With failing, gasping breath, he urged on his brother-in-law Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, the necessity of his completing Scotland’s conquest, as the first work to be done in the new reign.
Edward Seymour, as Prince Edward’s uncle, would be on the Council of Regency which Henry appointed; and with him fifteen of the wisest of his Ministers: a judicious mixture of the ‘New Men’ who inclined to reform, and conservative elements to act as a brake; such as Chancellor Wriothesley, a heretic-hater, to pull Cranmer’s lawn sleeve when it flapped too urgently at ‘Old Mumpsimuses’ – so he said with the ghost of a smile before it twisted into a grimace of pain. And he added Edward Seymour’s younger brother Tom to the Council, a lively fellow after his own kidney, with none of Edward’s priggish and possibly dangerous earnestness; he might act as a check on it, for the two brothers couldn’t abide each other.
Henry knew that Edward Seymour, beneath his stern exterior, was white with eagerness for him to die. He had accused Norfolk and Surrey of aiming at the sceptre – well, the pot may have accused the kettle. One could trust no one. The nobles were always ready to conspire, the commons to rebel. The nation itself had a proverb that the vice of the French was lechery, but that of the English, treachery. He had to leave his life’s work to a child of nine – and to what busy and ambitious schemers? What chances of treason and murder? ‘Woe to the land whose King is a child’ – woe also to the child! The skeletons of his own boy-uncles, murdered sixty years ago in the Tower by their uncle, Richard III, would raise their little heads through his fever to warn him how near the fate of Edward VI might be to that of Edward V and his small brother. But this uncle, Edward Seymour, virtuous, high-principled, was no Richard Crookback – or was he?
Anyway, he could do no more. And he had to see about dying. He left command that he should be buried at Windsor beside the body of Jane Seymour, his third wife, the only one who had given him a son. And that his soul was to be prayed for, and masses said for it, to release it the sooner from Purgatory. He had abolished Purgatory – he had intended to abolish the Mass – but no matter, one might as well be on the safe side. Henry had never learnt that he could not eat his cake and have it; there was no time to learn it now.
Bess spent the days in terror lest she be summoned to his sick-chamber. But he did not send for her, nor for Edward. It had become indeed no place for children. He sent for his wife Catherine, and for Mary, separately. They both came out weeping uncontrollably.
Bess gazed in wonder at her stepmother. She would be free now and unafraid, yet she was crying as if for the loss of a child. Had he been sorry? What could he have said to move her so? He had said, ‘It is God’s will that we should part.’
Bess could recognise the simplicity of greatness; and its practical quality. It was no good looking back; he had looked forward, told Catherine he wanted her to keep all the jewels and ornaments he had given her, and not to hand them back to the Crown, and that he had ‘ordered all these gentlemen to honour you and treat you as if I were living still.’ Yes, Bess conceded inwardly, as she listened to her stepmother, it was something for Catherine Parr to have been made a Queen.
And Mary, of course, was always ready to cry.
Mary had, in fact, cried so much at the interview with her father that he could not bear it, and had signed to her to leave him, for by then he could speak no more.
He had tried to talk to her of the councillors he had appointed, but she would only beg him not to leave her an orphan so soon. To which he made no answer. But presently with deep earnestness he had asked her to try and be a mother to her brother Edward, ‘for, you see, he is little.’
It was that last request that tore her heart. Catherine Parr owed him royalty, honour and jewels. Mary’s debt had been otherwise; she had been dispossessed from her royal and legitimate inheritance, and dishonour cast on her birth and on her mother; she owed him years of loneliness, sometimes imprisonment; insult and ill treatment both from himself and his servants; worst of all, separation from her adored mother all the last years of Katherine of Aragon’s life; a refusal even to be allowed to go to her when she was dying and afraid, as even her stout heart admitted, that she would have to die alone and abandoned, ‘like a beast.’ Did Mary not remember how she had been forbidden her mother’s death-chamber, when she came out of her father’s, sobbing as if her heart would break?
