Young Bess

by Margaret Irwin

  Charles Brandon himself seemed nearer now than his widow, so did all those other vigorous young men with whom he had once played games and practical jokes and exchanged low stories with roars of laughter and thumps on the back: that young rascal Bryan whom he had nicknamed the Vicar of Hell – Buckingham – Compton – Bullen – all dead; some, it is true, by his orders, but that didn’t make it the less pitiful for him that there were now so few of the old faces round him, so few to remember him as he once had been.

  There was that tough old ruffian Norfolk, of course, he’d always been there from the beginning of time – where was Norfolk? He stared at all these new young upstart whippersnappers, seeking Norfolk’s grizzled peaked beard and wiry hair, still black, somewhere among them. ‘Where—’ he began aloud, then checked; he had remembered, just in time, that Norfolk was in the Tower, awaiting sentence of death. He had already signed the death-warrant for Norfolk’s son, the Earl of Surrey; in a day or two now the insolent conceited lad would lay on the block the handsome head that had dared compose verses against his King.

  ‘Whose glutted cheeks sloth feeds so fat

  That scant their eyes be seen.’

  Was it possible young Surrey had intended that for his Dread Sovereign? But anything was possible with these Howards. Two nieces Norfolk had wedded to him, and both had to be beheaded. Now Cranmer and Ned Seymour said that he had conspired to put his son on the throne. He denied it, of course. ‘When I deserve to be in the Tower,’ he had exclaimed, ‘Tottenham will turn French!’

  Just like old Norfolk! Told George Lawson once that he was as good a knight as ever spurred a cow! Useful fellow, Norfolk, always ready to run and pull down whoever he was set on; how he’d chased Wolsey from town, swearing he’d ‘tear the butcher’s cur with his teeth if he didn’t shog off!’ Pity you couldn’t tell with the best wolf-hound when it mightn’t turn and bite its master.

  He took a deep drink, with a glance at his watchful physician. ‘Let every man have his own doctor,’ he wheezed. ‘This is mine.’

  This was a good song of his. Surrey, the lazy cub, was writing verse without rhyme and calling it a new invention, blank verse. Blank it was. His own was the real thing.

  ‘Youth will needs have dalliance,’

  sang the choristers.

  His youth had had all that youth ever dreamt of, once his dreary lonely boyhood had passed, and his stingy old father in the shabby fur cloak had died, and young Prince Hal found himself one of the richest kings in Europe. He had turned everything to gold with his Midas touch; the foreign visitors could not believe their eyes, they had to finger all the tassels and cups and jugs and horses’ bits, to be convinced that they were solid gold. He had been the most splendidly dressed king in Europe. What feasting there had been, unequalled by Cleopatra or Caligula, the ambassadors said; what spiced game and venison cooked in sour cream, what flowing of fulsome wines.

  It was the same now, but it had tasted better then, after his father’s diet of porridge and small beer; and with the zest of youth, an appetite as voracious for fun as for food, that pie he had carved, full of live frogs that leapt out over the table and floor, making the girls scream and jump on the benches, lifting their skirts above their knees – what a roar of laughter from him and all the other young fellows had volleyed and tumbled round the hall, echoing back to him now after all these years.

  The lids of those lowered eyes just lifted; the grey lips moved. ‘Another cup of wine,’ they mumbled.

  ‘Every man hath his free will,’

  sang the choristers from Henry’s early song.

  What masquerades there had been then, what pranks and dressing-up as Muscovites or Saracen robbers, surprising the Queen and her ladies into delicious alarm and then laughter! What dancing, he himself leaping higher than any, and long, long into the night, and then after he had played a hard game of tennis, wrestled in bout after bout, run races and leapt with the long pole, or been in the saddle all day riding at the gallop after hounds, riding in the lists and unhorsing all his opponents. There was no one could beat ‘Sir Loyal Heart’, the name he always took in those tournaments of his youth, when he cantered up on his great war-horse with his wife’s Spanish colours on his sleeve in defiance of the fashion (for a knight should wear some other lady’s), into the pavilion that was all spangled with gold Tudor roses and the pomegranates of Aragon, and H.K. intertwined.

