Young Bess (7 page)

On the last day of that March of 1533 Cranmer was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury and had to swear
allegiance to the Pope before the high altar – but, four days earlier, he arranged another and more private ceremony before the altar of the Palace Chapel in Westminster, where he forswore this sacred oath in front of a notary and other witnesses, declared that he put the King’s will above the Pope’s, and that whatever he would have to swear at his consecration was only an empty formula. He did not like being consecrated in deliberate perjury, but Henry had another word for it, which was ‘compromise.’

It took Cranmer under two months of the Sacred office thus achieved to find the marriage of Henry to Katherine of Aragon to have been ‘null and void from the beginning.’ That was just before the end of May, and on the first of June he crowned Nan Queen of England; King Henry was excommunicated that summer; and on the 7th of September Elizabeth was born.

Just when and where Nan’s marriage to Henry occurred in this sequence nobody quite knew: but Cranmer pronounced it to have been ‘good and valid.’ Its lack of ceremony was made up for at her coronation, when all London was draped in scarlet and a conduit ran claret and white wine through Cheapside all the day – but, so the seventeen-year-old Mary heard with delight, in all those gaping crowds there were few heads bared, and fewer still to shout ‘God save the Queen.’

But Nan still held her head high, and did so until just three years later she laid it on the block. That altered nothing – to Mary. Nan had won.

In twin birth with her child, Elizabeth, the Church of England was born; and the break with Rome, with the Pope and the
monastic orders, made complete. The bells were silenced.

Nan had won. Her daughter would win. Mary’s despondent nature was certain of it. But one comfort she could clutch to herself; she had been born of a woman who loved the King, and Elizabeth had not.

She looked up from her brooding reverie to speak to Elizabeth, perhaps to say that very thing – she did not want to, but often words came out of her mouth and hung on the air for her to hear them, aghast, before she knew she had spoken them.

But it did not matter now if she spoke them or not, for Elizabeth had tiptoed softly away.

Bess went to find Edward. He was reading St Paul’s Epistles in Greek with Jane Grey, while their tutor, pretending to correct their exercises, snored murmurously near the fire, its light flickering upwards over his finely cut nose.

She sat down on the bench beside them, and the three fair heads bent together over the book and talked in whispers.

‘They’ve sent for old Mumpsy-mouse,’ said Edward in his even little voice. (Bess’s nickname had at once become the children’s name for Cranmer.) ‘He’ll be coming down by water. That means he’s not likely to last the night, and I shall be King tomorrow.’

Bess, callous enough herself about her father’s death, was startled, not for the first time, by Edward’s lack of feeling, for Henry adored his son. She longed to tell him he was an ungrateful cub, but one doesn’t say these things to a boy who will be King tomorrow. Probably Jane had influenced him, since she openly hated her parents.

But Jane was not interested in current affairs; she was wrestling furiously with a tough passage of Greek prose. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘Paul got it wrong himself.’

‘Very likely,’ said Bess. ‘Pope Clement told the theological students at Rome never to read him, as it would spoil their style.’

Both the younger children froze at mention of the Pope. It was not done. ‘Have you been talking to Mary?’ Edward asked severely.

‘Yes, but not about religion. She is very unhappy at the King’s dying.’

‘Why should she be?’ said Edward. ‘I shall see to it that she is properly treated, even though she is a Papist.’

‘If we don’t finish this epistle,’ said Jane, ‘we shall be whipped tomorrow.’

‘I shan’t,’ Edward reminded her. ‘Barnaby might.’

‘Yes, Your Highness has a whipping-boy. It isn’t fair,’ she added under her breath.

‘What is the day of the month?’ Bess asked suddenly.

‘The 27
^th
,’ they told her, and knew why she had asked. If the King lived till tomorrow morning, the Duke of Norfolk would die. His execution had been fixed for dawn on Friday, January 28th. But if the King died tonight, then Norfolk would live. His son, Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, had been beheaded nine days ago, after a speech of furious defiance when, like a stag at bay, he had stood and gored the King and Council with his words.

