Young Bess

by Margaret Irwin

  Edward suddenly flared up. ‘Who is he, I’d like to know? Just Edward Seymour, that’s all. He’d be nobody if he wasn’t my uncle; everything he’s got is through me, and yet he behaves as though he were King and I nobody. Nothing is as I want, only as he wants. I’ll show him who he is some day, by God’s soul I will!’

  Nothing could have more displayed the influence Tom Seymour had already won over the child in his brief stolen interviews than his favourite oath piping out of the prim little mouth. Edward swearing was like Jane talking about her parents’ company as hell; people were often oddly unlike themselves. An Uncle Tom’s Edward might become something very different and, to Bess anyway, far more attractive than the Uncle Ned’s Edward, even though in revolt, which was all he had the chance to be at present.

  The seeking voices had died away, calling in the distance. Edward cautiously reared his head above the logs. ‘The coast’s clear. Better take our chance before the search thickens. We’ll go by Barney’s secret way.’

  Bess clambered after him; they crept along by a wall, climbed in through a little window, ran along a passage, her heart thumping at the sound of scullions’ voices in the kitchens, and her ironic sense telling her that it was an odd entry into his palace for the absolute monarch that Edward had just so proudly shown himself.

  A minute later they were seated on the window-sill of the room where they had first met, and, as the door opened, conversing brightly in Latin on the advanced views of Bishop Hooper of Gloucester, that surplices, like copes and chasubles, were ‘the rags of the Harlot of Babylon’.

  It was not only the tutors who entered and Mrs Ashley, sniffing atrociously, either in continued pretence of her cold or in genuine tears, for with them was that redoubtable lady the Protector’s wife, the new Duchess of Somerset, her fine eyes snapping in fury and alarm, her tall elegant form wiredrawn with agitation. To her torrent of angry questions Edward replied calmly that he had wearied of waiting for the shuttlecocks and returned to the Palace for a little religious discussion ‘with my sweet sister, Temperance’.

  The Duchess only just suppressed rapping out one of the oaths that were familiar to all who knew her in the huntingfield, and demanded the reason for this preposterous new name for the Princess Elizabeth.

  ‘It suits her,’ said Edward. ‘Temperance is a fair and godly thing in women. I would more of them had it.’

  Bess held her hands together to keep from clapping. The Duchess’s thin face was nearly purple, all its hard beauty had gone from it – ‘she looks like a meat-chopper,’ thought Bess – and then the Duchess’s voice rang out on a new icy note of rage as she enquired if it were in godly conversation that the King had torn his stockings? Edward looked down at his legs, baffled, but his sister came to his defence.

  ‘There is a nail sticking out on that chair,’ she said. ‘That is why we came over to the window-seat.’

  The nail could not be found. The Duchess fumed. Bess, watching her in delight, said in a voice of soft concern, ‘Perhaps, Madam, the King my brother might wear some of the late Lord Surrey’s stockings?’

  ‘And now,’ she sobbed out to Queen Catherine, when she had got home and told her adventures and already counted the cost of that delicious rapier-thrust, ‘now she will never allow me to see him again if she can help it.’

  Edward did write to his stepmother, who between tears and laughter showed the letters to Elizabeth. They were extremely fatherly; they gave his blessing on her marriage and exhorted her to ‘persevere in always reading the Scriptures, for in so doing you show the duty of a good wife and a good subject’; they thanked her heartily for her gentle obedience to his royal advice to accept the Admiral as a wooer, and assured her that ‘he is of so good a nature that he will not be troublesome to you’. And he promised the lovers his protection and to ‘so provide for you both that if hereafter any grief befall, I shall be sufficient succour to you’.

  ‘And he will not have his tenth birthday for four months yet!’ exclaimed Catherine.

  In contrast with his elderly style, the Princess Mary’s blunt refusal to the Admiral to use her influence in their favour seemed quite schoolgirlish.

  ‘I refuse in any way to be a meddler in this matter,’ she wrote to him, though glad to help him in anything else, ‘wooing matters set apart, wherein, being a maid, I am not cunning’ (even the emphatic underlining suggested the raw girl). She showed very plainly that she was both shocked and hurt that Catherine could contemplate marriage so soon, undeterred by ‘the remembrance of the King’s Majesty, my father…who is as yet very rife in my own remembrance’.

