Young Bess (26 page)

‘The Government – the Council—’ Henry repeated slowly. ‘What then are
you
? You sit on a high seat above all the rest of the Council. You act at times without consulting them. This Court of Requests is set up by you, and judged by you alone. You try cases without any other judge. You reverse decisions made by other judges. Yet, when it is a case of life and death for your own brother, you make as if to wash your hands of it, like Pontius Pilate. It can mean but one thing – that you want Tom’s death. You alone gain from it. No one else gains anything.’

‘The whole country gains, if the country is at peace.’

‘It will not have peace. Nor will you. Hark’ee, Ned, this is but a feather of your own goose. Kill Tom, and you’ll put a rope round your neck. The country calls you the Good Duke. They won’t if you kill your brother. No one will stand by a man who doesn’t stand by his own kith and kin. They’ve heard how your guards took him at Mother’s house, with her there. They don’t like that.’

The Duke looked at him as though he neither saw nor heard him. Henry spoke a little louder, but gently, for his brother’s face was white and piteous. ‘Taking him at Mother’s
house, and she standing by. You shouldn’t ha’ done that, Ned.’

Ned sat quite still, staring before him. What was he seeing? Henry felt anxious. Was Ned, as they say, himself? There was a queer look on him, the look, it might be, of a man whose horse was riding straight for a precipice, and he with no power and perhaps no will to stop it.

When at last he began to speak it was in a different voice, no longer low and measured, disdainfully impersonal. It was sharp and querulous, the voice of a complaining schoolboy who at any minute will burst into tears.

‘Mother this and Mother that,’ he cried. ‘Is Master Tom always to shelter under her petticoats? Precious little mother’s darling,
he’s
shown how he stands by kith and kin, hasn’t he? Working against me all these two years, doing his best to pull me down, and she –
she
never sees it. Oh no, she wouldn’t! Tom can make mincemeat of me for all she cares. All she cares about – all – all – is that he shall be safe, her spoilt brat, and that is all she’s ever cared about. You know it too.
We
were never anything to her, as soon as she’d got Tom.’

It was utterly bewildering. There was Ned gone clean back to being a child again, sobbing his fury under the old apple tree in Broom Close because he had been blamed for something that he said was all Tom’s fault. These clever fellows who came to the top and ruled the Kingdom didn’t ever know how to grow up, seemingly.

‘Well, but in nature she loved him best.’ Henry spoke carefully, as to a child. ‘He was the youngest and always gave her a deal more trouble than the rest of us. Feminine kind are like that. And they like Tom. Men do too. It’s in nature.’

He wished he could make it plain to Ned. He had always seen it so plain.

All of romance he had ever known had been bound up in that babbling baby creature who had always rushed into danger as soon as he could toddle: into the green duck-pond or the bright fire, straight up to the fierce stallions or mastiffs or the ring-nosed bull, all of which Henry had always known he must not touch, and at once dragged Tom away. But so soon was Tom standing up to Henry himself or to anyone who opposed him, so soon he shot up taller and handsomer and livelier than any of them, so soon he had darted away from home out into the world, and brought Henry back a whiff of the scent and colour of strange countries and foreign wars, had talked with the Sultan and cracked jokes with the King of France, and sent Henry strange treasures fashioned by dark heathens who wore petticoats.

Henry’s hunting-cap at home rested on a round hat-stand of blue and white pottery with Arabic inscriptions; on his sideboard was a Persian dish five hundred years old, with a gay little bird on it sprouting into a serpent’s tail at one end and at the other a smiling woman’s face in jaunty cap and collar as modern as a lass of today. Tom had told Henry with a dig in the ribs that he sent him his rarest finds for the pleasure he had in hearing him say ‘Ar, mighty feat and pretty.’

If he lived as long as Methuselah he’d never cram as much into his years as Tom had done in even one of his dazzling kingfisher flights across the Continent.

Henry had always been rather awed by his elder brother, had adored his younger, and taken it for granted that he
himself was the stupid one who did not count – but not so stupid that he couldn’t see that the women would love Tom best. Odd that the clever ones should be so stupid.

But nothing of this could he say to Ned, for the poor fellow was fair beside himself, mouthing his face all awry as he talked, and it white to the lips, rolling his eyes round the room and grabbing at one unhelpful thing after another on the table, just as he had done in those queer unchancy rages he had had as a boy.

