Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims
Read Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims Online
Authors: Toby Clements
Contents
Factions in the Wars of the Roses
Part One: Priory of St Mary, Haverhurst, County of Lincoln, February 1460
Part Two: Across the Narrow Sea, February–June 1460
Part Three: The Road to Northampton Field, June–July 1460
Part Four: Marton Hall, County of Lincoln, September 1460
Part Five: To Kidwelly Castle, Wales, January 1461
Part Six: To Marton Hall, County of Lincoln, February 1461
Part Seven: To Towton Field, County of Yorkshire, March 1461
February, 1460
: in the bitter dawn of a winter’s morning a young nun is caught outside her priory walls by a corrupt knight and his vicious retinue.
In the fight that follows, she is rescued by a young monk and the knight is defeated. But the consequences are far-reaching, and Thomas and Katherine are expelled from their religious Orders and forced to flee across a land caught in the throes of one of the most savage and bloody civil wars in history: the Wars of the Roses.
Their flight will take them across the Narrow Sea to Calais, where Thomas picks up his warbow and trains alongside the Yorkist forces. Katherine, now dressed as a man, hones her talents for observation and healing both on and off the fields of battle. And all around them, friends and enemies fight and die as the future Yorkist monarch, Edward, Earl of March, and his adviser the Earl of Warwick, later to become known as the Kingmaker, prepare to do bloody battle.
Encompassing the battles of Northampton, Mortimer’s Cross and finally the great slaughter of Towton, this is war as experienced not by the highborn nobles of the land but by ordinary men and women who do their best just to stay alive. Filled with strong, sympathetic characters, this is a must-read series for all who like their fiction action-packed, heroic and utterly believable.
Toby Clements
was inspired to write
Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims
having first become obsessed by the Wars of the Roses after a school trip to Tewkesbury Abbey, on the steps of which the Lancastrian claim to the English throne was extinguished in a welter of blood in 1471.
Since then he has read everything he can get his hands on and spent long weekends at re-enactment fairs. He has learned to use the longbow and how to fight with the pollaxe, how to start a fire with a flint and steel and a shred of baked linen. He has even helped tan a piece of leather (a disgusting experience involving lots of urine and dog faeces). Little by little he became less interested in the dealings of the high and mighty, however colourful and amazing they might have been, and more fascinated by the common folk of the 15th Century: how they lived, loved, fought and died. How tough they were, how resourceful, resilient and clever. As much as anything this book is a hymn to them.
He lives in London with his wife and three children.
Winter Pilgrims
is his first novel.
Toby Clements
To Karen, with all my love.
Factions in the Wars of the Roses
Principal Yorkist leaders in 1460
Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, senior Yorkist claimant to the throne (died at the Battle of Wakefield, 1460).
Edward Plantagenet, Earl of March, son of the Duke of York (to become King Edward IV).
Edmund Plantagenet, Earl of Rutland, second son of the Duke of York (died at the Battle of Wakefield, 1460).
Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury – powerful magnate (executed after Wakefield, 1461).
Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick – Earl of Salisbury’s son, later known as the ‘Kingmaker’ having helped Edward IV to become king.
Lord Fauconberg – Earl of Salisbury’s brother, a fine soldier.
William Hastings – Earl of March’s friend and pimp.
King Henry VI – Son of Henry V, weak willed and possibly insane.
Margaret (of Anjou) – Henry VI’s strong-willed French wife.
Henry, 3
rd
Duke of Somerset – Margaret’s favourite, good soldier, louche.
In addition almost every other magnate in the land, including the Dukes of Buckingham, Exeter, Devon, the Earls of Shrewsbury, Wiltshire, Northumberland, as well as Lords Scales, Roos, Hungerford, Ruthyn and Clifford.
DURING THE 1450S
England was in a sorry state: her hundred-year war in France had ended in humiliation, law and order had broken down in the towns and shires, and at sea, pirates were everywhere so that the wool trade – which had once kept her coffers brimming – had withered to nothing. Meanwhile her king, Henry VI, was prey to bouts of madness that robbed him of his wits, and with no strong leader, his court had become riven by two factions: one led by the Queen – a strong-willed Frenchwoman named Margaret from Anjou; the other by Richard, Duke of York, and his powerful allies the Earls of Warwick and of Salisbury.
