Young Bess (19 page)

At the least, she could smile and flourish her whip as they ran from their fields and barns and cottage-doors to stare at the young Princess Elizabeth riding by in her white dress with the sunlight on her hair; at the most, she could find some pretext to stop and talk with them, pretended her pony’s shoe was loose, or that she wanted a drink of new milk from the pail that some sturdy bare-armed girl was carrying home (‘How enchanting to be a milkmaid!’ she said, while the girl’s shy glances told her how enchanting she would find it to be a princess).

Her escort found it impossible to hurry her through the little country towns, especially if a market were going on, or a travelling fair; then she must buy this or watch that; it was all they could do to stop her getting her fortune told, and always she would talk with any and everybody, however unsuitable. ‘Why not, if my father did, and he was King of England?’

Old men told her that it would never be a merry England again till they heard the church bells ringing through the day and night at the hours of prayer, reminding the sick and sorry that they could always go up to the kindly monks for a bite and sup. Bess listened sympathetically to them; as also to the young men on the extreme left of Reform, who insisted that God Himself should be abolished; and that the country would never be right till ruled by ‘communistic law’.

But what everybody told her, and far more eagerly than matters of religion or politics, was that in spite of the new
laws wages were sinking, since men would work for next to nothing to avoid unemployment; prices were rising, for, though fixed in name, one could always pass something under the counter; and that for all the money you spent you only got rotten imitation goods – leather falsely curried and tanned; ‘feather’ beds stuffed with rubbish; and even, worst of all, beer made without true malt.

Things were bad, but they might be worse, and one mustn’t grumble, said they, grumbling hard, but generally finding something they could make a joke of.

This, and the dogged courage of their patience, made her feel akin to them, though she did not recognise it, only that she was interested and pleased, especially in that they liked her.

She saw a rabble of beggars, alarming as a troop of marauding robbers – which indeed they were; her escort closed in round her, church bells clashed out a warning, and the gates of the little country town she had just left clanged to against them.

She saw a little boy led by a chain, and a man with an iron ring round his neck and the letter S branded on his forehead to show that he was his master’s slave for ever, to be sold or bequeathed at his will; for the new law against unemployment had made it legal for vagabonds and their children to be sold into slavery. This then was what lay behind the cheerful remark ‘might be worse’.

A chill fell on all her high spirits; she rode under the great oaks of Hatfield Park knowing suddenly, irrevocably, that she must not love Tom, nor Tom her, that she was going away where she would not hear his jolly laugh nor deep teasing voice, nor look up at the swaggering shoulders and catch his mocking glance, that had lately grown heavy with desire as he looked at her.

How could she, even half in fun, as a game of ‘Let’s pretend’, have imagined herself with the boy Barney in his remote and savage island? If she could not love Tom, she would never love anybody else, never, never.

But she must not love Tom, and, almost worse than this, she might not have her Pussy-Cat Purr’s loving tenderness round her any more.

Nonsense, Catherine had said, of course she would see her again, and very soon; wait till her child was born, and then everything would be the same as before. But would it? Bess could not quite believe it. She too had had her glimpse, though she tried not to recognise it, into what was written in the stars.

In this sudden depression at the end of her long ride she sat down to write her departed-guest letter, giving thanks for the manifold kindnesses received from her late hostess. With an unusual and pathetic humility she assured Catherine that ‘Although I answered little, I weighed it all the more deeply when you said you would warn me of all evil that you should hear of me. For if you had not a good opinion of me, you would not have offered friendship to me that way at all. But what may I more say than thank God for providing such friends to me?’

The new tutor was a success, especially in his pupil’s opinion. At thirty-three, Roger Ascham was one of the foremost Greek scholars of the day, but he was by no means only a scholar; he was an accomplished musician, and a keen and knowledgeable sportsman. Bess remembered her father’s pleasure in the Treatise on Archery which the young Cambridge don had published and presented to King Henry shortly before his death; it was in English, which showed his originality and freedom from pedantry; in fact, he valued the writing of good English prose as highly as that of Greek or Latin, and foretold a magnificent future for it. The new Bible, the new prayers in the churches, showed, as the poets had already shown, what the English language could do. But it must not stay only in the pulpit, nor in poetry; it must come down into the world and express the common life and simple pleasures of humanity – yes, not only of the science of the long bow, that backbone of England, but of such lesser sports as cock-fighting. And his mild brown eyes glowed as he sketched his plans to the Princess for a Book of the Cockpit which should be his best offering to English sport and prose.

He was full of praise for Bess’s own writing, the simplicity and directness she could command when she chose, letting the
style grow out of the subject. Unfortunately she was apt to forget this when anxious to write brilliantly, and would never quite believe him when he told her that good style knew no tricks.

He encouraged her dancing and music, which previous tutors had condemned as a waste of time, played and sang duets with her, taught her to shoot with the long bow as her father had taught her mother; and of course, when she discovered from Mrs Ashley that Nan Bullen had had a special shooting-costume made for her, she had to have one too and a saucy green hat with feathers and long elegant shooting-gloves. He told her of cockfighting matches and dicing parties at Cambridge in which he had so nearly made his fortune, but managed instead to lose all his spare cash. All this was surprising in so learned and gentle a scholar, but was very far from meaning that lessons were neglected.

