Young Bess (6 page)

H.K. everywhere for Henry and Katherine.

That was another song of his, but he never cared to hear it sung after the ‘H.K.’ was all changed everywhere to ‘H.A.’ for Henry and Anne. ‘HA HA!’ shouted the rude Cockney boys, and they were right – the common people always were in the long run – right to mock and distrust that accursed whore who bewitched Sir Loyal Heart and led him into captivity, unrewarded for six long years. What torture of desire he had undergone for her, what abject letters he had written her – and then the reward, good God, another girl!

He blinked down the table at the girl, as lithe and whippy as a greyhound puppy, and the light glinting on her red-gold
hair. ‘Nan Bullen’s brat!’ he muttered to himself, ‘a wheyfaced scrap of a thing like her mother, a green apple, a codling,’ he drooled on, regarding her with a fixed and menacing eye.

She looked back at him; for one instant he saw himself reflected in the dreadfully dispassionate eyes of a very young girl. But the image was quickly blurred; the light seemed oddly dim tonight, as it had been in his father’s day when they cut down the number of candles and saved the candle-ends.

What did that girl matter – or all the other girls either? – though it was enraging the way the Tudor stock had run to seed in a crop of females: first his own two daughters; and then the only grandchildren of his two fine strapping sisters were those three diminutive Grey brats, and the baby in Scotland who might well become the most dangerous person in Europe.

But he had the boy, his son Edward, yes, he had got a legitimate son at last. He turned his great stiff head slowly and stared at the pale child beside him; nothing like as big and strong as he himself had been at his age; he was much more like what Henry’s elder brother Prince Arthur had been, but that Henry could not bear to recognise; for the slight boy whom he could scarcely remember had died at fifteen of a consumption. No, Henry would see no likeness to Arthur in Edward; for one thing, Edward was far cleverer, already he knew more than lads twice his age. ‘I wish I had more learning’ Henry had sighed when a youth, as greedy for the beauty of great minds as for rich food and drink, for pleasure and sport and glory and conquest.

He had welcomed Erasmus to his Court, he had been proud to count him as a friend; and witty ironic Thomas More too,
with whom he had walked so often in More’s garden at Chelsea, watching the river flow past and the seagulls swoop and swirl, while they discussed everything under heaven and in it too as they walked up and down, his arm round his friend’s neck. But his friend had betrayed him, defied him, tacitly refused to recognise the righteousness of his divorce from Katherine of Aragon, turned stiff-necked in resistance to his will, until there was nothing for it but to cut off his learned and witty head. Tom Cromwell had urged him to it. ‘More must go,’ he had said; and then in his turn Crum had to go. Crum was a knave if ever there was one: when Henry held a knave in his hands at cards he used to say ‘I hold a Cromwell!’ But he was a witty devil and a good servant.

The best of friends, the best of his servants, the best of women, how was it that all had failed him? He needed friendship, he needed love, he needed a wise, tender, infinitely understanding companion who, while giving him all the glowing admiration that was his due, would also know just where to throw out a hint in guidance of his judgment, where to encourage and where to still the doubts that often stirred deep down within himself, so deep that even he did not always recognise them until too late.

But he had never had such a companion; never since— Was there a strong draught that made the candles gutter and sway, and the smoke swirl in wreaths from their flickering flames? Through the blue and shifting mist he was seeing pictures he had not seen for over forty years – a fair Spanish princess of sixteen, all in white, with long hair down her back, seated in a litter hung with cloth of gold, and himself riding beside her, a cavalier of ten, entrusted to escort his brother Arthur’s bride
through the roaring, cheering flower-strewn streets of London. He, who was never allowed all his boyhood to be with any girl except his sisters, had then his first taste of the pageantry of chivalry that he adored in the romances; and was so intoxicated by it that, that evening, to show off to Katherine, he danced so hard that he had to tear off his hot coat and caper in his small-clothes. And after Arthur had died a few months later, and Henry had married his widow a few years later, he went on showing off to Katherine, finding her the perfect audience, through twenty years of marriage – until he found to his rage that she too claimed to take a part in the play herself.

Muttering something to himself, he reached forward to take another helping of sugared marchpane, felt the marble edge of the table pressing into his belly, and squinted down at it resentfully. How long had he been in labour with this huge paunch? Tonight it seemed so short a time had turned that splendid young athlete, with flat hard stomach and limbs clean as a whistle, into this mountain of pain and disease, in labour with – was it death? The choristers sang:

There was no one to offer let or hindrance to his pleasures; except himself. ‘
Every man hath his free will
,’ but what use was that? Since a vast aching body told one, as sternly as any
gaoler come to arrest a quaking girl, that ‘it is no more the time to dance.’

