The sight of Bess preening herself on her dignity and gentleness, who so short a time ago had locked her into her room while she went gallivanting on the river at night alone with the Admiral, was the last straw.
‘I tell you what it is, my young Madam,’ she flared out, ‘you are like the cat in the fairy-tale who was turned into the form of a lady and could behave as such perfectly – as long as she did not see a mouse! Mice or men it’s all the same – the moment you catch sight of one, hey presto! Away go all your fine manners and you must pounce!’
And the scolding ended in fits of laughter from them both.
But Bess was not entirely as confident as she seemed. She was anxious about Catherine, who she heard was not at all well, and at last realised that it was a serious matter for her to be having her first child at thirty-five. And Catherine’s generosity made her ashamed and embarrassed; she had actually encouraged her husband to write to her, and sent messages by him as she did not feel up to writing herself, and told Bess how she missed her companionship and wished she were there with them at Sudley Castle, where they had gone for her to bear her child in the peace and quiet of their Gloucestershire home.
Determined to be as prudent as possible, Bess wrote her answer to Catherine, not Tom, but asked tentatively that he should continue to ‘give me knowledge from time to time how his busy child does’, and added with a sad little attempt at a joke, ‘If I were at his birth no doubt I would have him beaten for the trouble he has put you to.’
‘Him’ and ‘he’; no one thought of the coming baby in any other terms. Catherine made his sex a particular point in the petitions she offered up for his safe arrival, in the family prayers that she held for her household – a new development which her husband complained was adding fresh revolutionary terrors to the Reformed Religion, since the servants would be wanting their wages raised for having to troop into the hall and pray twice daily. He himself generally found he had to attend to some earnest business at the bottom of the garden at just those moments, and would stroll off, singing a popular street song in parody of the New Religion, which, he declared, was one of hate.
‘Hate a cross, hate a surplice,
Mitres, copes and rochets.
Come hear me pray
Nine times a day
And fill your head with crochets.’
Pity the best of women had to have crochets, he told Cathy, laughing at her pet preachers and her enthusiasm over the higher education for women. She was only a little hurt, for she knew she would not like her Tom any the better if he held advanced views like his brother. She told herself they were so happy that they could afford the jolts that might have broken a more brittle happiness – differences of opinion, downright quarrels, even bitter moments of jealousy.
Until, when it came to that last: the image of Bess’s darting glance, the dragonfly swiftness of her turn of head, would rise before her, and she could not feel her happiness so secure.
But her child would safeguard it.
Tom did his own part towards the coming event by visiting all the best astrologers and fortune-tellers, and they all gave him certain assurance that his child would be a son – just as they had done to King Henry before his daughter Elizabeth was born, but nobody was going to remember that now. It would make all the difference to Tom’s position, his ambitious hopes and intrigues, if he had a son and heir to be their focal point for the future.
At the end of July, just a month before Catherine’s time was due, the Duchess gave birth to a son. ‘And let that spur you to a strapping boy!’ Tom told his wife. He was full of gay confidence, and as long as he was there she was too; but in his absence she drooped and was beset with nervous fears and melancholy. That was easily remedied, he told her; he would not leave her till the child was born and all well again.
He refused Somerset’s offered command of the fleet in this summer’s campaign against the Scots armies who had been annihilated last summer at Pinkie. But in spite of that, the Protector had to appeal to the Emperor for help, and march against his conquered enemy with the German troops, paid for in advance – a difficult matter with the Treasury bankrupt from the debts and debased coinage left over from the old King’s reign; and Somerset could not help thinking it an uneconomic measure, when thousands of unemployed Englishmen were wandering homeless on the roads, and the magistrates could find no remedy except to flog and imprison them for their failure to find work. Though they knew well that no work was to be had, since they themselves were mostly employing one shepherd boy to mind their new flocks, where their fathers had given work to fifty ploughboys and farm labourers.
Still, there was no doubt that unemployed men quickly became unemployable, and these wretched vagrants would be no use as soldiers compared with the German mercenaries; moreover, they were apt to fraternise with the Scots, and particularly, as fellow-peasants, to dislike firing their harvest and ripening crops.
