Young Bess

by Margaret Irwin

  His nervous eyebrows went fidgeting half-way up the furrowed dome of his forehead as he complained how he had to cut short his campaign in Scotland to hurry home and enquire into all manner of disturbing reports of his brother. Surely the welfare of the State mattered more than petty personal affairs, women’s toys, trinkets.

  What was this about the Lord High Admiral countenancing piracy? It had even been suggested that he meant to establish a naval base for himself in the Scilly Isles.

  But here the Admiral blew away the suggestion like a gale at sea.

  ‘Piracy, pooh! The pirates of today are the pioneers of tomorrow. You’ll see! England will owe more to her pirates than to her Protectors.’

  The Protector hastily abandoned pirates. Tom had been unsettling the King’s mind, taking him out hunting when he should have been at his lessons, thrusting himself into his favour—

  ‘God’s blood, and isn’t he my nephew as much as yours? Why should you have the right to work the poor little brat to death at his books when his head’s spinning so that he can hardly see? I’ll swear you don’t even know that his eyes are weak and have to be bathed with Mother Jack’s foul mixtures—’ (The Protector didn’t; nor did the Admiral till his wife had told him.) ‘Suit you finely to have a blind King, so that you can carry on your Protection – God save the mark!’

  The younger brother shouted; the elder compressed his lips; the Duchess swept in and told Master Admiral what she thought of younger brothers and their wives, and the Admiral told her what he thought of her; the Protector slid away to compose a prayer to ‘the Granter of all peace and quietness, the Defender of all Nations, who has willed all men to be accounted as our neighbours, and commanded us to love them as ourselves; and not to hate our enemies, but rather to wish them, yea and also to do them good if we can…to give unto all men a speedy wearisomeness of all war, hostility and enmity…and grant in Thy days Thy great gift of unity’.

  It was perhaps the most moving and perfect prayer ever addressed on behalf of a conquered enemy, for it was a prayer for Union with Scotland; but, for once, ‘petty personal affairs’ may have also tinged those austere desires for the welfare of the State.

  The brothers’ quarrel was patched up somehow, as it had to be to avoid a hideous open scandal. The Lord High Admiral’s income was increased by £800 a year; and then the Duke of Somerset settled down with a sigh of relief to the enormous but congenial burden of the reform of religion and organisation of the Church as an efficient branch of the Civil Service; the direction of all England’s foreign diplomatic correspondence (with only two secretaries to help him); the supervising of every meeting of the Council and of Parliament; and a host of far-reaching but not always practicable schemes for the freedom of speech and the Press, and for social reforms to check the rise in prices and the debasement of the currency, to stop land-grabbing by the New Rich and unemployment of the poor; he even had a Court of Requests set up in his own house so that the humblest suppliant who came to complain of any wrong or oppression might get the ear of the great Duke himself, the Good Duke, as the poor now called him.

  But the Duchess still wore the Queen Dowager’s jewels.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Admiral lost his chance to make that autumn’s Parliament the blackest ever seen, not because of the power of the greatest statesman in England, but because of the intractability of a small boy.

  Edward had never supplied him with that signed list of complaints that was to win him his freedom and his Uncle Tom’s ascendancy; instead, he had asked his tutor about it, and ‘Mr Cheke said I had better not write it,’ he said in his cool little even voice, as dispassionately as if he had been let off writing a Latin prose.

  For the second time the reckless adventurer felt a slight shiver as he looked down at the pretty, rather mulish little face. Did he – or anyone else – understand children, their secret and incalculable life, governed by no one knew what obscure impulses and caprice?

  Young Edward had certainly seemed to resent his elder uncle’s domination even to the point of hating him and wishing his death; but now he appeared to have forgotten all about it, or at any rate did not wish to be bothered with it, but only to be left alone.

  This was indeed something of the case, for Edward’s weak vitality had begun to shrink from his overpowering younger uncle; he vaguely felt that he could never be the sort of King that Uncle Tom expected him to be – but if he couldn’t be a mixture of Christopher Columbus, Richard Coeur de Lion and Saint George (silly, that story of Saint George, he was sure there had never been any Dragons in England), at least he could be the wisest, most learned and most religious King England had ever had. A deal of people thought he would be, too.