So Bess asked herself with the clear-cut logic of thirteen, and a horror of the father who had killed her own mother four months after he had at last worried Mary’s to death.
She could not guess how much else Mary remembered.
The huge decaying body Mary had just seen had not appalled her as the corruption of his soul had done, long years ago, when he became rotted with power and the lust of life.
The thirty-year-old woman who met the child’s astonished gaze, all her pent-up passion in these repressed years broken loose by an agony of pity and desire for what might have been, had one of her violent irrational impulses, and tried to tell her what her father had been; like the Sun himself when he ‘cometh out of his chamber like a bridegroom.’
‘You never knew him as I did,’ she burst out, ‘you never saw him as a young man, glorious, gay, doing everything twice as hard as other men. He made everyone else seem a ghost. You should have seen him as I did when I was a child, on board his ships in a common sailor’s dress, short trousers and vest but all of cloth of gold, and blowing a whistle so loud it was like a trumpet. But he was kind and tender too, tender even in teasing.’
A flood of tears choked her as the memory swept over her of his pulling off her hood at some solemn State function, so that her hair came tumbling over her shoulders. The schoolboy prank had been partly due to his pride in her long fair hair – she had known that, even at six years old. He had loved to show her off to the grave courteous foreigners who had come to ask her hand for their Sovereigns of France or Spain. ‘This girl never cries,’ he had told them proudly.
‘She has made up for it since,’ Bess thought, in acute discomfort at her half-sister’s emotion. It only made her hate her father worse than ever; why couldn’t Mary be sensible and hate him too, and then she would be glad instead of sorry that he was dying?
‘You will be able to marry now,’ she said in desperate attempt to comfort or at least turn her thoughts, ‘and then you’ll have your own children instead of just Jane and the other silly little Greys – you know you said that as long as he lived you’d only be the Lady Mary.’
But Mary’s re-discovered appreciation of Henry could not go so far as to admire the forward-thrusting mind he had bequeathed to Bess. She only wanted to look back, to forgive, and if possible excuse her father.
‘He would have arranged a marriage for me if he could,’ she said eagerly. ‘He spoke of it to me just now and how sorry he was that fortune had prevented it. You are too young to understand – but you will – how difficult and dangerous a thing is a royal marriage. The fate of a whole nation may depend on it.’
Her eyes narrowed; her face grew strained and terrible. ‘The fate of a nation,’ she repeated. ‘Yes, and its soul, its living soul. That is what one marriage may destroy.’
She was thinking how the King’s marriage to Nan Bullen had done that; had torn the nation’s soul away from Christ’s Church to the pagan worship of the State; had imposed a revolution from above on to the people, so that they were persecuted, not for a new idea, but for believing in the faith of their fathers; had robbed and desecrated the tomb of Saint Thomas à Becket who for three hundred years had been a national saint and hero and was now declared a traitor for having opposed his King, his bones thrown on the common dust-heap by royal command. Henry had, in fact, pulled down the whole structure of the Church just as he had pulled down and robbed the monasteries, and built it up anew with himself at the head of it – in order that he might marry Nan Bullen.
And of Henry himself, and ‘the terrible change’ that the foreign ambassadors had noticed in him at
that time, Mary could only think as of the destruction of a soul. Only a year or two before, they had reported that ‘Love for the King is universal…for he does not seem a person of this world, but one descended from Heaven.’
But so had Lucifer descended from Heaven, to become Lord of Hell. Mary had seen her gay affectionate father, a conventionally pious man, disintegrate before her eyes into an irresponsible ogre; or else, even more disillusioning, into the ridiculous figure of a man driven between two women, living for a long time under the same roof with them both, helpless, angry, even frightened.
Yes, he had been frightened of his Nan; she had taunted him and told him what to do and what not to do.
She had told him not to argue with Katherine of Aragon, for he ‘would always get the worst of it’; not to see his daughter Mary when he went to visit his baby daughter Elizabeth, for his ‘weakness and instability’ might let him soften to her.
