Young Bess

by Margaret Irwin

  But she fully intended to utter all her rage against the Protector to him in front of the King, ‘if you do not give me advice to the contrary,’ – as if it were likely Tom should ever give her such advice! Now that she was married to him she was so deep in love that she was coming to rely utterly on him in all matters, with the abandonment of a woman entirely happy and satisfied for the first time in thirty-five years and four marriages. Any doubts she had ever felt as to his perfect moderation in temper or judgment had been cast to the winds; she was now young for the first time, young and foolish, glorying in feeling so and in looking up to the finest man in England as her arbiter in all things.

  Others did not altogether endorse her opinion; that of the more discriminating of his fellows was that ‘the Lord Sudley was fierce in courage, courtly in fashion, in personage stately, in voice magnificent, but somewhat empty in matter.’

  But he was extremely popular with them; they agreed that his little wife, after all she had been through, deserved her luck, for it was plain that they were really lovers. And if all the world loves a lover, it also loves a younger son, who has to make his own way in the world, as Tom had done triumphantly, and no thanks to his elder brother. And now that that supremely fortunate elder brother was actually trying to hinder him, it was not only base, it was unnatural.

  They all liked the little Queen and they liked Tom, even if he did brag and wag his beard a bit – in fact, all the more for doing so; he was so wildly, gloriously indiscreet, generous not only with his money and his sumptuous entertaining, his royal banquets, his gaming parties and water parties and sports of every kind, but also with himself, talking so freely and openly without any shadow of suspicion or even caution of his hearers, taking them all for granted as his friends, certain that they would feel just as he did about the wrongs he had to endure from his brother, and quite reckless lest such talk might lay up occasion for yet worse wrongs. And, however angry, he was never tedious nor doleful, would shrug it off with a laugh and ‘Oh well, “more was lost on Mohacs’ field,” as they still say in Hungary!’

  The common people too adored him. Every time he went out they roared for him as they had done for King Hal when at the height of his popularity, and there were many who said he was more like that King when young than the pale little Prince ever showed a sign of becoming – as kingly, and with a finer beauty than even that giant had once worn; and the hearty carefree laugh that rang out from him as he scattered coins among the crowd sounded in all older ears as the echo of that great laugh of Bluff King Hal in his golden youth.

  Free with his money he was, like Hal, and saw to it that the conduits ran wine in the Strand when he gave some grand show at his house there – which was more than his elder brother did, for all that he called himself the Protector. Solemn as a judge he was; he might talk big about reform, but reforms never did anybody much good, there was always a catch somewhere, and the rich managed to make themselves richer by them while the poor came off worse than before. A lot of fine talk cost him nothing, and did nothing for anyone else; hot air never warmed anybody – but what everyone could see and hear for themselves was that he was busy feathering his own nest, with hundreds of workmen hammering all day at that vast new house to be called by his name.

  Altogether, Tom had good reason to be pleased with the way things were going. The Protector went up to Scotland at the head of his army and left his younger brother as his Lieutenant-General in charge of the South Ports, and this gave him more scope. Which he used rather mysteriously when he went to dislodge a notorious pirate called Jack Thompson who had seized the Scilly Isles, and came back apparently well satisfied although he had not dislodged him. Was it because he had agreed to share the swag with Mr Thompson?

  His friends chuckled and said they always knew Tom was a born buccaneer; but agreed it looked serious when he protected pirates even in the Admiralty Courts, and complaints began to come in from foreign Powers of the loss of their ships.

  He was playing with fire, too, among papers, hunting up all the old records he could find to prove that when a boy-King had two uncles, one of them should be Protector of the Realm and the other the Governor of the King’s Person. There was no doubt that the King himself would eagerly welcome it. ‘If only he were five or six years older!’ Tom would exclaim, ‘then it would all be plain sailing.’ Still, he had got the boy eating out of his hand, eating up a lot of cash certainly, but it should pay good interest.

  In his brother’s absence he now had more chance to see him by himself, though they still had to resort to the underhand tricks of truant schoolboys to get in touch, but that too was all to the good, since it was breeding in Edward a contained fury of discontent against his present guardians. Nor did it seem to be only self-interest that bound the child to his younger uncle; he was obviously dazzled by him and would stare, almost awed, when he heard his jolly laugh, as at something so alien to his cold restricted life that he did not know how to meet it.

  For his stepmother his feelings were simpler and more certain; for four years she had taken the place of the mother he had never known, and as naturally and lovingly as if she were indeed his mother. He missed her badly, and deeply resented that he was still being kept apart from her except for the briefest of formal visits. Even when she stayed at St James’s Palace and he at Whitehall within a stone’s throw, he found he could only write to her although ‘I was so near to you and expected to see you every day’.

  But the Admiral promised he would make it all come right. The Admiral said it was ridiculous that he should have to sit at his books all day. A King ought to be a good fellow, and mix with other good fellows – ‘Look at your father, he was hail-fellow-well-met with everyone at sight and it served him a deal better than writing treaties against Luther and getting dubbed Defender of the Faith by the Pope,’ – an unfortunate example, for the small face beneath him at once looked huffy and his nephew hastened to say that he was writing a comedy against the Pope, called ‘The Whore of Babylon’.

