Young Bess

by Margaret Irwin

  He forgot that he would not get out.

  The Council came, to remind him.

  His eyes like a hungry wolf’s sought Ned among them. But he was not there.

  They read him the thirty-three charges against him. He demanded to hear them from the witnesses themselves, in open trial. He was told he could have no open trial, he could call no witnesses in his defence. He could answer to the charges against him now, by himself, or not at all.

  ‘Then not at all,’ he said. What was the use if he could not answer the men who made them? They had risen up against him as fast as daws rising up from corn at the shot of a gun – ‘Caw, caw, caw,’ they cried, flapping forward, croaking their accusations, clawing and pecking at his eyes – and nearly all were those he had thought his friends, fellows he had dined and drunk with and talked to freely, who had nodded in agreement and then chimed in with lists of their own grievances. But now they had all come forward to quote his words as heinous treason, and not a hint of the eagerness they had shown to join in the intrigues they now exposed.

  Even Henry Grey whose debts he had paid, whose daughter was under his roof, even Grey had pulled his long melancholy moustaches and turned informer against him.

  And Tom could not answer back, to him or any of them. But talking over the charges afterwards with Harington he was cheered again.

  ‘There’s not enough to hang a cat among the lot of them. Their worst charge is slackness in dealing with pirates. But they’ve not attempted to prove it, and if they did, the punishment can only be dismissal from my post as Admiral, with a large fine. There’s not a thing that amounts to treason. It’s not treason to want to marry the Princess Elizabeth, and they’ve made that the principal charge. But they’ve got no change out of it – not one word to help them from the girl herself, bless her stout little heart!’

  Bess would prove a match for Ned any day; she had done so since she was four years old. Hilariously he reminded Jack Harington how she had to bear the christening robe for the baby Prince Edward when she herself had been too small to walk all the way in the Procession, and so Ned had been given the doubtful honour of carrying her – to his intense discomfiture, for she had grabbed off his cap and plucked at his beard and all but wriggled herself out of his arms, and everybody had laughed at him – him, Ned – who could not bear to be laughed at!

  ‘And still she’s as slippery as an eel. “Wild for to hold” – she’ll always be that.’

  His pride was sharpened with regret, for he himself had not yet held her, only begun to do so, only enough to know how exquisite would be the triumph when he did.

  He swerved sharply to other charges against him – plentiful as blackberries, but as waterlogged as those picked in November.

  ‘Was there ever such blether as to call it treason because I married Cathy so soon after the King’s death that if she’d had a child at once, it might have been thought to be the King’s. Confuse the issue, hey?’ he suddenly shot at Harington, who gaped in amazement that he could still joke. ‘Well, if that’s treason, why did no one say it then, instead of waiting two years? Because no man thought such piffle – nor does now. It’s the cloven hoof of the Duchess kicking that bit of mud out from her petticoats!’

  ‘There’s more mud from the pulpits,’ murmured Harington.

  For the preachers were carrying on a furious campaign to work up public opinion against the Admiral. The Bishop of Worcester, Dr Latimer, thundered out sermon after sermon to prove his wickedness. But his proofs could not be said to justify the death penalty.

  Imprimis. A woman executed for robbery nine years ago had said her bad life was due to having been seduced by the Admiral about ten years before that.

  Item: The Admiral had not attended family prayers regularly twice daily when at home with his wife, but was apt to ‘get himself out of the way like a mole digging in the earth.’

  Item: He had said this brand new Prayer Book was not really God’s holy word, but old man Cranmer’s.

  Item: He had tried to get his King away from his lessons and out to sports in the open air – ‘Now woe,’ cried the Bishop, ‘to him, or anyone else, that would have my Sovereign not brought up in learning, and would pluck him from his book!’

  This list of his crimes brought the heartiest roar of laughter Harington had heard from his master since he entered the Tower. ‘What’s the use of turning the pulpit into a dung-heap if that’s the worst they can rake up against me? They nose out muck near a score of years old, and all they can find is a drab’s word for it. And it’s treason to care for the King’s health and pleasure! Just wait and hear what the boy himself will say to that!’