Once – it was on an autumn morning and all the fields and trees were gold under the wide still sky – Mary had met him by chance walking in the open country, and he stopped and spoke kindly to her, telling her he hoped he would soon be able to see her more often, and then, abruptly, he moved away, and she saw it was because two of Nan’s servants were sidling up to overhear.
Mary knew that her desperate loathing and jealousy of Nan was not only on her mother’s account; it ran like a withering fire through her veins. The image of Nan had burnt into her eyelids so that whenever she closed them she saw the slight supple figure enthroned in the amazing black dress that her daring French taste had dictated. It had cost more than five times the amount of Mary’s dress allowance for the whole year; thirty-two yards of black satin and velvet, and the King’s jewels gleaming out of all the blackness; and framed in it a thin white face, bold forehead and scarlet lips and black eyes that sparkled and, the ambassadors said discreetly, ‘invited conversation.’ ‘The Night Crow,’ Wolsey had called her; the She-Devil, Mary called her, as did all decent women, knowing the danger of her and her like to safe, ordered matrimony; she had been chased by a mob of women several thousand strong who yelled their curses on ‘the goggle-eyed whore,’ – and Nan had told of that herself, with shrill shameless laughter.
Would Mary ever forget her laugh? Never, never, never, she told herself in agony when she woke in the night to hear it ringing in her ears, hearing that laugh alone, and everywhere else the night-long silence. No more the sweet familiar sound of bells from the chapels where the monks had prayed for men’s souls at their appointed hours, the bells that had always comforted her childhood when she woke afraid of the dark. That laugh, ringing down through the years, had silenced them, it seemed for ever.
It was on an evening in early spring that it had sounded their doom; when the wind and slanting sunlight were sharp as thin steel and all the little thrusting flames of the crocuses in the garden at Hampton Court were tossed this way and that with the light shining through them, and out swept ‘the Lady’ (not wife yet, nor Queen) from the Palace, into the bowing, curtsying company on the terrace, out she swept all in one flashing movement, chattering and calling, greeting first one and then another, and cried to Sir Thomas Wyatt, whom all the world knew to be mad for love of her, ‘Lord, how I wish I had an apple! Have you such a thing about you, my sweet Tom? For three days now I have had such an incredible fierce desire to eat apples. Do you know what the King says? He says it means I am with child. But I tell him “No!” No, it couldn’t be, no, no, no!’
And then out rang her laughter, sharper, wilder than the early March wind; and her thin nervous hands flew up like fluttering white birds to peck and clutch at the King’s pearls round her throat, pearls bigger than chick-peas, and she stared at all the shocked dismayed faces, and suddenly turned and fled from them, still laughing, back into the Palace, leaving only a ringing, mocking, frightened echo in the appalled hush she had created.
Now everyone knew. The six-year siege that the King had laid to Nan had been raised at last, the fortress yielded, which she had held through all his furious importunings while living under the same roof, his showers of gifts and titles, even through the general belief that she had long since been his mistress. It had been yielded at the exact moment when, his patience strained to snapping point and his resentment mounting to fury at the way she treated him, it had become necessary to apply the final spur.
Now Henry and his new servant Cranmer would have to stir themselves in good earnest to get Nan’s child born in wedlock. They did.
On the last day of that March of 1533 Cranmer was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury and had to swear allegiance to the Pope before the high altar – but, four days earlier, he arranged another and more private ceremony before the altar of the Palace Chapel in Westminster, where he forswore this sacred oath in front of a notary and other witnesses, declared that he put the King’s will above the Pope’s, and that whatever he would have to swear at his consecration was only an empty formula. He did not like being consecrated in deliberate perjury, but Henry had another word for it, which was ‘compromise.’
