Young Bess (31 page)

The other two were caught in the ice and there found by the Russian fishermen the next spring, the crews all frozen in their transparent coffin, their gear and belongings intact, to be carefully returned to England by the Tsar.

But now it was still the summer of 1553, and the three ships still sailing out, while the two friends by the Palace window strained their eyes into the future.

‘When next they go,’ said Edward, ‘I will go, too. Old Thorne said he “wondered any prince could be content to live quiet within his own dominions.” I am not content. I will—’ his cough interrupted him.

Barney laid him down again in his bed.

The roses were like lamps filled with the level light of the sunset. Beyond them the river shone dark through the bright trees and their long slanting shadows.

The lawns and flowerbeds of the Palace gardens glowed iridescent and unreal like the transparent scene reflected on the surface of a soap bubble – a bubble floating on a ripple of tinkling music that drifted from a boat, clear as sounds can only be on the water; lutes were playing and boys’ voices singing to comfort the young King lying sick in the Palace.

In this idyllic scene, screened by the trees from any watching windows, Barney met his Princess once again at last.

He did not in the least want to do so.

Alarmed by the serious reports of her brother, she had ridden in haste to Greenwich to see him, but she had not been allowed to do so. Ever since the Admiral’s death she had been carefully prevented from seeing anything of her brother in private, and as she had been living a deliberately retired life she had had only an occasional meeting with him even among the crowds of the Court. Now her desperate attempt to force a meeting had failed, and all she had been able to do was to arrange this semi-clandestine interview with his reluctant page.

It was just five years since that night in early summer when Barney had partnered her for a few moments in the Hungarians’ Palace-Dance at the Admiral’s house and she had swung him aside into the window seat – to take off her tight shoes, she had said, but surely it was for more than that? She had let him take her hand and speak his love for her; she had smiled at him, and her glorious eyes had opened on him as though he alone were there in all the world; she had – he
never could believe it afterwards – but she had sprung up into his arms and kissed him.

And later he had learnt, through tittering deviations of backstairs gossip, that she had gone out that very same night alone with the Admiral in his barge.

Scandal had blackened her far more deeply in the months that followed; and the grudging Proclamation that the Council had at last issued to clear her name had, in the opinion of many, only confirmed it. ‘No smoke without a fire,’ was a good, knowing proverb. But nothing that he heard later, not even the confident assertion that the Admiral had been beheaded for getting the Princess with child (the clear proof of it being that none of the open charges against him merited the death sentence), nothing that he heard later could hurt Barney as did the memory of that summer night when she had kissed him – and then crept out in secret to the Admiral.

Even at the French Court it had hung about him, giving him a contemptuous distaste for the gay young women who would have been ready enough to flirt with the grave handsome youth. But he had found it easy to obey his little King’s anxious injunctions ‘for the avoiding of the company of the ladies.’

Now he had to meet the Princess again. She was nineteen by now and had changed, much, so he had heard on all sides; she had lived retired from the Court; she was often ill and, though no one could say what exactly was the matter with her, the doctors sometimes despaired even of her life. Yet she worked like a Trojan, she devoted herself to her, studies; she had become a paragon, not only of learning and theology, but
of maidenly modesty and discretion. If she had been a Roman Catholic like her sister Mary, she would undoubtedly have gone into a nunnery, so they said; and as it was, her dress was so simple and severely plain that it was almost that of a nun’s. Even when Mary of Guise, the French Queen Dowager of Scotland, had come to visit King Edward with all her ladies from the French Court, and set all the English Court ladies on fire to follow the French fashions, causing a complete revolution in feminine dress and hairdressing, the Princess Elizabeth had not changed her style one jot, had refused to wear jewels or even to curl her hair.

This had brought loud praise of her ‘maiden
shamefacedness
’ from the Reformers, who were busy condemning the new fashions, especially the ‘hair frounced, curled and double curled’ – a hit at the Lady Mary, who, a devout
Catholic
, could never resist new finery, however unbecoming.

