Young Bess

by Margaret Irwin

  But he went down fighting. He refused consolations of religion from Dr Latimer, and even from any other preacher. He refused to make a penitent speech on the scaffold acknowledging his crimes and the justice of his punishment. The executioner, frightened by the defiance of that towering figure, struck a feeble blow with his axe so that it slipped on to the victim’s shoulder and a great spurt of blood gushed up.

  Tom saw red; this was Ned himself striking at him, as Ned had always wanted to do. He leapt up and grappled with the man, dragging him down, down, but it was Ned he was dragging down with him to hell. A dozen hands tore them apart and flung him on to the block, and again the axe hacked at him, but, not yet dead, he struggled to rise again.

  The third blow killed him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The bright late March sunlight shone into the King’s garden where Bishop Latimer was preaching his next Sunday’s sermon to the King who sat looking out of the window at the end of the gallery, and to the lords and ladies and servants of the Court, who walked up and down in the garden, an annoyingly restless practice, apt to distract the preacher.

  Dr Latimer shouted suddenly, ‘This I say, if they ask me what I think of the Lord Admiral’s death, that he died very dangerously, irksomely and horribly.’

  It worked. The shuffling and whispering stopped; no more of his congregation slid away up side-paths; some who had begun to, turned back. Old Latimer was off again on the Admiral, even though he was now in his grave in the Tower.

  ‘He was a covetous man, a horrible covetous man.’ The preacher’s eyes rolled round his congregation and his voice dropped a semi-tone: ‘I would there were no more in England.’

  Now, whom did he mean by that? Sly glances slid among the crowd, at the elegant Earl of Warwick whose blank ironic stare was fixed upward at the preacher; at the Protector himself, who was gnawing at his lip.

  ‘He was an ambitious man. I would there were no more in England.’

  ‘He was a seditious man, a contemner of the Common Prayer. I would there were no more in England.’

  (‘Latimer’s new Litany!’ murmured the Earl of Warwick to his neighbour.)

  ‘He is gone. I would he had left none behind him.’

  And with this generic curse on all men still left alive, the Bishop stepped down from the pulpit. There was no doubt about the effectiveness of this sermon.

  But the effect was not what he intended. People were soon saying that these snarling curs of the clergy worried even the dead in their graves. And if one did attend to his text, why then it was true enough that there were more men left alive in England as covetous, ambitious, and seditious as ever the Admiral had been – yet he had had to die, while they still pranked it.

  Immediately after the execution, men who had been paid by the Council ran among the crowds of waiting citizens, crying that a traitor had died. But they had met no enthusiastic response and many had turned away. ‘The man died very boldly,’ they said. ‘He would not have done so had he not died in a just quarrel.’ The Protector himself must have thought so, they said, else why did he not let him be heard in his own defence? There were mutterings about the curse of Cain. The Good Duke had killed his brother. It would do him no good. Soon people were quoting a verse, made, it was said, by one of the Duke’s own Council:

  ‘But ever since I thought him sure a beast,

  That causeless laboured to defile his nest.’

  And the following line exonerated the Admiral (though not the poet), declaring:

  ‘Thus guiltless he, through malice, went to pot.’

  Poetry was not what it had been a few years ago when Surrey and Wyatt were writing; there were no coming young men to take their place, said the critics. Sir John Harington’s Muse did only a little better, when praising his patron’s ‘strong limbs and manly shape,’ his ‘sumptuous generosity’ and ‘in war-skill great bold hand.’ That last was in actual and vivid touch, it called up the Admiral at once to those who knew him.

  His servant had been searched; the letters to the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth discovered in the soles of his shoes and instantly burnt; the man himself hanged.

  They told this to Bess, still a prisoner at Hatfield; they told her how her lover had died, ‘very dangerously, irksomely and horribly’; to the last instigating her to rebellion against his brother.

  They asked questions. They were watching her. She had to speak. At last she said,

  ‘This day died a man of great wit but little judgment.’

  After that there was no more for her to say or do.

  They had burnt his last letter to her; she would never know what he had written. The nightmare she had dreamt had come true; and she was living it.

  She went to bed and did not get up again for a long time. For many weeks she was too ill to know clearly what was happening in the country round her, certainly too ill to care – so ill that the doctors thought at first she would not live, though they could find no definite cause of disease. But she had lost the will to live. She had lost the only two people she had really loved in her short life; and perhaps Cathy’s death as well as Tom’s had been in part due to her. She had lost her good name; she was beggared of love, of character, and of her health; before she was sixteen, it seemed there was nothing left to live for.

  But one thing no fate could take from her, her fierce loyalty, not only to a person, but to an intention. The first got Cat Ashley out of prison and back to her side; the second set her to work, with the almost blind force of instinct, to recover the ground she had lost; to win ‘the goodwill of the people’ that had been so jeopardised by scandal. They thought her a wanton; they should see that she was not.