  The learned refugee, Dr Bucer from Germany, said how lucky his subjects were to have a philosopher for their Prince. (Dr Bucer was lucky too, for Edward had sent the cash for him to have a German stove in his house at Cambridge as he couldn’t get warm with the English open fires.)

  But his Uncle Tom wouldn’t think anything of a philosopher King. His Uncle Somerset would.

  The Admiral could tell him exciting stories of the heathen Turks, how their janissaries dipped the horsehair plumes of their lances in blood as a sign of war, and for years now those lances were pointing further and further into Europe; the Sultan’s dashing incendiaries had plundered Austria and hammered on the walls of Vienna while his Crescent still flew from the citadel of Buda Pest, where Tom himself had feasted and talked with him in his dark gleaming coat of mail, with heron plumes waving in his turban, fastened by a diamond named the Eye of Heaven.

  Edward listened with interest, but considered that the Turk was still a long way off, and Europe wasn’t England, there was all the sea between; and moreover England was his, and Scotland ought to be too, his father had always said so; and his Uncle Somerset was fighting this Scottish war, not just for Europe or Christendom, but for him.

  So that it was with a thrill of personal pride that he wrote in his Journal a full account, almost as clear and vivid as if he had been there himself, of the battle of Pinkie, how 10,000 Scots were slain, and 1,000 lords (he wrote 2,000 in his first enthusiasm but punctiliously altered it to the more modest estimate); how the Scots strove for the higher ground ‘and almost gott it’, but Somerset rallied the English horse so that ‘the Scotts stood amasid’; how Somerset was challenged by the pompous Earl of Huntly to single combat but refused him for the excellent reason that he was in charge of so precious a jewel as the governance of his King’s person, and how John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, chased that plump Scottish braggart and was almost taken prisoner himself by riding slap into an ambush, but was rescued by a French knight Berteville who got ‘hurt in the buttok’, but, as Edward finished with a flourish that turned his final ‘y’ into a horsewhip, ‘the ambush ran away’.

  And he rubbed his eyes, which were smarting again, and sent for Mother Jack, who clucked like an angry hen at all these books – ‘Aren’t there enough in the world as it is and enough trouble caused by them?’ (she disapproved of the new English Bible) ‘But you too must go scribble, scribble, scribble?’ – and delicately painted his sore eyes with a feather dipped into a precious water compounded of fennel, rue, pimpernel, sage, celandine, honey, and fifteen peppercorns, boiled in a pint of white wine to which was added five spoons of ‘the water of a man-child that is an innocent.’

  But the precious water didn’t do as much good as usual, and Edward swore at his nurse with a few of the Admiral’s thundering oaths, and the Protector, who never used a brutal or coarse expression in the whole of his life, heard them and demanded which of the King’s playfellows had taught him those shocking words. Edward was just going to tell their origin when young Barnaby Fitzpatrick, rolling up his blue eyes with the look of a repentant cherub, admitted to having taught his King to swear.

  ‘And why did you so abuse your trust?’ demanded the Protector sternly, while Edward stared, too astonished to speak.

  Barn
aby was plainly perplexed, but only for the instant. ‘I thought,’ he said presently, now casting down his eyes in an even more specious humility, ‘that it was the proper thing for a King to do.’

  There was a moment’s hush in which all there seemed to hear the echoed roar of King Harry’s monstrous blasphemies. Then the Protector hurriedly ordered the Irish boy to be whipped in Edward’s presence, and rubbed it well into his nephew that the same should be done to him too if he were not the King. Edward, white and sullenly furious, watched his friend’s punishment, and as soon as they were alone, demanded indignantly why he had courted it.

  ‘Ah, and why wouldn’t I?’ said young Barnaby carelessly. ‘You don’t want another fight between your uncles, do you?’

  ‘I have too many uncles,’ said Edward ominously.

