Young Bess

by Margaret Irwin

  The garden was all still round her, cut into sunlight and sharp shadows, and the bees hummed loud, or was it the blood throbbing in her ears?

  Then, with a glance to right and left of her, she picked up her skirts and ran, ran into the Palace to her stepmother and gasped out what she had seen.

  Catherine Parr sat stunned; she neither moved nor spoke nor wept. Bess despaired. No silent grief would move the King. At last, through blue lips, Catherine moaned, ‘What shall I do? What shall I do?’

  Bess told her.

  ‘You must cry, cry, cry, and loud; so that he’ll hear, so that he can’t hear anything else. Do it in the room next his. Shriek. Be hysterical, mad. Go on for hours and hours and hours.’

  Catherine did. A clamour of weeping and howling next door disturbed the King; he sent to stop it, but it went on; he sent to ask the reason for it, and was told the Queen was distressed because she feared she had displeased him.

  That brought him himself; he told her he could not bear her to cry, which was true, especially after three hours. But he spoke kindly; he got her to stop; then, after a little more comforting, he went on with their last theological argument. But the mouse avoided the cat’s paw this time; his wife would not discuss religion; she referred it and all other questions to his omnipotent wisdom; if she had ever seemed to do otherwise, it had only been to pass the time and take his mind off his bad leg.

  ‘Then, sweetheart, we are perfect friends again!’ said Henry; and the Chancellor was sent packing with a flood of abuse when he called about the Queen’s arrest. There was no arrest. The crisis had passed, and Henry yawned, when he did not swear at his bad leg. Perfect friendship is not as stimulating as discussion.

  Life was growing dull and depressing. Old enemies were dying, and that is often worse than the death of old friends. Martin Luther died, far away in Germany. When Henry was a brilliant young man he had written a theological treatise confuting Luther’s heresies, and the low fellow had replied with his usual bad taste. ‘Squire Harry wishes to be God,’ wrote the miner’s son, ‘and do what he pleases.’

  The Pope, on the other hand, had shown his appreciation by giving Henry his title ‘Defender of the Faith’: ‘F.D.’ He thought of putting it on all the coins of his realm. Now there was no one to confute – except the Pope, whose latest title for him was the ‘Son of Perdition and Satan.’

  Worse even than Luther’s death, they said François I of France was dying. Ever since he could remember, Henry had been an envious rival, a frequent foe, an occasional boon companion of Foxnose François. It was impossible to imagine life without this peppery stimulus.

  Worse still, François was three years younger than Henry, was as tall and strong, had lived as well (though it was doubtful whether he or any other man had ever eaten as much), and yet here he was, petering out, surely long before his appointed span of years, like a feeble old man, a premature death’s-head warning at the feast of life. For if life were not still a feast, what was it? Luther was dead, François might be dying, and he wasn’t feeling very well himself; but thank God there was still good eating and drinking, and not all his doctors could keep him from it, especially when it came to the Christmas and Twelfth Night feasts.

  All the Royal Family were together for these festivals, and most of the cousins too, with one notable and, to Henry, infuriating omission. The Queen of Scots, four years old this December, was still absent from the hospitable board of her great-uncle who had offered his only son in betrothal to this fatherless brat, Queen of such a beggarly kingdom that his Ambassador had nearly burst out laughing at the poverty of the baby’s coronation in Stirling.

  But there was one bit of news from Scotland that had put Henry in high good humour; the new Scots leaders of the Reformed Religion had at last succeeded in murdering the great Cardinal Beton, the right-hand man of the French Queen-Dowager, the Regent of Scotland. Henry had been giving advance payment for this work for years; now at last, in his palace of Greenwich just before Christmas, he heard from the murderers’ own lips how they had stabbed the enemy of Christ as he sat in his chair, and hung his body over the wall of his castle at St Andrews.

  Henry, as he made his final payments, reflected that it had been well worth the money. Much as he disliked these ‘ministers of the true religion,’ they would work for Scotland’s alliance with England against the age-old Franco-Scottish alliance favoured by Cardinal Beton and his Regent of Scotland, that damned obstinate, suspicious-minded Frenchwoman who would not entrust her little daughter to his tender avuncular care.