None of the children spoke of him, for they had worshipped him from afar as a scornful god who had scarcely noticed their presence; they had yelled with shrill delight as
they watched him at tennis, winning game after game, or in the tilt yard, charging down on his horse White Cherry, as he wrote himself, on

they had sung his songs, all in the modern Italian manner which made other verse seem so tame and old-fashioned; and envied the Irish girl, Fair Geraldine, to whom he had written them.

But his father Norfolk, a grumpy fierce old man, they did not like; it was therefore possible to discuss his chances.

‘Mary will be sorry if he lives,’ said Edward, who had heard how Norfolk had tried to bully her into submission to her father’s divorce. ‘He told her once that if she were
his
daughter he’d knock her head against the wall till it was as soft as a baked apple.’

‘It’s that already,’ said Bess, and they all giggled. Somehow it was irresistible to make a butt of Mary when they got together, but she felt guilty and uncomfortable in doing so; poor old Mary, it wasn’t fair, especially just after she had been talking to her almost like a sister – well, a half-sister.

‘Why are you always rubbing your nose?’ Edward asked his sister suddenly.

‘I’m not,’ she said indignantly, and then in
self-contradiction
, ‘it tickles.’

Ever since Tom Seymour had tweaked it in that game of Blind Man’s Buff she had felt anxious about her nose. Why did he say he’d know it in a thousand? Did he think it would be big or
bony? She could feel just the faintest hook in the bone, but then all the heroines in the romances had aquiline noses. Still—

‘You’ll make it red if you go on,’ said Edward, and buried his own in St Paul again.

Silence fell on them all except for the gentle rhythm of Mr Cheke’s faint snores and the sudden spurts and crackle in the fire.

It was a wet windy night. The draught blew the woodsmoke down the chimney and the candle-flames this way and that. Bess noticed a winding-sheet of wax forming in one of them; was it for her father or for Norfolk? She shivered, and glanced at the others, but they had noticed nothing; they were deep in their Greek. ‘They’re only children,’ she thought.

Mr Cheke woke with a snort as a puff of smoke blew into his face; he jerked up, saying, ‘Well, well, well!’ and tried to pretend that he was exclaiming at something he was correcting in the exercises and that he had not been asleep at all. The little girls smiled slyly at him; they had a great admiration for him – Jane because he was the best Greek scholar in Cambridge; Bess because he was so handsome and aristocratic looking that no one would guess his mother kept a small wine-shop in a back street there.

‘A forfeit!’ she cried, in what Jane thought a very pert way. ‘Whoever falls asleep must tell a story!’ And instead of reproving her, as Jane thought he would and should (again it wasn’t fair), he laughed in a shy pleased way as though she had paid him a compliment. So they all sat beside him, hunched on the hearthrug, with their hands held out from their wide sleeves to the spluttering blaze of the logs as the rain fell down the great chimney, and he told them the story
of Saint George of Merry England and the Dragon. He told it well and dramatically, making Saint George speak in Latin in a very grand voice, and pointing out a great dragon with fiery eyes that they could all see in the fire. The girls listened with grave attention, but Edward startled them all by bursting out laughing. It was the more astonishing as no one had ever heard him laugh before; a pale little smile was the most he had ever achieved. Nor could he tell what he had found so funny in the story; he just went on laughing in that shrill childish treble, to their consternation, for no one in the Palace should do it on the night the King was dying, and for Edward of all people to do it was so odd as to be uncanny.

Jane said in her sedate fashion, ‘They say Crassus laughed only once in his life, and that was at an ass eating thistles.’

‘But St George isn’t an ass,’ said Elizabeth rather sharply.

‘Hee haw! Hee haw!’ brayed Edward weakly, wiping his eyes; then began to laugh again.

Was he bewitched? He looked as though he had been suddenly transformed into a goblin, with that small mouth stretched from one to other of the immensely long ears that peaked up above his straight hair, and the little round button of a chin turned to a sharp point. Was he really a changeling? Bess asked herself with a twinge of childish fear.