  There was still, then, something for her to do, and at once; it just saved her nerves, perhaps her reason, from shipwreck. As soon as she could leave her bed she began her lessons again, though her hand was still so shaky that she had to dictate her letters to a secretary since her wilting was ‘not now so good as she trusts it will be.’ In those last three words lay all her indomitable resolution. Her handwriting ‘will’ be good again. She ‘will’ work; and with a fury that now allowed itself no alleviation of flirting with Mr Ascham, not even when her always ready jealousy was roused by his admiration of little Jane Grey’s industry in learning.

  For there were three children in England just then driving at their lessons with ferocious intensity, and with the same object, the Crown of England.

  Edward must work to make himself a good King. Jane, though herself working for sheer love of it, was being urged by her parents in order to make herself a suitable consort for him.

  Elizabeth was working to fit herself for her far more remote chance of becoming Queen. Now that there was nothing left for her to live for, she was free to live only for that. She did. She worked – or someone else did, whom she had ceased to recognise as herself.

  She saw this other self sit at her books and write, heard it give the right answers, a shadow moved by some strange mechanism, while all the time she stood apart. Very rarely her own self stirred; once it took up her jewelled pen and wrote words that had nothing to do with her lessons:

  ‘I love and yet am forced to seem to hate,

  I seem stark mute, yet inwardly do prate;

  I am, and am not – freeze and yet I burn,

  Since from myself my other self I turn.

  My care is like my shadow in the sun –

  Follows my flying – flies when I pursue it;

  Stands and lives by me, does what I have done

  Or let me live with some more sweet content

  Or die and so forget what love e’er meant.’

  She stared astonished at the lines. Why had she written them? She had no need to pray to forget what love e’er meant. She had forgotten.

  She worked not only at languages ancient and modern, insisting on beginning to learn Spanish as well as Italian (was not Spain the most powerful country in the world and therefore the most important to understand in all
the finer shades of political meaning?); not only at history and mathematics and music and dancing; but at acting a part completely alien to her nature. She wore dresses of nun-like severity, refused to wear or even look at jewels, strained her hair straight and smooth, avoided company whenever possible, and in the presence of men kept her eyes downcast and spoke scarcely at all.

  But she listened. In her secluded shell of quiet she heard echoes of the world without, and brooded over them, at first in a dull despair that tried to pass as indifference, for what could anything matter now?

  Yet it did begin to matter a little when the sun shone more brightly at her archery practice, and her fingers as she drew her bow were no longer stiff with cold inside the long elegant gloves. The silly shout of the cuckoos in the towering trees in Hatfield Park only mocked her unhappiness.

  But then came the time when she first heard the nightingale in the hot bright silence of noonday in early June. It mattered too much; she flung down her bow and rushed headlong into the house in a passion of tears.

  The sun must not shine, the birds not sing, or she would never dare go out again. She would sit always in a cool dim room, drowning her heart in dead languages. She pulled the books towards her – but a wild leaping tune of the Tartar tribes that Tom had often whistled came into her head; she beat her hands against the table to shut it out, but they were beating to the same rhythm. It was no use to try and read, to deafen her thoughts.

  It had all come back, the agonised longing for the sound of Tom’s voice, of his quick firm step that made the world his own; for the touch of the ‘great bold hand’ on her shoulder, on her face, lifting it to meet his – but here the pain became unbearable, she uttered little sharp cries aloud to herself, she seized the papers before her on the table, all the careful work on which she had been laboriously engaged for the past weeks, and tore them into shreds, her hands shaking, her lips trembling, muttering, ‘Fool, fool, fool!’ to herself, and to him; all her unwilling anger against him burning up again, scorching and withering her heart to ashes.

  Why could he not have managed things better, plotted more secretly, played his hand more cunningly, as even she could have done?

  He had loved too much, hated too much, talked too much – thought too little. ‘Much wit but little judgment,’ so little – less than a child’s, a young girl’s. Why couldn’t he have been more like herself?

  But if he had been, she would never have loved him, as now she did; loved him just because he had been so gaily reckless of consequences, because, though they could kill him, no one could make him cautious; loved him so that the thought of him was tearing her in two – tearing – tearing – as she tore these senseless scraps of paper.

  Why couldn’t she forget him?

  But she would never forget.

  ‘No, she’ll never forget,’ said Mrs Ashley to Mr Parry (for the two of them were both out again). ‘Love someone else? Why, yes, I should hope so, and she all but a child still. But mark my words, she’ll only love men who’ll remind her of the Admiral.’

  Wherein Mrs Ashley showed that, though lacking in prudence she had her own wisdom.

  Something else woke in Bess in those June days, the hope of revenge.

  The house was a-buzz with reports confirming the vague rumours of weeks past, rumours of discontent, of insurrections coming to a head in different parts of England against her rulers. Bess’s interest, which she had curbed against hope (the people were always rising, and it led to nothing but their own hurt, poor wretches), now galloped forward into fierce excitement.

  The mills of God were grinding, not slowly, but exceeding fast. Retribution was coming quickly on the man who had killed her lover and her good name. Within only three or four months of Tom Seymour’s death there were rebellions all over the country against the Lord Protector.

