Young Bess

by Margaret Irwin

  And they were looking into his eyes, sinking into them, as once they had done on a night of early summer years before – and suddenly he knew that there was only one reason why he had consented to meet her thus; only one thing he wanted to ask of her: had she, that same night that she had kissed him, given her body to the Admiral.

  He had no chance to ask it. In that same instant that he looked at them, those deep blue eyes changed again, the pupils narrowed, they were the colour of steel as she asked the question that she, not he, had chosen.

  ‘What the devil is this foolery of Dudley’s? He has just married his son Guildford in hugger-mugger haste to Lady Jane Grey, to her little liking, and to his own purpose only. You must know of it. It can mean but one thing – that he intends to rule England through her; get the King to alter the Succession and appoint Jane his heir to the throne.’

  ‘It must be for the sake of the true religion, Your Grace,’ said Barney uncomfortably. ‘If the Lady Mary came to the throne now, it would wreck the course of the Reformation.’

  But it was difficult to explain why the Lady Elizabeth, so widely regarded as the representative of true religion, should also have been set aside.

  She saw his thought and laughed. ‘Yes, he approached me first, all in the cause of the true faith! He quickly found I would have nothing to do with it. So he will set both Mary and myself aside, as declared bastards, which is absurd, for if either is a bastard then the other must be legitimate. Jane’s a child for all she’s sixteen – and a little fool for all her learning. Her villainous parents are pushing her into this – to her ruin.’

  She spoke the more emphatically as she saw the young man’s face settle into resistance to her argument. How wooden and conceited and disapproving he had grown – and she had once thought him so charming!

  Barney on his side, having stiffened himself against any attempt to beguile him, was annoyed to find none made. Did she not think it worth while? Frigidly he put Edward’s view to her: he disapproved of his sister Mary; all his reign had been clouded by quarrels with her over her observance of the Mass in her private household; it had nearly caused a war with the Emperor, since she had got him to take her side. That was the danger – Rome – foreign interference—

  ‘I think,’ she interrupted crisply, ‘you must have been listening to Dr Latimer’s sermon last Sunday. In his opinion, “God had better remove both the Princesses from this Earth,” since we might marry foreign princes who might endanger God’s Church. But if Godly Dudley takes that hint, he’ll pull a hornet’s nest about his ears. He’ll do it in any case by putting Jane on the throne. The throne of England depends ultimately on the consent of the people. And the people will never stand it if the rightful heir is set aside.’

  ‘The consent of the people? Yes, Your Grace, and the people have given their consent to the new religion. Which the Lady Mary has rejected.’

  ‘So that they will reject her? Never think it! I know more of them than you do – you’ve been abroad,’ she added, to soften this. ‘But indeed I know them, the commoners, well. Creeds don’t matter to them as much as people – or as the simple standards of right and wrong. Some of them may think it fun to toss a priest or two in a blanket, but they won’t stand seeing an innocent woman done out of her rights. And they like Mary all the better for standing up for them and insisting on her own form of private worship. They tell dozens of good stories about her pluck – how she roared at the Council, “My father made the best part of you out of nothing!” How they bawled back! It could be heard in the street outside! But so was the story. When the English tell stories about anyone it means they’ve taken him – or her – as their own. And she is not only comedy to them, she is romance. For so many years now she has been a legend, a princess cruelly shut up in Dolorous Guard. I will tell you something I saw myself only this spring; a simpleton of a girl who wandered the countryside, believing herself to be the Princess Mary! She told me that King Henry’s sister, the lovely Mary Rose, had appeared to her in a dream – she was sitting in a silver bath! – and told her, “You must go a-begging once in your life, either in your youth or in your age.” “And so,” said the poor fool, “I have chosen to do it in my youth.” You will think this not worth a straw – but straws show the wind – and the hold that my sister’s sad state has had on the people’s imagination.’

  On hers too, it seemed, with such eager sympathy she told the queer little tale – until it occurred to Barney that she too, as well as Mary, had had to go a-begging in her youth; and might well see herself as another ill-used princess in Dolorous Guard.

  For the first time it struck him that he himself had not been the only person to be pitied in the affair of the Princess and the Admiral.

  He knelt and kissed her hand. ‘I will do what I can with His Majesty for Your Grace,’ he murmured.

  For answer she flicked him on the nose. ‘You are impertinent. Who said it was for my Grace?’

