Free Young Bess by Margaret Irwin Page B

Cranmer was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury and had to swearallegiance 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 themonastic 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