Young Bess

by Margaret Irwin

  Written in haste, from Hatfield,

  Your assured friend to my little power,

  ELIZABETH.’

  The Protector blinked as he read the upright beautifully shaped hand. Never surely did a fifteen-year-old Princess dispose of so base a charge in so brief and businesslike a manner. Nothing here of the proper outraged modesty and ignorance of a very young lady – but a sound medical knowledge, and the courage to stand upon it. They said she was with child. Let them prove it then; she was perfectly ready to come to Court to be medically examined and to outface all the prying whispering gossip of the women who would know why she had come.

  The Good Duke was scandalised. Why, at her age his sister Jane would not even have known such things. And the bold accusation (for it plainly accused him too), ‘My Lord, these are shameful slanders’, was like a blow straight between his eyes. Almost he could hear it thundered out in King Harry’s voice with one of his tremendous oaths.

  There was finesse in the letter too; she thanked him at the beginning for his ‘great gentleness and goodwill’ to her, and told him that she was only writing to him because he had told her to. (So whatever he got from her, he had asked for it!)

  She even insinuated a subtle defence of the Admiral by quoting an almost too innocent question of his, ‘Why he might not visit me as well as my sister?’; and of Mrs Ashley, by declaring that her governess had always said ‘she would never have me marry without the consent of the King’s Majesty, Your Grace’s, and the Council’s’.

  And the only pathetic note in this letter from an utterly friendless child in a desperate position, was that she had altered the conventional closing, ‘Your assured friend to my power’, with the addition ‘to my little power’.

  It did not impress the Duke, who wrote in sharp retort that she was too well assured of herself; as to these shameful slanders, let her but name the author of them, and the Council would take up the matter.

  Again he got more than he bargained for. She was very sorry he took her letter ‘in evil part’, but coolly observed that ‘I do not see that Your Grace has made any direct answer’. As to naming the scandal-mongers, ‘I can easily do it, but I would be loth to do, because it is mine own cause’, and she had no wish to punish anyone in that cause, ‘and so get the ill will of the people’.

  But she told him with uncompromising directness what he ought to do, and that was ‘to send forth a Proclamation declaring how the tales be but lies’.

  The Duchess, reading it over the Duke’s shoulder, gave a squeal of exasperation. ‘Telling you what Proclamations to issue! Who the devil does she think she is?’

  The letter told them. She was ‘The King’s Majesty’s sister’. It would be well for the Protector and the Council to show the people that they remembered this, and that they had some regard for her honour.

  The Duchess screamed. This bastard, this wanton, was giving herself all the airs of a future Queen. All her talk of the people (it was a marvel she did not write ‘my people’!) and their will towards her, good or ill, showed her sinister intentions. She was determined to play for popularity, to work up a following in the country, as her seducer had tried to do. There would not be a moment’s peace in England till she met the same fate as he.

  And why, she demanded, was that fate so long in coming to him?

  It was over a month now since the Admiral had been sent to the Tower, and every week, day, hour while the Duke delayed, hesitated, prevaricated, hummed and hawed and made tedious speeches, was giving his equally traitorous brother Henry time to work up more and more opposition to the execution.

  She swept out of the room. A servant entering just after was surprised to get an inkpot thrown at his head, and hurriedly departed, to tell his fellows that the Protector was not the same man since he had started hounding his brother to the scaffold. He was growing quite irritable.

  The Protector raged round the room, hurling books on to the floor, flinging papers into the fire. The airy, erect handwriting of the Princess looked up at him as he was about to destroy that too. It was very like her; the fantastic looped lines of the signature that twirled into a little arabesque at the end were those of an artist longing to draw rather than write; even the two large sploshy blots on the other side of it, which she had ignored rather than write her letter again, were characteristic. But the words were quite unlike the hard frivolous young thing he believed her to be.

  ‘They are most deceived that trust most in themselves.’