There was no pleasure now left to that body except to cram it further with food, with deep stupefying draughts of wine, cloying the palate, mercifully dulling the senses. He reached forward for his cup. ‘
Who shall me let
?’ Neither his
anxious-eyed
physician nor his fearfully watching wife dared offer let or hindrance.

And suddenly he began to talk. His great voice swayed gustily to and fro, a storm wind rising and falling in the hall that a moment since had been full of music and pattering chatter, and now was paralysed into silence with the resurgence into life of the figure-head, monstrous and moribund at head of the table.

He talked of the French and how he had so lately beaten them; he had made the Narrow Seas English for all time; no other foreign invaders would ever dare come sailing up the Channel. Once indeed he might have turned the tables the other way and conquered the whole country of France after winning a yet more glorious Agincourt; he had in fact conquered and now held Boulogne. When only twenty-two he had taken the Chevalier Bayard prisoner and shown them that an Englishman could be every bit as much a ‘very perfect gentle knight’ as any bowing Frenchman. (‘Now,’ thought Bess, playing with the nutshells on her plate, ‘now he will say, “Stout fellow, Bayard, a very fine fellow.”’) Sure enough he said it, and with episcopal authority – ‘Old Gardiner showed sense, for a bishop, when he said Bayard is a stout fellow.’ He always had to say that when he mentioned Bayard, to remind himself that he did not really bear the noblest man in Europe
a grudge for knighting François on the terrible battlefield of Marignano when the young French King and his armies had fought ‘like infuriated boars.’ Henry had never been in a battle like that; even now, when François too had grown old and cautious, it irked him to think how the Foxnose had once fought his own battles, where Henry had only paid the Emperor to fight them.

Well, it was something to have had an Emperor in his pay. And once he had planned to make himself Emperor when his servant Wolsey had aimed to be Pope – Wolsey the butcher’s son, a fellow that had once been put in the stocks for a brawl at a fair, but whom he had raised to be the greatest priest and statesman in England, and, almost, in Europe. Yes, he had brought England back into the Continent, he had made her a power to be feared and courted.

‘Look at the Field of the Cloth of Gold!’ he shouted suddenly.
That
showed Europe was at his feet – and with what a show! The English had outvied the French at every point; François alarmed at the competition, had sent anxiously to him beforehand to ask him to forbear making so many rich tents and pavilions. François had shown him with great pride a portrait of a woman called Mona Lisa that he had bought from the old painter Leonardo da Vinci who had died the year before; he had paid four thousand florins for it, a ridiculous sum for a picture, and of a rather plain woman too.

Henry could retaliate with Holbein, whom he had honoured with his patronage and an income of
£
30 a year (less
£
3 for taxes) apart from the sale of his pictures. The new Dutch School was coming far more into fashion than those old Italians.

They said François was as tall as Henry, but it was only because the Frenchman’s wretchedly thin legs made him seem taller than he really was. If only he could have matched his knightly prowess against François in the tourney, which cautious royal etiquette forbade, he would have proved himself the victor, he was sure of it. He had overcome all his opponents in it, and killed one of his mounts from sheer exhaustion (François had overcome all his too, but they had probably thought it wise to let him win). Henry had excelled even his crack English archers at the long bow; the French had gasped with admiration of his aim and strength. Certainly he would have been more than a match for François.

‘Remember how I threw him in the wrestling bout?’ he chuckled. ‘What a to-do there was! Kings mustn’t be thrown! Why, Kate, you and the French Queen had to pull us apart, d’you remember, hanging on to our shirt-tails like a couple of fishwives parting their husbands in a brawl!’

The hall seemed to rock to the sound of that mighty
guffaw
, and echoed it back in a frozen silence. No one knew where to look, what to say. The King heard and saw the emptiness all round him, a herd of sheep staring, but not at him, not at anyone, a wavering cloud of white foolish faces, scared and averted, and among them a very young redheaded girl playing with the nutshells on her plate. Who was that girl? She was always cropping up, baffling, frustrating, charged with some hideous memory.

The scene grew thicker, more confused. ‘Kate!’ he called in sudden terror, ‘
Kate
!’ A woman was hanging on to his arm, imploring him something. She seemed to think it was her that he had called – why, he did not even know who she was! Some
fellow was loosening his collar, the woman put water to his lips.

He stared at the red-headed girl and knew now she was his daughter – but not by Kate. There had been other Kates, Annes, Jane – but the Kate who could remember him at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, as King and bridegroom at eighteen, as a child of ten riding beside her, that Kate had gone for ever, and would never come back.