The German mercenaries had no such scruples; they were a race apart, bred only for war, heavy and inhuman as their armour: ‘Find some means of making it move without ’em inside it, and you’d never know the difference!’ said Tom, who hated the Germans from what he had seen of them in Hungary where they had spied and wormed their way in for centuries, and now treated the Magyars like slaves in their own country, holding them to the law passed over a hundred years before, that no one should have any position of importance unless he could produce a testimonial of Purity of Race, proving that all his four grandparents belonged to the ruling German nation.
Ned asked what the – he nearly said ‘the devil’ but changed it to ‘on earth’ – the four German grandparents had to do with his mercenaries?
‘Why, this, you fool – yes, you can look down your long nose at me and think you’re always right, but you don’t know everything, nobody here knows what the Germans are like. Ask the Magyars. Ask the Poles. Ask that old fellow I met in Cracow – only he died last year – you know who I mean – old fellow with a beard like a furze bush and a bumpy nose turned up at the end from poking it so high into the heavens – God’s light, what was his name? – who wrote that the sun doesn’t move but that we all go whizzing round it instead.’
‘If you mean the Polish heretic Copernicus—’
‘Why heretic? He dedicated his book to the Pope, who accepted it. Are you Reformers going to be more pernickety than the Pope? But whatever Copernicus wrote of the stars, he was sound on the Teutons, and the way they’ve ravaged Poland year after year. He told me himself, “We can scarcely dwell in our own houses for an hour.” And all because the Germans think they are made by God to conquer the world. Their Emperor is not the Emperor of Germany, he’s the German Emperor – of the World. But you’ll never understand that here, you think it’s just an empty traditional title. One has to have lived on the Continent to see it. And it’s this Master Race of mechanic monsters that you’re bringing into this island to fight your battles for you, against fellows who speak the same language as ourselves – and to do the dirty work you can’t get Englishmen to do. You hire German hogs while our decayed yeomen rot in idleness on the roads. And then you complain that the Scots won’t listen to your fine speeches about brotherly love and Free Trade!’
His elder brother said that Tom entirely failed to understand the Scottish question. Extreme measures had unfortunately been made necessary by this final outrage of the Scots, for they had at last shipped off their little Queen safely to France. Even Tom’s shallow brain should grasp the danger to England of a Scottish-French encirclement.
But Tom only howled in exasperated boredom. He said that a lot of long words didn’t alter facts; that Ned thought he could make the Devil himself sound respectable by speaking of his ‘extreme measures’; that the Scots ought not to object to having their people slaughtered, their wives ravished in their sight, their fields burnt, their churches, towns and villages razed to the ground, as long as he left the words ‘English Sovereignty’ out of his peace terms; that in all his life N
ed had never grasped a single fact – only words, words, words.
The argument, as so often happens in the inconsequence of family quarrels, wandered far afield in a furious comparison of the ‘ordered and disciplined’ German rulers in Hungary with the dispossessed Magyar nobles who, having been left no other means of subsistence, would swoop down from their mountain fortresses on the market-place and carry off goods or, better, someone for ransom – preferably a Jew, for that was worth a bag of ducats where even a rich merchant would only fetch a reasonable sum. Good fellows, those Robber Knights, and no one in the world so handy with horseflesh.
Tom, glowing with nostalgic appreciation, wondered whether it wouldn’t be a good plan to kidnap his royal nephew and ransom him for his own Protectorship of him. It was a bright notion and would be thought nothing of in Hungary, but here in England everyone was so conventional.
He swung off to visit his nephew and consider him from the point of view of this possibility. He found Edward ruffled as an angry kitten because Mary had written to him (on the eternal vexed question of having the Mass in her household) that ‘although he was of great understanding, yet experience would teach him more yet’; an elder-sister touch far more irritating than the friendly equal arguing and wrangling between him and Bess. He showed his uncle with some pride his prompt retort to Mary that she ‘might have something to learn, and no one was too old for that!’
