Young Bess Read online

  Certainly an invasion was the best thing to talk about. And next to that, the Scots. The King had beaten them last year too. But the Scots were not quite so good, for they would not stay beaten. He (or rather Norfolk) had smashed their whole nation years ago at Flodden, where his brother-in- law, King James IV, had got killed together with most of his nobles; he had smashed them again about a couple of years ago at Solway Moss when his nephew, young King James V, died of a broken heart from his defeat; and since then Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, had destroyed Melrose Abbey and Dryburgh, and 7 monasteries, 5 market towns, 243 villages, 13 mills and 3 hospitals in one district alone. But still the unspeakable villains would not stay smashed; though ruled only by James’s French widow, Mary of Guise, that very same tall lady who had had the effrontery to refuse King Henry’s offer of marriage with an unseemly joke about the smallness of her neck, and to prefer his red-headed rascal of a nephew to himself. She was now refusing his offers of marriage for her infant daughter Mary to his little son Edward, or rather (for she would have agreed to the marriage without his conditions) she was refusing to send her baby away from her to be brought up at the English Court under the charge of her great-uncle who had caused the death of that baby’s father and grandfather; such ungrateful, unnatural, unwomanly behaviour made Henry purple with rage every time he issued orders to his armies to raze Edinburgh and all the Border cities to the ground, exterminate every man, woman and child in them, and above all seize the person of the infant Queen of Scots. But she had not yet been caught, although she had had to be hurried away into lonely mountain fastnesses to escape. It was early to begin adventure, very early to be a queen, almost as soon as she was born. Elizabeth felt a thrill of envy for the tiny mountain princess whose mother was guarding her so indomitably.

  Here came the gentle Archbishop Cranmer, his heavy sagging cheeks more yellow even than usual, for he had just been seasick. Bess detested his soft voice and nervous eyes, even as her mother had done. He had helped Nan Bullen to the Crown, but done nothing to hinder her from the block; his ‘former good opinion of her prompted him to think her innocent,’ so he wrote to the King; but then ‘his knowledge of the King’s prudence and justice induced him to think her guilty.’ Such balanced casuistry had echoed down the years, even to Nan’s little daughter.

  Henry flung out a great wave of charm at the Archbishop’s approach, and a padded arm like a silken bolster round his shoulder, sweeping him in his stride ahead of the others.

  ‘Aha, my chaplain, I’ve news for you. I know now who is the greatest heretic in Kent!’

  The Archbishop’s eyes seemed to bolt out of his head like a startled rabbit’s. For an instant Bess thought he was going to be sick again, on the royal sleeve. And no wonder, for Henry, watching him sideways with some amusement out of the poached eyes set flat on his cheeks, was twitting him with his own words; had he, or had he not, burst out to his Chapter at Canterbury, ‘You will not leave your old Mumpsimuses, but I’ll make you repent it!’

  ‘Old Mumpsimuses,’ the King pointed out, was not the way an archbishop ought to refer to the ancient holy forms of religion; it was small wonder that the Chapter had retaliated by sending out an accusation of heresy against him and his chaplains. And from the very sleeve that was now enfolding the victim’s neck in the affectionate grip of a grizzly bear Henry produced the paper of the accusation, while in a jocular aside he reminded his friend that three heretics had lately been burnt alive on Windsor Green: ‘And what do you say to that, my old Mumpsimus?’

  Cranmer had so much to say that the King quickly cut him short, and Norfolk seized his chance to cut in. He shared Bess’s feelings about the Archbishop. Cat Howard had been Norfolk’s niece as well as Nan Bullen, he had worked for her marriage to the King as hard as he knew. And then that sneaking Lutheran fellow, who had picked up a wife in Germany, as well as a lot of these poisonous new revolutionary notions, had gone and destroyed all his work by getting poor Cat beheaded, just as Nan had been, and the whole family had shared in the disgrace for a time.

  ‘For my part,’ he growled virtuously, ‘I never read the Scriptures and never will. It was merry in England before this new learning came up, but now every ploughboy thinks he’s as good as the priest – and maybe he is, seeing what some priests are!’