  He still held his trump card – the King himself. They could set justice and even the law at naught, but they could not carry out the death-warrant without the King’s own signature. It did his heart good to describe the miniature roar from the lion cub when told to sign away the life of his favourite uncle – he could be as royal in his rage as his father, a chip off the old block as he had called him, and as he would prove. The living spit of his mother too – loyal little Janey, who had stood by her friends, stood up for them even against Old Harry himself.

  And he reminded Harington of those days a dozen years ago when King Hal was visiting Wolf Hall to woo their Janey and complain of Nan Bullen – ‘I was seduced into this marriage’ – and little Jane, while so sorry for him and certain that he could never have loved That Woman, was still devoted to the memory of his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, whom she had served, and her daughter the Princess Mary, Jane’s best friend at Court, and insisted that he should reinstate her.

  ‘You are a fool,’ King Hal had growled. ‘You ought to plead for the advancement of the children we will have, not any others.’

  But ‘Foy pour devoir’ was really Jane Seymour’s motto; she even risked her neck for it (and so he threatened her) when she implored him to restore the Abbeys and told him the rebellions against him were a judgment on him for seizing them.

  ‘A woman who could do that,’ Tom said proudly, ‘would stand up for a blind puppy against a tiger.’

  And he remembered her nice kind little ways to the people at home – making endless babyclothes for the wife of John Wynbolt the undergrubber (‘her fifteenth, isn’t it, Janey,’ he would tease her, ‘or have I lost count?’); compounding lozenges of ‘Manus Christi’ in the stillroom, of white sugar and rosewater and powder of pearls, as a sovereign remedy for the old shepherd John Gorway’s quotidian fever, the daily ague, and explaining with flushed earnestness that she was not really being extravagant as they were only the seed pearls off her old blue bodice. Kind, prim, serious, tactless little Janey; nobody thought she had much beauty, and that cynical Spaniard Chapuys marvelled that an Englishwoman should have been so long at Court and still a maid (she was twenty-five when she married the King). But she was true as steel; she was the only one of his wives to do her duty to the King, she gave him a son and died of it – and he forgot her in a week, ‘as merry as a widower may be,’ one of his Councillors said slyly. And as if to mock her demure memory, all the College of Heralds disgraced themselves getting dead drunk after her funeral – Clarencieux falling downstairs on top of the Garter King-at-Arms, Chester trying to ravish a maid of the house and all but strangling her, and Rouge Dragon, with his three wives all living, the worst of the lot.

  So Tom poured out his memories of his sister to John Harington as he walked up and back again, up and back again, and Harington said a word here and there to keep him thinking of her – and not of her son King Edward.

  But back and back again Tom came to Edward.

  ‘Of course her boy will stand by me – just as I’ve always stood by him, given him pocket money, helped him cut a dash with his fellows, taken his side against his domineering old bully of a guardian. Hasn’t he said a hundred times – shown it anyway – that he wanted me for his guardian and not Ned? He’d never let me down.’

  Less than a mile away the Lords of
the Council listened to a clear monotonous voice, as dispassionate as if it were saying a lesson, telling to his uncle’s enemies his uncle’s hopes to make it the ‘blackest Parliament ever,’ with the King’s complaints.

  ‘The Lord Admiral came to me and desired me to write a thing for him. I desired him to let me alone. Cheke said afterwards to me, “You did best not to write.”…

  ‘The Lord Admiral said of the Lord Protector, “Your uncle is old and I trust will not live long.”

  ‘I answered, “It were better that he should die.”…

  ‘Then he said he would give Fowler money for me, and so he did. And he gave Cheke money, as I bade him; and also to a book-binder; and to others at that time, I remember not to whom…

  ‘The Lord Admiral said I was too bashful in my own matters and asked me why I did not bear rule, as other Kings do; I said I needed not, for I was well enough.’

