Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (539 page)

Then she saw that lady riding down the hill, with all her many, towards the little figures in the plain; but they went so quickly that it was like a flight of blue doves in the sunlight below her. Then the Lady Margaret wondered who that lady must be, for she knew of none in that neighbourhood that could keep up so fair a state, except it were the King of Scots, and not even he, and that could not be the Queen of Scots, for she was a stout, black lady, whereas this one had been a tall woman with red-gold hair, such a one as she could have loved if she had been a man. And, at the thought that that woman was going to her lover and her lord, the Lady Margaret wept three or four tears, for that she would never do herself, and going back to her guards, she upbraided them for that they had let that lady pass unchallenged. But they said they ha seen no one.

CHAPTER V
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THE Princess Rohtraut of Croy, Tuillinghem and Sluijs, Duchess of Muijden and Lady Dacre, dowager of the North, was a vociferous old German woman who passed for being ill to deal with. She would cry at the top of her voice orders that it was very difficult to understand, and, when her servants did not swiftly carry these out, she would strike at them with the black stick that she leaned upon when she hobbled from place to place. This she did so swiftly that it was a marvel; for she was short and stout. She could not move without groans and wheezing and catching at the corners of tables and the backs of chairs. Nevertheless she would so strike with her stick at her servants, her stewards, the gentlemen attendant upon her son, the Lord Dacre, or even at knights, lawyers, or lords that frequented her son. She had told the King, Richard III, that he would come to no good end; she had told the Queen, Elizabeth Woodville, that she was an idle fool, and King Henry VII that his face was as sour as his wine. For that King, being a niggard, served very sour wine to his guests. Richard III had laughed at her; the Queen Elizabeth Woodville had gone crying with rage to King Edward IV. King Henry VII had affected not to hear her, which was the more prudent way. For her father, the Duke of Croy, who still lived, though a very ancient man of more than ninety, was yet a very potent and sovereign lord in Flanders, Almain, and towards Burgundy. Seventy thousand troops of all arms he could put into the field either against or for the French King, and eighty armed vessels upon the sea. The Emperor of Rome was afraid of him, for he was very malicious and had great weight with all the Electors from Westphalia to Brunswick and the Rhine. Moreover, though he himself rode no longer afield, his son, the brother of the Princess Rohtraut, was a very cunning, determined, and hardy commander. And that was to say nothing of the powers of the Dacres in England.

So those Kings and Queens did what they could least to mark the outrageous demeanour of this Princess. They did no more than as if she had been a court jester, and affected to wonder that she had once been a beautiful and young Princess, for love of whom her husband, then a simple esquire, had languished longer than need be in prison in Almain. Yet so it was.

This Princess spent the winter of most years, latterly, in London for the benefit of the climate. The summers until lately she had been accustomed to spend in Bothal Castle or Cockley Park Tower, which she hired of Sir Robert Ogle, who had lately been made Lord Ogle of Ogle. Upon the death of her husband she had inherited much land near Morpeth and she considered that she would have had much more had not the Lord Lovell, lately dead, seized so much of it by reason of his marriage with the Lady Rohtraut, the Princess’s daughter. The lawsuits about these lands were not yet concluded, and it was these that the knights of Cullerford and Haltwhistle were seeking to force from the Lady Rohtraut by keeping her imprisoned. The Princess had, however, by no means abandoned her claim to these lands and it was to prosecute her lawsuits that, each summer, she came to the North. She was otherwise a very rich woman, having many coronets, chains with great pearls, rubies, ferezets, silks, hangings, furniture and much gold. Moreover, she was for ever trafficking in parcels of land with the Ogles, the Bartrams, the Mitfords and other families round the town of Morpeth. In that way she had both occupation and profit, and she harried the leisure of the several receivers of her son, the Lord Dacre whom the King kept in London.

Now, upon a day, being the second day in July of the year 1486, this lady sat upon a chair resembling a high throne upon three stone steps covered with a carpet. She had behind her yet another carpet that mounted the wall and came forward over her head in the manner of a dais. This old lady inclined always to the oldest fashions.