  That was Mary all over, prudish, sentimental, clinging to the past, blind to facts (for no one had better reason to know what horror the remembrance of the King held for his widow), but doggedly honest. No one would ever get a promise out of Mary that she did not mean to keep. ‘Poor lady,’ sighed Catherine while her lover swore at Mary for a rude old maid: ‘“To be plain with you”! – hardly necessary to tell us that, when she can never be anything else!’ he growled.

  Mary maintained her tone when at last the marriage was made public by the end of June, and presently wrote to Elizabeth begging her to come and live with her at her manor-house of Kenninghall in Norfolk, so that the two royal sisters should join together in showing their disapproval of the behaviour of their father’s widow.

  Elizabeth giggled. Nothing would induce her to leave the delights of her homes in or near London, now grown so gay and exciting with the Admiral as their acknowledged head, for the dank marshy misty place in the wilds of the Norfolk fens, with her strict elderly sister in charge of her instead of the easy-going Catherine. But whatever happened, she must not offend Mary; every time Edward had a cold or a bad headache, the behaviour of the Court to Mary, as heir to the throne, showed her that.

  So she had to pass her first real test in diplomatic correspondence, and settled down to it at her little escritoire with such lively enjoyment that her tongue kept stealing out all the time she was writing, and curling round the corners of her smiling mouth so that, as the Admiral declared on coming into the room, she looked like a sly sandy kitten licking her lips over stolen cream.

  ‘And what is it you’re writing? Your first love-letter, I’ll be bound, to make you so smug! Come, confess, which of the pages have you seduced?’

  He looked over her shoulder, but she had put her hands over the paper; he pulled them away, the inkstand overturned, she shrieked in indignation, snatching up the precious letter, and he chased her round the room for it. Catherine came running at her cries and scolded them both like a pair of naughty children, and the Admiral defended himself, saying he had got to supervise their ward’s conduct and how could he, if she carried on a clandestine correspondence with the grooms?

  ‘I don’t!’ shrieked Bess. ‘The letter’s to my sister Mary.’

  ‘Tell that to the Beef-eaters! Would anyone write to your sister Mary grinning all over their face? Let’s see what merry jests you’ve put in it!’

  ‘No, no, the jest’s to me only. No one else can see it. No one shall see it. Give it back, give it me!’

  She was chasing him now, for he’d snatched the paper out of her hand and was holding it at arm’s length above his head far out of her reach while he dodged round the furniture and finally behind the Queen, darting out first on one side of her, then the other, while Bess put her arms round her stepmother’s plump little figure to try and catch him behind it.

  ‘Ouch! You’re squeezing me to death between you,’ Catherine gasped out, laughing. ‘Stop teasing the child and give her back her letter.’

  ‘Read it yourself then first, Cathy, or I’ll not be responsible!’

  ‘No, no!’ shouted Bess, stamping her foot in a real rage by now. ‘She’s not to, nor you. It’s my letter. Give it back.’

  He fluttered it above her head, making her jump for it like a dog; at last he let her snatch it from him and she fled from the room clasping it to her breast. He turne
d to Catherine, suddenly dropping his fooling.

  ‘Is it safe to let her send it without our reading it? We’ve got to be careful with Mary – so has Bess. It’s a ticklish position.’

  ‘Dear heart,’ said Catherine, smiling at him as though he were a cross between God and her imbecile child, ‘I’d trust Bess to deal with a ticklish position rather better than yourself!’

  Bess, reading her letter in the beautiful flowing handwriting that her tutors had taught her, would have concurred. She had pretended entire agreement with her ‘very dear sister’ while refusing to do anything she asked; shared her ‘just grief in seeing the ashes or rather the scarcely cold body of the King our father so shamefully dishonoured’ by their stepmother’s marriage. (Yes it would have been awkward if Catherine had read that! though she would have understood why Bess had to write it.)

