Young Bess (10 page)

It had reminded her of the children playing on the village green at Hatfield:

and she thought that one day her turn might come, and she would be up, up, up, not on a see-saw but on a white pony riding to her Coronation, and a tinsel-winged angel would come flying down (but you could see his wire ropes in the sunlight) from a triumphal arch in Cheapside and give her a purse of a thousand gold pounds, and
she
wouldn’t just drop it like a toad as Edward did because it was so heavy. But even Edward had shown pleasure at the tightrope dancer who greeted him with such amazing antics on a cord slung from St Paul’s Cathedral to the Dean’s door. It was grand sport being crowned; but her envy was the more painful for a throb of pity that Edward had been too tired to enjoy it as she would have done.

Her elders had settled down into a rich comfortable grumble; it was comfortable because they were sharing it so wholeheartedly, but they were both angry and indignant; Tom kept exploding into more and more surprising references to different parts of the Deity’s person, and Catherine kept beginning her sentences with ‘I should have thought—’

All the arrangements for the new regime seemed to have been just what the late King did not intend. The Council of Regency that he had ordered was being set aside as a completely subservient body to Edward Seymour, who had at once taken supreme power as Protector and got himself created Duke of Somerset, while Tom had been fobbed off with a couple of empty titles, for he was now Lord Sudley and Lord High Admiral – ‘God’s beard, what’s that to me who have been Admiral of the Fleet in good earnest?’ And of what account was an extra title or two at a Coronation when everybody got them? Even his bashful second brother, Homely Harry, had had to accept a knighthood to bring him slightly more into line as one of the King’s uncles.

But Tom had been given no working share in the Government nor personal control of the King, although, or no doubt because, the King liked him far better than his Uncle Edward. Catherine too had had good reason to expect a share in the Government, for King Henry had once appointed her Queen Regent during his absence in France; the only time a Queen Consort had had the title formally conferred on her. But what she really wanted was to be made personal guardian to the King; she had looked after him more closely than anyone these last few years, nursed him through illness and read his lessons with him; she knew how fond he was of her in his odd way, and that King Henry would have wished her to continue her charge of him.

‘It isn’t what Hal wished that counts now,’ said Tom, ‘it’s what our precious pious Ned wishes.’

‘I should have thought he’s pious enough to carry out Hal’s wishes. He was there when the King told his nobles to treat
me always with as much honour as when he was alive – when he said I was to keep the jewels he’d given me.’ And suddenly she gave a sharp cry, ‘Oh, the jewels! I’ve just thought! I left them at Whitehall.’

‘God’s blood, why didn’t you keep a hold of them?’

‘I didn’t think of them, or anything else except getting here as fast as we could. I could hardly wait for my maids to pack. All those horrible whispers at Whitehall—’ she shuddered and hid her face in her hands. ‘You know they say the King was dead three days before—’ She broke off and laid a hand on Bess’s shoulder.

‘Yes, I knew that too, Madam,’ said Bess, and looked across her in cool challenge at Tom Seymour.

So he had not told Catherine how she had met him on the night the King died. But he paid her no attention; the jewels were worrying him far more.

‘You were mad to leave them behind,’ he said. ‘I’ll get them for you at once, before my sweet sister-in-law puts a claw on them.’

‘She
could
not, Tom. They’re the King’s jewels.’

‘Couldn’t she! You don’t know our new Duchess, our Lady Protectress! She’d say she’s protecting them for
this
King. And Ned would back her.’ His blue eyes were brilliant with anger under their dark brows; he sprang up, swearing torrentially, and looked round for his cloak.

‘Where are you going?’ she cried in distress.

‘To Whitehall and the whole Protectorate pack. I have a deal to say to them.’

He strode over to Bess and patted her head. ‘What else shall I say to them, my Lady Bess? Shall I ask them for your hand?’

She swung up her arm with a slap at his face, and he caught it by the wrist.

‘So here it is, you’ve given me it already.’

He lightly kissed her hand and then the top of her head, and in another moment he was gone, Catherine pattering out beside him, plucking at his sleeve, begging him to be cautious, her tone half laughing and wholly loving.