  That had been in answer to his reproof of her overconfidence; but seeing the sentence apart from the rest, it sounded a warning to himself. Had he, after all, trusted so earnestly in his fine resolves, his noble desires for humanity, only to be deceived by a traitor within his own breast?

  He looked again. He saw, ‘I know I have a soul to be saved as well as other folk have.’ Its simplicity seemed utterly forlorn; yet there was a true pride in it that no humiliation could crush.

  Was this girl indeed a contemptible wanton? Her dealings with him and his servants were showing sparks of unexpected greatness. He laid down the letters, still looking searchingly at the writing as at a portrait then inward at himself.

  He too had a soul. What had become of it? Always he had regarded himself as morally superior to the run of men. He never swore, nor drank too much; nor felt any temptation to lechery; his greed for money and property was too cold a lust for him to recognise it as that. How should it be a personal lust when he was building his possessions for the future, laying up treasure, honourable position and power for his sons’ sons rather than himself?

  That sophistry had crumbled. It would not even be his true heir who would inherit his titles, his eagerly grasped lands and gold – a little mud and metal, that was what it had turned to now in his eyes. Yet he had been no greedier nor more ambitious than many others; and no vices stained his private character.

  But for all that, he knew now that for many years his soul had been in hell.

  He hoped that death would release it.

  Bess got her Proclamation. The Protector issued one as she had requested, stating that the scandals against her were lies, and forbidding the people to repeat them, on pain of severe punishment.

  Whereupon she promptly made another request: that the Protector and the Council should be good to her governess in the Tower, ‘because she has been with me a long time, and has taken great labour and pains in bringing me up in learning and honesty’.

  There were many tales of poor Ashley’s pains in bringing Bess up; the Protector almost suspected that baffling smile of the Princess behind the words. Yet it was a touchingly loyal appeal. It made no reference to any other subject, though she wrote it only three days after the Bill of Attainder against the Admiral had passed its third reading in the House of Lords. She could make no appeal for him; it would only harm him, since his courtship of her was one of the chief charges against him.

  She could only plead for her old Ash-Cat, a poor substitute, and in her agony of anxiety she did not think at first that she could drive herself to do it. But Cat was her old friend and she must do the best she could for her. She did.

  The letter was full of a faithful and passionate tenderness – perhaps not all for Ashley. But Ashley was the only person for whom she could admit it.

  She walked, these first cold days of March, under the great oaks of Hatfield Park, where she had been so glad to run out and listen to the nightingale on the early summer evenings when she had first come here with Mr Ascham – and Queen Catherine was still alive. There was the old tree scarred with her arrows where she had shot at a mark and her tutor had told her she drew as pretty a bow as the goddess Diana.

  Was she indeed walking in the very same place, under the self-same trees? Was she here at all, and was she the same self? Or was there nothing round her, the world nothing, and she herself nobody?

  ‘Thus in no place, this nobody, in no time I met

  Where no man, nor naught was, nor nothing did appear.�
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  The world seemed to have dropped into a vast silence, and yet there were birds shrilly piping their first songs, dogs barking, and the chatter and rustle of female voices and movement all round her.

  Lady Tyrwhitt and her women walked with her, talking, talking, watching her, trying to make her talk too. Of what was Her Grace thinking? Why did her lips move and yet say nothing?

  ‘Because I can say nothing,’ she said.

  And still she said, only to herself:

  ‘He said he was little John Nobody that durst not once speak.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  In those first days after his arrest, Tom walked up and down his room in the Tower and talked, while his friend and servant Sir John Harington sat by the fire and stared at it in silence. He listened sympathetically to every word his lord was saying, while the back of his mind, which was irrepressibly given to statistics, computed the number of miles Tom must have already walked that day. He would verify the measurement of the room presently, but he must be doing a good average of twenty-five miles a day. At this rate he could have walked to the South Coast by now and got on one of Jack Thompson’s ships for France; in a fortnight he could walk across the Border to Scotland and freedom.