  And now came the cream of the jest, though, as she had just said, for herself alone: ‘I cannot express to you how much affliction I suffered when I was first informed of this marriage.’ (True enough that, in all conscience! No wonder she had grinned as she wrote in amused appreciation of her insincere candour.) Sincerity broke in also when she wrote of the Queen’s ‘so great affection and so many kind offices’ to herself, but these were advanced only in excuse for Bess having to ‘use much tact in manoeuvring with her for fear of appearing ungrateful for her benefits’. It was the nearest she dared get to reminding Mary that she, too, owed her stepmother gratitude for her kindness.

  But she did manage with consummate aplomb to warn her ‘dearest sister’ (why did that look so much more affectionate when it came in the middle of a letter?) of the folly of ‘running heavy risk of making our own lot much worse than it is; at least, so I think. We have to deal with too powerful a party, who have got all authority into their hands, while we, deprived of power, cut a very poor figure at Court,’ – a pathetic picture of two royal Cinderellas that made its writer, in the midst of a whirl of festivities, chuckle happily.

  And here Bess did make a bad slip, carried away by her own worldly advice to the woman of over thirty. ‘I think, then,’ she wrote, ‘that the best course we can take is that of dissimulation… If our silence does us no honour, at least it will not draw down upon us such disasters as our lamentations might induce.’

  The letter was a perfect piece of diplomacy – if only it had been addressed to the right person. But a letter is a joint affair, depending almost as much upon its reader as its writer. The determined honesty, the loathing of compromise, that Mary had inherited from her mother, without any of her mother’s tact, made her quite incapable of taking warning from Bess’s reminders of the harm her protests might do to herself.

  But the warning she did take was of Bess herself, that inscrutably smiling girl, just on fourteen, who could so complacently accept it ‘if our silence do us no honour’; who could so cynically plan, ‘the best course we can take is that of dissimulation’.

  And Mary would remember that warning to the end of her life.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Young Edward, not content with writing good advice and assurances of his patronage to his elders, and terse demands for cash to be slipped under carpets, also kept a Journal.

  It was Mr Cheke’s idea, and it gave him a pleasing sense of importance to write it, sitting at his little desk which was covered with black velvet, so as not to show the inkstains (an economical notion of the Duchess); it contained fascinating inner compartments and secret drawers where he could store his treasures; some buttons of agate and gold, some strange new instruments that showed the signs of the zodiac and the movements of the stars (Edward liked stars); a cormorant’s egg which Barnaby had brought him from the Donegal cliffs; and half a dozen dog collars of red and white leather, a present from Cuthbert Vaughan, his Master of the Dogs.

  There he sat in ‘the Kynge’s secret studie’ at Westminster, the only place where he could feel himself in undisputed command of a kingdom, looking out on the busy river and on the further shore the gardens and towers of Lambeth Palace where Archbishop Cranmer sat writing, just as busily as himself, at the new English Prayer Book, that staggering innovation that was to make a new religion, a new England, and all the great men in the land would contribute something to it; Edward would himself. Already his only title for it was ‘the Book of my proceedings’.

  Meanwhile he wrote his Journal. And on the same page as his account of the ‘great preparation mad to goe into Scotland’ by the Lord Protector and other great nobles, to carry out King Henry’s dying wishes to have the Scots finally and thoroughly smashed, he put the briefest of records of his uncle Tom Seymour’s marriage to the Queen, ‘with wich mariag’ (spelling was not yet stabilised, especially Edward’s) ‘the Lord Protectour was much offended’.

  But as the Scottish campaign was carrying the Lord Protector away from this domestic scene of action, he had at first to leave hostilities to that keen lieutenant, his wife. The Duchess instantly attacked with full batteries of abuse which did not spare even that national monument the late King.

  ‘Did not King Henry marry Catherine Parr in his doting days, when he had brought himself so low by his lust and cruelty that no lady that stood on her honour would venture on him?’ Whereas she herself was not only the wife of the Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector of England, but the great-great-granddaughter, on her mother’s side, of the tenth son of Edward III. It was nothing to her that the progeny of that enormous family would soon make it quite difficult for any gentry not to be descended from Edward III; she looked on herself as the one and only Plantagenet, and it was a gross personal insult that she should have to bear the train of the Queen Dowager who was really only Catherine Parr, a nobody, ‘now casting herself for support on a younger brother. If Master Admiral teach his wife no better manners, I am she that will.’