She worked at Greek with him in the mornings and at Latin in the afternoons, on his system of double translation, turning the originals into English and then back into Greek and Latin; she even worked a little at what he called, rather contemptuously, ‘Euclid’s pricks and lines’, since mathematics were also fashionable, though they could never, he assured her, be of the same value to human intelligence as the classics. And he was enchanted with her skill and speed and the fiery intentness of her concentration. Bess collected compliments on her brains as greedily as her mother had done those on her charms. Not but what she would have liked those too. But that would come.

There were encouraging signs of it even now, when Mr Ascham sought to inflame her with his own passion for this
new world of ancient Greece, to which her own nature was, he suggested, as much akin as if she were a nymph or goddess born anew from that shadowless tireless dawn of the world, with the dew of that dawn still glistening on her brow, and the spear of the huntress Diana poised in her hand. Indeed, the fancy sometimes affected him almost with fear, as he watched her across the study table, her face, intent and pale in the bright aureole of her hair, lighting suddenly into a smile that was not of any christened soul, but inscrutably aware of her strange power.

So had he seen a marble goddess smile, made by a man who had never heard of Christ.

In excuse for these pagan fancies he would remind himself and tell his pupil that the world was coming out of its old dark cramped preoccupation with Heaven and Hell, with the Earth wedged unalterably between them; that Copernicus had proved the Earth to be no longer the centre of the universe but one of a myriad stars circling round the sun, ‘like courtiers round their Sovereign,’ said he, thinking of a vast red face and a hot hand that had slapped him on the back, and a mighty voice saying his treatise on archery had scored a bull’s eye! ‘And as they will circle round your royal father’s daughter, should Divine Providence ever place you on the throne.’

Bess’s smile was certainly pagan now. It was all very well for an upstart Protector to make a modest claim for Providence putting
him
in power, but when she got there she would know what to thank for it – her father’s blood and her own wits.

At present those last were well occupied, and she herself content to stay quiet and work, but not as her cousin Jane was
working with her grave young tutor Mr Aylmer, a scholar of the conventional pattern and no sportsman, for the sheer disinterested love of abstract learning. For Bess never lost sight of the aim and object for which she worked: to make herself as fit to be on the throne of England as ever her learned young brother would be.

And in the meantime Mr Ascham’s admiration (was it perhaps, sometimes something more? She had caught him looking at her rather oddly across the study table) was a faint compensation for the Admiral’s exciting companionship; it served to pass the time, and it provided her with useful counter-thrusts against Cat Ashley.

That much-tried governess was not unnaturally in a twitter of nerves at their expulsion from Catherine’s household, and the construction that might be put on it; she was for ever warning Bess against making eyes at men, against making pert answers, against a score of new-found faults in her behaviour.

Never before had Mrs Ashley seen so clearly, in watching her charge, that her mother had not been a lady. What was it that Queen Nan had said when Cat Ashley was going to see the Princess Mary? ‘Give her a box on the ears now and then for the cursed bastard she is!’

No, much as she had admired her husband’s cousin, even in her flashes of dangerous temper, Mrs Ashley could not but reflect on looking back through the years that that had not been the remark of a lady.

‘How can you hope to be Queen’, (the girl had let that out) ‘when you chatter with every stable-boy and take no care of your dignity?’

‘Mr Ascham says my dignity and gentleness are wonderful.’

Or – ‘Women should be modest and remember their weakness. They can’t be the equal of man.’

‘They can, and I am. Mr Ascham says my mind has no womanly weakness, and my perseverance is equal to a man’s.’

Mrs Ashley began to think her silver pen rather dearly bought. At this rate there would soon be no holding her young mistress. It was clear that she had captivated her new tutor as she had the last, and the greater the scholar, the less his sense.

The sight of Bess preening herself on her dignity and gentleness, who so short a time ago had locked her into her room while she went gallivanting on the river at night alone with the Admiral, was the last straw.

‘I tell you what it is, my young Madam,’ she flared out, ‘you are like the cat in the fairy-tale who was turned into the form of a lady and could behave as such perfectly – as long as she did not see a mouse! Mice or men it’s all the same – the moment you catch sight of one, hey presto! Away go all your fine manners and you must pounce!’

And the scolding ended in fits of laughter from them both.

But Bess was not entirely as confident as she seemed. She was anxious about Catherine, who she heard was not at all well, and at last realised that it was a serious matter for her to be having her first child at thirty-five. And Catherine’s generosity made her ashamed and embarrassed; she had actually encouraged her husband to write to her, and sent messages by him as she did not feel up to writing herself, and told Bess how she missed her companionship and wished she were there with them at Sudley Castle, where they had gone
for her to bear her child in the peace and quiet of their Gloucestershire home.

Determined to be as prudent as possible, Bess wrote her answer to Catherine, not Tom, but asked tentatively that he should continue to ‘give me knowledge from time to time how his busy child does’, and added with a sad little attempt at a joke, ‘If I were at his birth no doubt I would have him beaten for the trouble he has put you to.’