  H.K. everywhere for Henry and Katherine.

  ‘As the holly groweth green and never changeth hue,

  So I am – ever have been – unto my lady true.

  For whoso loveth should love but one,

  Change whoso will, I will be none.’

  That was another song of his, but he never cared to hear it sung after the ‘H.K.’ was all changed everywhere to ‘H.A.’ for Henry and Anne. ‘HA HA!’ shouted the rude Cockney boys, and they were right – the common people always were in the long run – right to mock and distrust that accursed whore who bewitched Sir Loyal Heart and led him into captivity, unrewarded for six long years. What torture of desire he had undergone for her, what abject letters he had written her – and then the reward, good God, another girl!

  He blinked down the table at the girl, as lithe and whippy as a greyhound puppy, and the light glinting on her red-gold hair. ‘Nan Bullen’s brat!’ he muttered to himself, ‘a wheyfaced scrap of a thing like her mother, a green apple, a codling,’ he drooled on, regarding her with a fixed and menacing eye.

  She looked back at him; for one instant he saw himself reflected in the dreadfully dispassionate eyes of a very young girl. But the image was quickly blurred; the light seemed oddly dim tonight, as it had been in his father’s day when they cut down the number of candles and saved the candle-ends.

  What did that girl matter – or all the other girls either? – though it was enraging the way the Tudor stock had run to seed in a crop of females: first his own two daughters; and then the only grandchildren of his two fine strapping sisters were those three diminutive Grey brats, and the baby in Scotland who might well become the most dangerous person in Europe.

  But he had the boy, his son Edward, yes, he had got a legitimate son at last. He turned his great stiff head slowly and stared at the pale child beside him; nothing like as big and strong as he himself had been at his age; he was much more like what Henry’s elder brother Prince Arthur had been, but that Henry could not bear to recognise; for the slight boy whom he could scarcely remember had died at fifteen of a consumption. No, Henry would see no likeness to Arthur in Edward; for one thing, Edward was far cleverer, already he knew more than lads twice his age. ‘I wish I had more learning’ Henry had sighed when a youth, as greedy for the beauty of great minds as for rich food and drink, for pleasure and sport and glory and conquest.

  He had welcomed Erasmus to his Court, he had been proud to count him as a friend; and witty ironic Thomas More too, with whom he had walked so often in More’s garden at Chelsea, watching the river flow past and the seagulls swoop and swirl, while they discussed everything under heaven and in it too as they walked up and down, his arm round his friend’s neck. But his friend had betrayed him, defied him, tacitly refused to recognise the righteousness of his divorce from Katherine of Aragon, turned stiff-necked in resistance to his will, until there was nothing for it but to cut off his learned and witty head. Tom Cromwell had urged him to it. ‘More must go,’ he had said; and then in his turn Crum had to go. Crum was a knave if ever there was one: when Henry held a knave in his hands at cards he used to say ‘I hold a Cromwell!’ But he was a witty devil and a good servant.

  The best of friends, the best of his servants, the best of women, how was it that all had failed him? He needed friendship, he needed love, he needed a wise, tender, infinitely understanding companion who, while giving him all the glowing admiration that was his due, would also know just where to throw out a hint in guidance of his judgment, where to encourage and where to still the doubts that often stirred deep down within himsel
f, so deep that even he did not always recognise them until too late.

  But he had never had such a companion; never since— Was there a strong draught that made the candles gutter and sway, and the smoke swirl in wreaths from their flickering flames? Through the blue and shifting mist he was seeing pictures he had not seen for over forty years – a fair Spanish princess of sixteen, all in white, with long hair down her back, seated in a litter hung with cloth of gold, and himself riding beside her, a cavalier of ten, entrusted to escort his brother Arthur’s bride through the roaring, cheering flower-strewn streets of London. He, who was never allowed all his boyhood to be with any girl except his sisters, had then his first taste of the pageantry of chivalry that he adored in the romances; and was so intoxicated by it that, that evening, to show off to Katherine, he danced so hard that he had to tear off his hot coat and caper in his small-clothes. And after Arthur had died a few months later, and Henry had married his widow a few years later, he went on showing off to Katherine, finding her the perfect audience, through twenty years of marriage – until he found to his rage that she too claimed to take a part in the play herself.