  Christmas brought the first full reunion of the royal family since their father’s death. Even Mary accepted the invitation to Court, though it involved her in long arguments with the Protector, who attacked her right to have Mass said privately in her own house; and she counter-attacked the way in which he was setting aside all the terms of her father’s Will.

  Somerset’s attempts to prove that his late Sacred Majesty’s intentions were entirely Protestant landed him in a mass of self-contradictions; it was the Admiral who, as he crudely said, ‘took the cow by the horns’ and pointed out to Mary that King Henry’s words and actions had been so inconsistent that it was impossible to base a settled policy upon them. Oddly enough, the Princess seemed to prefer this to his brother’s justifications; in spite of the snubbing she had given Tom over his marriage a few months before, they grew very friendly together over music; and when she sighed over her lack of practice in the virginals he lent her his best musician to give her lessons.

  He had brought a band of gipsies from Vienna who delighted both the Princesses by playing to them the music they considered appropriate to their charms; Elizabeth’s was a wild Hungarian dance, and Mary’s a tender mournful ballad about the wanderings of the Magyars in search of their Promised Land, which brought tears to her eyes.

  She was in a genial mood, very new to those who had not seen her since she kept her own household, free of the Court and her father’s domination. Even her religion seemed to be sitting more loosely on her, for she lost a bet of £10 to Dr Bill, one of the leading theological lights of the Protestant Church; and could not refrain from going a pleased pink when told that her translation of Erasmus’s Paraphrases of St John had been issued to all the churches in England as a companion volume to the new English Bible.

  ‘We’ll be having you as good a Protestant as any of us,’ Tom said, and she only gave her great gruff laugh that reminded one of her father and sounded so oddly from her small, rather shrunken figure. As usual, it was much too showily dressed; ermine stripes ran in every direction like an erratic zebra, and the shoulder-puffs on her sleeves reached her ears, her face poking forward between them, shortsighted, peering, vaguely bewildered but determined.

  The dances and romping games, the fooling and practical jokes were as fast and furious as they had been a year ago under the glazed eye of the huge figure that had sat glittering and moribund in the chair worked by his devoted daughter. This was not because the Protector had the same simple enjoyment in games of Snapdragon, Forfeits, Kiss-in-the-Ring, and Hunt-the-Slipper (indeed, he was barely conscious that they were going on), but because the Admiral had by common consent been appointed Lord of Misrule.

  Even the little King took part in a Masque of Cats, and was gravely pleased with his tabby coat and furry mask with whiskers a foot long. He had to enter on the shoulders of John Dudley, the Earl of Warwick, dressed as a dog, according to the curious Natural History of masques. The famous soldier capered about behind the scenes, barking beautifully, then ducked before Edward, but the boy, small even for his age, looked round for a stool to help him to mount; there was none, so Tom placed a massive brass-bound Bible on the floor, but his nephew was shocked at the idea of standing on the Word of God.

  ‘Half the fellows at Court have risen by it,’ said Tom with a wink at John Dudley, but the joke went too near home, for the new Earl had made an enormous fortune out of the Reformation and the sale of Church lands, and had testified to the new piety à la mode by christening one of his sons Guildford, the first time anyone had been christened after a town and not a saint. Since Henry’s death, with the Reformation coming out into the open, he had risen rapidly. So he naturally found Tom’s joke in the worst of taste. ‘A fine figure of a man,’ he drawled in an audible aside. ‘Pity it wants a head – may do so in earnest before long.’

  There would have been a duel had not the Protector been determined to put down that ‘heathenish custom’. Tom told him he was a fool to be so scrupulous as to miss a chance to get Dudley out of the way. ‘He’s a dark horse and will be in the running against you before long, you can take my word for it,’ – nor did it strike him as odd to expect his brother to take his word for it, when he himself had so openly entered the running against him.

  Elizabeth had lost a forfeit to the Admiral; she was indignant, for he had taken the unfair advantage of bursting into her room in the morning, putting his head through the bed-curtains and shouting ‘Bonjour, Philippine!’ before she was awake. He was always up early and generally looked in on his way from Catherine’s room before Bess was up, or he himself more than half dressed. ‘Now then, Slug-a-bed!’ he would call, and pull off the bed-clothes and tickle or smack her to make her get up, and tell her she was an idle slut and sing:

  ‘See-saw, Margery Daw

  Sold her bed to lie upon straw.

