Young Bess

by Margaret Irwin

  She liked to make her own presents, and had always insisted on her own choice in them. At six years old she had flatly refused to give her baby brother Edward any of the jewels or elaborate ornaments that were offered to her as suitable gifts for his second birthday; no, she would have none of them, though tempted momentarily by a bush of rosemary covered with gold spangles, which, however, on reflection she decided to keep for herself. And she carried out her determination of making the baby a cambric shirt.

  A small girl so practical and independent was wasted in a royal household, the women decided; Bess was clearly cut out to be a good wife and mother in a poor household with a host of children. But Bess did not agree, though she did not say so. Even at six years old she had become something of an adept at not saying things, though she could not always keep it up, for she was also an adept at pert answers. And nothing could alter her quick and imperious temper, which had shown itself so masterfully before she was quite three years old that her distracted governess had written long garrulous letters to the Lords of the Council about the difficulty of controlling ‘my lady’s’ princely demands for the same wines and meats that her grown-up companions were having at table. Bess’s state had been far from princely then; her clothes were all outgrown and there were no new ones for her; she had been sent away into the country with no provision made for her, and her governess at her wits’ end as to how to clothe and feed her.

  Yet only a very short time before, her father had tossed her up in his arms, and crowds of gorgeous strangers had thronged round her, uttered ecstatic little cries at the sight of her, bowed down to her and pressed glittering toys into her hands.

  There was a winter’s evening when she was just two and a half years old (she always remembered it, though people said she could only have remembered hearing of it) when that enormous figure, not nearly as stout as now but seeming even taller, and dressed from top to toe in yellow satin like a monstrous giant toad, hoisted her up on to a vast padded shoulder, where she clutched at the white feather in his flat cap, and carried her round at that dizzy height, showing her off to everybody, shouting, ‘Thank God the old harridan is dead! Here is your future Queen – Elizabeth!’ And all the courtiers shouted back, and the dark crowds in the street below the window where he stood with her, in a terrifying exciting roar, ‘God save the King! God save the Princess Elizabeth!’

  ‘The old harridan’ was her father’s first wife and her half-sister Mary’s mother, Queen Katherine of Aragon, that noble Spanish princess who had been hounded to death at last by her husband’s six-year persecution. That was at the end of January, and by the following May Bess’s mother too was dead, her head cut off by her father’s orders; and by the next morning he was wedded to Jane Seymour.

  Bess did not know that at the time, only that she went away into the country, that there were no more crowds nor shouting for her, that her clothes grew shabby and uncomfortably small for her, and no one was in the least excited or pleased to see her.

  ‘Here we go up, up, up,

  Here we go down, down, down,’

  so the children sang, playing on the see-saw on the village green, but she was not allowed to play with them either. The time of neglect and poverty passed; she went up again, though never to the dizzying height of her first two and a half years; she went back to Court, where, however, a new baby, a tiny boy, was now the centre of all the swaying, bowing crowds, carried aloft on that towering shoulder.

  It was he now whom the giant King would dandle and toss in his arms by the hour together, and stand at a window showing him to the crowds below; and their roars would surge up in rugged waves of sound, ‘God save King Hal!’ ‘God save the Prince!’ ‘Long live Prince Edward!’

  The baby’s mother, Jane Seymour, was not there. She had died in giving birth to him – ‘my poor little Jane,’ the King said occasionally with a sob.

  He did not seem to like Bess now, he was odd and uncomfortable with her; sometimes she would catch him looking at her with a strange intent gaze, and then when she looked back he would turn away and talk to someone else. And he never again called her Elizabeth, but only Young Bess, which should have sounded more affectionate, but did not. Long afterwards she guessed that he had ceased to feel her worthy of the name, for he had bestowed it on her in memory of his mother, that gracious and beloved princess, last of the royal Plantagenets, who had given him his most legitimate claim to the throne.

  But at the time Bess only knew that she must be very good and quiet and not thrust herself forward. Her half-sister Mary, a grown-up woman, said: ‘It is your turn now to learn to be silent, as I have done.’

  She said it on a note of acid triumph, for she had been forced to agree to the Act of Parliament that declared her mother’s marriage illegal and herself illegitimate, forced to acknowledge this baby sister’s prior right to the throne over herself, to let her take public precedence to her everywhere, and even to serve as maid-of-honour to her. That had been when Elizabeth was ‘up, up, up’; now she too had been bastardised and was ‘down, down, down,’ where Mary had been for many years now. She looked cowed and dull. She was a good woman and did not seek to revenge herself on her small half-sister for the agonies and humiliations she had had to suffer on her behalf; instead she tried hard to be kind to her, but Bess knew she did not like her.

  The King talked about finding a new mother for his poor motherless children, and then something opened in Mary’s dull face: in one instant it had shut again, but in that instant Bess felt she had seen into hell.