Thus, upon her round, old head she had an immense structure that bent her face forward as if it had been that of our Father at Rome beneath the triple tiara. It was made of two pillows of scarlet velvet, covered with a net of fine gold chains uniting large pearls. Such a thing had not been seen in England for two or three score years, but the ladies at her father’s court had worn them when she had been a girl. For the rest of her, she was dressed in black wool with a girdle, from which there hung ten or a dozen keys of silver, steel, or gold inlaid with steel.

The room was fair in size, but all of stone and very dark because of the smallness of the windows. The roof went up into a peak. All painted the stone walls were, with woods and leaves, with fowlers among trees setting their nets, and maidens shaking down fruits, and men and women bathing in pools, and the vaults of the ceiling showed the history of the coffin of St. Cuthbert. Each history was divided from the other by ribs of stone painted fairly in scarlet with green scrolls. There you might see how the good monks set out from Holy Island, or how the coffin floated of itself, or how the women called one to the other about the Dun Cow. This room without doubt had formerly been some council chamber or judgment room of the Prince Bishop’s in old days. But its purpose was by now forgotten, and the Lord Dacre had bought the house lately, for he considered the practice of living always in castles to be barbarous and uncomfortable. It was his purpose to pull down this old stone house and build there a fair palace where he might dwell in comfort. But, for the time being, it suited his mother well enough to dwell there.

She was sitting in the chair like a throne, leaning forward and perusing a great book of accounts held up to her by an old fellow who knelt before her in black cloths with the badge of the Dacres upon one shoulder and the silver portcullis of Croy upon the other. The old lady puzzled over this tale of capons, pence, eggs, bolls of wheat, oats and the rest that her tenants owed her. She thought it was not enough.

And consequently messengers came in from the Prince Bishop, from the Dean, from the Chapter, down to the sacristan, to ask how it was with her health after her long journey from London city to Durham. She had come there the night before. And one brought her the offering of a deer, another of two fat geese, a third a salmon, a fourth a basket of strawberries grown beneath a southern wall. And, as each of these things was brought before her, she would lean forward and look upon it, and so she would lose her place in the book of accounts and scold perpetually at the old man that held it up for her.

In one of the deep, narrow window spaces stood a notable man of forty, stout and grave, with a brown beard cut squarely, and wearing a very rich blue cloak and blue round hat with a great white plume. He said nothing at all, but pared his finger-nails with a little knife. He looked between whiles out upon the high, wooded banks of the Wear that confronted his gaze across the river, and were all ablaze with the sunlight: once the Princess Rohtraut turned her head stiffly to have sight of him. But he was standing too far in the depth of the window, her chair being between one window and the other. So she cried out in a rough voice that was at once insulting and indulgent:

“This is very easy spying for King Henry.” Then she chuckled and added, “Do you hear me, Sir Bertram of Lyonesse? This is very easy spying for King Henry.”

He made no answer to this gibe, but instead he pushed open the window and carefully surveyed the deep gorge beneath him, for this place was new to him. The night before they had come in by torchlight, over a steep bridge above a black river. The gate into the tower had been opened for them only after long parleying, but he had perceived walls well planned and formidable, great heights in the blackness, and steep, up-and-down streets amongst which they went between strong, stone houses. But he had been aware that this city of Durham was a very strong place.

He had been set to sleep that night in a room that faced inwards, and rising in the morning he had seen that just before his face were the great stones of the wall surrounding and fortifying the cathedral. Beneath his gaze were two great towers, pierced with meurtrières, which are slits through which arrows may be shot. Between these two towers was a gateway which he doubted not had a double portcullis, devices for dropping huge stones and rafters upon any enemy that should break through the first portcullis and be captured by the second, so that they would be like rats in a trap. By craning his head out of his window he could see, further along, both to his right and to his left, tall towers in this inner wall, each tower having the appearance of an arch let into its face. But this Sir Bertram was an engineer well skilled in the plans of fortresses, and he knew that what appeared to be arches led up to two slanting holes in each tower, and that the slant of each hole was directed with a fell and cunning purpose. For, to each tower foot a steep and narrow street of the town came up. So, if any enemy should have won the town itself and should come up those streets, then those in the tower would set running down these slanting holes balls of stone weighing two, three or four hundred pounds. By the direction of the slantings, those balls of stone would run bounding down those narrow streets and cause dreadful manglings, maimings and death, principally by the breaking of legs.

