Young Bess

by Margaret Irwin

  To secure his position, Dudley had to strike again, this time to kill. And so, less than two years after Tom Seymour was beheaded, his brother Ned laid down his head on the same block. There was a trial of him on some flimsy charges; he was accused, rather oddly, of trying to secure his position against possible enemies; and of plotting against Dudley, even as Dudley had plotted against him. Dudley himself dared not call this ‘treason.’ But it made no odds. From the first it was clear that the Duke would share the fate to which he had sent his brother.

  He met it very differently. Tom died like a tiger, Ned like a gentleman. He behaved perfectly throughout, thanked the Council on his knees for having given him the open trial that he had denied his brother – though indeed it was only the show of justice that was granted him, for the House had been carefully packed. And he made a beautiful before-execution speech which moved all the watching crowds to a passion of pity, both for him and for themselves.

  They surged forward; a deep muttering growl rose and thickened the air. He had them in his sway in this hour of death as he had never had them in his life. They knew now whatever his faults, crimes even, he had taken thought for them, had wished them well; as none had done of the pack of greedy wolves who were now pulling him down. He had but to lift his hand in sign to them and they would rescue him.

  But he did not do it. Why should he give the signal that would lead many of them to their deaths, in order to escape his own? It was little he had been able to do for them, prevented by the greed and ambition of others; but also by his own. ‘Let me alone’ – yes, alone to die – ‘for I am not better than my fathers.’

  And he did not even remember in that hour that he had at least wished to be better.

  Jan. 22. ‘The Duke of Somerset had his head cut off upon Tower Hill between eight and nine this morning,’ wrote King Edward briskly in his Journal.

  Earlier he had entered all the charges against his eldest uncle with considerable satisfaction, especially his ‘following his own opinion and doing all by his authority.’

  He had shown indifference over his Uncle Tom’s fate; this time it was an active animosity, for the Duke’s execution was both suggested and warranted under Edward’s own hand. The whirligig of time had brought a strange revenge for King Edward V and his brother, the two small princes murdered by their uncle in the Tower, whose fate King Henry had remembered with dread for his own son.

  Edward VI, nearly seventy years later, brought about the death of his two uncles.

  It did not weigh on him. At a shooting-match shortly after, when Dudley shouted, ‘Good shot, my liege!’ the boy brightly answered, ‘Not as good as yours, when you shot off my Uncle Somerset’s head.’

  He was painted standing with his legs rather apart, both thumbs in his belt and the fingers of one hand resting on his dagger, in exactly the same stance as his father, with the same argumentative stare, the same thrust of the dogmatic under-lip. This conscious likeness between the slight boy and his tremendous sire gave amusement to many, but also some alarm.

  He was enjoying life: the matches and tourneys that his new guardian arranged to dispel any ‘dampy thoughts’ about his former guardian’s fall (but after that shooting-match Dudley realised he need not have worried); the visit of the little Queen of Scots’ mother, the stately and gracious Queen Dowager, whom Mr Knox in his rugged fashion called ‘an old cow,’ and Edward with schoolboy wit amplified it to the Dow Cow. He showed off his music and dancing to her, and, which he enjoyed still more, his performance on horseback at Prisoners’ Base and Running at the Ring, and in shooting, where he was able to record proudly that though he lost at Rounds he won at Rovers.

  To Barney he wrote gleefully of musters of a thousand men-at-arms, ‘so horsed as was never seen. We think you shall see in France none like.’

  For now that his little King seemed free at last to enjoy life and apparent health, Barney too had felt free to follow his ambition and go to France. Edward had generously done his utmost for him in this, got him appointed as one of the French King’s Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, and made up for his absence by writing him long eager letters into which he put far more of himself than into his Journal.

  To Barney indeed he showed what he had never done to anyone else, an affection that could rise to sympathetic imagination. For while Barney went to the French wars, Edward went a delightful royal progress round the country, staying at the houses of his chief nobles, fêted, entertained with dancing and sports and hunting, and ‘whereas you have been occupied in killing your enemies, in long marches in extreme heat, in sore skirmishings, we have been occupied in killing of wild beasts, in pleasant journeys, in good fare, in viewing of fair countries…and goodly houses where we were marvellously – yea rather excessively – banquetted!’