  ‘Very sound, very sound,’ said his uncle, ‘though you’d do it better later when you know more about—’

  ‘I know all about the Pope.’

  ‘—more about whores then.’ But he found it safer to step off the subject, for Edward took his position as Supreme Head of the English Church very seriously. So he talked to him of his other duties as King. He ought to go on board the splendid ships that his father and grandfather had built, and tell the sailors that he would build more, to down the Spaniards and conquer the New World beyond the Western Ocean. All true Englishmen were growing sick and tired of sitting at home, watching the smoke of their firesides, now that they no longer went out in every generation to fight in the wars in France. Agincourt was now only an old song –

  ‘Our King went forth to Normandy

  With grace and might of chivalry’ –

  and England had shrunk from a Continental Empire to a little island (and only half of that). But a fine navy might still make her a world power.

  And Edward ought to go hunting and hawking and prepare to lead his armies in the field; in Hungary a man did not count himself a man unless he were on a horse.

  ‘Yet the Turks beat them at Mohacs,’ Edward interpolated – odious child, he knew everything; but his uncle had a better answer this time.

  ‘And well I know why, as Master Gunner of England, who am seeing to it that it shall never happen to an English army. The Turks were the first to use this stinking new artillery in full force, and the finest chivalry in Europe went down before it. It happened once, it will happen again, but not to us while I’m in command of the Ordnance – if I have the right backing.’

  ‘I’ll back you,’ said the child, suddenly lighting into enthusiasm.

  ‘You’ll be a fine King,’ said Tom, patting the fair head, but again came the petulant jut of Edward’s full under-lip, that so reminded one of his father.

  ‘I am King now,’ he said.

  ‘You ought to be more of
one. You can’t always be tied to your Uncle Ned’s leading-strings, you know, and he’s a bit of an old woman, far too old for you anyway.’

  The under-lip stuck out further in a ferocious pout. ‘I wish he were dead,’ it said.

  This was going further than Ned’s brother had dreamt of. Edward saw his uncle’s astonishment, sucked in his lip so that his mouth became a tiny red button, and repeated with cold, considered obstinacy, ‘It would be better if he died.’

  It was too much for the hardy buccaneer, who had only been tentatively feeling his way to the suggestion of a joint guardianship with his brother, and now felt a slight shiver at this ‘sweet gentle child’, as everybody called him.

  He told his wife that he was a little monster, whereat his Cathy indignantly told him that he did not understand children and that it was all because Edward had been taken away from her own motherly care. Tom scoffed at the notion that he did not understand his nephew; anyway, the boy understood him and what he wanted, which was the important thing. Edward was going to write out a list of his complaints against his Uncle Somerset, and sign it with the royal signature, telling exactly what he felt about being kept so strictly in hand and so short of cash, and so entirely unsuitably for a great King who had just had his tenth birthday. Tom was going to read it out at that autumn’s Parliament, ‘And,’ said he, ‘if they don’t do as I want about it, then by God’s teeth I’ll make it the blackest Parliament ever known in England!’

  Even Cathy was startled into alarm and begged him not to oppose his brother so openly; but he only laughed at her fears; and then, before the scheme was ripe, the Protector, Duke of Somerset, came home from Scotland in the autumn, a conquering hero, his position greatly strengthened by his having won a tremendous victory at some place with the absurd name of Pinkie. The soldiers said it was really his second-in-command, John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, who won it. In any case, everybody said that this time the Scots would certainly never be able to lift their heads again; though a few seemed to remember much the same thing being said five years ago after the battle of Solway; and some old croakers went so far as to remember that there had been even more reason to say it over thirty years ago, after Flodden.

  The conquering hero himself felt his success oddly clouded, though it was only by a dream, which he recounted to his secretary Mr Patten on the morning of the battle as they walked on the ramparts, looking towards Scotland; and told him to write it down, though, as Mr Patten objected, it was only an idle dream.

  ‘Dreams should not be idle,’ said his master. ‘They should be the busy servants of those statesmen who have the courage to dream wisely.’

  So the secretary shrugged imperceptibly and noted down how the Protector had dreamt of his triumphant return to Court after the campaign, and the hearty thanks expressed to him by the King and all the country: ‘but yet he thought he had done nothing at all in this voyage – which, when he considered the King’s Highness’ great costs and great travail of the great men and soldiers all to have been done in vain, the very care and shamefast abashment of the thing did waken him out of his dream.’

  What could be the point in noting such moonshine, thought Mr Patten, when it had been directly followed by his winning a stupendous victory in which he had killed thousands of the enemy, laid waste their country and destroyed their harvest; and his troops, mainly hired mercenaries from Germany and Spain, had kindled such furious hatred among the Scots that there was no hope of their accepting his very reasonable and conciliatory offer of peace and union.

