Read Young Bess for Free Online

not have let the French land on the Isle of Wight.’
    But the French accomplished nothing by that; they soon had to take to their ships again, and after a short engagement were driven back out to sea. The fortune-tellers were now saying they had known all along that this was not the invasion England had to fear; her real danger, worse than any she had faced since the Normans landed, would not come for more than forty years, in the summer when there would be four noughts in the date, for an 8 is a double nought, one on top of the other, so the year ’88 would be quadruply unlucky. Bess asked why the unlucky noughts shouldn’t be for the invaders. ‘Anyway it’s naught to me,’ she said, for who cared what would happen more than forty years hence, when she would be an old woman, if indeed she could bear to live aslong as then? And anyway there could be small danger from foreign ships since the great French Armada had such poor success; everyone was boasting of England’s security behind her sea-walls; a blunt fellow even said as much to the Emperor Charles V in Spain, and his son, that cold, formal youth, Prince Philip.
    ‘Young Cheese-face,’ Henry still persisted in calling the Emperor, the nephew of his first wife, ever since Charles’s visit to England, to be betrothed to the Princess Mary, then a pretty child of six, who had not shared her father’s view of her prospective bridegroom’s long pale face and wedge-shaped chin, very like a slab of cheese. She had given an ardent hero-worship to her cousin, the young monarch on whose lands, her mother had told her, the sun never set; and who, still more important, was a very devout Christian. But the betrothal came to nothing; all that was over twenty years ago, and now the Emperor Charles was mobilising against the Protestant princes in his Empire, so that, in spite of his confidence in England’s splendid isolation, Henry was finding orthodoxy advisable, and the Queen’s broadmindedness untimely. (Besides, she had not borne him an heir. ‘Impossible! she is so virtuous!’ said the wags.) So Anne Askew was burnt for denouncing the Mass; though the following month Henry tried to get the King of France to join with him in abolishing it. Bess found politics difficult to understand. Anyway, they were now at peace with France, and the King spoke so beautifully on charity and concord to his Parliament that they all wept.
    But Parliamentarians’ tears, and the King’s charity and concord, did not lessen Bess’s anxiety one jot, and there camea moment in the garden when the confirmation of it stared her in the face, stared up at her from the path, a sickly white paper scrawled with black writing which told her at one glance that the King had finally given over his faithfully devoted wife to the power of the beast. It was an indictment of Catherine Parr, and Henry had set his name to it.
    No sooner had Bess seen it than the Chancellor Wriothesley, who had been Chancellor Cromwell’s secretary and helped work his fall, came hurrying back between the clipped yew hedges.
    ‘A paper!’ he panted, ‘a scrap of paper – has Your Highness seen it?’
    Bess shook her head, lifting wide blue eyes to his, and pointing at what she had apparently all this time been staring – a butterfly that had perched on her bright shoe, mistaking it for a flower.
    ‘Oh, you have disturbed him!’ she exclaimed reproachfully as it flew away. ‘A paper, did you say? Is it important?’
    Mr Wriothesley had already stuffed it into his sleeve, violently cursing the tailors who could not invent any safer receptacle in men’s clothes, while women went hung round with pockets.
    He departed as fast as, or rather faster than courtesy permitted; a beast padding away in his soft broad velvet slippers, and the little slits of satin over the toes like claws in the sunlight, Bess thought, standing there stock still until he disappeared.
    The garden was all still round her, cut into sunlight and