Not Katherine of Aragon hung on his arm, but Catherine Parr, who knew him only as an obese, sick old man.

He made a mighty effort and guffawed again. ‘Why, how I’ve scared the lot of you!’ he gasped out. ‘Who do you think I took you for, Kate? I was asking only if you remembered hearing the tale. You were only a little girl when it happened.’

But he spoke with difficulty and his lips had gone blue, as had his twitching hands where the great jewelled rings were sunk in fat.

Bess, holding on to her nutshells so tight that they cut into her hands, stole a glance at him under her down-dropped eyelids and thought his face looked like a glistening suet pudding. Then, even as she glanced, it sagged, a deflated bag, turned a greyish purple, and a tight smile twisted it as though trying to hold it together; the eyes opened for one instant in a puzzled, frightened stare – and then the crash came. He fell forward over the table, into clattering plates and knives and cups, and a great red pool of spilt wine pouring over and
drip-dripping
on to the floor like drops of blood.

Women shrieked, men sprang up, Edward Seymour rapped out a sharp order, and servants surrounded the King, bent over him, more and more of them, until at last they succeeded
in hoisting the inert mass into a poled chair, and staggering off with it through the wide-opened doors.

Bess unclenched her hands and saw the palms were bleeding. She looked at Tom Seymour, and saw he was looking at her. She looked hastily at her brother Edward, and saw he was finishing Jane’s marchpane. Edward liked sweets.

She slipped out and found her governess, Cat Ashley, who had already heard all about it.

‘But, Ashley,’ said Bess, ‘I thought it was François who threw the King.’

‘Sh-sh-sh,’ said Ashley.

The king lingered nearly a fortnight. His mind did not again wander. With Herculean courage he bent it to his will, though his face had gone black with agony, and his legs, which had had to be cauterised some time before, were plunged in a perpetual fire. Yet he forced all those last hours of his long torture to the service of his son, and the constitution of the government that might best safeguard his minority.

There was no time now to brood on the past; that company of long-forgotten comrades that had stepped forward as he began to lose his grip on life were driven ruthlessly back into the shadows. They were dead and done with; there was nothing to be done about them. With the hand of death heavy on him, every nerve and impulse in that fast decaying body reached forward to the future. His dying urgency was fiercer far than that of youth and hope.

For thirty-eight years he had worked tirelessly to secure his kingdom both on and from the Continent; to secure it at home in England, both from Papal interference and the revolutionary dangers of the New Ideas; and to secure its uncertain sovereignty over Wales, which now he had definitely incorporated with England by Act of Parliament ten years ago; over Ireland, where the sovereignty was far more
uncertain; and over Scotland, where, he had to admit in rage, it still did not exist.

With failing, gasping breath, he urged on his brother-in-law Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, the necessity of his completing Scotland’s conquest, as the first work to be done in the new reign.

Edward Seymour, as Prince Edward’s uncle, would be on the Council of Regency which Henry appointed; and with him fifteen of the wisest of his Ministers: a judicious mixture of the ‘New Men’ who inclined to reform, and conservative elements to act as a brake; such as Chancellor Wriothesley, a heretic-hater, to pull Cranmer’s lawn sleeve when it flapped too urgently at ‘Old Mumpsimuses’ – so he said with the ghost of a smile before it twisted into a grimace of pain. And he added Edward Seymour’s younger brother Tom to the Council, a lively fellow after his own kidney, with none of Edward’s priggish and possibly dangerous earnestness; he might act as a check on it, for the two brothers couldn’t abide each other.

Henry knew that Edward Seymour, beneath his stern exterior, was white with eagerness for him to die. He had accused Norfolk and Surrey of aiming at the sceptre – well, the pot may have accused the kettle. One could trust no one. The nobles were always ready to conspire, the commons to rebel. The nation itself had a proverb that the vice of the French was lechery, but that of the English, treachery. He had to leave his life’s work to a child of nine – and to what busy and ambitious schemers? What chances of treason and murder? ‘Woe to the land whose King is a child’ – woe also to the child! The skeletons of his own boy-uncles, murdered
sixty years ago in the Tower by their uncle, Richard III, would raise their little heads through his fever to warn him how near the fate of Edward VI might be to that of Edward V and his small brother. But
this
uncle, Edward Seymour, virtuous, high-principled, was no Richard Crookback – or was he?

Anyway, he could do no more. And he had to see about dying. He left command that he should be buried at Windsor beside the body of Jane Seymour, his third wife, the only one who had given him a son. And that his soul was to be prayed for, and masses said for it, to release it the sooner from Purgatory. He had abolished Purgatory – he had intended to abolish the Mass – but no matter, one might as well be on the safe side. Henry had never learnt that he could not eat his cake and have it; there was no time to learn it now.