  He glared at the Archbishop, who weakly averted his gaze. Henry, cocking an amused little gooseberry eye at Norfolk, called out, ‘Paws off there! Down – good dog, down! You got your teeth into a Cardinal when you shogged off Wolsey – must you worry an Archbishop too?’

  ‘God’s body, Your Majesty, I only meant that I wish everything were just the same as it used to be in the good old days. New ideas indeed!’ His glare had swivelled round on to Edward Seymour, who was of the advanced party and eager for reform in politics as well as religion. ‘New ideas – and a brand-new peer to lead ’em! All this fine talk of the rights of the people – rank revolution, that’s all it amounts to,’ he snarled at Seymour, but the King clapped a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘No more of that now, or you’ll be giving us one of your Council speeches till we all get lost in your thirdlys and fourthlys.’ He turned to his anxiously waiting Archbishop, but only to deal him some heavyhanded chaff about his wife. Was it true that Cranmer had had her smuggled from Germany into England in a packing-case which some careless porter had placed upside down, so that she had had to scream to be rescued? ‘There’s a fine tale of a wife tails up! Well, well, I owe a couple or so of my wives to your services, so no doubt you think I should wink at yours, but it’s a big wink that will cover an archbishop’s wife boarded up in a box. Old Wolsey had as fine a mistress as money could buy, but that was all correct and above-board – not under the boards!’

  Cranmer became incoherent in his denials and protestations; he would not dream of evading the law against married clergy, he had never seen his wife since he came to England to be Archbishop – at least, not, not—

  ‘Not in a packing-case, hey? Or did you send her packing?’

  Like some huge cat with a shivering mouse, he played with the terrified little man, enjoying his discomfiture and the roars of laughter from Norfolk and the others. Just as Cranmer was certain that the blow would fall on him both for heresy and illegal matrimony, Henry suddenly returned to the former charge and rumbled out, ‘That little matter of your Chapter’s complaints is easily handled. I’ll appoint a commission to examine the charges – and put you at the head of it! And help you with the answers. I’ve not forgotten my theology. That will cook their goose for them. So whichever goose roasts, it won’t be you.’

  His hearty friendliness made Cranmer almost blubber with thankfulness; it made his small daughter grow thoughtful. The Queen was still with the two men, though Henry had outstripped the rest of the company, but he had beckoned her on, so he must wish her to hear this conversation. Bess they did not notice; she was, indeed, at some distance and looking out to sea as though absorbed in the other ships, but her sharp ears had been listening acutely. Why was her father so kind to old Mumpsimus? (Yes, that was the perfect name for him and his meek bag face – a mouse with the mumps!) Henry had, as it happened, a warm and affectionate respect for Cranmer’s disinterested love of learning and his lack of ambition, but as these qualities did not appeal to Bess, she discounted them. And the King had been angry enough, so she had heard, when he had first received the accusation of his Archbishop’s toying with heresy. But then someone had said Cranmer was too useful for the King to lose him. How useful?

  Was it because he had already got rid of three wives out of six for the King, and might be required to get rid of a fourth? The notion came to her on a sudden heartstop of dismay as she realised what prompted it, for she could hear her father’s and stepmother’s voices – arguing! How could the Queen be such a goose? ‘Whichever goose roasts’ – the King always said he liked nothing so well as a good theological argument; that he liked women to be intelligent – but surely anyone would know that he on
ly liked an argument when he got the better of it; and however intelligent a woman might be, she must be less so than himself. Queen Catherine was arguing the case for translating the Bible into English; Henry was shouting that, in consequence, ‘that precious jewel, the Word of God, was being disputed, sung, and jangled in every alehouse and tavern,’ which showed how he was getting the worst of it, for he was only quoting from his last speech in Parliament, since he could not think of a fresher answer.

  Catherine evidently began to get some sense of her danger, for without any crude change of subject she adroitly introduced some flattery on the great and beneficial changes Henry had made in England’s religion. But that wouldn’t do; couldn’t she see that the King had never wanted to introduce any changes in religion, that he was as ardent and conservative a Papist as anybody – with this one exception, that he alone was to be Pope.