  They then produced his servants’ account-books of ‘such sums of money as I Fowler have disbursed by the King’s Majesty’s Commandment.’

  First. Delivered to His Highness to give to Mr Cheke, at sundry times.

  £xx

  Item, to Mr Barnaby by the King’s commandment at sundry times.

  xxs

  Item, at Greenwich, to certain tumblers that played, His Grace looked out upon them.

  xls

  Item, to my Lord Privy Seal’s trumpet at Hampton Court when his Highness skirmished in the garden at sundry times.

  xls

  That account-book had been Tom’s answer to his own jocular comments, ‘You are a very beggarly King; you have no money to play with nor give to your servants.’ He had given him the money to play with, to give to his friend Barney, to his tutor, to the tumblers that the child had watched, delighted at their skill and daring, to the trumpeters of old Father Russell of the snowy beard at Hampton Court when Edward had skirmished in the gardens, playing at soldiers with his favourite uncle, the Lord High Admiral.

  But now the source of all these childish games, this royal boyish generosity, was revealed – in the guise of treason. He who had helped the King to it was a traitor. Why then was the King not a traitor also, who had said of the Lord Protector of his realm, ‘It were better that he should die’?

  But Kings were not traitors – not yet.

  ‘If this goes on,’ said Tom when he heard of it, ‘in another hundred years they will find the King himself guilty of high treason and cut off his head.’

  ‘A hundred years?’ said Harington statistically. ‘That would be in 1649.’

  ‘God damn your dates, you old mathematician!’ Tom had stopped walking, he had actually sat down, to take it in.

  So, then, the boy was handing him over to his enemies as coolly as Henry Grey, as Ned himself. Tom had bribed him, as he had bribed the bankrupt Grey, in vain. Owing to him, they were both now ‘well enough.’ And so they could now do without him.

  His nephew would not lift a finger to save him.

  His head sank into his hands. At last he had broken down.

  ‘The rat, the rat!’ he sobbed. ‘The little white rat – with Janey’s face. And I loved the boy. I was sorry for him.’

  His own fate was as yet nothing to him. It was his betrayal by Jane’s own son, a boy of eleven and a half, that had crushed him.

  But sitting there with his fingers pressed against his eyeballs so that red suns came whirling up out of the blackness, he began to know that the impossible nightmare was coming true. The walls of his prison were closing in on him, as they did in that torture-chamber of the Inquisition, taking forty days to crush their victim out of life.

  It had taken about as long with him. One hope after another had died, and now he knew. His brother intended his death. And his nephew consented to it.

  He leapt up, his arms flung high about his head, his fists clenched, his laughter hurling about the little room.

  ‘A chip off the old block, I said, and so he’s proved it. He’s handed me over to my enemies as Hal handed Crum, whom he called the best of his servants. I loved the boy and he knows it, yet he’s handed me over to Ned whom he hates – hates – and will bring to death, as he has brought me. He said it were better Ned should die – he’ll do it too – God, let him do it, let him kill Ned as he’s killing me. Let Ned kill him too! The rats will devour their own flesh and blood down to the ends of their tails. God, if I could kill them myself! – but I’ll do it, alive or dead. I’ll drag Ned down, down. He’ll curse the day he killed me – he’ll long for death – and he’ll get it, the same way as he’s killed me.’

  He would go down fighting and drag his brother with him. England would never stand being ruled by a man who had killed his own brother. King Hal killing his wives was another matter. But to kill one’s own mother’s son, that was against nature. He himself would raise revolution against Ned.

  He sent Harington away, and his voice was surprisingly calm. Then he sat down on the stone bench by the fire and pulled off his shoes. There was paper secreted in them; he drew it out, and pulled a quill from their aigrette ornament. He had ink as cunningly and secretly prepared. He wrote two letters, one to the Princess Mary, the other to the Princess Elizabeth. He told them that his brother the Protector was murdering him in killing him without a fair trial; he told them what the Protector would do to them if they suffered him to live and work his own ends against them. Let them rise up against him while yet there was time, and make the throne safe for their brother, perhaps for themselves. Let them raise the country against this usurper.