Bess spent the days in terror lest she be summoned to his sick-chamber. But he did not send for her, nor for Edward. It had become indeed no place for children. He sent for his wife Catherine, and for Mary, separately. They both came out weeping uncontrollably.

Bess gazed in wonder at her stepmother. She would be free now and unafraid, yet she was crying as if for the loss of a child. Had he been sorry? What could he have said to move her so? He had said, ‘It is God’s will that we should part.’

Bess could recognise the simplicity of greatness; and its practical quality. It was no good looking back; he had looked forward, told Catherine he wanted her to keep all the jewels and ornaments he had given her, and not to hand them back to the Crown, and that he had ‘ordered all these gentlemen to honour you and treat you as if I were living still.’ Yes, Bess conceded inwardly, as she listened to her stepmother, it was
something for Catherine Parr to have been made a Queen.

And Mary, of course, was always ready to cry.

Mary had, in fact, cried so much at the interview with her father that he could not bear it, and had signed to her to leave him, for by then he could speak no more.

He had tried to talk to her of the councillors he had appointed, but she would only beg him not to leave her an orphan so soon. To which he made no answer. But presently with deep earnestness he had asked her to try and be a mother to her brother Edward, ‘for, you see, he is little.’

It was that last request that tore her heart. Catherine Parr owed him royalty, honour and jewels. Mary’s debt had been otherwise; she had been dispossessed from her royal and legitimate inheritance, and dishonour cast on her birth and on her mother; she owed him years of loneliness, sometimes imprisonment; insult and ill treatment both from himself and his servants; worst of all, separation from her adored mother all the last years of Katherine of Aragon’s life; a refusal even to be allowed to go to her when she was dying and afraid, as even her stout heart admitted, that she would have to die alone and abandoned, ‘like a beast.’ Did Mary not remember how she had been forbidden her mother’s death-chamber, when she came out of her father’s, sobbing as if her heart would break?

So Bess asked herself with the clear-cut logic of thirteen, and a horror of the father who had killed her own mother four months after he had at last worried Mary’s to death.

She could not guess how much else Mary remembered.

The huge decaying body Mary had just seen had not appalled her as the corruption of his soul had done, long years
ago, when he became rotted with power and the lust of life.

The thirty-year-old woman who met the child’s astonished gaze, all her pent-up passion in these repressed years broken loose by an agony of pity and desire for what might have been, had one of her violent irrational impulses, and tried to tell her what her father had been; like the Sun himself when he ‘cometh out of his chamber like a bridegroom.’

‘You never knew him as I did,’ she burst out, ‘you never saw him as a young man, glorious, gay, doing everything twice as hard as other men. He made everyone else seem a ghost. You should have seen him as I did when I was a child, on board his ships in a common sailor’s dress, short trousers and vest but all of cloth of gold, and blowing a whistle so loud it was like a trumpet. But he was kind and tender too, tender even in teasing.’

A flood of tears choked her as the memory swept over her of his pulling off her hood at some solemn State function, so that her hair came tumbling over her shoulders. The schoolboy prank had been partly due to his pride in her long fair hair – she had known that, even at six years old. He had loved to show her off to the grave courteous foreigners who had come to ask her hand for their Sovereigns of France or Spain. ‘This girl
never
cries,’ he had told them proudly.

‘She has made up for it since,’ Bess thought, in acute discomfort at her half-sister’s emotion. It only made her hate her father worse than ever; why couldn’t Mary be sensible and hate him too, and then she would be glad instead of sorry that he was dying?

‘You will be able to marry now,’ she said in desperate attempt to comfort or at least turn her thoughts, ‘and then
you’ll have your own children instead of just Jane and the other silly little Greys – you know you said that as long as he lived you’d only be the Lady Mary.’

But Mary’s re-discovered appreciation of Henry could not go so far as to admire the forward-thrusting mind he had bequeathed to Bess. She only wanted to look back, to forgive, and if possible excuse her father.

‘He would have arranged a marriage for me if he could,’ she said eagerly. ‘He spoke of it to me just now and how sorry he was that fortune had prevented it. You are too young to understand – but you will – how difficult and dangerous a thing is a royal marriage. The fate of a whole nation may depend on it.’

Her eyes narrowed; her face grew strained and terrible. ‘The fate of a nation,’ she repeated. ‘Yes, and its soul, its living soul. That is what one marriage may destroy.’

