, ‘You can have him if you will, and well you know it. If the Protector and the Council give their consent, would you be so cruel as to deny him? You were his first choice, you know…’

  Bess had clapped her hand over her governess’s mouth. ‘If you don’t stop talking,’ said a small clear deadly voice, ‘I’ll thrust you out of the room.’

  One could never be sure what she would welcome.

  But certainly she listened with both ears when people spoke to each other, not to her, about the Admiral – especially if they spoke praise, which made her flush with pleasure. Mr Parry the cofferer, who kept all the household accounts, was a great friend of Mrs Ashley’s, and the two of them would casually remind each other, in front of their young mistress, what a great man the Admiral was clearly born to be; how he had begun to win position and notice entirely on his own merits, as a younger son, and before any of his sisters had made important marriages; how the sumptuous state he kept abroad for the honour of his country came as naturally to him as to any of the great princes of the House of Valois and of Hapsburg, and how his popularity with them had made his success as a diplomat.