  ‘For my Lady Mary’s then.’ At last he was smiling.

  But she sighed. ‘Why not say, for my Lady Jane’s? It’s she who would come off worst.’

  She went back to Hatfield and wrote telling her brother how she had come to see him and been prevented. It is doubtful if he ever got the letter. He was fast getting worse. Dudley was having to work madly against time. He had married Jane to his son almost as quickly as one bought a cow (but Jane was still refusing to consummate the marriage).

  Now he bought quantities of arms and was manning the Tower; twenty ships fully manned and gunned rode at anchor in the Thames on the thin pretext of an expedition to Barbary and the Spice Islands, which everyone knew would not take place.

  Only one thing remained to secure his position; he must seize the persons of the two Princesses.

  Two bodies of horsemen were sent to bring them to London in answer to urgent messages from their dying brother.

  Mary started from Hunsdon. Elizabeth, just about to start from Hatfield, had a sudden suspicion that these pathetic appeals might be a trap to take them prisoner. What if they had been sent, not by the King, but by Dudley in his name?

  Edward Seymour had kept King Henry’s death a secret for three days while he snatched the supreme power. Was John Dudley now playing the same trick?

  She promptly went to bed and declared herself too ill to ride to London. It would gain time, but only for a few days, perhaps hours, and sooner or later she would have to declare herself either for Mary or Dudley.

  It was an appalling dilemma, for she knew nothing of what had happened to Mary, and if she continued to disobey the summons to London, it might well lead to Dudley sending an armed force to carry her to the Tower, perhaps the block. On the other hand, if she threw in her lot with him, it would bring her into open enmity with Mary, who might even now be fighting his army – and winning.

  She lay back on her pillows and knew that she could do nothing more but wait for the next move.

  It came with the public announcement of the King’s death. The heralds proclaimed Jane as Queen at street corners, and their printed Proclamations, stuck up in market squares and church porches all over the country, justified her succession on the ground that the King’s sisters were both bastards.

  It was Sunday, and preachers all preached the same doctrine: Jane alone was the true and rightful Queen. A servant rode back from Amersham where he had heard a little man with a beard like a billygoat thump the pulpit and scream, ‘Woe! Woe to England!’ if she allied herself to the enemies of the Gospel – by which Mr Knox intended Mary.

  No one could tell Bess where Mary was – alive or dead – free or a prisoner – in England or escaped – (as she had often planned) to the Netherlands.

  But there was far more that no one could tell her about Mary. She lay by the new open windows, and the clang and peal of church bells acclaiming Jane as Queen of England floated in on the golden early July air. Would the country tamely accept her, or would they rise on behalf of Mary, as she had so boldly assured Barn
ey they would?

  She had not felt as bold as she had sounded. Dudley held whatever army there was, and the navy (all those ships lying off London all ready to attack! ‘Spice Islands my nose!’ she had exclaimed. It had smelt gunpowder, not spices); he held the Tower and all the great nobles in his pay. He was the greatest soldier England had had for years; he had succeeded in Scotland where Somerset, a sound and ruthless general, had failed; he had succeeded against the revolution.

  Would he succeed now? Or would that inveterate bungler, Mary?

  And if Mary did succeed, what then?

  Dudley was the only man Mary had ever feared, except her father.

  Nobody feared Mary. Her gruff good-natured laugh; her overdressing coupled with her simplicity and utter ignorance of the world, ignorance that had begun as a secluded girl’s, devoted to her deeply religious mother, and had fixed into an old maid’s; her inability to say anything she did not mean (‘to be plain with you,’ it was always accompanying some fresh gaffe); all these things had made her, among those who knew her, a figure of fun, certainly not of any mystery or alarm.

  But Bess, lying in the warm July sunshine, shivered as she thought of her half-sister. Would it be better for herself if Mary won instead of Dudley? Dudley was utterly unscrupulous, ruthlessly bent on his own ambition, and would sweep anyone who interfered with it out of the way without remorse.

  But Mary was unpredictable. She would never do anything that she did not feel to be right – but what might govern those feelings? Her starved emotions, her bitter broodings on the past and the wrong her father had done her mother, had twisted her judgment, of which she had never had much. She could not see nor reason clearly, but acted on impulse, letting her heart govern, and not her head. That ought to be well, since Mary had a good heart. But a female heart rampant could be a terrifying thing.