She was thinking how the King’s marriage to Nan Bullen had done that; had torn the nation’s soul away from Christ’s Church to the pagan worship of the State; had imposed a revolution from above on to the people, so that they were persecuted, not for a new idea, but for believing in the faith of their fathers; had robbed and desecrated the tomb of Saint Thomas à Becket who for three hundred years had been a national saint and hero and was now declared a traitor for having opposed his King, his bones thrown on the common dust-heap by royal command. Henry had, in fact, pulled down the whole structure of the Church just as he had pulled down and robbed the monasteries, and built it up anew with himself at the head of it – in order that he might marry Nan Bullen.

And of Henry himself, and ‘the terrible change’ that the foreign ambassadors had noticed in him at that time, Mary could only think as of the destruction of a soul. Only a year or two before, they had reported that ‘Love for the King is universal…for he does not seem a person of this world, but one descended from Heaven.’

But so had Lucifer descended from Heaven, to become Lord of Hell. Mary had seen her gay affectionate father, a conventionally pious man, disintegrate before her eyes into an irresponsible ogre; or else, even more disillusioning, into the ridiculous figure of a man driven between two women, living for a long time under the same roof with them both, helpless, angry, even frightened.

Yes, he had been frightened of his Nan; she had taunted him and told him what to do and what not to do.

She had told him not to argue with Katherine of Aragon, for he ‘would always get the worst of it’; not to see his daughter Mary when he went to visit his baby daughter Elizabeth, for his ‘weakness and instability’ might let him soften to her.

Once – it was on an autumn morning and all the fields and trees were gold under the wide still sky – Mary had met him by chance walking in the open country, and he stopped and spoke kindly to her, telling her he hoped he would soon be able to see her more often, and then, abruptly, he moved away, and she saw it was because two of Nan’s servants were sidling up to overhear.

Mary knew that her desperate loathing and jealousy of Nan was not only on her mother’s account; it ran like a withering fire through her veins. The image of Nan had burnt
into her eyelids so that whenever she closed them she saw the slight supple figure enthroned in the amazing black dress that her daring French taste had dictated. It had cost more than five times the amount of Mary’s dress allowance for the whole year; thirty-two yards of black satin and velvet, and the King’s jewels gleaming out of all the blackness; and framed in it a thin white face, bold forehead and scarlet lips and black eyes that sparkled and, the ambassadors said discreetly, ‘invited conversation.’ ‘The Night Crow,’ Wolsey had called her; the She-Devil, Mary called her, as did all decent women, knowing the danger of her and her like to safe, ordered matrimony; she had been chased by a mob of women several thousand strong who yelled their curses on ‘the goggle-eyed whore,’ – and Nan had told of that herself, with shrill shameless laughter.

Would Mary ever forget her laugh? Never, never, never, she told herself in agony when she woke in the night to hear it ringing in her ears, hearing that laugh alone, and everywhere else the night-long silence. No more the sweet familiar sound of bells from the chapels where the monks had prayed for men’s souls at their appointed hours, the bells that had always comforted her childhood when she woke afraid of the dark. That laugh, ringing down through the years, had silenced them, it seemed for ever.

It was on an evening in early spring that it had sounded their doom; when the wind and slanting sunlight were sharp as thin steel and all the little thrusting flames of the crocuses in the garden at Hampton Court were tossed this way and that with the light shining through them, and out swept ‘the Lady’ (not wife yet, nor Queen) from the Palace, into the bowing, curtsying company on the terrace, out she swept all
in one flashing movement, chattering and calling, greeting first one and then another, and cried to Sir Thomas Wyatt, whom all the world knew to be mad for love of her, ‘Lord, how I wish I had an apple! Have you such a thing about you, my sweet Tom? For three days now I have had such an incredible fierce desire to eat apples. Do you know what the King says? He says it means I am with child. But I tell him “No!” No, it couldn’t be, no, no, no!’

And then out rang her laughter, sharper, wilder than the early March wind; and her thin nervous hands flew up like fluttering white birds to peck and clutch at the King’s pearls round her throat, pearls bigger than chick-peas, and she stared at all the shocked dismayed faces, and suddenly turned and fled from them, still laughing, back into the Palace, leaving only a ringing, mocking, frightened echo in the
appalled
hush she had created.

Now everyone knew. The six-year siege that the King had laid to Nan had been raised at last, the fortress yielded, which she had held through all his furious importunings while living under the same roof, his showers of gifts and titles, even through the general belief that she had long since been his mistress. It had been yielded at the exact moment when, his patience strained to snapping point and his resentment mounting to fury at the way she treated him, it had become necessary to apply the final spur.

Now Henry and his new servant Cranmer would have to stir themselves in good earnest to get Nan’s child born in wedlock. They did.