It took Cranmer under two months of the Sacred office thus achieved to find the marriage of Henry to Katherine of Aragon to have been ‘null and void from the beginning.’ That was just before the end of May, and on the first of June he crowned Nan Queen of England; King Henry was excommunicated that summer; and on the 7th of September Elizabeth was born.
Just when and where Nan’s marriage to Henry occurred in this sequence nobody quite knew: but Cranmer pronounced it to have been ‘good and valid.’ Its lack of ceremony was made up for at her coronation, when all London was draped in scarlet and a conduit ran claret and white wine through Cheapside all the day – but, so the seventeen-year-old Mary heard with delight, in all those gaping crowds there were few heads bared, and fewer still to shout ‘God save the Queen.’
But Nan still held her head high, and did so until just three years later she laid it on the block. That altered nothing – to Mary. Nan had won.
In twin birth with her child, Elizabeth, the Church of England was born; and the break with Rome, with the Pope and the monastic orders, made complete. The bells were silenced.
Nan had won. Her daughter would win. Mary’s despondent nature was certain of it. But one comfort she could clutch to herself; she had been born of a woman who loved the King, and Elizabeth had not.
She looked up from her brooding reverie to speak to Elizabeth, perhaps to say that very thing – she did not want to, but often words came out of her mouth and hung on the air for her to hear them, aghast, before she knew she had spoken them.
But it did not matter now if she spoke them or not, for Elizabeth had tiptoed softly away.
Bess went to find Edward. He was reading St Paul’s Epistles in Greek with Jane Grey, while their tutor, pretending to correct their exercises, snored murmurously near the fire, its light flickering upwards over his finely cut nose.
She sat down on the bench beside them, and the three fair heads bent together over the book and talked in whispers.
‘They’ve sent for old Mumpsy-mouse,’ said Edward in his even little voice. (Bess’s nickname had at once become the children’s name for Cranmer.) ‘He’ll be coming down by water. That means he’s not likely to last the night, and I shall be King tomorrow.’
Bess, callous enough herself about her father’s death, was startled, not for the first time, by Edward’s lack of feeling, for Henry adored his son. She longed to tell him he was an ungrateful cub, but one doesn’t say these things to a boy who will be King tomorrow. Probably Jane had influenced him, since she openly hated her parents.
But Jane was not interested in current affairs; she was wrestling furiously with a tough passage of Greek prose. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘Paul got it wrong himself.’
‘Very likely,’ said Bess. ‘Pope Clement told the theological students at Rome never to read him, as it would spoil their style.’
Both the younger children froze at mention of the Pope.
It was not done. ‘Have you been talking to Mary?’ Edward asked severely.
‘Yes, but not about religion. She is very unhappy at the King’s dying.’
‘Why should she be?’ said Edward. ‘I shall see to it that she is properly treated, even though she is a Papist.’
‘If we don’t finish this epistle,’ said Jane, ‘we shall be whipped tomorrow.’
‘I shan’t,’ Edward reminded her. ‘Barnaby might.’
‘Yes, Your Highness has a whipping-boy. It isn’t fair,’ she added under her breath.
‘What is the day of the month?’ Bess asked suddenly.
‘The 27th,’ they told her, and knew why she had asked. If the King lived till tomorrow morning, the Duke of Norfolk would die. His execution had been fixed for dawn on Friday, January 28th. But if the King died tonight, then Norfolk would live. His son, Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, had been beheaded nine days ago, after a speech of furious defiance when, like a stag at bay, he had stood and gored the King and Council with his words.
None of the children spoke of him, for they had worshipped him from afar as a scornful god who had scarcely noticed their presence; they had yelled with shrill delight as they watched him at tennis, winning game after game, or in the tilt yard, charging down on his horse White Cherry, as he wrote himself, on
‘The gravel-ground, with sleeves tied on the helm,
On foaming horse, with swords and friendly hearts’;
they had sung his songs, all in the modern Italian manner which made other verse seem so tame and old-fashioned; and envied the Irish girl, Fair Geraldine, to whom he had written them.
Young Bess Page 6