Bess was left alone. She raised her eyes to the wall and saw the shadowed pattern of her branches fade fainter and fainter as the light died, until it disappeared and the wall was blank.

Four days later, Catherine told Bess that she and Tom Seymour would marry as soon as it was possible for her, so recent a royal widow, to do so. They had just become formally betrothed, with rings and a written contract of marriage, but this would have to be kept the closest of secrets while Tom set about getting the consent of the Council to it. She had written to him to wait two years, but he had scratched out ‘years’ and changed it to two months.

She looked anxiously at the wooden little face in front of her, pale, with the mouth set in a determined line and the eyes regarding her so steadily yet blankly; Catherine could not see what lay behind them. Surely she liked Tom; Catherine could not imagine any woman of whatever age failing to do so, and he was so charming with her, teasing her so gaily, and really fond of her too. She did want this odd difficult girl to be glad of their marriage, to know that her home would be with them for as long as she wanted it. She said this last, and Bess thanked her, and then remembered to smile and said she could not imagine any home as home without her Pussy-Cat Purr on the hearth. Catherine, feeling baffled, admitted that it was indeed extraordinarily soon for her to be planning her next marriage, only a month after the King’s death had been made
public; she told her of her previous betrothal to Tom and how all thought of it had had to be laid aside at the King’s command to her to be his wife.

Bess thought, ‘Why does she tell me all this, and of her betrothal now, when if I were foolish or treacherous it might bring ruin to them both?’ How silly women were, always telling each other things, however dangerous! She would never tell any woman anything; even if it were not dangerous, what was the use? You never knew what the other might be thinking about it. Here was she thinking all sorts of angry, contemptuous things about Tom Seymour, while her stepmother prattled on in her artless fashion about his wonderful loyalty and constancy in having waited for her these long three and a half years, and never wanting to marry anyone else, though he might have made such brilliant matches.

‘Such brilliant matches,’ thought Bess, ‘to a King’s daughter and second in succession to the throne’; yes, he had wanted that; and if she were as foolishly girlish as her stepmother she would now be telling her so, and causing all sorts of mischief for all of them.

But had Tom really wanted it, or had he only been playing at it?

Her questions tormented her. Catherine, looking down at her shut face, asked her what she was thinking.

‘That I should be happy, Madam, ever to find a tenth part of the happiness you deserve.’

It was far too good to be satisfactory.

Catherine with a sigh went over to her little Italian escritoire and began to write to Tom. Within three minutes
she had forgotten that odd difficult girl as she scribbled in hot haste, her face flushing and her breath coming faster in delicious excitement.

‘I pray you be not offended with me in that I write sooner to you than I said I would, for my promise was for but once in a fortnight. Howbeit, the weeks are shorter at Chelsea than in other places.’ She smiled broadly at the excuse, and indeed she had a better; she must tell him that his brother Edward had said he would answer all her requests about her jewels, etc., when he came to see her, which he had said more than once he would do, and had not done. ‘I think his wife has taught him that lesson, for it is her custom to promise many comings to her friends and to perform none.’

Then, having signed it in a hurry, she remembered all the things she really wanted to say, and a P.S. followed, longer than the letter, telling him how she had always wanted to marry him, ‘before any man I know.’ She had had to give up her will, and now God had given her it again – ‘God is a marvellous man.’

And then she remembered that she must tell him if he visited her here in secret he must come so early in the
morning
as to be gone again before seven o’clock when anyone was about, and to come always by the postern gate in the garden and the lonely marshy road across the fields over the
footbridge
that was ominously named Bloody Bridge from the number of murders committed there by highwaymen – a terrible precaution, when he must ride alone in the dark hours to preserve their secret, but the danger from highway robbers to such as Tom was nothing to the danger of the Council – and the Duchess, his brother’s wife.

But God would protect him, God was a marvellous man, the birds were singing their mating songs high and glad through the sunny window, and Catherine felt no fears as her quill pen scratched on; and behind her her stepdaughter sat on her low stool with her face cupped in her long hands, and listened to that scratching and the songs of the mating birds and wondered whether, if she had been a woman grown, Tom Seymour would have deserted his loving Catherine for herself.