But what chiefly infuriated him was that the German Emperor, her mother’s nephew, was throwing out hints that if Mary were not allowed her own way, he would withdraw his Ambassador.
‘Just because he is her first cousin and was once betrothed to her, how dare he think that gives him any right to interfere with me? I’d have declared war on him by now, only my Uncle Somerset is such a slug and won’t set about it.’
Tom heartily encouraged him to ‘pull the Emperor’s nose’ – in spite of the fact that he had always said it was a shame to bother the Princess Mary about her private worship, and that ‘Live and let live’ was the only sound course in religion. He disliked the Reformers, if anything, rather more than the priests; he complained that they made far more fuss about religion in their determination to prove themselves in the right; in fact, he had only joined them for professional purposes, since it was politically necessary to be on their side, and also because, like the rest of the nobles, he had made a good thing out of the plunder of the Church lands and property.
But questions of consistency never troubled him. It was enough that his brother was letting in an advance guard of the Emperor’s troops, that the Emperor wanted to interfere in England as he had done practically everywhere on the Continent, and worst of all, that he was the Princess Mary’s first cousin.
‘The Hapsburgs don’t need to fight – they marry. They’ve got a hold over half Europe by that, and they’ll get it here if we don’t look out. Peaceful penetration – allies in the family – paid troops to fight our battles and act as spies in our country! Show him you won’t stand any of it.’
‘I will,’ said Edward, squaring his elbows and clenching his inky fist round his pen as he bent over his black velvet desk to write a belligerent letter to the terrible Charles V, Imperator Mundi.
Tom, standing behind his chair, suddenly swept him up out of it, tossed him up in his arms just as though he were a baby, and hugged him. ‘You’re the living spit of your mother – just Jane’s prim little determined air!’
‘Put me down!’ exclaimed the King in a squeak of astonished indignation. ‘I’m like my father – they all say so.’
‘Oh, you’re old Harry’s own, sure enough, a chip off the old block. By Christ’s soul, you’ll make a King to match himself, and not all these canting snivelling book-learned old women shall keep you from it! I’ll get you away from them, never fear.’
‘Put me down!’
At last Tom heard him, put him down and knelt to him with exaggerated deference, humbly craving his dread Sire’s pardon for his familiar treatment of him. Edward pulled down his waistcoat, smoothed his hair, and said in aggrieved tones, ‘Now I shall have to get it brushed again.’
It wasn’t until he had left that Tom remembered the prime motive of his visit, which was to consider his nephew’s kidnapping.
Well, that could come later.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Good Duke sat looking down his long nose at the letter, in Latin, of King Edward of England to the Emperor of the World. There were three mistakes in the syntax. It was time young Barnaby was whipped again. It was the only thing that had any real effect on Edward. He made a note of it and leant across the table to stick it in a stand.
His eye fell on his last letter from his brother Henry at Wolf Hall.
‘Further ye sent us downe such a lewde company of Frenchmen masons as I never sawe the lyke. I assure you they be the worst condicyoned people that ever I sawe and the dronkenest; for they will drynke more in one day than 3 dayes wages will come to, and then lye lyke beasts on the flore not able to stande. They are well nigh XXXs in debt for beer, victuals and other borrowed money. Praying you that I may be most hartely commendyed—’ but here the Duke’s eye instinctively averted from the fateful word ‘bedfellowe’.
What a welter of things he had to see to, and all himself, for no one else ever did them properly. Was it even worth the trouble, all this accumulation of vast estates which he never had time to ride over – of palaces spreading over the earth, towering to the sky, which he might never live even to see finished?
But this would never do. He made a shuddering guess at what his Duchess would say if she had heard his thought. He was not building for himself (nothing that he did was for himself) but for his son – and hers. Not for his eldest son, by Katrine Fillol; he had already been dispossessed of his birthright and his younger stepbrother was to inherit his father’s titles and estates. The Good Duke did not care to think of that.