Mr Cheke in his kind way said he was over-tired, excited, he had got another of his colds, and had better go to bed and he would tell Mother Jack to bring him a hot posset to drink. Mrs Jackson had been Edward’s nurse ‘as a child,’ he would explain gravely, but he still called her Mother Jack and got her to tuck him up in bed on every possible excuse; Bess said it was why he had so many colds.

She decided to go to bed too; it was better than doing nothing. She left the room with exaggerated grace, for she thought Mr Cheke was looking at her.

But in bed she could not sleep. She lay watching the firelight through her bed-curtains, hearing the rain
drip-dripping
, and all the time the minutes too were dripping past; old Mumpsy-mouse was slipping along down the black
rain-drummed
river in his barge, landing at Westminster, coming up to Whitehall Palace, coming into that awful room where the King lay already unconscious, the greatest King England had ever had, people said, and there he lay, a rotting hulk, with the life drip-dripping away from him.

She shivered and huddled the blankets more closely round her. All the warmth imparted by the silver warming-pans seemed to have gone chill; the sheets were cold as cere-cloths to wrap the dead in, so she told herself with an almost enjoyable thrill in working up her own fears.

The great clock outside tolled out midnight: one, two, three, four—; if that hulk still kept its fierce hold on life, by eight o’clock tomorrow old Norfolk, listening to the rain, and the minutes dripping past, would then be beheaded. Would they go down to hell together, the King’s hands gripping his servant’s throat?

She did not care for old Norfolk, but he was in ‘that very narrow place, the Tower, from which few escape except by a miracle,’ and that place exercised a terrifying spell on her imagination; was it because of her mother’s last hours there? Or because – because somewhere in the unwritten future she might find herself floating down the rain-drummed river to the Water Gate that is only opened to admit traitors?

Past and future, death and life, the air all round her was full of forces struggling together in the dark, and behind them, flowing on endlessly, relentlessly, the dark river of Time, bearing them all away.

With a sudden panic-stricken movement she leapt out of the bed, pulled on a long, fur-lined bedgown, thrust her bare feet into a pair of heelless embroidered slippers, and went hastily, stealthily out of the room.

The Palace was alight, silent, waiting. She ran along the passage and paused as she saw at the end of the long gallery the armed halberdiers standing at attention like statues against the tapestry that moved in the wind so that its patterned figures looked more alive than they. What use were they? They could not hope to bar Death from stalking down the gallery, in through that door at the end. She slipped back behind the corner of the passage as she heard the faint sound of a voice, very low, but fast, urgent, almost desperate, coming near, then further away till lost in silence, then back again, up and down, up and down the gallery. She peeped round the corner again and saw Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, walking there with his friend Sir William Paget, the Secretary of State, and talking, talking as if he would never stop, flinging out his arm every now and then in an abrupt, angry gesture. Sometimes Paget would lay a hand on it as if to restrain him, and once he spoke, clearly, ‘Too many irons in the fire,’ she heard, but that was all, and indeed he had little chance to speak through that low persistent torrent of words. Their shadows ran up against the wall as they advanced, Paget’s thick nose and two-pronged beard sticking out of his great fur collar in absurd exaggeration, while Edward
Seymour’s face ran into a long narrow point; the shadows grew, then dwindled, then came again, then away.

The clock boomed out a single note. It was one o’clock, it was morning, it had only to strike seven more times and then—

The door at the end of the gallery opened. The two men walking up and down stopped dead, their faces turned towards the open door and the little close-knit group of figures that came out of it, walking very slowly with bent heads and a faint intermittent murmur of voices, just as though they were mumbling in church, Bess thought. Old Mumpsy-mouse was in the middle of them, his face yellow and glistening with sweat under the waving torches; and, yes, with tears; he drew his sleeve across it and mopped it as he came up to Seymour and his friend, and said on a beautiful low yet clear note, like the toll of a bell:

‘All is over. His Majesty has died in the faith of Christ.’

They were all coming on now down the gallery towards her. Bess had slid back behind the shadowed corner of the passage and now fled noiselessly down it. Had they seen her, were they coming after her? She dared not look back, she turned down a little stairway of only three or four steps, sped along another corridor, swung round a corner and fell against a man. She began to sob and gasp something about a nightmare.