The King's Grey Mare (58 page)

‘How can I hear at this distance?’

‘The Hog – is – dead!’
Bray bawled, long-drawn-out notes.
‘Henry lives!
Vivat Rex!’

‘Does he say – is it …’ Elizabeth said hesitantly.

Bray, desperate to impart his message, turned and seized a banner from an esquire.
A soiled despoiled banner, furled and carried as proof of conquest, as booty.
He unrolled it, and for a moment the White Boar ramped and snarled on an azure ground.
Then Bray in savage pantomime, flung it to the cobbles, stamped upon it, and for good measure, spat.
Over his head the Red Dragon flamed, tongue and claws like gouts of fire.

Elizabeth turned from the window.
Grace looked at her and knew that the warmth, the intimacy between them was over for that day.
Triumph and crystal hardness sat on the worn, dewy face.

‘Gown me,’ she ordered.
‘I must look my best.
My saviour is come.’

Jasper will breed for us a Dragon,

Of the fortunate blood of Brutus is he,

A Bull of Anglesey to achieve,

He is the hope of our race …

Welsh Song (ca.
1484)

The glory was still with him.
He sat in the Bishop of London’s Palace, while outside, September, as if in penance for wild August, brightened the city with a day of gold.
Like a sovereign insect in the hive’s deepest cell he sat, able at last to determine the things which excitement and trepidation had snarled together in a wanton skein.
For the first time in many days he could catch his breath; the swift nightmare and the ecstasy of conquest were equal; the nightmare fled and the glory remained.
Through the high window’s diamond panes the sun sparkled.
One dusty beam played downward and rested on Henry’s head so that he was at the end of a tunnel of light.
He felt his mind restoring itself to order and to plan.
Part of the glory was that, thanks to the Stanleys, he had quit himself well.
In truth they had done it all; they and Northumberland had placed the day in Henry’s lap.
He thought: I am indebted.
A little of the glory fled, leaving watchfulness, and an irony that made his long lips smile.
They will expect fair payment, he told himself.
And what shall I give them?
Only the honour of being ever under my eyes.
For if they betrayed one king, what might they not work upon his successor?

They would do nothing against him, for they would never have the chance.
Before him on the table lay Richard’s crown, taken from a thorn bush in the field and placed on Henry’s head with great drama and reverence by Lord Stanley.
Henry took it up and held it in the sun-shaft.
It was rather misshapen; the side of the slender ellipse was dented almost beyond repair.
There was the half print of a hoof in the soft gold, and one of the delicate trefoils was broken off.
Although it had been cleaned it still bore, deeply ingrained, traces of blood and mud.
He lifted it higher; it weighed very little; it had been built to circle a battle-helm.
The hard joyless glory left him as he stared at the ruined bauble, his imagination augmenting it with a head, a face.
A raised visor, a white face distorted with fury.
He would not easily forget that face.
Richard was dead, hacked almost to pieces by Stanley’s men.
Yet even thinking of that last charge when the demented figure on the white horse came straight for him, started the sweat upon his hands so that the crown moved in their grasp.

He had been no more than a bowslength away; so near that he could see the hairs on the muzzle of the great white horse, the frog of the deathly hoof raised to strike.
He could see the bloody whites of Richard’s eyes, the froth-filmed teeth, the razor edge of the whirling axe, that red-edged axe shaped to shear a man in twain.
He could hear the screams of ‘Richard!’
– the tribal cries of the Household – the blind exaltation of the handful of men who rode behind the Boar on that last lunatic charge, their lances like teeth, their armour running blades of light.
Across Redmore Plain at him they came, a sweeping wave of menace.
He had thought, sharply: So this is my end.
Standing on the little knoll whence he had watched the battle thus far in safety, he had clutched at Jasper’s mailed arm with frantic fingers.
Then Richard was almost upon him; he had felt his tongue cleaving to his palate; shamefully, secretly, had felt the spurt of wetness on his thigh.
He had watched his standard-bearer, William Brandon, go down to meet the charge and be swept away by a blow from that axe, the Dragon falling, undulating gracefully, its scarlet deepened by Brandon’s blood.
The giant Cheney had stepped out to do battle and Richard had sliced him through the throat.
And Henry had taken his first pace, backwards, to fly, anywhere, to bury himself in the bushes, never to see or speak again.