The two sisters were regarded as the rival heroines of the two religious creeds. Little Lady Jane Grey, an ardent admirer of her now austere cousin, had flung herself into the controversy with all the eagerness of a schoolgirl in taking sides; she had refused to wear a cloth-of-gold dress that Mary had sent her, ‘It would be a shame to follow my Lady Mary’s example, against God’s word, and leave my Lady Elizabeth’s example, who is a follower of God’s word.’

The speech, duly reported, had infuriated (and alarmed) my Lady Elizabeth a good deal more than my Lady Mary; but Barney could not know that; nor would it have altered his firm opinion that in whatever way she dressed or did her hair she did it of set design, for her own ends – and those far from spiritual. Since in all Papist eyes she was illegitimate, she
would naturally plump for the Reformed Religion.

And the total abstinence from coquetry was too good to be true; he had the word of others for that. The new Spanish Ambassador to England had spoken of her as ‘a creature full of beguilement.’

Let her be! She would never again find it possible to beguile
him
!

So he waited on that glimmering golden evening that was filled like a crystal cup with light and music. The boys on the river were singing the song that the young Earl of Surrey had composed in his scarlet-coated pride and joy in a sportsman’s life. Barney hoped the sick boy would not recognise it, for he never cared to be reminded that his father had cut off Surrey’s head.

A slight figure was coming towards him through the trees with swift and resolute tread. Barney found himself looking at a pale girl in a plain dress of dull green, which for all its sober hue showed up marvellously the whiteness of her long bare throat, uncovered by any necklace, and the red-gold glint on her straight, demurely parted hair that was brushed as smooth and shining as satin. Her mouth was wide and the thin lips shut fast as if not to let any secret escape them; she looked sad and strained, a pale girl, rather tall, with no especial beauty, so he kept telling himself – but then he had to admit that her
eyes were really beautiful. They were the colour of the blue dusk in the shadow of the trees; he remembered now how they reflected the lights and colours round them, the pupils contracting or dilating till sometimes the eyes seemed pale almost as water, and at others nearly black.

And they were looking into his eyes, sinking into them, as once they had done on a night of early summer years before – and suddenly he knew that there was only one reason why he had consented to meet her thus; only one thing he wanted to ask of her: had she, that same night that she had kissed him, given her body to the Admiral.

He had no chance to ask it. In that same instant that he looked at them, those deep blue eyes changed again, the pupils narrowed, they were the colour of steel as she asked the question that she, not he, had chosen.

‘What the devil is this foolery of Dudley’s? He has just married his son Guildford in hugger-mugger haste to Lady Jane Grey, to her little liking, and to his own purpose only. You must know of it. It can mean but one thing – that he intends to rule England through her; get the King to alter the Succession and appoint Jane his heir to the throne.’

‘It must be for the sake of the true religion, Your Grace,’ said Barney uncomfortably. ‘If the Lady Mary came to the throne now, it would wreck the course of the Reformation.’

But it was difficult to explain why the Lady Elizabeth, so widely regarded as the representative of true religion, should also have been set aside.

She saw his thought and laughed. ‘Yes, he approached me first, all in the cause of the true faith! He quickly found I would have nothing to do with it. So he will set both Mary
and myself aside, as declared bastards, which is absurd, for if either is a bastard then the other must be legitimate. Jane’s a child for all she’s sixteen – and a little fool for all her learning. Her villainous parents are pushing her into this – to her ruin.’

She spoke the more emphatically as she saw the young man’s face settle into resistance to her argument. How wooden and conceited and disapproving he had grown – and she had once thought him so charming!