The weeks were short at Chelsea, and elsewhere. Everything seemed to move twice as quick now the old King was dead and men dared to put their plans into action as fast as the changes in nature. The spring rushed on, the flowers rushed on, the birds picked off the heads of the crocuses, but the daffodils shot up in their place, the birds built nests, and the nobles houses.

Edward Seymour decided that as Lord Protector and Duke of Somerset he must have a London palace worthy of himself, and pulled down the north aisle of St Paul’s Cathedral (which contained the elder Holbein’s pictures of the Dance of Death), the Priory of St John of Jerusalem at Clerkenwell, and a couple of Inns of Court, all in order to furnish space and materials for Somerset House.

So of course his brother Tom was not going to be outdone in the housing matter, which had hitherto given him no concern, for he had always preferred to live in lodgings when in London, changing them frequently, but always taking his adoring old mother to keep house for him wherever he moved. But now he too decided that his dignity as Lord Sudley and Lord High Admiral demanded a fine house in his
name, though characteristically he could not wait to build one. His brother for once was really sensible and pleasant about it, for ‘good old Ned’ promptly turned a bishop out of his house and confiscated the best part of his property, so that Tom should have a huge mansion all ready to hand, with stables, tennis-courts and bowling-greens in the Strand, orchards and meadows and terraced gardens leading down to the river, and call it Seymour Place. He was already installed in it a fortnight after the proclamation of Henry’s death, and the whole vast place was humming with activity and gaiety, banquets, sports and water-parties.

Spring was in the air; even tutors and bishops, even
vice-chancellors
, even archbishops, bore testimony to it, and with them half the clergy. Bishop Parker, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, rode off to get married to the young woman who had waited patiently for him for seven years. For Cranmer had at once pushed forward Parliament’s edict to legalise matrimony for the clergy, and produced his German Frau in the open, to everyone’s rather malicious curiosity. It was extraordinary how difficult it was to avoid references to packing-cases in her presence. Tom Seymour did not try; he at once asked her what she thought of that little box of a palace at Lambeth.

Curates and parish priests all over the country were rushing to get married, but the results were not always as happy as the bridegrooms, for their parishioners frequently sent in complaints of their choice: that these new young wives were either too frivolous and got their husbands into debt, or else they poked their noses into the affairs of the parish, in which they should have no business. Finally it was decided to pass
another edict, declaring that all clergymen’s prospective wives should first have to be passed as suitable by a bishop and two Justices of the Peace.

It was well they had not also to be approved by the Duchess, for her antagonism to poor John Cheke’s new wife would have lost him his place as the King’s tutor had he not written letters that fairly crawled in apology for her, both to the Duke of Somerset and his exigeant lady.

Among all these mating and nesting plans, those of Tom Seymour, both for himself and others, threatened more upheaval than those of all the clergy. For a boy-King’s uncle who married the Queen Dowager of England would form a great counter royal house which might well bring about another civil war. His elder brother had already taken on a practically royal authority, given himself powers to act independently of the Council’s advice, used the royal ‘we’ even in his private correspondence, and alarmed everybody by his presumption in addressing the new French King as ‘Brother’. (For Foxnose François died at the end of that March, having been as much dashed by Henry’s death as Henry had been by François’ dying illness; the lifelong rivalry had ended without either of them finally succeeding in getting the better of the other.)

Somerset House and Seymour Place already looked like dividing not only half London but all England between them. ‘You
must
go warily,’ Queen Catherine told Tom Seymour, who wagged his finger against his fine nose and promised he would be as wily as the serpent and as gentle as the dove – which gave her more amusement than hope.

But he was being more wily than she knew. One proof of it,
though not to her guileless eyes, was that little Lady Jane Grey came to stay at Seymour Place with her tutors and her servants and her personal possessions, in charge of Tom Seymour and his mother. Catherine was delighted, for this would mean her having the charge of Jane’s tuition as soon as she was openly married to Tom; the child was far from happy at home; the country air of Chelsea with the sea-breezes coming up the river, and the companionship of her gay playfellow Elizabeth, would do her a world of good. In fact, Jane had already grown a whole new crop of freckles in her first week at Seymour Place, and her small nose was quite covered by them, so much more time did she spend out of doors.