  Wasn’t she an idle slut!’

  Bess found these sudden surprises very exciting, sometimes rather alarming, but even that was pleasant. One moment she would be sound asleep, and then crashing into her dreams would come a deep gay voice, a thrill of expectation – what was it that was going to happen? – and she woke to see his face laughing down on her, and this time it was saying, ‘Bonjour, Philippine! And now what forfeit will you pay me?’

  ‘Bread and cheese! You’ve got everything you want.’

  ‘Not everything. Pay me a kiss to start with.’

  She had kissed him often, leaping up and flinging her arms round his neck, but now suddenly she shied at it, slid out at the other side of the bed, and ran through the open doorway into the next room where her maids were preparing her bath. He gave chase, there was a wild scurry and giggling, she dodged behind first one girl and then another, she ran round the wide tub of porphyry and he leapt over it, dropping a slipper splash into the steaming scented water, stubbed his bare foot against the marble side of the tub, sprawled forward, dealt her a resounding smack from behind, caught at the flying skirt of her shift and gave it a tug which pulled her backwards plump into the bath with a mighty splash that emptied half the water on to the floor, drenched her hair and all the furniture near. The laughing shrieks brought Mrs Ashley running; she shrieked a little too, in camaraderie, but not with the same conviction; she was shocked at the Admiral’s deshabille, at his bare foot, at his romping with the Princess and her maids in her bedroom. People might talk, they might even blame herself.

  She pointed this out to him later and asked him to stop his morning visits: she owed it to herself, as she was in charge.

  The Admiral did not care what she owed to herself, an interfering cackling busybody, making a storm in a possetcup! He was genuinely astonished, for he not only swore, to show the purity of his intentions – ‘God’s precious soul, where’s the harm? I mean none, so I’ll not leave off!’ – but he actually burst out that if there were any more of this meddling he would tell the Protector how he was being slandered – as certain of Ned’s partisanship as if they were still at school, and Ned the much elder brother who would lecture him gravely on his faults but be sure to take his side against anyone else.

  So the Admiral did not leave off, and out of bravado made the fun even more outrageous; sometimes Bess
ran from him among her maids, sometimes hid from him in the bed-curtains or cupboards and was punished with a slap or tickling that made her wriggle and giggle and hit out at him and shriek for mercy or for help from the giggling maids, and enjoy it all thoroughly. All very well, thought Mrs Ashley, to say it was nothing but a childish frolic, but there were none of these frolics with the child Jane Grey – indeed, one couldn’t imagine her, though only eleven, taking part in them. But there was no question of it, for she had her separate apartments, servants, and tutors.

  Mrs Ashley, not the wisest of women, and terrified of tackling the Admiral again, tried warning her charge, reminding her that she was now nearly fourteen and a half, and growing very like her mother in some ways, and ought to begin to behave with the dignity and decorum of a young lady.

  ‘Did my mother?’ asked Bess demurely.

  Her governess wished she had the Admiral’s privilege of smacking her. She said she was very pert and silly, that men were fools in not recognising when a girl was no longer a child, but that they did not really like hoydens, and that of all people a Princess should not behave like a romping milkmaid.

  This began to go well; Bess felt uncomfortable and looked furious; but Mrs Ashley, afraid of provoking one of the girl’s rages, which always reduced her to a shaking fit of nerves, then spoilt all chance of real effect from these snubs by making mysterious hints.

  Bess’s mother, Nan Bullen, had driven men mad for her; she had been betrothed when only fifteen to the poor young Percy, Lord of Northumberland, who had never got over it, ‘and your eyes are like hers, though they were black as sloes – but I’ll swear the Admiral sees it too. If you knew all I could tell you, you’d see I’m not making a fuss for nothing, but there are things you don’t know and you must take my word for it, and be very careful with that man.’