  This time they had found a leader: a man called Robert Kett who preached ‘communistic law’ from the branches of an oak tree, and told his followers to keep the peace and harm no man, and share all property in common. As they themselves had none, this meant sharing other people’s property; they tore up the palings of the gentry’s parks, levelled the hedges, and drove off their deer and cattle to feed on. The Council sent the German and Italian troops against the rebels, under near a score of noble commanders. But Kett’s rabble defeated them and took some of the noble commanders prisoner.

  So this, said the Council, was the result of the Protector’s Reform measures!

  He had to forswear them all; to enforce the Land Enclosures that he had tried to abolish, and follow the hated policy of his colleagues. But he still told them what he thought of it – and of them: it was their covetousness that had caused the revolt, and though it must be put down, he would not himself lead a force against it. Characteristically he ended his bitter speech to all those sneering faces, with a crumb of still bitter comfort, to himself. ‘Better that they should die fighting than live to die of lack of a living.’

  Death was beginning to wear a desirable aspect to him; no grisly pursuing skeleton through the dance of life, but an angel with welcoming arms and a smile of infinite understanding. When he himself was dead, then only perhaps would the people begin to know how he had wanted to help them. But now a quick death instead of a slow one was the boundary of his hopes for them.

  So John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, marched against the rebels, hanged Kett from his Oak of Reformation, put the landlords firmly in power, and returned in triumph, strong enough to move openly against the Protector.

  Danger is the best antidote to despair. The Duke at once retorted with a far-flung attack of pamphlets; they were scattered among the people, most of whom were unable to read them at all, and those who began were too bored to finish.

  He descended upon Hampton Court, barricaded it, got the little King, who had a heavy cold, out of his bed, and made him address the uneasy populace through the bars of the great gates, with a petition to them ‘to be good to me and to my uncle.’ Edward did not like it at all. His dignity was ruffled and his cold got worse. And the pathetic effect of his childish appeal was entirely spoilt by the Protector’s speech which followed it, asserting that if he went down, the King would go down with him.

  The people did not see it. Nor did the King.

  And the next night his uncle made him get out of bed again, this time at midnight, and go on a long cold tiring ride through the autumn river mist. They rode out of those gates where Nan Bullen’s initials, intertwined with King Hal’s, had been defaced for Jane Seymour’s. Now the servants at Hampton Court were saying that Jane Seymour’s ghost came out from the doorway on to the Silver Stick Gallery with a lighted taper in her hand. And Nan Bullen’s cousin, pretty Catherine Howard, beheaded in her teens, was heard at nights shrieking in the Long Gallery that led to the Chapel. Bloated red spiders five inches wide had appeared in the Cardinal’s palace, which King Henry had looted from him for his own pleasure, and from which his enormous body could not be moved in those last months of his life without the help of machinery. He who had boasted that he never spared a man in his anger (he might have added, in his greed) or a woman in his lust, was no longer spared.

  From this haunted pleasure palace on the river his little son rode away at midnight, frail as a feather on his pony, and coughing fretfully in the dark dank October fog. He had to ride all the way to Windsor – for his safety, the Protector said, though of that Edward was sceptical. It seemed to be entirely for his uncle’s safety.

  There at Windsor the Earl of Warwick found him, more disgruntled and becolded than ever.

  ‘I bight as well be in prison,’ he said; ‘there are do galleries here or gardens to play in.’

  Dudley took him out of prison. He gave him his friends to play with again, especially Barney. He gave him sports and Christmas parties and mummings, he took him hunting and shooting and made him feel that soon he would be a man among men. The boy was delighted at the change; he flung himself into sports and exercises – with rather too
sudden energy in fact for his delicate physique; and sometimes even cut his church attendance so that the Court preacher was disgusted to find himself preaching to an empty royal chair.

  But still that nasty cough, that Edward had caught on the long cold night-ride to Windsor, hung on. Dudley told him not to bother about it, he would soon shake it off, as he had at last shaken off his oppressive guardian uncle.

  For the Duke of Somerset was no longer the Protector. Dudley, now created Duke of Northumberland, reigned in his stead.

  The Seymours’ mother, the poet Skelton’s Mistress Margery Wentworth, the ‘flower of goodlihead,’ died only a few months after Tom’s death. It was decided not to give her a royal funeral. This was done in order to insult the Duke of Somerset’s mother; nobody seemed to notice that it also insulted the King’s grandmother – not even the King. He did not even record her death in his Journal. And the Duke himself took it meekly, as he took most things now; people said he was a changed man since his brother’s death, not now in his increased nervous irritability but in his broken spirit.

  There was enough, without remorse, to break it, for he had to stand by and watch the utter ruin of all his hopes of social and economic reform, of liberty and religious tolerance, destroyed by the greedy tyranny of Dudley and the new landlords. He had lost not only the power, but much of the will to act. But whether he acted or not, he was naturally the focus point of any opposition to the new rule. And the common people, who had been shocked by his executing his own brother, could now consider that he had paid for it in his swift downfall from power, and remember that the Good Duke had been on their side. So were they now on his side. But they had no power; it was all in the hands of the rich, who were on the side of Dudley, a sensible fellow, especially in his sense of property. And Dudley had the sense to see that an ex-Protector was a danger. Even if he didn’t do anything, he was always stirring up the people with his talk of liberty.