  Under Mary’s essential goodness of nature there lay the sickening uncertainty of hysteria. That quagmire, that welter of shifting angry unhappy emotion, blind, bottomless, a bog on a black night, was always there, waiting to engulf her, and anyone who was so unfortunate as to be having any dealings with her at that moment.

  Jane might well turn out to be as much of a bigot as Mary.

  But Jane was not an hysteric. Jane’s fury of righteous indignation would be a deal less dangerous than Mary’s sobbing paroxysms of grief over her sainted mother,

  ‘May God preserve me from good women!’ sighed Bess.

  But there she had to lie, on the horns of a dilemma, between two very good women.

  The church bells broke out again into a peal of joyous triumph. A white butterfly fluttered in and flapped about the room. She got out of bed, caught it and let it fly out of the window, watching it join a cluster of its fellows and go dancing all together, up, up, like flecks of light against the green glory of the sunlit trees, until suddenly she remembered she might be seen at the window.

  She jumped into bed again, and looked at her face in the little hand-mirror. It was sufficiently white not to need any rubbing with chalk. Her teeth were chattering with fear; but she laughed.

  Something in her that had lain numb all these four and a half years, since Tom Seymour’s death, was quickening her pulses to a terrified yet heartening throb.

  Now at last again, when at any moment she might lose it, she knew how sweet life was, and hope; yes, and fear too, since it had made her want to keep that life, want passionately, with all the wild excitement of a young lover’s desire, to live, and to be Queen.

  About the Author

  MARGARET IRWIN (1889–1969) was a master of historical fiction, blending meticulous research with real storytelling flair to create some of the twentieth century’s best-loved and most widely acclaimed novels, including The Galliard and Young Bess.

  By Margaret Irwin

  The Galliard

  Young Bess

  Elizabeth, Captive Princess

  Elizabeth and the Prince of Spain

  If you enjoyed Young Bess, read on to find out

  about more books by Margaret Irwin …

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  ELIZABETH, CAPTIVE PRINCESS

  July, 1553. Sibling rivalry has never been more turbulent and perilous than between the daughters of King Henry VIII. Queen Mary Tudor has just won possession of the throne, but her younger half-sister – the beautiful and vivacious Princess Elizabeth – holds the hearts of the people. Knowing this, Mary banishes her sibling to a country retreat, determined to keep her as far away from court life as possible.

  But Mary’s health is fading fast and her power beginning to crumble. The people of England are crying out for a new monarch and it seems, at last, they may have their wish and crown their beloved Bess as Queen. In these treacherous times, when all about her lies secrecy and deception, Elizabeth must rely on her faith and courage if she is to rise to fulfil her destiny.

  ELIZABETH AND THE PRINCE OF SPAIN

  Philip, Prince of Spain, the unwilling bridegroom of Queen Mary, has been warned about the Queen’s half-sister, the young Elizabeth. According to all reports, she is a heretic, a rebel and a potential enemy, and has ‘a spirit full of enchantment’. An alluring description and one that immediately intrigues, rather than deters, the foreign prince.

  Accused of treachery by Mary and under threat of death, Elizabeth’s life hangs in the balance. Only Philip, idolised by his ageing wife and able to sway her decisions, holds the power to save the courageous young princess. And so Elizabeth must advance warily towards her destiny, running the gauntlet between Bloody Mary’s jealousy and Philip’s uneasy ardour.

  THE GALLIARD

  The young and trusting Mary, Queen of Scots, is sailing home to her kingdom after years in exile. The danger from her cousin, the English Queen, has not lessened since she first departed. Religious divides threaten to tear the nation apart and, across the border, Elizabeth keenly watches this new threat to her throne.

  Amid the furious turmoil and uncertainty in her Scottish kingdom, Mary finds she has one loyal servant – James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, a ‘glorious, rash and hazardous young man’ known to all as the Galliard. In Bothwell’s courage and love for her, Mary finds serenity, and though fate works against them, no force can conquer their spirit.

  Copyright

  Allison & Busby Limited

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  First published in Great Britain in 1945.

  This ebook edition published by Allison & Busby in 2013.

  Copyright © 1998 by THE ESTATE OF MARGARET IRWIN

  The moral right of the author is hereby asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978–0–7490–1247–2