  Muttering something to himself, he reached forward to take another helping of sugared marchpane, felt the marble edge of the table pressing into his belly, and squinted down at it resentfully. How long had he been in labour with this huge paunch? Tonight it seemed so short a time had turned that splendid young athlete, with flat hard stomach and limbs clean as a whistle, into this mountain of pain and disease, in labour with – was it death? The choristers sang:

  ‘To hunt, sing, dance

  My heart is set.

  All goodly sport

  To my comfort

  Who shall me let?’

  There was no one to offer let or hindrance to his pleasures; except himself. ‘Every man hath his free will,’ but what use was that? Since a vast aching body told one, as sternly as any gaoler come to arrest a quaking girl, that ‘it is no more the time to dance.’

  There was no pleasure now left to that body except to cram it further with food, with deep stupefying draughts of wine, cloying the palate, mercifully dulling the senses. He reached forward for his cup. ‘Who shall me let?’ Neither his anxious-eyed physician nor his fearfully watching wife dared offer let or hindrance.

  And suddenly he began to talk. His great voice swayed gustily to and fro, a storm wind rising and falling in the hall that a moment since had been full of music and pattering chatter, and now was paralysed into silence with the resurgence into life of the figure-head, monstrous and moribund at head of the table.

  He talked of the French and how he had so lately beaten them; he had made the Narrow Seas English for all time; no other foreign invaders would ever dare come sailing up the Channel. Once indeed he might have turned the tables the other way and conquered the whole country of France after winning a yet more glorious Agincourt; he had in fact conquered and now held Boulogne. When only twenty-two he had taken the Chevalier Bayard prisoner and shown them that an Englishman could be every bit as much a ‘very perfect gentle knight’ as any bowing Frenchman. (‘Now,’ thought Bess, playing with the nutshells on her plate, ‘now he will say, “Stout fellow, Bayard, a very fine fellow.”’) Sure enough he said it, and with episcopal authority – ‘Old Gardiner showed sense, for a bishop, when he said Bayard is a stout fellow.’ He always had to say that when he mentioned Bayard, to remind himself that he did not really bear the noblest man in Europe a grudge for knighting François on the terrible battlefield of Marignano when the young French King and his armies had fought ‘like infuriated boars.’ Henry had never been in a battle like that; even now, when François too had grown old and cautious, it irked him to think how the Foxnose had once fought his own battles, where Henry had only paid the Emperor to fight them.

  Well, it was something to have had an Emperor in his pay. And once he had planned to make himself Emperor when his servant Wolsey had aimed to be Pope – Wolsey the butcher’s son, a fellow that had once been put in the stocks for a brawl at a fair, but whom he had raised to be the greatest priest and statesman in England, and, almost, in Europe. Yes, he had brought England back into the Continent, he had made her a power to be feared and courted.

  ‘Look at the Field of the Cloth of Gold!’ he shouted suddenly. That showed Europe was at his feet – and with what a show! The English had outvied the French at every point; François alarmed at the competition, had sent anxiously to him beforehand to ask him to forbear making so many rich tents and pavilions. François had shown him with great pride a portrait of a woman called Mona Lisa that he had bought from the old painter Leonardo da Vinci who had died the year before; he had paid four thousand florins for it, a ridiculous sum for a picture, and of a rather plain woman too.

  Henry could retaliate with Holbein, whom he had honoured with his patronage and an income of £30 a year (less £3 for taxes) apart from the sale of his pictures. The new Dutch School was coming far more into fashion than those old Italians.

  They said François was as tall as Henry, but it was only because the Frenchman’s wretchedly thin legs made him seem taller than he really was. If only he could have matched his knightly prowess against François in the tourney, which cautious royal etiquette forbade, he would have proved himself the victor, he was sure of it. He had overcome all his opponents in it, and killed one of his mounts from sheer exhaustion (François had overcome all his too, but they had probably thought it wise to let him win). Henry had excelled even his crack English archers at the long bow; the French had gasped with admiration of his aim and strength. Certainly he would have been more than a match for François.