  But at every few steps the Tower walls turned his footsteps sharp round and back again. Would he ever walk straight on, out into the air, except to his grave?

  The subject of these gloomy fancies was far from indulging in them.

  Tom was blazingly angry, but he still had no notion that there was anything to be really afraid of – except of the shock that his sudden arrest must have given his mother. He’d never forgive Ned for that – he’d let him know it too, the damned clumsy heavy-footed brute, so full of his own importance that he’d got blunted to everything and everyone else – ‘he can only think in terms of Council speeches, he’s forgotten that the People are made up of persons. No wonder his wife is sick of the sight and in especial the sound of him – much good it does her to have a fellow like that in bed with her – if it weren’t for the loathing I’ve got for the bad-tempered bitch I’d cuckold Ned myself to show her what a Seymour can do.’

  Three turns in silence, only two steps off four, then out he broke again, ‘This is to give me a jerk, that’s all. They’ve not a thing they can really hold against me. I’ll be out in no time, and by God if he thinks I’ll keep the peace the better for this brotherly hint, he’ll soon find his mistake! I’ll make him sorry he ever did such a damn fool thing as to clap me into the Tower. Who can be behind it? That’s what worries me. Ned would never have done this of himself.’

  Another turn, then a sharp swing-round on his heel and a thump on Harington’s shoulder that nearly spun him into the fire. ‘By God, Jack, I’ve got it! I always knew it really, but I was too hot with Ned to think of anyone else. I’ll swear this is Dudley’s doing. I’ve always distrusted that fellow. Didn’t I say he’s a dark horse, hasn’t shown his form yet, but I’ll bet a thousand pounds he’s keeping something back that will show when it comes to a race for power. And that blind jackass Ned doesn’t see it, for all his conceit about his brains – but you know the Spaniard Chapuys always said Ned was “not very intelligent and rather haughty”!’ He interrupted himself with a roar of delighted mirth. ‘Sure enough, our Ned isn’t intelligent enough to see that this dainty fop the Earl of Warwick is making trouble between us for his own ends – the old tag, “divide et impera”, and so come in for the pickings. Isn’t it clear as mud?’

  ‘Clearer,’ said Harington, ‘if it’s clear that Dudley is in this thing. There’s nothing to show it yet.’

  ‘But someone must be, and if not he, who is it? Who else would gain?’

  Harington hesitated. Then he said, ‘Your brother would gain, or thinks so, or he wouldn’t have done it.’

  Tom stared at him, really shocked. ‘You bloody-minded old cynic, you don’t really think Ned did this of himself!’

  ‘I don’t know. What is the use of thinking, till one knows?’

  ‘There’s the mathematician! But we’ll soon know, for it’s bound to come out at the trial. That’s the best of a trial, everything comes out at it – you can see who’s against you, answer their accusations and show how piffling they are. And by God, I’ll show ’em a few things on the other side! I’ll bring it all out in the open about Ned stealing my wife’s wedding ring! And Fasterne – her own family lands. What’s he got against me compared with that? He’ll wish he’d never given me the chance to speak in public. And mark you, I’m going to get that chance. I’m not going to be let out with a warning after a few weeks in the Tower and told to take my medicine like a good boy and go quietly and not make a fuss. I shall insist on a trial. I’ll make it so hot for them all, they’ll wish to God they’d never touched me.’

  And for several more miles he went over and over all the things that he would bring up against Ned at the trial.

  He had walked nearly as far as the Welsh Border before he heard that there was not going to be any open trial; but not because he was to be set free without one. It was because they were bringing a Bill of Attainder against him.

  He stopped walking. He stopped talking. He stood dead still and stared before him. It was Harington who could no longer bear the silence, though a man discreetly trained to it. He had married a bastard daughter of King Henry’s, oddly named Ethelred, and with masterly lack of snobbery in a snobbish age never let it be supposed that she was anything but the bastard of Henry’s tailor. And in these last weeks the Council had tried their utmost by bribes and threats to get out of him any incriminating evidence on the Admiral’s relations with the Princess Elizabeth – but all in vain.