But now he was not a boy, and Henry felt deep in his bones that he was witnessing that terrifying thing, the rage of a weak man in mortal fear.

It was a case of Tom’s life or his, Ned said; there could not be two Protectors, nor even two brothers in power; for himself he cared nothing – but Tom would ruin his great work for England. He worked for the future and for others – but Tom only for the present moment and himself. Tom would always undermine his authority; the country was not big enough for them both, and that was the plain fact of it – and why should he show any consideration for Tom, who had never in all his life shown any for him?

Henry waited till the storm spent itself out and a shaken yellow-faced old man had shrunk back, cold and exhausted, into his huddled furs.

Then he said, ‘’Tisn’t right, Ned, that’s all that matters. Take it that Tom’s not done right by you – well, you can’t help that. But you can help this. Bible says you should forgive your brother, not seven times only, but seventy times seven.’

The Protector passed a feverish hand over his brow. It came away damp. Mechanically he murmured, as he had often
found it well to do, ‘That may be a mistake in the translation.’

‘It’s God’s holy word, isn’t it?’ persisted Henry.

‘Oh yes, yes, and a dozen fellows at work on it. Miles Coverdale isn’t the only Hebrew and Greek scholar in England. Miles acknowledges himself that he’s used five other translations in it.’ He began to wonder wearily if he had been wise to push forward this business of the English Bible – you couldn’t tell where it might lead to, when every ploughman, however simple and ignorant, started quoting it to suit his purposes, profaning the Sacred Word in every ale-house and tavern, just as the old King had complained, and rightly, Ned now thought.

He
would
not doubt it; he would not lose faith and hope in himself, nor yet in the humblest of his brethren – but how could he believe in himself or anything else while this clod stood and gaped at him and preached to him, yes, to
him
, of his duty to his brother?

‘Go back,’ he shouted suddenly, ‘back to your stables and your pigsties! What can such as you understand of me, and of the work I have been called upon to do?’

As if in answer to that hoarse strained shout, a servant entered hurriedly, looking rather aghast. But it was to announce an unexpected visit of King Edward, and with him John Dudley, Earl of Warwick.

They came in, leaving their gentlemen-in-waiting outside, and with only Barnaby Fitzpatrick still in attendance at the royal elbow. The Protector rose in haste, and bowed very low, so Henry did too, though – dear Lord! – it seemed a queer way to go on to a small boy who was your nephew when all’s said and done, and in a private room and no affair of State.

He took a good look at the lad, who was complaining about something in a high fretful pipe; he wasn’t shaping as well as Henry had hoped, not much taller nor sturdier than at his Coronation two years ago, and he’d been small even for a nine-year-old then. Peaky too. Kept too hard at his books by the look of him. Young plants never grew well indoors. He’d like to turn him out to grass for a year or two to kick up his heels and run wild, and loosen that set small mouth that shut like a trap as he finished speaking.

By which time Henry had heard what his nephew had been saying.

‘It’s intolerable. Why don’t you stop it? The people shout at me in the streets, they yell “Justice for the Admiral!” A woman called out that I was an unnatural nephew, and she wished she had the jerking of me –
me
! And look at that!’ He stuck out his foot and the Protector backed as though suspecting a kick. ‘Mud! Mud on my stocking. Someone threw that – at
me
!’

‘One cannot prevent people calling out in the street, Your Grace.’

‘Why not? My father would have. Is this your freedom of speech for all? There’s been too much of it.’

John Dudley’s cool voice slid between the child’s angry treble and the exasperated answer that his uncle was just beginning. ‘Indeed, my lord, His Majesty has grave cause for his annoyance if the people are encouraged to think they can insult the Crown with impunity.’

The Protector’s hands began to twitch with nervous rage – (How well Henry knew that clenching of the fists, blue-white at the knuckles. If you touched them they would be as cold as
frogs.) ‘What does Your Lordship suggest I should do?’ he rasped. ‘Order out the guard to fire on them because some street urchin, who’s probably no longer there, threw a clod of mud some time before? Will that impress them with the royal justice?’

He turned sharply on his nephew, ‘I have yet to learn how it is Your Majesty is out riding with the Earl of Warwick when you should be at your Hebrew with Mr Cheke?’

Edward drew back from him. ‘There’s the match of Rovers and Prisoners’ Base in ten days’ time. How am I to have a chance of winning if I never practise?’