  And Barney wrote back about Romish processions with crosses and banners in Paris, and street rows between French and English soldiers; and soothed Edward’s anxiety for his morals by promising that ‘as for the avoiding of the company of ladies, I will assure your Highness I will not come into their company unless I do wait upon the French King’; and always ended, ‘Other news have I none.

  The meanest and most obligest of your subjects,

  BARNABY FITZPATRICK.’

  Then the young man got a letter from the boy more reassuring than any other, in the casual cheerful pluck with which Edward dismissed a recent illness: ‘We have been a little troubled with smallpox which has prevented us from writing; but now we have shaken that quite away.’

  But it was his death-knell. It left him weakened; his persistent cough, that ill legacy from his last ride with his Uncle Somerset, had come back worse than ever; it got no better as summer came on, and it was evident that he was gravely ill. Barney instantly threw up his promising career abroad to hurry back to him.

  He found the fifteen-year-old boy, who had had to give up his new-found triumphs in sport, indomitably interested in all the recent marvels of scientific discovery. He had been studying the cause of comets and rainbows; he showed Barney his geographic and astronomic instruments, the magnetic needle and astrolobe which had been explained to him by old Sebastian Cabot, the Emperor’s Pilot-Major of the Indies.

  Once again Edward was not going to be outdone by the Emperor; he proposed to make Cabot the Grand Pilot of England.

  ‘The New World ought to be English,’ he told Barney indignantly; for it was the Sheriff of Bristol, Richard Ameryk, who’d paid a pension to Sebastian’s father, John Cabot, for his voyages of discovery, and that was why people were calling the place America, and not, as foreigners tried to make out, because a wretched ship’s chandler called Amerigo Vespucci had happened to get there too, within a fortnight of old Father Cabot. ‘I’ll publish the whole facts to the world – the exact sums my grandfather told Ameryk to pay him—’

  ‘Ah, I wouldn’t do that,’ said Barney with a careless glance at the accounts that Edward was flourishing at him from his bed, ‘£40, over three years, doesn’t sound much these days for a royal pension!’

  The boy gave him a weak thump on the arm. ‘All you Irish are cynics. I can’t help it if my grandfather was a skinflint. My father made up for that. So will I. And I’m showing what my discoverers can do to rival the Emperor’s.’

  This very day he was sending out three ships under Sir Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor to find a North-East passage through the Arctic to Cathay. It would be a voyage through ‘perils of ice, intolerable colds,’ but years ago the merchant Robert Thorne had told King Henry that it was possible, for a man might ‘sail so far that he came at last to the place where there was no night at all, but a continual light and brightness of the sun shining clearly upon the huge and mighty sea.’

  ‘And,’ said the sick boy, flushing with the triumph of man’s unconquerable spirit, ‘he told my father “there is no land unhabitable nor sea unnavigable.”’

  He spoke only of Robert Thorne, whom he had not seen. He did not wish to remember his uncle the Lord
Admiral and the sunlight flashing on the gold lacing of his coat as he stood there by the window of this very room in the palace of Greenwich, and pointed at the river Thames flowing down below towards the sea; and said, ‘There lies the path of England’s glory. Take it, and you’ll travel far.’

  The Admiral had gone, with his great laugh and promise of splendour and power; but the river flowed on.

  From its shores a murmur was rising that grew into a distant roar; it came nearer, louder, ripping out in great tearing gusts of sound, echoing up from the water like a drum.

  ‘They’re coming downstream. Look out of the windows. Can you see them yet?’ Edward was leaning forward from his pillows.

  His old nurse Mother Jack came up and patted them and pressed him back on to them again. ‘There, there now, don’t you get excited. They won’t be here yet. Your Highness will know all about it when they come, the brave fellows, though indeed I think they’d better have stayed at home.’