  It was not so easy a task by now to find a new Queen for England. The foreign princesses were growing wary. A Danish one said that if she had two heads she would be delighted to lay one at the English King’s disposal; a French one, tall and stately, of the House of Guise, was told that Henry wished for her as he was so big himself, he needed a big wife; and she replied, ‘Ah, but my neck is small.’ And Mary of Guise had the effrontery to marry his nephew instead, that young whippersnapper King James V of Scotland. Then Tom Cromwell, the ‘best of his servants,’ engineered a German Protestant alliance and a marriage with the Bavarian princess, Anne of Cleves, whose portrait was very pretty, but not, Bess decided, as quick and chic and merry-looking as that of her own mother, Anne.

  But when the new bride arrived, and all the Court went to meet her with the King (Bess, now six years old, by the side of her twenty-five-year-old sister, Mary), then everybody saw with a shock that the bride was not pretty at all. Fat ‘Crum’ was bustling about with a staff in his hand, sweating with energy and anxiety – ‘just like a post boy,’ Tom Seymour whispered wickedly, though Bess thought him much more like a panting ox. He acted as interpreter between the King and the large raw-boned German princess, who beamed effusively and said ‘Ya, Ya,’ for she was as stupid as she was plain, she could speak no language but her own, to the shocked amazement of Bess, who had never heard of a princess who couldn’t speak at least six languages including Greek and Latin. Crum remarked to the King that she looked ‘very queenly,’ but he did it timidly, ‘as though he were offering a coin to an elephant,’ said Tom Seymour.

  The elephant rejected it; he shot one red glance at the best of his servants and trumpeted two words: ‘What remedy?’ In six months he had found it; annulled his marriage with Anne, and beheaded Cromwell.

  Elizabeth heard of it a month before her seventh birthday, while she was stitching at the shirt for her baby brother. She knew by now that this ox, who could pounce like a tiger, had got her mother beheaded, after making her Queen; and now he was beheaded himself. ‘Here we go down, down down.’

  Anne of Cleves lived on in England; she said she would ‘always be a sister’ to Henry, she was kind and friendly to his daughters, and she did not even mind (perhaps she was relieved) when he married Cat Howard, an enchanting creature not quite eighteen.

  Mary was cold and haughty to Cat, a flighty girl, seven years younger than herself, who had scrambled up to womanhood in the careless modern fa
shion among a host of boys and girls as wild and reckless as herself. She said Cat was of inferior rank and not at all fitted to be their father’s wife. In her scorn of Cat, Bess could see what this daughter of the Spanish kings had felt for Bess’s mother, Nan Bullen, whose family had lately started to spell their name Boleyn to make it sound grander. They were relations of the Howards – but of far less noble stock, and Nan was the granddaughter of a mercer and Lord Mayor of London, as Mary once blurted out to the child when provoked by her to one of her hysterical rages.

  It was perhaps the worst shock to her self-esteem that Bess had received in her childhood. There was no disgrace in having some of your family executed; it was a thing that might happen to anybody, and frequently did; and under the Tudors, the more noble the family, the more likely it was to happen. But a mercer, a Lord Mayor! She flung an inkpot at Mary, called her a liar, and rushed screaming with fury to her beloved governess, Mrs Ashley, who soothed her with reminders of her mother’s Howard uncle, the great Duke of Norfolk, of one of the oldest families in the kingdom. But Bess was not impressed; she thought her great-uncle Norfolk a vulgar old man who said very rude things, and she had heard that he was always ready to do the King’s dirty work for him; this she imagined to be something to do with cleaning his horse or his boots when on an expedition together.

  Mrs Ashley was worrying about something more important; Bess must be very careful never to quarrel with her half-sister, the Lady Mary, ‘for one never knows – And she had good reason to hate your mother, Queen Anne, who was, God forgive her, very unkind to her and to her poor mother, Katherine of Aragon – and she was a saint if ever there was one.’

  Bess said mutinously, ‘Well, I’d rather have a witch for my mother than a saint – and an Englishwoman than a Spaniard – and anyway, why should Mary turn up her nose at Cat Howard?’

  She adored the lovely warm impulsive creature, the Rose without a Thorn the King called her, who insisted on giving Bess the place of honour next herself, as she was her cousin. She brought gaiety into all their lives; she coaxed the King with such endearments as ‘her little pig,’ for he was growing very stout; but, determined to defy it, he rose at five or six and rode and went hunting and hawking with her every day and often all day, sometimes tiring out nine or ten horses in a single hunt. King François’s sister, the fascinating Marguerite, kept asking flatteringly but tactlessly for his portrait, and he hoped to give Holbein a chance to show how young he’d grown in body as well as heart – but alas he was still ‘marvellously excessive in drinking and eating’, so people noticed; and also that he often held quite different opinions in the morning from those he held after dinner.

  And the months went on passing and Cat gave no sign of bearing a child.

  But on the whole he was in a sunny humour, so much so that he quite forgot his awkwardness with Bess and treated her once again as his especial favourite, so that the child came under his wayward, extraordinary spell, and saw how it worked on others; they might be baffled, thwarted, exasperated, even terrified or loathing, but, when he chose, they could not resist him. Nor could Bess. She tingled with triumph when he laughed at her bright answers and quoted them to the Court as remarkable specimens of childish wit. It was a thrilling sport, this answering back; she knew that she must go about it as warily as if ‘offering a coin to an elephant,’ for she could never be sure if the offer would be accepted with a slap of his thigh that sounded as though he were thumping a cushion, and a delighted roar that he would write and tell that to old Foxnose François himself, by God so he would! Or else a sudden terrifying knitting of those infantile eyebrows, a pursing of the little slit of a mouth, a narrow glance like the thrust of a stiletto, and the sharp command to get out of his presence for an impudent little bastard. ‘By God you go too far!’