  He wrote faster and faster, and then in the midst of the second letter, to the Princess Elizabeth, he stopped. He saw her in his mind as clear as if she were there before him, saw her sitting up in bed with that startled, suddenly awakened air that made her look like a wild deer standing at gaze for an instant before it fled into the forest. So he had seen her a dozen times when he had woken her for a romp on those bright mornings in Chelsea Place when she had been a rosy sleep-tumbled child – not quite a child. But never had she looked at him so, in this strained agony and terror, as though awakening from a ghastly dream of him, to find it true.

  She must know by now that it was all up with him. Soon there would be no more to know but that he was dead. She was very young, very impressionable, as wild a coquette as her mother. She would forget him for others – but oh, not yet, not yet!

  He finished the letter, but no longer saw the words he wrote, for still he was dazzled with his vision of the slight figure sitting up in bed, the red hair rippling over the bare shoulders, the small white face aghast, with staring eyes, staring at him, and open mouth that shrieked, calling his name.

  He sent for his valet, gave him the letters, told him to hide them in his shoes and immediately after his execution to give them in secret to the Princesses.

  But all the time that he was pushing forward his last desperate project the refrain was echoing in his head, ‘Forget not yet.’

  Tom Wyatt had written that song; a gay reckless lover like himself, he had written it to that black-eyed witch, Bess’s mother, and been imprisoned in the Tower along with the five other men who were executed for her, but Tom Wyatt had been let off.

  ‘Have you such a thing as an apple about you, my sweet Tom? Lord, I have such an incredible fierce desire to eat an apple! Do you know what King Henry says? He says it means I am with child!’

  And the child was Bess, the love-apple for whom he himself had had such incredible fierce desire.

  There was no more to do. He sent away his valet. He refused to have a jolly supper with the Governor to drown the fact that it was his last night on earth; he would not even spend it with his old friend Jack Harington.

  It did not matter now that death was waiting for him on the morrow. Death had always been there waiting for him, ever since he had been born, as it waited for every man: to strike him down, in battle or on the block, of the plague or moribund old age, at the height of the Christmas feast as it had struck down King Hal
, looking out with glazed eyes at his vanishing greatness.

  And through all the dancing whirligig of his own life, his feasting and fighting and jollity and popularity with women and kings; through all of it that grisly skeleton had been coming nearer. Now, after the mocking, torturing delay of weeks, days, hours, he could feel on his cheek the cold breath of his pursuer in this relentless game of Blind Man’s Buff.

  Music was going from him, his lute, his magnificent voice. In so few hours it would be dumb for ever; dust would choke his mouth and close his eyes. He would see no more of pleasure nor sing its praise. The hour had come when he must die.

  He had loved a Queen, he loved a Princess, he had loved his little King, and put his trust in him. Put not your trust in princes. He had forgotten God. And now there was so short time to remember Him. So soon would no living man nor boy nor girl matter to him any more, but only God.

  He dipped the quill again into the ink and wrote on a torn off scrap of paper:

  ‘Forgetting God to love a King

  Hath been my rod.’

  That had been his own fault, not the King’s. He wished now he had not cursed Janey’s boy; he was frail like her, and would have a hard time of it now.

  He wrote,

  ‘Yet God did call me in my pride,’

  but though he tried hard to think of God and how He would judge him, he was still thinking of the King. Rhymes did not come easily with him as with Tom Wyatt, but he must leave something behind to wipe out that curse. He wrote:

  ‘Lord send the King in years as Noe,

  In governing this realm with joy,

  And after this frail life such grace,

  That in thy bliss he may find place.’

  He flung down the quill in relief. Rhymes were the devil, especially to ‘Noe.’ But he had got down what he wanted; he had wished long life and happiness to Janey’s boy. Now he was free to die.