  Barney put his head out of the window, rested his elbows on the sill, and looked upstream, the wind behind him from the sea blowing his hair before his eyes. In the brilliant early summer sunshine the Thames glittered like a diamond ribbon, between its shores that were dark with the swarming crowds thronging to see the start of this wild venture into the terrors of the Outland ocean; where no night was, and rocks of ice as high as mountains and gleaming like sapphire and emerald came drifting down to crush the ships that were no bigger than walnut shells beside them.

  Nearer and nearer came the hurly-burly of that mighty cheering as the three ships hove into sight, towed downstream by small boats rowed by mariners in sky-blue cloth. And in answer, more sailors were running up the rigging and shouting till the sky rang with the noise. Now the guns of the Palace were booming out their God-speed to them.

  The Courtiers were already clustered on the tops of the towers, the Privy Council had run to the windows of the other rooms in the Palace.

  ‘Hurrah! hurrah!’ they all shouted, even old Father Russell of the snowy beard, even the douce quiet secretary Mr Cecil. The King was all but sobbing, ‘I must see them. It’s my venture. Their chief ship is called after me, the Edward Bonaventure.’

  Barney carried him to the window; it was terribly easy, his weight was so light. Mother Jack tut-tutted and fussed with blankets, but they stayed there till the crowds had swept shouting on, leaving the river banks green and bare; and in the distance the three ships grew misty on that sparkling river, broadening out towards the sea. They sailed out on it, to discover, not the passage to Cathay but the White Sea, and then Moscow, where the great Tsar Ivan the Terrible waited to do them honour in a long garment of beaten gold with an imperial crown upon his head.

  But only one of the three ships, the Edward Bonaventure, was to achieve this and return to England.

  The other two were caught in the ice and there found by the Russian fishermen the next spring, the crews all frozen in their transparent coffin, their gear and belongings intact, to be carefully returned to England by the Tsar.

  But now it was still the summer of 1553, and the three ships still sailing out, while the two friends by the Palace window strained their eyes into the future.

  ‘When next they go,’ said Edward, ‘I will go, too. Old Thorne said he “wondered any prince could be content to live quiet within his own dominions.” I am not content. I will—’ his cough interrupted him.

  Barney laid him down again in his bed.

  The roses were like lamps filled with the level light of the sunset. Beyond them the river shone dark through the bright trees and their long slanting shadows.

  The lawns and flowerbeds of the Palace gardens glowed iridescent and unreal like the transparent scene reflected on the surface of a soap bubble – a bubble floating on a ripple of tinkling music that drifted from a boat, clear as sounds can only be on the water; lutes were playing and boys’ voices singing to comfort the young King lying sick in the Palace.

  In this idyllic scene, screened by the trees from any watching windows, Barney met his Princess once again at last.

  He did not in the least want to do so.

  Alarmed by the serious reports of her brother, she had ridden in haste to Greenwich to see him, but she had not been allowed to do so. Ever since the Admiral’s death she had been carefully prevented from seeing anything of her brother in private, and as she had been living a deliberately retired life she had had only an occasional meeting with him even among the crowds of the Court. Now her desperate attempt to force a meeting had failed, and all she had been able to do was to arrange this semi-clandestine interview with his reluctant page.

  It was just five years since that night in early summer when Barney had partnered her for a few moments in the Hungarians’ Palace-Dance at the Admiral’s house and she had swung him aside into the window seat – to take off her tight shoes, she had said, but surely it was for more than that? She had let him take her hand and speak his love for her; she had smiled at him, and her glorious eyes had opened on him as though he alone were there in all the world; she had – he never could believe it afterwards – but she had sprung up into his arms and kissed him.

  And later he had learnt, through tittering deviations of backstairs gossip, that she had gone out that very same night alone with the Admiral in his barge.