  And behind all Bess’s anxiety was the terrifying fact that the Queen’s friend, Lady Anne Askew, had been arrested for denouncing the Mass, and had been tortured in the Tower more than once. Was it an attempt to make her implicate the Queen? Whatever happened, Catherine must not plead the cause of her friend now – let her be tortured, racked, burnt, but if the name of Anne Askew were mentioned now, it would be the death-knell of Catherine Parr.

  It didn’t look as though Catherine would get the chance to mention it, for Henry was doing all the talking now, watching her out of the corner of a hot, intemperate eye while he threw out some ominous chaff: ‘So you’ve become a learned doctor, have you, Kate? You’re here to instruct us, we take it, not to be instructed or directed by us?’

  Kate quickly protested, but, unheeding, he began to roll his great head and mutter, ‘That’s a pretty business when women turn clerics; a fine comfort for me in my old age, to be taught by my wife!’

  It was going to happen – it was happening now – nothing could stop it. Bess shut her lips tight to keep from screaming aloud. Could nothing else happen to prevent it? Why couldn’t the French sail up now and attack? More fervently than any stout fellow of Norfolk, she prayed silently for a sight of their foes. ‘Oh God, let them come and invade England now, quick!’

  ‘Anne Askew!’ The fatal name had been spoken, it crashed on the air like the crack of thunder. But it was not the Queen who had uttered it; it was the King, accusing her of having sent the condemned woman money and promises of help, of having received heretical books from her in times past, of – would the next word be – ‘Treason!’?

  Bess opened her lips and screamed.

  They all turned towards her, hurried towards her, cried out what was the matter. Now she would have to find an answer. Had she twisted her foot? Seen a mermaid or a sea-serpent? She would only be scolded and sent below, and the King’s rage increased by so momentary an interruption. She screamed again, on a high note of childish excitement, and pointed: ‘The French! Their ships – far out to sea – coming up like clouds!’

  So intense was the conviction in her voice that for an instant they believed her. Then, as no confirmation came from the crow’s nest, they said she must have imagined it and taken the white clouds on the horizon for the sails of the French fleet. Her best retreat would be to look childishly stupid and sulky, admit she had been frightened, perhaps even shed a few tears. But she decided to brazen it out. ‘I did see the ships – for a moment. They’ve disappeared now. Perhaps they saw us and sailed away.’

  Henry’s infantile eyebrows puckered in his vast face. His just anger had been interrupted by this false alarm, and now surged back, redoubled. ‘The girl’s lying!’ he roared. ‘The French have been reported miles away. She could never have seen them.’

  He looked at his daughter and saw her mother’s face, the big forehead, the clever bright eyes, the silly little rosebud of a mouth that had smiled so sweetly at him – and at others. ‘Take the little bastard away!’ he shouted,

  But at that moment Elizabeth had one of those stupendous strokes of luck that were enough to accuse her as well as her mother of witchcraft.

  A shout came ringing over the sea and was echoed by another. The alarm had been raised in good earnest, the French fleet sighted, sailing straight towards Portsmouth.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Elizabeth was disappointed in her first invasion. She had thought they would stay on the flagship, that she would have a first-hand experience of a sea-fight, that somehow she would manage to dress up as a sailor and save Tom Seymour’s life. Then for once he would take her seriously, he would take her hand, and look deep into her eyes and say – what would he say?

  It didn’t matter, for it didn’t happen, none of it happened.

  That glittering July sea and the proud ships floating over it all vanished like sea-spray as far as the royal family party were concerned; in no time they all bustled off the flagship and on to a very fast pinnace and made for the shore and then inland. It was not Bess’s idea of the way to take an invasion. She had seen her father ride off to the French wars last year, in a suit of armour that two slight young men could easily have got into together, and hoisted on to an enormous dapple-grey Dutch stallion, seventeen hands high, with white feathered hoofs and flowing white mane and a little angry red eye, not unlike his rider’s. They had needed no army behind them, she had thought, to strike terror into the foe.