  Short and sturdy, he glanced uneasily up at that magnificent figure of his patron, like an unhappy dog, and at last murmured, ‘I’m afraid this looks bad.’

  But Tom did not hear him.

  A Bill of Attainder was the surest and deadliest weapon they could bring against him. Thomas Cromwell had used it again and again to rid King Henry of anyone he wished out of the way without the inconvenience of an open trial – until the King turned it on Cromwell himself. And now the Protector had turned it on his brother.

  ‘So – Ned – is in it!’ He spoke as though he had seen a ghost.

  Harington looked at his watch. It was twenty-five minutes since the Admiral had last spoken. And still he had not moved.

  Ten minutes later he said, ‘Then there’ll be no trial. I’ll not get a hearing.’

  Five minutes, and he said, ‘Ned must be in it.’

  Two minutes, and he moved in a mad rush across the room, sweeping everything off the table with a stroke of his arm, kicking over a heavy chair, and gripped Harington by the shoulders till the fingers seemed to meet through his flesh.

  ‘He can’t do this thing. He’s my own brother, he’s stood by me again and again – in a damned superior priggish way if you like, but – he can’t mean to kill me.’

  ‘Let go!’ said Harington.

  Tom dropped him. ‘It would kill Mother. He must know that. If he doesn’t mind killing me, he’d mind that, wouldn’t he? Answer me!’ he roared.

  ‘He won’t let himself think he’s killed her,’ Harington replied, feeling his shoulder tenderly.

  ‘By God, I believe you’re right. He has my head under his belt.’

  But still he could not believe that Ned would keep it there – still less, put it on a spike. From his nursery days he had been brought up to think of his eldest brother as good. Why, even the common people were now all calling him the Good Duke.

  There must be some compensation for being good, and now he would find out what it was: a good man did not cut off his brother’s head. Ned would still stand by him, somehow or other. Ned would find a way to get him out.

  But then the Governor of the Tower, who was very friendly, especially after sharing a bottle or two of Tom’s wine, brought him news of the proceedings in Parliament. There were many who objected to a Bill of Attainder be
ing brought instead of an open trial; there were speeches against it in both Houses, especially in the Commons.

  But the Lord Protector, ‘declaring how sorrowful a case this was for him, did yet regard his bounden duty more than his own son or brother’.

  ‘“His own son” – the Roman father, hey? He’s getting on his toga for the rôle. By Christ’s soul, he means to do it! Once Ned starts talking about duty, anything may happen. He’ll talk himself into being good enough to kill his brother, yes, and his own mother. And never see that he’s an unnatural monster – only a man who does his duty – the damned inhuman conceited swab of dirty cotton mopping up the mess that his own injustice has got him into, mopping it with his own flesh and blood. “His bounden duty” – “Foy pour devoir” – that our father used to preach to us, the fine old man, shouting the family motto out like a battle-cry – and Ned the good boy of the family lapping it up like a cat with cream – to see what use he could put it to. If he were living now, he’d have strangled Ned in his cradle to prevent it coming to this – to kill me and “my Margery” as he always called her, and used to say the verse that was written to her, and watch her blush –

  “With margerain gentle,

  The flower of goodlihead.”

  “To Mistress Margery Wentworth” – yes, old John Skelton wrote that to her when they were both young.

  “Benign, courteous and meek,

  With wordes well devised”—

  She’s using them now, no doubt – on her Ned. And small good they’ll do her – or me. For she’s using them on a stone, a clod of earth long since fossilised, a man who’s never known what it is to be one, who’s wrapped himself round with a cloud of “wordes well devised” so that he sees and hears nothing but what he says himself. So that he can call it his bounden duty to kill me! My God, I’ll kill him! Just let me get my hands on his scrawny throat when I get out!’