‘Him’ and ‘he’; no one thought of the coming baby in any other terms. Catherine made his sex a particular point in the petitions she offered up for his safe arrival, in the family prayers that she held for her household – a new development which her husband complained was adding fresh revolutionary terrors to the Reformed Religion, since the servants would be wanting their wages raised for having to troop into the hall and pray twice daily. He himself generally found he had to attend to some earnest business at the bottom of the garden at just those moments, and would stroll off, singing a popular street song in parody of the New Religion, which, he declared, was one of hate.

Pity the best of women had to have crochets, he told Cathy, laughing at her pet preachers and her enthusiasm over the higher education for women. She was only a little hurt, for
she knew she would not like her Tom any the better if he held advanced views like his brother. She told herself they were so happy that they could afford the jolts that might have broken a more brittle happiness – differences of opinion, downright quarrels, even bitter moments of jealousy.

Until, when it came to that last: the image of Bess’s darting glance, the dragonfly swiftness of her turn of head, would rise before her, and she could not feel her happiness so secure.

But her child would safeguard it.

Tom did his own part towards the coming event by visiting all the best astrologers and fortune-tellers, and they all gave him certain assurance that his child would be a son – just as they had done to King Henry before his daughter Elizabeth was born, but nobody was going to remember that now. It would make all the difference to Tom’s position, his ambitious hopes and intrigues, if he had a son and heir to be their focal point for the future.

At the end of July, just a month before Catherine’s time was due, the Duchess gave birth to a son. ‘And let
that
spur you to a strapping boy!’ Tom told his wife. He was full of gay confidence, and as long as he was there she was too; but in his absence she drooped and was beset with nervous fears and melancholy. That was easily remedied, he told her; he would not leave her till the child was born and all well again.

He refused Somerset’s offered command of the fleet in this summer’s campaign against the Scots armies who had been annihilated last summer at Pinkie. But in spite of that, the Protector had to appeal to the Emperor for help, and march against his conquered enemy with the German troops, paid
for in advance – a difficult matter with the Treasury bankrupt from the debts and debased coinage left over from the old King’s reign; and Somerset could not help thinking it an uneconomic measure, when thousands of unemployed Englishmen were wandering homeless on the roads, and the magistrates could find no remedy except to flog and imprison them for their failure to find work. Though they knew well that no work was to be had, since they themselves were mostly employing one shepherd boy to mind their new flocks, where their fathers had given work to fifty ploughboys and farm labourers.

Still, there was no doubt that unemployed men quickly became unemployable, and these wretched vagrants would be no use as soldiers compared with the German mercenaries; moreover, they were apt to fraternise with the Scots, and particularly, as fellow-peasants, to dislike firing their harvest and ripening crops.

The German mercenaries had no such scruples; they were a race apart, bred only for war, heavy and inhuman as their armour: ‘Find some means of making it move without ’em inside it, and you’d never know the difference!’ said Tom, who hated the Germans from what he had seen of them in Hungary where they had spied and wormed their way in for centuries, and now treated the Magyars like slaves in their own country, holding them to the law passed over a hundred years before, that no one should have any position of importance unless he could produce a testimonial of Purity of Race, proving that all his four grandparents belonged to the ruling German nation.

Ned asked what the – he nearly said ‘the devil’ but changed
it to ‘on earth’ – the four German grandparents had to do with his mercenaries?

‘Why, this, you fool – yes, you can look down your long nose at me and think you’re always right, but you don’t know everything, nobody here knows what the Germans are like. Ask the Magyars. Ask the Poles. Ask that old fellow I met in Cracow – only he died last year – you know who I mean – old fellow with a beard like a furze bush and a bumpy nose turned up at the end from poking it so high into the heavens – God’s light, what was his name? – who wrote that the sun doesn’t move but that we all go whizzing round it instead.’

‘If you mean the Polish heretic Copernicus—’

‘Why heretic? He dedicated his book to the Pope, who accepted it. Are you Reformers going to be more pernickety than the Pope? But whatever Copernicus wrote of the stars, he was sound on the Teutons, and the way they’ve ravaged Poland year after year. He told me himself, “We can scarcely dwell in our own houses for an hour.” And all because the Germans think they are made by God to conquer the world. Their Emperor is not the Emperor of Germany, he’s the German Emperor – of the World. But you’ll never understand that here, you think it’s just an empty traditional title. One has to have lived on the Continent to see it. And it’s this Master Race of mechanic monsters that you’re bringing into this island to fight your battles for you, against fellows who speak the same language as ourselves – and to do the dirty work you can’t get Englishmen to do. You hire German hogs while our decayed yeomen rot in idleness on the roads. And
then
you complain that the Scots won’t listen to your fine speeches about brotherly love and Free Trade!’

His elder brother said that Tom entirely failed to understand the Scottish question. Extreme measures had unfortunately been made necessary by this final outrage of the Scots, for they had at last shipped off their little Queen safely to France. Even Tom’s shallow brain should grasp the danger to England of a Scottish-French encirclement.