  ‘Remember how I threw him in the wrestling bout?’ he chuckled. ‘What a to-do there was! Kings mustn’t be thrown! Why, Kate, you and the French Queen had to pull us apart, d’you remember, hanging on to our shirt-tails like a couple of fishwives parting their husbands in a brawl!’

  The hall seemed to rock to the sound of that mighty guffaw, and echoed it back in a frozen silence. No one knew where to look, what to say. The King heard and saw the emptiness all round him, a herd of sheep staring, but not at him, not at anyone, a wavering cloud of white foolish faces, scared and averted, and among them a very young redheaded girl playing with the nutshells on her plate. Who was that girl? She was always cropping up, baffling, frustrating, charged with some hideous memory.

  The scene grew thicker, more confused. ‘Kate!’ he called in sudden terror, ‘Kate!’ A woman was hanging on to his arm, imploring him something. She seemed to think it was her that he had called – why, he did not even know who she was! Some fellow was loosening his collar, the woman put water to his lips.

  He stared at the red-headed girl and knew now she was his daughter – but not by Kate. There had been other Kates, Annes, Jane – but the Kate who could remember him at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, as King and bridegroom at eighteen, as a child of ten riding beside her, that Kate had gone for ever, and would never come back.

  Not Katherine of Aragon hung on his arm, but Catherine Parr, who knew him only as an obese, sick old man.

  He made a mighty effort and guffawed again. ‘Why, how I’ve scared the lot of you!’ he gasped out. ‘Who do you think I took you for, Kate? I was asking only if you remembered hearing the tale. You were only a little girl when it happened.’

  But he spoke with difficulty and his lips had gone blue, as had his twitching hands where the great jewelled rings were sunk in fat.

  Bess, holding on to her nutshells so tight that they cut into her hands, stole a glance at him under her down-dropped eyelids and thought his face looked like a glistening suet pudding. Then, even as she glanced, it sagged, a deflated bag, turned a greyish purple, and a tight smile twisted it as though trying to hold it together; the eyes opened for one instant in a puzzled, frightened stare – and then the crash came. He fell forward over the table, into clattering plates and knives and cups, and a great red pool of spilt wine pouring over and drip-dripping on to
the floor like drops of blood.

  Women shrieked, men sprang up, Edward Seymour rapped out a sharp order, and servants surrounded the King, bent over him, more and more of them, until at last they succeeded in hoisting the inert mass into a poled chair, and staggering off with it through the wide-opened doors.

  Bess unclenched her hands and saw the palms were bleeding. She looked at Tom Seymour, and saw he was looking at her. She looked hastily at her brother Edward, and saw he was finishing Jane’s marchpane. Edward liked sweets.

  She slipped out and found her governess, Cat Ashley, who had already heard all about it.

  ‘But, Ashley,’ said Bess, ‘I thought it was François who threw the King.’

  ‘Sh-sh-sh,’ said Ashley.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The king lingered nearly a fortnight. His mind did not again wander. With Herculean courage he bent it to his will, though his face had gone black with agony, and his legs, which had had to be cauterised some time before, were plunged in a perpetual fire. Yet he forced all those last hours of his long torture to the service of his son, and the constitution of the government that might best safeguard his minority.

  There was no time now to brood on the past; that company of long-forgotten comrades that had stepped forward as he began to lose his grip on life were driven ruthlessly back into the shadows. They were dead and done with; there was nothing to be done about them. With the hand of death heavy on him, every nerve and impulse in that fast decaying body reached forward to the future. His dying urgency was fiercer far than that of youth and hope.

  For thirty-eight years he had worked tirelessly to secure his kingdom both on and from the Continent; to secure it at home in England, both from Papal interference and the revolutionary dangers of the New Ideas; and to secure its uncertain sovereignty over Wales, which now he had definitely incorporated with England by Act of Parliament ten years ago; over Ireland, where the sovereignty was far more uncertain; and over Scotland, where, he had to admit in rage, it still did not exist.