He looked appealingly at Dudley, who smilingly said: ‘Mea culpa! Let me be His Majesty’s whipping-boy instead of young Barney this time. The day was fine, the royal head ached, and it is certain the King needs practice to give him a fair chance in the match I’ve arranged. He draws no strong bow as yet, though a very pretty shot.’

Edward flushed with pleasure, then turned to his uncle with his upper lip sucked in and his under stuck out. For two pins, it seemed to say, his tongue would follow it.

It began to dawn on Henry that if the King had been turned against his youngest uncle by his eldest, he did not like his eldest any the better for it.

The Protector burst out, ‘Am I the King’s guardian or am I not? How can I have any authority if the moment my back is turned every Tom, Dick, and Harry works against it?’

‘My name is not Tom,’ said Dudley softly. ‘I trust you will not confuse the matter. It is not I who am in the Tower on charges of undermining your authority.’

‘With as little reason, maybe,’ came an unexpected voice.
Something had boiled up in Henry’s head, and boiled over. They turned and stared at him, those fine gentlemen, as mum and mim as a couple of calves. As for the little lad, he looked at him as though a piece of the furniture had given tongue.

‘Who is this – gentleman?’ Edward asked with a slight emphasis on the last word.

As Ned didn’t seem able to collect his wits or his words, Henry answered: ‘Your Uncle Henry, Your Grace, up from Wolf Hall.’

‘Another uncle!’ The boy turned away.

But Henry wasn’t going to let go of his chance. ‘You’ve a finer uncle than me in the Tower. Have justice done to your own flesh and blood. Give him a fair and open trial. You are the King. Show it.’

The King and the Protector spoke at once. But Henry only heard the boy’s voice shrilling hysterically above the man’s expostulations.

‘Uncles – uncles everywhere – always quarrelling – bullying me – keeping me from my bow, wanting to make me a butterfingers. And Uncle Tom’s a bad man, he’s dishonoured my sister, he poisoned my stepmother so as to marry her, he—’

‘Christ have pity!’ shouted Henry, silencing both boy and man. ‘Are these the lies they’ve been telling you? Even a child should see their falseness. The Queen’s own brothers are almost the only loyal friends to stand by Tom now. Would they do so if he’d poisoned their sister? Let Tom confront his accusers. Give him the chance you’d give to any common thief or murderer.’

The Protector had got his hand on his shoulder and was trying to shove him out of the room, while the Earl of
Warwick stared with an expression of detached interest.

Henry knocked off the hand as though it were a fly. ‘Hark’ee, brother, you shall hear me, aye and the lad too, before you’re rid of me. “Whoso causeth one of these little ones to stumble, it were better for him that a millstone were tied about his neck and he were cast into the uttermost depths of the sea.”’

Then he went. The Earl of Warwick’s eyebrows rose slightly as he looked at his colleague.

‘Is that another mistake in the translation?’ he asked.

Edward, alone with Barney at last, was fuming at him. Barney had shown him respectfully that he hadn’t liked Edward’s manners to his Uncle Henry. Edward said that he was sick to death of all his uncles, a lot of nobodies who wouldn’t be anybody but for
him
, but just lumps of Wiltshire mud and he wished to heaven they’d stayed there – ‘that oaf, that clod, to thrust his way into my presence and speak to me like that –
he
my uncle! They’re all alike – knaves, bullies, upstarts.
These Seymours
!’

Barney felt it better not to stress the King’s own half of Seymour blood. He said, ‘In my country the lords of the land treat humbler people, even peasants and servants, with as much courtesy and friendliness as those of their own kind.’

‘Yes, dine at the same table, feed out of the same dish, don’t they? We English had to pass a law against it. In your country they live like savages.’

The King swung out of the room and slammed the door. Barney stood looking after him.

‘
These Tudors
!’ he said.

Lady Tyrwhitt had been appointed by the Council as the Princess Elizabeth’s new governess: an awkward position for the lady, for the Princess herself flatly refused to recognise her as such. Haughtily she declared that Mrs Ashley was her governess; she had not so demeaned herself that she needed any other set over her. In fact, she would rather have none at all. Sir Robert Tyrwhitt’s opinion was that she needed two! But he had to admit to his master that ‘she cannot digest such advice in no way’.