  But now – was this the way he had fought when he got there? She was told that Kings and Queens must not adventure their persons like common soldiers and sailors. She was not convinced. She told Tom Seymour with a sniff that the flagship had better be re-christened ‘The Great Hurry’!

  He scrutinised her narrowly. ‘How could you, on deck, have seen the French fleet before any lookout in the crow’s nest had seen it?’

  ‘I don’t know. My eyes are better than theirs, I suppose.’

  ‘Even your bright eyes couldn’t see them before they came up over the edge of the horizon. Haven’t your tutors taught you that the world is round?’

  ‘Then they must be wrong, and the world is flat.’

  ‘So that’s flat. You’d shape the whole world differently to suit yourself!’

  ‘Why not? My father does.’

  ‘You’re his daughter, no doubt about that!’ he chuckled.

  ‘I’d have stayed and seen the fight,’ said Bess. ‘I’d not have let the French land on the Isle of Wight.’

  But the French accomplished nothing by that; they soon had to take to their ships again, and after a short engagement were driven back out to sea. The fortune-tellers were now saying they had known all along that this was not the invasion England had to fear; her real danger, worse than any she had faced since the Normans landed, would not come for more than forty years, in the summer when there would be four noughts in the date, for an 8 is a double nought, one on top of the other, so the year ’88 would be quadruply unlucky. Bess asked why the unlucky noughts shouldn’t be for the invaders. ‘Anyway it’s naught to me,’ she said, for who cared what would happen more than forty years hence, when she would be an old woman, if indeed she could bear to live as long as then? And anyway there could be small danger from foreign ships since the great French Armada had such poor success; everyone was boasting of England’s security behind her sea-walls; a blunt fellow even said as much to the Emperor Charles V in Spain, and his son, that cold, formal youth, Prince Philip.

  ‘Young Cheese-face,’ Henry still persisted in calling the Emperor, the nephew of his first wife, ever since Charles’s visit to England, to be betrothed to the Princess Mary, then a pretty child of six, who had not shared her father’s view of her prospective bridegroom’s long pale face and wedge-shaped chin, very like a slab of cheese. She had given an ardent hero-worship to her cousin, the young monarch on whose lands, her mother had told her, the sun never set; and who, still more important, was a very devout Christian. But the betrothal came to nothing; all that was over twenty years ago, and now the Emperor Charles was mobilising against the Protestant princes in his Empire, so that, in spite of his confidence
in England’s splendid isolation, Henry was finding orthodoxy advisable, and the Queen’s broadmindedness untimely. (Besides, she had not borne him an heir. ‘Impossible! she is so virtuous!’ said the wags.) So Anne Askew was burnt for denouncing the Mass; though the following month Henry tried to get the King of France to join with him in abolishing it. Bess found politics difficult to understand. Anyway, they were now at peace with France, and the King spoke so beautifully on charity and concord to his Parliament that they all wept.

  But Parliamentarians’ tears, and the King’s charity and concord, did not lessen Bess’s anxiety one jot, and there came a moment in the garden when the confirmation of it stared her in the face, stared up at her from the path, a sickly white paper scrawled with black writing which told her at one glance that the King had finally given over his faithfully devoted wife to the power of the beast. It was an indictment of Catherine Parr, and Henry had set his name to it.

  No sooner had Bess seen it than the Chancellor Wriothesley, who had been Chancellor Cromwell’s secretary and helped work his fall, came hurrying back between the clipped yew hedges.

  ‘A paper!’ he panted, ‘a scrap of paper – has Your Highness seen it?’

  Bess shook her head, lifting wide blue eyes to his, and pointing at what she had apparently all this time been staring – a butterfly that had perched on her bright shoe, mistaking it for a flower.

  ‘Oh, you have disturbed him!’ she exclaimed reproachfully as it flew away. ‘A paper, did you say? Is it important?’

  Mr Wriothesley had already stuffed it into his sleeve, violently cursing the tailors who could not invent any safer receptacle in men’s clothes, while women went hung round with pockets.

  He departed as fast as, or rather faster than courtesy permitted; a beast padding away in his soft broad velvet slippers, and the little slits of satin over the toes like claws in the sunlight, Bess thought, standing there stock still until he disappeared.