  And that Impossible She proceeded to teach her new sister-in-law manners by jostling her in the doorway at State functions and fairly stampeding out of the room so as to take precedence of her and avoid bearing her train. ‘Exceeding violent’ was the verdict of the astonished witnesses, and, in the opinion of one sly observer, this business of the Queen’s train was kicking up so much dust that it might well end in smothering both their husbands.

  For Tom could also be exceeding violent; he swore with loud and terrible oaths that ‘no one should speak ill of the Queen, or he would take his fist to the ears of those who did, from the lowest to the highest.’ Which gave to many a reasonable hope of seeing him box the Duchess’s ears, or perhaps even the Duke’s.

  The Court was beginning to take sides, and furiously. Nearly everybody there was finding the Duchess’s ‘many imperfections intolerable, her pride monstrous’. Ned Seymour had always been an almost oppressively upright and conscientious man; but no one could trust a man ruled by such a wife, and many said that in his quieter way he was becoming almost as bad. He had set aside the conditions of the late King’s will almost before the breath was out of his body and taken his supreme power by a coup d’etat; he was destroying churches, even parts of St Paul’s, to build himself Somerset House – the churches did not matter, they were fair game and everyone was doing it, but St Paul’s was more than a church, it was the City, it was London itself; and Somerset House was more than a house, it was a palace bigger than anybody else, even a King, had ever had.

  Worst of all, the fellow would make speeches; beautiful speeches, which nobody could make head or tail of; speeches about liberty and freedom of speech for all men, about religious toleration and free discussion as the best way to settle all problems, and not merely of religion either. He had not only repealed all the laws against heresy but most of those against treason too; a man might now even impugn the Royal Supremacy in speech, though not in writing. It was plain asking for trouble and rebellion, and as if this were not enough, he was actually going against his own class, encouraging discontent among the common people, for that was what would come of his taking their side against their landlords in his
attempts to give them back their common lands. For centuries they had been allowed to graze their sheep and cattle on them, but they had now been enclosed for the use of the big landowners, who were bristling like hedgehogs at the idea of giving them back to the people.

  Let him try out his fool notions on religion if he must; but property, that was another matter, that was sacred.

  And now here he was doing his youngest brother out of the property that was rightly, even legally, his and his wife Catherine’s. A fellow that could trick his younger brother out of his own, that showed you what the fellow was really like.

  For in the midst of all these mutterings and growlings was heard that magnificent voice of Tom Seymour.

  ‘My brother is wondrous hot in helping every man to his right, save me! He makes a great matter of preventing my having the Queen’s jewels, which you see by the whole opinion of the lawyers ought to belong to me, and all under pretence that he would not the King should lose so much – as if it were a loss to the King to let me have mine own!’

  Even the Queen’s wedding ring had been robbed from her, he told Fowler as he sat drinking in the privy buttery; and Mr Fowler sighed piously and said (or said afterwards that he said), ‘Alas, my lord, that ever jewels or muck of this world should make you begin a new matter between my Lord Protector and you!’ At which my lord roared for his boots and rode away.

  And his wife Catherine, who had been so careless of the ‘muck of this world’ when she had fled the Palace of Whitehall in those haunted days of last January, was now as eager and indignant about the jewels as he. To her they were no capricious gift of King Henry’s doting days, but her just wages for three and a half years’ devoted service as his sick-nurse, a job that few women would indeed have willingly ventured on.

  And it was not only the jewels, and not only King Henry’s gifts. Catherine’s favourite country manor of Fasterne had been grabbed by methods even more flagrant. The Protector, or again his Duchess, had without its owner’s consent, coolly installed a tenant in it who paid the bare minimum of rent (and presently ceased doing even that) and refused even to allow her to graze her cattle in its park, so that she had to pay farmers for their pasturage – and this at the same time that the Protector was proposing to reform the grievance of the enclosures and to give the grazing lands back to the people! Charity, or rather justice, should begin at home, said Tom loudly; and even his gentle Cathy wrote to her husband that it was lucky his elder brother was away at the moment, ‘for else I believe I should have bitten him’.