Then Sir William Stanley had come, so tardy that Henry would always resent him for it.
At the very last of last moments he had ridden up with a sparkling pristine force, red roses and fresh mounts, like actors on cue but only just.
They had smashed into the flank of Richard’s little company, translating it in moments from a monster of hell to a toil of severed limbs and massacred flesh.
He had not watched while they killed the King; not through any squeamishness but only through the necessity to turn and vomit his relief into the grass.
None saw; the pallor he later presented was marked down as reverence to the moment when Stanley crowned him in the field.

He set the crown slowly down upon the table.
As soon as it left his fingers he felt warm, for it had been like touching a ghost.
He would have a new crown fashioned, a crown of greater magnificence.
Emeralds in honour of the Dragon’s green ground.
He looked up to where his banner hung.
The Dragon was so powerful, with its rippling body and serpentine tail, its fierce gory colour.
Men said that the Dragon had originally come from the sea; so it possessed all the inexorable tumult of the ocean.
Against the sea even fire was powerless.

He pressed his bare bony hands together, and squinted into the floating gold sunlight.
Like a myriad motes of debris in the bright ray, the weird talismen and beliefs, his since childhood, arose, pushing back all uncertainty.
In one trembling moment omnipotence crystallized, and he was wise enough to know he must work to enslave it.
The first lesson was to profit from the mistakes of others.
Richard Plantagenet had trusted his ministers and was now bloody defiled carrion in the mean house of the Greyfriars at Leicester.
What of his predecessors?
Where had their paths forked, their feet trodden in error?
Detail, thought Henry, is the great instructor.
On the table lay a pile of tomes, heavy ledgers bound with brass.
The Household Books, the Grants from the Crown, the Privy Purse.
The Docket Book, the Parliamentary Statutes.
He pulled one near at random and opened it.
The pages smelled musty, with a faint reek of incense.
Even without looking at the rusty writing he would have known whose reign this was.
From The Issue Rolls he read:

To John de Serrencourt, who came to witness Queen Margaret’s coronation and report the same: thirty-three marks.

A hundred pounds to be paid out of the customs on wool and skins at Southampton, to William Andrews, for his services during his attendance on the Queen in foreign parts.

Skipping a few pages, he read:

To Jean de Jargean, minstrel, 50 livres for his succour of the King in great melancholy.

To the masters of Alchemy, 2001 to the manufacture of gold for the King’s pleasure.

Henry opened another book and read from the Acts of the Privy Council: ‘This day Wm Cleve, King’s chaplain and clerk of the works, made supplication for money to pay the poor labourers their weekly wage.
This he has the utmost pain and difficulty to purvey.’

Slowly he closed both books.
Dust rose and vanished.
So, Henry.
Men would not hear the later Henry miscall that saint, that dupe.
Half-brother to Uncle Jasper, a vein of royalty to be cherished for Lancaster’s sake.
This did not alter the fact that, according to the Books, he had left the realm almost bankrupt.

He reached for another tome.
Gayer writing here, bright with gold leaf

Writ the feast of St.
Crispin and Crispinian, the sixteenth year of King Edward the Fourth:

To John Goddestande, footman, ten marks; for purveying of six ells of sarcenet and three of velvet, and two counterpanes, cloth-of-gold, furred with ermines, for the pleasure of Mistress Shore.