By those and other signs, this Sir Bertram knew that here, even within the walled town was a fortress almost impregnable and dreadful to assault. This Bishop might well be a proud and disdainful prelate. He was safe, not only from foreign foes, but from his own townsmen, which was not so often the way with Bishops. For it is the habit of townsmen to be at perpetual strife with their Bishops, seeking to break in on them by armed force and to make the Bishops give up their rights and rents and fees in the towns, which if the Bishops could not prevent was apt to render them much the poorer. But at this Prince Bishop the townsmen could never come, so strong was this citadel within the town.

So he would become ever richer, not only for that reason but because of the great shrines of St. Cuthbert and of the Venerable Bede. To these, year in, year out, at all seasons and in all weathers, thousands resorted with offerings and tolls and tributes.

So this Sir Bertram perceived it would be no easy thing to humble this Palatine Prince even though the Percy had reported to King Henry VII that he could smoke out Bishop Sherwood at very little cost.

It was true that, as the Percy thought, King Henry VII heartily desired the downfall of this Bishop Sherwood. He had supported Richard Crookback and loved little King Henry. And indeed, Sir Bertram knew, for he had the King’s private thoughts, that the King would very willingly see the downfall not only of the Bishop Sherwood but of this whole see of Durham. For it was contrary to that Prince’s idea of kingship to have within his realm a Palatine county with a Bishop there having such sovereign powers that it was as if there was no King at all in the realm. But, to be rid of the bishopric, even King Henry thought would be impossible since it would raise against him all the Church and get him called heretic and interdicted as King John had been. So that the King would very willingly have had the Percy to act as his catspaw and make civil war upon Bishop Sherwood and so drive him out of the land. That might impoverish and weaken the see a little, but not much. For a Bishop is not like a temporal baron; though Sherwood be cast out another must succeed him and have all his rights and grow as strong or stronger.

It was upon these things that this Sir Bertram — a cool and quiet knight, loving King Henry and beloved by him above most men — meditated whilst that old lady cast up her accounts, and he trimmed his finger nails. So, when he leaned out of that bright window, he perceived how steeply perched was the house in which he was. Sheer down to the river ran rocky paths with here and there a tree. At the bottom was a high wall well battlemented and slit for archers to hold it. The river ran very swiftly. On it there was a fisherman casting his nets from an anchored boat. The boat tugged and tore so at its chain that even the practised fisherman had difficulty to stand. So the river must be very swift, and there would be no mining there.

On the other side of the river the banks rose as steeply and were clothed with trees. There cannon might be set against the town. But to shoot so far they must be great guns and the Percy had none of these, nor were there any large enough nearer than Windsor. If the Percy had them, it was difficult to think that he could drag them there into position, and all that would take a year or two years. So, this Sir Bertram, who had been sent there by the King to advise him, considered, as his first thoughts, that if the Earl of Northumberland attacked this Bishop Palatine he might take the city, but hardly the inner citadel, and never at all the castle within. Or, if the King lent him cannon, he might break the wall of the citadel.

On the other hand, having the Bishop shut up in the castle the Earl might starve him out — but this he could not do unless all the country round were friendly to the Earl and hated the Bishop. Without that there would be no doing it. And the same might be said of any project for dragging cannon on to those heights. For the cannon must be brought up narrow valleys where ambushes very easily could lie, and that could not be thought of in a hostile country.

The Percy had reported himself to King Henry as being cock of all the North parts; if that were true, he might very well be loosed upon the Bishop. But from conversations that he had had with the Lords Dacre and Ogle, as well as with the Abbot of Alnwick and lesser men, this Sir Bertram thought it was possible that the Earl Percy was not so strong nor yet so beloved in those parts as he would have the King believe. In that case, if he relied upon this Earl and this Earl’s faith, the King might get great discredit and no profit either in those parts or elsewhere. It was in order to study and inquire into these things that this cautious Sir Bertram was come into those parts. So he leaned upon the sill of the window and looked down upon the river that appeared two hundred feet below.