  He omitted all King Henry’s arrogant claim to Scotland as a vassal state, and based it only on an equal union through marriage of her Queen and England’s King, with Free Trade between the countries, and both England and Scotland to be renamed together with Wales as Great Britain; an island empire ‘having the sea for a wall, mutual love for a garrison, and no need in peace to be ashamed, or in war to be afraid of any worldly power.’

  Which put it beautifully; but, as Tom said, it wasn’t much use to preach mutual love when you’d let loose the German landsknechts and Spanish ruffians under the Italian condottiere Malatesta to loot and rape, burn and murder through the countryside. With their aid he’d won the war but lost the peace, for Scotland was more determined than ever to get their little Queen over in safety to France and betroth her to the Dauphin before she should be captured by force and taken to England. A French fleet had been known to have been hovering off the Scottish shores this summer; now they would have to wait for the spring, since no good seaman would trust so precious a freight to the dangers of a voyage between St Simon’s and St Jude’s Day and Candlemas, when storms were at their worst, and by seaman’s law no ships should then sail the Northern Seas. But they were only biding their time, and then Scotland would be driven deeper into the arms of France than ever before, and England would have to face the prospect of encirclement on south, north and west by France, and by French armies in Scotland, with Ireland as a third base for invasion, easy to capture from Scotland – the very danger that Somerset had recognised and striven so hard to avoid.

  It was his fate to have to work by force when he would far rather use persuasion. He tried to use it now, and set in train an immense invasion of another sort – to wit, thousands of religious leaflets and hundreds of Bibles in English, printed in Geneva. For he saw clearly that Scotland could only be united to England if she shared her new Reformed Religion, and that this was the best lever to use against her alliance with Roman Catholic France.

  Another propaganda weapon lay in the prisoners he had taken, who were to buy their freedom, also pensions and promises of important marriages, by undertaking to work for English interests in Scotland. The Scots Lord Chancellor himself was one of these, the Earl of Huntly, a fat, talkative fellow who thought he ruled Scotland; and the fickle flimsy Fair Earl of Bothwell, tall and stooping rather from his slight shoulders, very vain of his delicate colouring that betokened consumption, and of his wavering blue eyes. He insisted on marriage to either of the Princesses, Mary or Elizabeth (he hadn’t seen either and didn’t mind which) as his price; and was fobbed off instead with the usual promise of Anne of Cleves – a promise that nobody, least of all the lady in question, intended to keep. The Fair Lord Francis had a wife at home (and a schoolboy son, James, as dark as he himself was fair), but he had just managed to divorce her, having had the intention of marrying his own Queen-Regent, the mother of the little Queen of Scots. A royal marriage was evidently his idée fixe.

  The citizens of London wanted to express their loyal gratitude to the victorious Duke of Somerset by giving him a triumphal procession through the city, but this he modestly refused – to their annoyance, for if one had the expense of a war, one might as well have the fun of it. But the eldest Seymour’s lonely spirit was too aloof to see how a gorgeous spectacle and free drinks running in the gutters would enhance his popularity – just as he never saw that his modesty was first credited as parsimony, and then hypocrisy; for he now placed himself in Parliament on a throne high up and apart from all the other lords, to their intense exasperation.

  If this were modesty, give them Old Harry’s pride! Their offended dignity was only aggravated by his piety, for in his prayer at the opening of Parliament he spoke of himself as ‘called by Providence to rule’ – but Providence never offered him that upper seat!

  The newly self-made Duke then complained of his parvenu Council as a lot of ‘lords sprung from the dunghill’; after that, a good many of them said they would prefer Tom as Protector. And Somerset put the final edge on Tom’s own grievances against him by writing him a long and solemn letter urging him ‘to receive poor men’s complaints, that find themselves injured or grieved, for it is our duty and office so to do’.

  Tom’s roar of rage as he read it brought his household running to hear his blasphemously and indecently expressed opinion of an elder brother who had never helped him to anything, but withheld his wife’s possessions, down to her wedding ring, and then l
ectured him on brotherly duty to his neighbour!

  His furious laughter went rolling and roaring through the house; he kicked a chair across the hall and picked up another and broke it in his hands; he swore he would go and see our Pulpit Ned on the instant and ram his canting letter down his throat; he would ask him how he had the face to talk about the Rights or Wrongs of the poor, when he had done his own son and heir out of his inheritance and was now cheating his own brother out of his goods; he was an unnatural father and an unnatural brother, in fact there was nothing natural about him, and he accused his own mother, as she came tottering and quavering down the stairs, of having conceived him of the Devil.

  A birdlike little old lady, usually spry and dapper as a water-wagtail, Lady Seymour now twittered about the hall, fluttering her hands and uttering disconsolate chirps such as ‘Now, now, now!’ ‘Another quarrel!’ ‘Not again!’ ‘Always fighting as boys, I thought they’d kill each other, and now, now—’

  His wife sobbed, the servants peeped awestruck round doorways, Bess took a gallery seat at the top of the stairs to watch the row, and little Jane Grey peeped over her shoulder and wondered if all grown-ups were mad.

  The quarrel raged its way into the Protector’s palace, and as usual it took the Protector some time to understand what Tom was making all this noise about. He had been meaning himself to get in first with his own grievances.