Henry sucked in his lip.
Whoremaster.
His righteousness was tempered by not a little envy.
For a moment he grudged Edward the years of hot beds and willing bodies; he remembered his own stunted youth.
He had been driven to learning and piety as a substitute for more earthly pleasures.
Always subservient; to Uncle Jasper, Lord Herbert, Francis of Brittany.
And yet there had been sweet moments.
Maud Herbert had loved him truly, and of her he had had his pleasures, fleeting thing though it was.
Maud still loved him and she was here with him in London.
He would not, however, like Edward flaunt his concubine to the derision of Europe and the deficit of the Privy Purse.
He would never on Crispin’s Day, when Harry of Lancaster had done so nobly at Agincourt, defile the Household Book with entries such as these.
Particularly when he was wedded to Edward’s daughter…

He opened another ledger, thin and small.
The reign of King Edward the Fifth.
The bastard king; the king that never was.
He looked blindly at the expenditure, clothing for knights, grants in preparation for the coronation.
He stroked the book, and closed it, drawing another ledger, the latest, towards him, bending to a random page.

An annuity of £20 to Joan Peysmarsh for her good service to King Richard in his youth and to his mother.

To Master John Bently, clerk of poor estate, four pound to defray his expenses at Oxford University.

He pulled the Statute Book towards him.
From it he learned that Richard had halved the Crown dues on eighteen cities, had forbidden the benevolence tax begun by Edward the Fourth; had loaded the poor with gifts and so doing had depleted the estate of many barons.
He read on and was taken aback by what he saw.
The lifting of taxes, together with the financing of Richard’s last battle, had brought the country again to the brink of ruin.

To Katherine Bassingbourne, goodwife of York, a pension.
For my Lord Bastard, two doublets of silk …

The Book closed of its own accord as his hand left it.
The terrible face snarled under the lifted visor, the death-white horse reared.
The bloody axe hung, ready to sever with its aching edge sinew and muscle and nerve.
It was full time to forget this demon; this man whose mild writings could bring shameful fear to Henry, the Dragon of Cadwallader.
He sat still, calling up his ancestors.
The great Uther Pendragon and his greater son, Arthur, not dead but sleeping under green banners and silence.
Down through a female line past Owen, the dreamers and warriors of Wales; through Llewellyn, Rhys, Gruffydd, Owain, Maredudd, Hywell, to the misted splendour of Cadell, Rhodri, Merfyn, and last, the Lady Ethil, of the Isle of Man.
Although no herald had yet traced it, there was the belief that somewhere beyond Uther, Noah’s virtuous blood ran deep.
Dragons, two by two …

‘I am immortal!’
said Henry the dreamer.
While Henry the realist countered: ‘So I shall remain!’

A thump on the door made him quickly compose himself.
He was reminded by the slither of halberds outside that he was safe in this lodging, as in all his lodgings.
At his word a young man entered.
He was impeccably liveried, flat cap on his head, high collar cutting into his gullet.
On his breast was the royal insignia: H.R.
and in his hand he bore a tall pike.
Henry looked him over, pleased with his own innovation.

‘Well, Master Yeoman Warder?’

‘Bishop Morton is here, your Grace.’

Henry frowned.
His long face grew lugubrious with annoyance but he did not chide the youth.
Though it was vital that his whims, like his orders, should obtain, reiteration in this case served better than scolding.

‘Have you forgotten already?
We are not ‘Your Grace’.’

The warder blushed.
He tried to bow, but the stiff collar choked him.
Strangling, he said: ‘Your Majesty.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Henry gently.
‘The term ‘Your Grace’ applies to Bishops and Earls and Dukes, a common thing.
There is only one Majesty, as there is only one God.
Bid the Bishop enter.’

Morton carried a heavy sheaf of papers and a little coffer worked with gold filigree.

‘You are tardy, my lord,’ said Henry.

‘Aye, but through no fault of mine.
I thought I had taken the sweating sickness.
Praise God, I still am whole.’

‘I myself have prayed against this sickness,’ said Henry.
‘Then, I thought: no Providence could be so cruel … I stayed here, with faith in my talisman.’
He indicated an oblong box, age-mildewed, hanging beneath the Dragon banner.