Free Young Bess by Margaret Irwin

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 thenyou’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