His wife told him that the girl sulked all day and wept all night. It was all the result they could boast, though she had now been under their constant supervision for more than a month. The confessions of her servants had led to none of any value by herself. She wrote a deposition that echoed theirs, and went no further – except for her bright assurance at the end that this was all she could remember at the moment of her dealings with the Admiral, but if anything came into her head that she had forgotten, she would promptly add it! It sounded far too good to be true. So did the close resemblance between her account and that of her servants. ‘They all sing the same song,’ wrote Sir Robert glumly, ‘which they would not do unless they had set the note before.’

But he grew more hopeful as he reported, ‘She begins now
to droop a little’; this when he had let her know that things were going badly for the Admiral, his horses already given away, his property plundered, his servants discharged.

But she did not droop if anyone spoke against him; she flared out then in his defence as passionately imperious as a reigning Princess. Could nothing teach her that she was a helpless prisoner, in danger even of her life?

The Protector wrote to impress her with the fact, and demanded an answer; Tyrwhitt wrote a rough draft for her to copy and send as her own, admitting her faults and submitting herself to his merciful forgiveness.

She scarcely looked at it. She would write to the Protector, certainly, but she needed nobody’s suggestions as to what to say.

She sat down, pen in hand, a tight determined smile on her face, the smile of a fighter. And not in mere defence. She would carry the war straight into the enemy’s camp.

‘Master Tyrwhitt and others have told me that there are rumours abroad that I am with child by my Lord Admiral. My Lord, these are shameful slanders. I shall most heartily desire Your Lordship that I may come to the Court, that I may show myself there as I am.

Written in haste, from Hatfield,

Your assured friend to my little power,

E
LIZABETH
.’

The Protector blinked as he read the upright beautifully shaped hand. Never surely did a fifteen-year-old Princess dispose of so base a charge in so brief and businesslike a manner. Nothing here of the proper outraged modesty and
ignorance of a very young lady – but a sound medical knowledge, and the courage to stand upon it. They said she was with child. Let them prove it then; she was perfectly ready to come to Court to be medically examined and to outface all the prying whispering gossip of the women who would know why she had come.

The Good Duke was scandalised. Why, at her age his sister Jane would not even have known such things. And the bold accusation (for it plainly accused him too), ‘My Lord, these are shameful slanders’, was like a blow straight between his eyes. Almost he could hear it thundered out in King Harry’s voice with one of his tremendous oaths.

There was finesse in the letter too; she thanked him at the beginning for his ‘great gentleness and goodwill’ to her, and told him that she was only writing to him because he had told her to. (So whatever he got from her, he had asked for it!)

She even insinuated a subtle defence of the Admiral by quoting an almost too innocent question of his, ‘Why he might not visit me as well as my sister?’; and of Mrs Ashley, by declaring that her governess had always said ‘she would never have me marry without the consent of the King’s Majesty, Your Grace’s, and the Council’s’.

And the only pathetic note in this letter from an utterly friendless child in a desperate position, was that she had altered the conventional closing, ‘Your assured friend to my power’, with the addition ‘to my little power’.

It did not impress the Duke, who wrote in sharp retort that she was too well assured of herself; as to these shameful slanders, let her but name the author of them, and the Council would take up the matter.

Again he got more than he bargained for. She was very sorry he took her letter ‘in evil part’, but coolly observed that ‘I do not see that Your Grace has made any direct answer’. As to naming the scandal-mongers, ‘I can easily do it, but I would be loth to do, because it is mine own cause’, and she had no wish to punish anyone in that cause, ‘and so get the ill will of the people’.

But she told him with uncompromising directness what
he
ought to do, and that was ‘to send forth a Proclamation declaring how the tales be but lies’.

The Duchess, reading it over the Duke’s shoulder, gave a squeal of exasperation. ‘Telling
you
what Proclamations to issue! Who the devil does she think she is?’

The letter told them. She was ‘The King’s Majesty’s sister’. It would be well for the Protector and the Council to show the people that they remembered this, and that they had some regard for her honour.

The Duchess screamed. This bastard, this wanton, was giving herself all the airs of a future Queen. All her talk of the people (it was a marvel she did not write ‘
my
people’!) and their will towards her, good or ill, showed her sinister intentions. She was determined to play for popularity, to work up a following in the country, as her seducer had tried to do. There would not be a moment’s peace in England till she met the same fate as he.