Jane’s freckles were not Tom Seymour’s prime motive; nor, when Catherine demanded with ingenuous admiration how he had managed to persuade Jane’s parents, did he confide to her that he had paid Jane’s impecunious father a lump sum down of
£
2,000 as an extra inducement to place his daughter in Tom’s care.

And he had bigger bait than that to offer: the opportunity and influence he would have as Edward’s favourite uncle to push forward a match for him with Jane Grey. The Protector might succeed at any moment in marrying the boy either to his own daughter Janet or to the little Queen of Scots; nobody was sure which he favoured most; he was indeed not quite sure himself, for his desire for England’s peace and prosperity and unity with Scotland was sometimes almost as strong as, sometimes even stronger than his desire for his own personal advancement.

So, as Tom was quick to point out to Jane’s anxious father,
with the odds against them on not only one but a pair of fillies for the matrimonial stakes, they must move quickly to get Jane into the running. He would work it with the boy, he could do anything with him, he told Henry Grey, a nervous pallid little man, overshadowed by his stout Grey mare, the hard-eyed, hard-riding Lady Frances, with the red hardening to purple in her fat cheeks (King Henry’s niece, so that it was she who gave Jane her claim to the throne, and never let her husband forget it). He trotted along in the terraced gardens by the river in vain effort to keep step with the Lord High Admiral’s long strides, and peered up at the wagging point of his burnished beard, at the gay blue eyes, and warmed himself in the ringing confidence of that great voice; while Tom, looking down at the thin moustaches, the long nose and absurdly high collar, longed to tell his fellow-conspirator that he looked like a seedy mule peering over a wall.

The Admiral’s first step was to introduce a valuable servant of his own, not inappropriately named Mr Fowler, into the King’s household, and was pleased to hear that Edward often asked about him and when Fowler thought he could see him. Fowler, under instructions, asked if the King didn’t think it strange that his younger uncle had never married. Edward, not having thought, did not answer. Fowler then asked if he would like him to marry.

‘Oh, very much,’ was the bored reply as he tried to tie his spaniel’s ears over the top of its head.

Well, then, to whom?

‘Anne of Cleves,’ said Edward automatically. It was always a safe answer.

The spaniel yelped. So did Mr Fowler, almost. ‘Your royal
father called her a Flanders mare,’ he said reproachfully.

‘What’s wrong with a Flanders mare? I wish I had one. I’m tired of ponies.’ Then an impish gleam came into his eyes and he swung round from the spaniel, who at once leapt up for more teasing. ‘No, d’you know what? I wish he’d marry my sister Mary and get her away from her old Mass.’ And he gave a shrill crow of unaccustomed laughter that suddenly robbed him of his chill bewildered royalty and turned him into a mischievous schoolboy.

‘Poor brat!’ Tom exclaimed in a burst of pitying affection when he heard of it. ‘
I’ll
make him laugh when I get at him!’ He could do anything with his nephew – if he could get at him. But that was the difficulty. Edward was being kept at his lessons harder than he had ever been kept before. Even when he was not at them, the Protector or one of his most trusted intimates was always with him; his own sisters could hardly ever see him by himself, and to Elizabeth, on one of the very rare occasions when they managed to give his guardians the slip, he burst out in fretful annoyance that he was scarcely ever alone for as much as half a quarter of an hour. And this particular occasion was won only by a glorious adventure.

She had been allowed to come and see him, but an excuse had been found to prevent Queen Catherine coming too to visit her stepson as she had wished, and Mrs Ashley was in attendance on her. The two children conversed solemnly in front of her and a couple of under-tutors (not Mr Cheke) and a major-domo of the Protector’s. Then Elizabeth showed off for a bit in Latin, and Edward first matched her easily in it, then branched off into Greek, at which she fell rather behind and made an attempt to catch up in Hebrew, but again the
honours were easy, so she shot into Italian, wherein she was really fluent and Edward far behind. The tutors, applauding her, excused themselves for the King’s backwardness by declaring that they had nothing to do with his Italian lessons and made no pretence themselves of proficiency in the language.