  Edward, now nine years old, a pretty boy with smooth flaxen hair, did not want to be betrothed to a baby. He would rather, if he had to have a cousin, marry the Lady Jane Grey, a year older than himself, though much smaller, who often helped him with his lessons. But Jane in her turn thought him more suited to one of her little sisters. She was undergoing a rather solemn adoration for Elizabeth, so much older, by three years, than herself, and wearing her cleverness with so gay and insouciant an air.

  Jane was King Henry’s great-niece, standing in the same relationship to him as the baby Queen of Scots. For Henry had had two sisters, the Tudor Roses they were called when in the splendour of their sumptuous white and red, their blue eyes and golden hair. The elder, the Princess Margaret, had married that strange, beautiful tortured creature, James IV of Scotland, and made a few gallant efforts, but only briefly, to live up to it. When he was killed on Flodden Field, her son, James V, was a year old; when he in his turn died broken-hearted from defeat by the English, his daughter Mary had become Queen of Scots at five days old.

  Henry had been much fonder of his younger sister, Mary Rose, who was lovelier and merrier than Margaret, and did not grow too fat like her; nor did she plague him with long tearful letters and demands for money. For all that, he had made Mary Rose, at eighteen, marry the invalid old French King Louis XII instead of the man of her choice. But Mary had the Tudor way of getting what she wanted; in a few months she had danced the adoring old Frenchman into his grave, avoided the proposals of his young successor, François I, and married her beefy English duke.

  Her granddaughter Jane Grey had inherited none of the glowing colours and bouncing vitality of the two Tudor Roses; she was tiny and pale, with some fair freckles on her straight little nose, which her mother unavailingly scrubbed with all sorts of concoctions, but they remained, with something of Jane’s own persistency. Her eyes and forehead gave promise of a certain grave beauty, and beneath it an unexpected force of character.

  Her younger sisters, Catherine and Mary, were so small that their mother was afraid they might be dwarfs.

  Taking Elizabeth’s hand before the banquet, Jane whispered as demurely as if she was saying grace, that thank God her parents were away, for it was hell when they were at home. Many children might think it dashing and modern to refer to their parents’ company as hell; not so Jane, that best of all good little girls. Elizabeth was as startled as if a mouse had sworn. ‘The creep-mice’ was her name for the three little Grey cousins; could this one be a shrew-mouse? She looked down at the meek little face under its smoothly parted hair, and saw it set and tense.

  ‘Your mother is very strict, isn’t she?’ Bess whispered back sympathetically.

  ‘She never stops scolding, pinching, and slapping me. However hard I work, it makes no odds. You are lucky to have only a stepmother.’

  And a murderously inclined father? Yes, on the whole Bess thought she was, since he forgot about her for long spaces together, whereas Jane’s mother never forgot her eldest daughter; in fact, the Countess of Suffolk never stopped thinking; it was a mistake. The Grey mare, Tom Seymour called her, and said she stood two hands higher than her little weak mule of a husband – also broader, for she had the Tudor tendency to fat, and hunted like fury to escape it, and not, like her uncle, King Henry, for love of the sport. But nothing that she did would be for its own sake. She rode ambition harder than any horse, and had great plans for Jane, that was e
vident. No doubt she had determined to marry Jane to Edward and make her Queen of England, thought Bess with a sharp twinge of exasperation that she had not been born a boy. For then she would be King before Edward or Mary, who had been put back into the Succession, after Edward, a year ago; and then, too, her mother would not have been beheaded, ‘and she would not have slapped and pinched me, especially if I had been a boy.’

  Aloud, she told the younger child to come and look at the Christmas present Mary had given her – five yards of yellow satin to make a skirt, and Mary was keeping it to have it made up. ‘It cost seven and sixpence a yard,’ said Bess proudly, and then winced at the sound of her own words; would Jane recognise in them the tang of the Bullens’ draper grandfather?

  But Jane was far too nice a little girl to do anything of the sort; she smiled with unenvious pleasure, while her younger sister Catherine, hugging a doll almost as big as herself that Mary had given her, uttered rapturous squeaks at sight of the shining stuff.