Barney on his side, having stiffened himself against any attempt to beguile him, was annoyed to find none made. Did she not think it worth while? Frigidly he put Edward’s view to her: he disapproved of his sister Mary; all his reign had been clouded by quarrels with her over her observance of the Mass in her private household; it had nearly caused a war with the Emperor, since she had got him to take her side. That was the danger – Rome – foreign interference—

‘I think,’ she interrupted crisply, ‘you must have been
listening
to Dr Latimer’s sermon last Sunday. In his opinion, “God had better remove both the Princesses from this Earth,” since we
might
marry foreign princes who
might
endanger God’s Church. But if Godly Dudley takes that hint, he’ll pull a hornet’s nest about his ears. He’ll do it in any case by putting Jane on the throne. The throne of England depends ultimately on the consent of the people. And the people will never stand it if the rightful heir is set aside.’

‘The consent of the people? Yes, Your Grace, and the people have given their consent to the new religion. Which the Lady Mary has rejected.’

‘So that they will reject her? Never think it! I know more of them than you do – you’ve been abroad,’ she added, to soften
this. ‘But indeed I know them, the commoners, well. Creeds don’t matter to them as much as people – or as the simple standards of right and wrong. Some of them may think it fun to toss a priest or two in a blanket, but they won’t stand seeing an innocent woman done out of her rights. And they like Mary all the better for standing up for them and insisting on her own form of private worship. They tell dozens of good stories about her pluck – how she roared at the Council, “My father made the best part of you out of nothing!” How they bawled back! It could be heard in the street outside! But so was the story. When the English tell stories about anyone it means they’ve taken him – or her – as their own. And she is not only comedy to them, she is romance. For so many years now she has been a legend, a princess cruelly shut up in Dolorous Guard. I will tell you something I saw myself only this spring; a simpleton of a girl who wandered the countryside, believing herself to be the Princess Mary! She told me that King Henry’s sister, the lovely Mary Rose, had appeared to her in a dream – she was sitting in a silver bath! – and told her, “You must go a-begging once in your life, either in your youth or in your age.” “And so,” said the poor fool, “I have chosen to do it in my youth.” You will think this not worth a straw – but straws show the wind – and the hold that my sister’s sad state has had on the people’s imagination.’

On hers too, it seemed, with such eager sympathy she told the queer little tale – until it occurred to Barney that she too, as well as Mary, had had to go a-begging in her youth; and might well see herself as another ill-used princess in Dolorous Guard.

For the first time it struck him that he himself had not been
the only person to be pitied in the affair of the Princess and the Admiral.

He knelt and kissed her hand. ‘I will do what I can with His Majesty for Your Grace,’ he murmured.

For answer she flicked him on the nose. ‘You are impertinent. Who said it was for
my
Grace?’

‘For my Lady Mary’s then.’ At last he was smiling.

But she sighed. ‘Why not say, for my Lady Jane’s? It’s she who would come off worst.’

She went back to Hatfield and wrote telling her brother how she had come to see him and been prevented. It is doubtful if he ever got the letter. He was fast getting worse. Dudley was having to work madly against time. He had married Jane to his son almost as quickly as one bought a cow (but Jane was still refusing to consummate the marriage).

Now he bought quantities of arms and was manning the Tower; twenty ships fully manned and gunned rode at anchor in the Thames on the thin pretext of an expedition to Barbary and the Spice Islands, which everyone knew would not take place.

Only one thing remained to secure his position; he must seize the persons of the two Princesses.

Two bodies of horsemen were sent to bring them to London in answer to urgent messages from their dying brother.

Mary started from Hunsdon. Elizabeth, just about to start from Hatfield, had a sudden suspicion that these pathetic appeals might be a trap to take them prisoner. What if they had been sent, not by the King, but by Dudley in his name?

Edward Seymour had kept King Henry’s death a secret for three days while he snatched the supreme power. Was John Dudley now playing the same trick?

She promptly went to bed and declared herself too ill to ride to London. It would gain time, but only for a few days, perhaps hours, and sooner or later she would have to declare herself either for Mary or Dudley.

It was an appalling dilemma, for she knew nothing of what had happened to Mary, and if she continued to disobey the summons to London, it might well lead to Dudley sending an armed force to carry her to the Tower, perhaps the block. On the other hand, if she threw in her lot with him, it would bring her into open enmity with Mary, who might even now be fighting his army – and winning.