  Scandal had blackened her far more deeply in the months that followed; and the grudging Proclamation that the Council had at last issued to clear her name had, in the opinion of many, only confirmed it. ‘No smoke without a fire,’ was a good, knowing proverb. But nothing that he heard later, not even the confident assertion that the Admiral had been beheaded for getting the Princess with child (the clear proof of it being that none of the open charges against him merited the death sentence), nothing that he heard later could hurt Barney as did the memory of that summer night when she had kissed him – and then crept out in secret to the Admiral.

  Even at the French Court it had hung about him, giving him a contemptuous distaste for the gay young women who would have been ready enough to flirt with the grave handsome youth. But he had found it easy to obey his little King’s anxious injunctions ‘for the avoiding of the company of the ladies.’

  Now he had to meet the Princess again. She was nineteen by now and had changed, much, so he had heard on all sides; she had lived retired from the Court; she was often ill and, though no one could say what exactly was the matter with her, the doctors sometimes despaired even of her life. Yet she worked like a Trojan, she devoted herself to her, studies; she had become a paragon, not only of learning and theology, but of maidenly modesty and discretion. If she had been a Roman Catholic like her sister Mary, she would undoubtedly have gone into a nunnery, so they said; and as it was, her dress was so simple and severely plain that it was almost that of a nun’s. Even when Mary of Guise, the French Queen Dowager of Scotland, had come to visit King Edward with all her ladies from the French Court, and set all the English Court ladies on fire to follow the French fashions, causing a complete revolution in feminine dress and hairdressing, the Princess Elizabeth had not changed her style one jot, had refused to wear jewels or even to curl her hair.

  This had brought loud praise of her ‘maiden shamefacedness’ from the Reformers, who were busy condemning the new fashions, especially the ‘hair frounced, curled and double curled’ – a hit at the Lady Mary, who, a devout Catholic, could never resist new finery, however unbecoming.

  The two sisters were regarded as the rival heroines of the two religious creeds. Little Lady Jane Grey, an ardent admirer of her now austere cousin, had flung herself into the controversy with all the eagerness of a schoolgirl in taking sides; she had refused to wear a cloth-of-gold dress that Mary had sent her, ‘It would be a shame to follow my Lady Mary’s example, against God’s word, and leave my Lady Elizabeth’s example, who is a follower of God’s word.’

  The speech, duly reported, had infuriated (and alarmed) my Lady Elizabeth a good deal more than my Lady Mary; but Barn
ey could not know that; nor would it have altered his firm opinion that in whatever way she dressed or did her hair she did it of set design, for her own ends – and those far from spiritual. Since in all Papist eyes she was illegitimate, she would naturally plump for the Reformed Religion.

  And the total abstinence from coquetry was too good to be true; he had the word of others for that. The new Spanish Ambassador to England had spoken of her as ‘a creature full of beguilement.’

  Let her be! She would never again find it possible to beguile him!

  So he waited on that glimmering golden evening that was filled like a crystal cup with light and music. The boys on the river were singing the song that the young Earl of Surrey had composed in his scarlet-coated pride and joy in a sportsman’s life. Barney hoped the sick boy would not recognise it, for he never cared to be reminded that his father had cut off Surrey’s head.

  ‘Summer is come, for every spray now springs,

  The hart has hung his old head on the pale,

  The buck in brake his winter coat he flings,

  The fishes flit with new repairéd scale.’

  A slight figure was coming towards him through the trees with swift and resolute tread. Barney found himself looking at a pale girl in a plain dress of dull green, which for all its sober hue showed up marvellously the whiteness of her long bare throat, uncovered by any necklace, and the red-gold glint on her straight, demurely parted hair that was brushed as smooth and shining as satin. Her mouth was wide and the thin lips shut fast as if not to let any secret escape them; she looked sad and strained, a pale girl, rather tall, with no especial beauty, so he kept telling himself – but then he had to admit that her eyes were really beautiful. They were the colour of the blue dusk in the shadow of the trees; he remembered now how they reflected the lights and colours round them, the pupils contracting or dilating till sometimes the eyes seemed pale almost as water, and at others nearly black.