And why, she demanded, was that fate so long in coming to him?

It was over a month now since the Admiral had been sent to the Tower, and every week, day, hour while the Duke delayed, hesitated, prevaricated, hummed and hawed and
made tedious speeches, was giving his equally traitorous brother Henry time to work up more and more opposition to the execution.

She swept out of the room. A servant entering just after was surprised to get an inkpot thrown at his head, and hurriedly departed, to tell his fellows that the Protector was not the same man since he had started hounding his brother to the scaffold. He was growing quite irritable.

The Protector raged round the room, hurling books on to the floor, flinging papers into the fire. The airy, erect
handwriting
of the Princess looked up at him as he was about to destroy that too. It was very like her; the fantastic looped lines of the signature that twirled into a little arabesque at the end were those of an artist longing to draw rather than write; even the two large sploshy blots on the other side of it, which she had ignored rather than write her letter again, were characteristic. But the words were quite unlike the hard frivolous young thing he believed her to be.

‘They are most deceived that trust most in themselves.’

That had been in answer to his reproof of her
overconfidence
; but seeing the sentence apart from the rest, it sounded a warning to himself. Had he, after all, trusted so earnestly in his fine resolves, his noble desires for humanity, only to be deceived by a traitor within his own breast?

He looked again. He saw, ‘I know I have a soul to be saved as well as other folk have.’ Its simplicity seemed utterly forlorn; yet there was a true pride in it that no humiliation could crush.

Was this girl indeed a contemptible wanton? Her dealings with him and his servants were showing sparks of
unexpected greatness. He laid down the letters, still looking searchingly at the writing as at a portrait then inward at himself.

He too had a soul. What had become of it? Always he had regarded himself as morally superior to the run of men. He never swore, nor drank too much; nor felt any temptation to lechery; his greed for money and property was too cold a lust for him to recognise it as that. How should it be a personal lust when he was building his possessions for the future, laying up treasure, honourable position and power for his sons’ sons rather than himself?

That sophistry had crumbled. It would not even be his true heir who would inherit his titles, his eagerly grasped lands and gold – a little mud and metal, that was what it had turned to now in his eyes. Yet he had been no greedier nor more ambitious than many others; and no vices stained his private character.

But for all that, he knew now that for many years his soul had been in hell.

He hoped that death would release it.

Bess got her Proclamation. The Protector issued one as she had requested, stating that the scandals against her were lies, and forbidding the people to repeat them, on pain of severe punishment.

Whereupon she promptly made another request: that the Protector and the Council should be good to her governess in the Tower, ‘because she has been with me a long time, and has taken great labour and pains in bringing me up in learning and honesty’.

There were many tales of poor Ashley’s pains in bringing Bess up; the Protector almost suspected that baffling smile of the Princess behind the words. Yet it was a touchingly loyal appeal. It made no reference to any other subject, though she wrote it only three days after the Bill of Attainder against the Admiral had passed its third reading in the House of Lords. She could make no appeal for him; it would only harm him, since his courtship of her was one of the chief charges against him.

She could only plead for her old Ash-Cat, a poor substitute, and in her agony of anxiety she did not think at first that she could drive herself to do it. But Cat was her old friend and she must do the best she could for her. She did.

The letter was full of a faithful and passionate tenderness – perhaps not all for Ashley. But Ashley was the only person for whom she could admit it.

She walked, these first cold days of March, under the great oaks of Hatfield Park, where she had been so glad to run out and listen to the nightingale on the early summer evenings when she had first come here with Mr Ascham – and Queen Catherine was still alive. There was the old tree scarred with her arrows where she had shot at a mark and her tutor had told her she drew as pretty a bow as the goddess Diana.

Was she indeed walking in the very same place, under the self-same trees? Was she here at all, and was she the same self? Or was there nothing round her, the world nothing, and she herself nobody?

The world seemed to have dropped into a vast silence, and yet there were birds shrilly piping their first songs, dogs barking, and the chatter and rustle of female voices and movement all round her.

Lady Tyrwhitt and her women walked with her, talking, talking, watching her, trying to make her talk too. Of what was Her Grace thinking? Why did her lips move and yet say nothing?

‘Because I can say nothing,’ she said.

And still she said, only to herself:

‘He said he was little John Nobody that durst not once speak.’