  But the person it gave most pleasure to was Mary as she showed it off to the children; she loved children, and fine clothes, and she loved giving presents; nearly all her allowance went in these three things. Her room was strewn with patterns of glowing carnation silk and blue and green brocades for yet more dresses, and a roll of some spangled Eastern stuff to which she had already treated herself, and a dozen pairs of fine Spanish gloves. ‘When will she wear them all?’ Bess wondered, and wondered more that at thirty years old a woman should care what she wore.

  ‘I have something pretty for you too,’ Mary said to Jane, pleased that the little girl had evidently not expected anything for herself; and she stooped to put a gold and pearl necklace round the thin childish neck. ‘It’s a very little neck,’ said Mary as she fastened the ponderous clasp, and Bess repressed a faint shudder, for wasn’t that what her mother had said in the Tower, when she put her hands round her slender throat and laughed that the executioner would have an easy job?

  She turned her attention hastily to the present moment; it was her chance now to feel envious, and she promptly took it. Why should Mary give anything so gorgeous, and worth far more than five yards of satin even at seven and six a yard, to their small cousin, who did not at all appreciate it? She was too young and too much of a bookworm to care about clothes and jewels, and was even rather critical of Mary’s doing so. She had said Mary overdressed; probably she had heard her mother say so, but anyway it was a foolish thing to say.

  ‘Anything might happen,’ Bess’s governess had said, warning her to keep friends with Mary. But the ‘anything’ might be Jane marrying Edward and becoming Queen of England; in which case it was sensible and far-sighted of Mary to give her the necklace, so Bess finally excused her – though indeed she could not believe in Mary being sensible and far-sighted.

  But she forgave her even this lack when Mary paid up the forfeit Bess had won from her at ‘Bonjour, Philippine’ last week. A gold pomander ball with a tiny watch dial in it was a fascinating prize, as curious as it was magnificent. All Bess’s careful respect to her elderly half-sister exploded at the sight of it, and she flung her arms round her neck.

  ‘My ball, my golden ball! I will carry it always at my girdle and never be late. I could never have got anything half so beautiful for you if you had won. But you will win next time, won’t you?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Mary with a rather bitter little laugh, ‘you will always win.’

  There was a moment’s uncomfortable pause. Why did Mary say these things? There was no answer one could make to them.

  But Queen Catherine, looking in to tell them to come and play Blind Man’s Buff, made everything seem happy and smiling again, as her dear Pussy-Cat Purr always did. She discussed Mary’s patterns and advised the goose-turd green rather than the brilliant new colour, popinjay blue, that Mary hankered after. ‘The goose-turd would be far more becoming to your delicate fair skin,’ she said tactfully, and they all giggled when Mary wrinkled up her round button of a nose and objected that it had a stinking name!

  Catherine took her arm as they left her room and chaffed her about all those gloves. Had the King of Poland sent them? He was the latest suitor for Mary’s hand; King Henry was encouraging him, and the Queen was really hopeful.

  But not Mary. There had been too many suitors ever since her early childhood: the Emperor Charles; James V of Scotland; François I, who had gallantly preferred her to the Princess of Portugal ‘with all her father’s spices’; even her own half-brother, the illegitimate Duke of Richmond, suggested by the ‘advanced’ Pope Clement as a means of securing the Succession – but found Henry less broad-minded. And now there was the danger that a foreign Papist husband would press her claim as the Papist heir to England: but still her father used her as bait. ‘A bride in the hand is worth two in the bed,’ he said.

  ‘As long as he lives,’ she broke out, ‘I shall be only the Lady Mary, the most unhappy lady in the world.’

  She burst into tears, dragged her arm away from her stepmother’s, ran back into her room and slammed the door.

  ‘Poor woman!’ said the Queen, and turned to Jane and her small sister Catherine, who were looking profoundly shocked. ‘I pray you will never know such unhappiness as your cousin’s,’ she said. Something told her that it was no use saying anything of the sort to Bess, whose little pointed face had shut itself up in an inscrutable expression. ‘Come,’ she cried gaily, ‘we mustn’t miss the Blind Man’s Buff. The Lady Mary will join us at the banquet.’