  There came a dreadful day when she went so far that she never came back for a whole year, and never knew what she had said to put him in such a lasting rage. But that was after he had become indifferent again, sunk in gloom and fat, his cheeks grey and flabby, and had a horrible tendency to burst into tears in front of everybody – for it was after he had had Cat Howard beheaded for adultery.

  ‘It is no more the time to dance,’ they told Cat when they came to arrest her, and sent away her musicians. They took her to the Tower, the royal palace, fortress, prison, where she had slept before her Coronation, as her cousin Nan Bullen had slept before hers; but this time she went in by the Traitors’ Water Gate, as Nan Bullen had done the second time she went there, and like Cat, left it only for the block.

  ‘It won’t be hard to find a nickname for me,’ Nan had giggled with desperate gallantry. ‘I shall be called Anne Sans-Tête!’ and she had put her hands round her long slender throat and promised the executioner an easy task. ‘They might make ballads of me now,’ she said, ‘but there is no one left to make them now they’ve killed my brother. Oh yes, there is my cousin Tom Wyatt – but he is in the Tower too.’ There had been a vein of wild poetry in Nan herself, a living echo to the art of her brother and cousin.

  But the people did not make ballads of her, they did not like her enough. Their legends of her were not pretty; they said she had tried to poison the Princess Mary; that she had a rudimentary sixth finger on her left hand, though so tiny that few ever noticed, and that it was a teat to suckle her devil’s imps who told her how to bewitch the King. In any case, she was an upstart who had worked and schemed and waited for six years to oust the Good Queen Katherine of Aragon and her daughter Mary, the true heir to the throne; she had been hard and sharp and tyrannised over everyone, even the King; had loved to crack her whip at him and show her power; she had met him at a dance, and a pretty dance she had led him ever since – so they said when, for her too, it was no more the time to dance.

  She had been unpopular, and that was the real reason she died; and her daughter knew this by the time her gay, kind-hearted cousin Cat Howard met the same fate, while still in her teens.

  Bess was eight when this happened; nine when she offended her father and was sent away from Court; ten when she returned again at the entreaty of yet another stepmother, another Queen Cat, no wild heedless kitten this time, but her motherly Pussy-Cat Purr, as Bess instantly called her.

  Would this one stay? Bess passionately hoped so. She had stayed two whole years by now, a record in the child’s experience. She never flirted with anyone else, she was wise and kind and tactful, but could anyone ever be tactful enough with the King? She had found that she herself could not; and Bess had a good opinion, and with reason, of her own tact. And Queen Catherine had given no sign of bearing him an heir, and everyone hoped for a baby Duke of York to follow the little Prince of Wales – ‘in case.’ It was the lack of direct male heirs to the throne that had torn and ruined the country with the Wars of the Roses in the last century. To secure the Succession, Bess knew this to be the one unswerving purpose behind her father’s murderous philanderings.

  She had noticed the sudden hush, the shiver of excited apprehension that seized the gay rollicking girls of the Court when the King’s gaze fell on one of them a trifle longer and more weightily than it was wont, ‘Was the King about to seek a new wife?’ The whisper would run like wildfire through the Court, and following it in the minds of all, though unspoken – how soon would yet another Queen be told that ‘it was no more the time to dance’?

  She watched her stepmother with a solicitude that was positively maternal; she was watching her so now, on the deck of the royal flagship, as they walked up and down in the wake of Great Harry. The men were talking of the danger of invasion – a nice safe subject, she considered; one could hardly go wrong over that. In fact, it put all the men in a good humour, as usual. Her magnificent Howard cousin, the young Earl of Surrey, the soldier-poet, blazing in scarlet from head to foot, was saying in his cool insolent drawl that all the men between sixteen and sixty had been called up along the coasts, and could be called out at an hour’s notice; his father, the Duke of Norfolk, that
lean old wolf, was snapping his jaws in a hungry grin as he told how all his stout fellows of Norfolk had sent a deputation to him begging him that ‘if the French come, for God’s sake bring us between the sea and them that we may fight them before they get back to their ships.’ God’s body, that was the spirit!

  Tom Seymour said it was sheer folly of the French to bring galleys from Marseilles, and barges – they would all be boarded as easily as jumping off a log. At which Edward Seymour drily remarked that they had three hundred tall ships as well.

  Tom flung back his head and shouted with laughter, ‘D’you think I’d forgotten their tall ships? They’d no reason to forget ours when I sailed slap through their blockade and revictualled our garrison at Boulogne under their noses.’

  ‘Braggart!’ muttered Edward, and for an instant the two brothers looked daggers at each other; but just then the King’s voice boomed out like a foghorn:

  ‘We whipped them by land and sea last year, and by God we’ll do it again.’