It was narrow to consider one’s own flesh and blood, or even one’s own countrymen, as of prime importance. His public prayer to the Defender of All Nations showed a new and nobler view. And he had given practical testimony to it by opening a settlement of Flemish weavers, exiled for their religious beliefs, on his own estates at Glastonbury; the Somerset Weavers they were called, after him, a lasting tribute to his tolerance and foresight.
He took long views, in private as well as public matters. It was a fine instinct that made him take his pleasure, not in momentary self-indulgence, but in planting great trees that he would never see full-grown, in building palaces such as Somerset House that would dominate the untidy huddle of London’s wooden buildings like an eagle brooding over a nest of sparrows.
The only idle moments he knew were those in which he stood watching his workmen, as busy as a swarm of ants, at work on that enormous ant-heap. He even sometimes watched them during sermon-time. The new Scottish preacher, Mr John Knox, whom he had imported as the latest of the Royal Chaplains, had actually dared raise complaints about it.
But then Mr Knox raised complaints about everything. His first sermon at Court had been a frenzied diatribe against the iniquity of kneeling at Communion. The Archbishop thought it went too far. The Duke had appointed him for his Protestant zeal, to which he had earlier testified by his share in the murder of Cardinal Beton in Scotland. King Henry had rewarded that deed with good money; but the French had imprisoned him in their galleys for it. You would have thought that after two years as a galley-slave the man would be pleased with the post of King’s Chaplain in the now most firmly Protestant country in Europe. But he spent most of his time in bitter quarrels with his fellow-Reformers, with half the Court officials, and even, when he could, with his new patron the Protector. It was plain he could bear no authority but his own. Yet the Duke hesitated to get rid of him. The fellow was a powerful preacher. He had a vein of shrill nagging invective that was all the more telling because of its feminine quality – in fact, it had something in common with the Duchess’s.
‘What do
you think of the new Chaplain – John Knox?’ he demanded abruptly of John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, who had just entered, twirling a minute nosegay of single clove pinks, lad’s love and balm of Gilead, in a slender silver flower-holder.
‘Neither grateful nor pleasable,’ replied the Earl promptly. He strolled over to the window and looked out. ‘Besides,’ he added over his shoulder, ‘he called me Achitophel in his last sermon.’
The Duke exclaimed ‘Tsa!’ so violently that it sounded like an oath. ‘It’s sheer blasphemy to use the Bible as a stalking-horse for opposition to the Government!’
‘He’ll always be in opposition to any Government.’
‘Yes. He’s best as a revolutionary agent. I might send him later into Scotland to stir up revolt against the Government there.’
‘Must it be later?’
The Earl’s voice was low and pleasant; it sounded always as though he were smiling, though he did not in fact often smile. His hair and slight fringe of beard were cut very short, his moustaches very thin in a curved pencilled line. He did not look in the least like a famous soldier, but a fastidious dandy; his clothes of exquisite simplicity, almost monastic in style, no jewels, not even a ring; his delicate eyebrows and fine eyes fixed in a cool stare that held a hint of mockery.
Nor did the new Earl look like one of the ‘Lords sprung from the dunghill’, as the new Duke had unkindly stigmatised him and his fellows. As a matter of fact, his remote ancestry was rather more illustrious than the Duke’s; and his air of patrician calm would never lead one to suppose that his father, Edmund Dudley, had been a clever shady lawyer who made a lot of money for King Henry’s father by hunting up obsolete old laws and imposing huge fines on all who were, quite unconsciously, breaking them. Henry VIII, on coming to the throne as a bright lad of eighteen, had promptly executed him, as a popularity measure; but there was no ill feeling about it. Edmund’s son, John Dudley, had risen steadily at Court; Henry had a high opinion of his ability, created him Viscount Lisle, appointed him Lord High Admiral, and nominated him as one of the Lords of the Council of Regency for his son. On the King’s death, when most people moved one up, John Dudley was created Earl of Warwick and handed over his post as Lord High Admiral to Tom Seymour, then Admiral of the Fleet.
Young Bess Page 19