  The Blind Man’s Buff had already begun, and Tom Seymour was Blind Man. Staggering and groping absurdly, his black sleeveless coat, lined with cloth of gold, swinging in a wild circular movement from his shoulders, he swooped and swirled and spun round on his heel, round and round like a gorgeous spinning-top, and the men thumped him on the back and then dodged away, and the girls pulled his coat and then fled shrieking as he darted on them. Bess flung herself into the game, plucked at his sleeve, then, more daring, pinched his hand and ran away, but he was after her; so directly that he must be cheating; she nearly called ‘A Cheat! A Cheat!’ but why should she? She wanted him to catch her, and in spite of her dodging he did. Now he had to guess who it was in three guesses; his hands stroked her face, her hair, her thin bare shoulders; he was an unconscionable time in guessing.

  ‘The Lady Mary,’ he said, and there was a shout of laughter, but it was not too absurd, for Mary was short and Bess was already the same height. ‘The Dowager Lady Dorset!’ he said, to a louder yell of laughter, for the Dowager was past seventy. He must make very sure now or he would lose his guess. He pinched her ear, and gave a tweak to her nose. ‘The Lady Elizabeth!’ he said. ‘I’d know that nose in a thousand.’

  And he pulled off his bandage and tied it round her eyes while she said low, ‘You are a poor Blind Man not to have caught anyone before.’

  ‘Ah, but you see I didn’t want to – before.’

  Now it was her turn to clutch at the air, and swing round and run while hands pulled and touched her and voices called and tittered all round her.

  The King sat in his great chair with the new seat embroidered by his daughter Mary for his Christmas present. The seats of Henry’s chairs were apt to wear out; this one was so ample that the materials had cost Mary £20. He was spread over every stitch of that labour of filial love as he sat staring at all those glittering young figures prancing, dancing, running here and there. Usually he chuckled and cheered them on, but now he stared without seeming to notice them; only, once or twice, his poached eyes rolled round between the folds of his cheeks to follow the antics of the pretty young widow of his old friend Charles Brandon who ran with tittering shrieks to escape the blindfolded pursuer.

  Would she be his seventh wife? It had been whispered. But there was another whisper that said the King would never have a seventh wife.

  Now came the real importance of the evening, and his flat eyes opened with the gleam of a hawk’s as a host of silver-clad pages carried in long
tables and set them up on trestles in the hall; roasted Peacocks in their Pride with spread tails and swans re-invested in their snowy plumage were perched on them, waiting to be carved, and a few of the lately discovered turkeys brought to breed in Europe from the New World by a Spanish adventurer, Pedro Nino. ‘But it will take more than Nine Pedros to make us English take to such poultry, tasteless as wood,’ proclaimed King Henry, who, however, liked to show these novelties among the old Christmas dishes; mince pies in the form of the Christ Child’s manger, boars’ heads whose jellied eyes glared between their tusks as fierce as in life, shepherds and their flocks made of sweetmeats, and flagons of cock ale, a mixture of ale and sack in which an old cock braised with raisins and cloves had been steeped for nine days and the liquid then strained and matured.

  Henry was hoisted by four men out of his chair and into one that fitted his stomach more accommodatingly against the table.

  The buzz of talking and guzzling rose higher and higher as the wine circulated; when it had soared almost an octave, music took up the note, and the voices of choristers clear and piercing sweet. They sang a song that Henry himself had composed, words and music, when he had just come to the throne, a youth of eighteen, in the full flush of his cherubic beauty and athletic vigour, ‘rejoicing as a giant to run his course.’

  ‘Pastime with good company

  I love, and shall, until I die.’

  The little eyes blinked and closed; the vast padded figure in the chair sat like a dummy, apparently insensible, as he listened to what he once had sung. It was still true, he told himself, it always would be; pastime – good company – none had had better. Odd that of all that brilliant company it was only those that he had enjoyed long ago who now stood out vividly in his mind, so much more vividly than all these scattering, chattering young apes he had just been watching, even that brisk young widow of Charles Brandon’s – the half-Spanish girl – what was her name? He could not trouble himself to remember. The notes that he had once plucked out for the first time on his lute were teasing him with older memories.