Relations between the two factions first broke down in 1455 and each summoned its men to arms. In a short sharp action in the shadow of the Abbey of St Albans in Hertfordshire, the Queen’s favourite, Edmund, second Duke of Somerset, was killed, and the Duke of York and his allies won the day.
But York’s ascendancy was short-lived. By the end of the decade the King had regained his wits and the Queen her control of the court, and the sons of those killed at St Albans sought vengeance for their fathers’ sakes.
In 1459 the Queen summoned the Duke of York and his allies to court in Coventry, where she was strong, and, fearing for his life, the Duke once more raised his banner and summoned his allies. The Queen – in the King’s name – did likewise and on the eve of St Edward’s Day in October that year, the two sides once more took the field, at Ludford Bridge, near Ludlow, in the county of Shropshire.
But the Duke of York and the Earls of Warwick and Salisbury were betrayed, and so, finding their position hopeless, they fled the country: the Duke of York to Ireland, the Earls of Warwick and Salisbury across the Narrow Sea to Calais.
And so now while those of the Queen’s faction strip the land of all that is left, men in England are waiting, waiting for the spring to come, waiting for the exiles to return, waiting for the wars to start once more.
Priory of St Mary,
Haverhurst, County of Lincoln,
February 1460
1
THE DEAN COMES
for him during the Second Repose, when the night is at its darkest. He brings with him a rush lamp and a quarterstaff and he wakes him with a heavy prod.
‘Up now, Brother Thomas,’ he says. ‘The Prior’s asking for you.’
It is not time for prime yet, Thomas knows, and he hopes if he is asleep, the Dean will let him alone and wake one of the other canons: Brother John perhaps, or Brother Robert, who is snoring. A moment later his blankets are thrown back and the cold grips him fast. He sits up and tries to gather them to him, but the Dean casts them aside.
‘Come on now,’ he says. ‘The Prior’s waiting.’
‘What does he want?’ Thomas asks. Already his teeth are chattering and there is steam rising from his body.
‘You’ll see,’ the Dean says. ‘And bring your cloak. Bring your blanket. Bring everything.’
In the lamp’s uncertain glow the Dean’s face is all heavy brows and a crooked nose, and the shadow of his head looms across the ice-rimed slates of the roof above. Thomas untangles his frost-stiffened cloak and finds his worsted cap and his clogs. He wraps the blanket about his shoulders.
‘Come on, come on,’ the Dean urges. His teeth are chattering too.
Thomas gets up and follows him across the dorter, stepping over the huddled forms of the other canons, and together they go down the stone steps to the Prior’s cell where a beeswax candle shivers in a sconce and the old man lies on a thick hay mattress with three blankets drawn up to his chin.
‘God be with you, Father,’ Thomas begins.
The Prior waves aside the greeting without taking his hands from under his covers.
‘Did you not hear it?’ he asks.
‘Hear what, Father?’
The Prior doesn’t answer but cocks his narrow head at the shuttered window. Thomas hears only the Dean’s breathing behind him and the gentle rattle of his own teeth. Then comes a distant rising shriek, pitched high, thin as a blade. It makes him shudder and he cannot help but cross himself.
The Prior laughs.
‘Only a fox,’ he says. ‘Whatever did you think it was? A lost soul, perhaps? One of the lesser devils?’
Thomas says nothing.
‘Probably caught in the copse beyond the river,’ the Dean suggests. ‘One of the lay brothers sets his snares there. John, it is.’
There is a silence. They ought to send for this John, Thomas thinks, the one who set the trap. He should be made to go and kill the fox. Put it out of its misery.
‘Quick as you can then, Brother Tom,’ the Dean says.
Thomas realises what they mean.
‘Me?’ he asks.
‘Yes,’ the Prior says. ‘Or do you think you are too good for such a thing?’
Thomas says nothing, but that is exactly what he is thinking.
‘Do it like this,’ the Dean says, miming with the staff, jerking its tip down on the skull of an imaginary fox. ‘Just above the eyes.’
The Dean has been to the wars in France, and is well known to have killed a man. Perhaps even two. He passes the staff to Thomas. It is almost as tall as him, stained at one end as if it has been used to stir a large pot.