We Speak No Treason Vol 1 (22 page)

The royal child, the Plantagenet. The child of my beloved.

HERE THE MAIDEN’S TALE IS BROKEN

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In mediaeval times, boar was spelled ‘bore’ and it is thought that Richard’s device was an anagram for EBOR (York).

Mankind
(
ca.
1470)

I
fear something’s amiss with my eyes. A pale shadow dims them at moments. Should it continue, I shall go back to the wise woman, over the river at Southwark, among the stews and taverns which flourish as briskly as in the old days. She will sell me the toadstone and whisper her charms, placing her hand on my brow, and I shall almost believe it is my sweet lady. Although her hands are sisters to the lilies, and I lose no chance of kissing them; this I do needlessly, often. We are good friends, if such a thing is possible between a Queen and a mocker, a diverter of courtiers, one who hides his wit behind idiocy and keeps a well-tuned ear. I am content; I serve the one I love; men treat me with respect, and he likes me, for he pays me, and that is great bounty from such as his Divine Majesty. I see him now, wandering in the pleasaunce, a tatterdemalion, wine-stains down his sparse robe, scratching in his little account-book. His long face is drawn in despair over some outrageous extravagance, such as a tun of malmsey for the Spanish Ambassador last month, or one dozen candles for my lord Stanley’s apartments. Poor fellow! Henry, ’tis a passing heavy business, this being a King.

This evening I will play cards, with my lady. I will sit on the floor for there are few chairs since the last inventory, and the ladies will have their cushions strewn around us. There are a few pleasures left in this life, if one knows how to look at them, as one might watch a disguising, absorbing its message until one is drawn in thread by thread, to become part of the picture.

We do not speak of King Richard now. Years past, she would lean the barest inch closer to me, give that small anxious cough and say:

‘Tell me, Sir Fool, do you remember that revel when...’

And I would say, very low: ‘A dreadful night, madam; when the mummers’ wildman costumes caught fire and poor Geffrey was burned...’

Of necessity, I am a diverter. Laughing, she’d fall a little woeful at the remembrance of a real tragedy, but be amused by my evasiveness and continue the game, and I would know she thought of the last Christmas before the turning of the tide... I have these troublesome eyes, and she laughs less than once she did; she looks weary, anxious about Arthur, for all his beauty frail enough to be blown off by a sneeze. Once, her mind was full of torment and courage and resignation, and wore mourning—truly. The darkness of it shone in her glance.

I do not know how old I am exactly, but I must be past my half century. My Queen has great understanding, and should I repeat the rhyme I pleased her with yesterday she merely smiles like the sun. Should she desire more riotous sport, dancing, tumbling, she will call one of the younger men, Scot, or Jakes, more agile than I. It is not that my mind is wanting; more that I seem to live in two dimensions, past and present, and sometimes the two merge and the former cuts sharply through the soft outlines of reality. There I am back again, in the merry days of my lady’s father, whom God assoil. The Maiden dances, dances, alone on the gallery. Was it only six moons she stayed at court? It seemed a lifetime; would to all the Saints it had been so!

King Henry has a stable full of fools. If my sight worsens, I may be blessed with a small pension and end my days in a monkery. Yet I cannot brook the thought of parting from my sweet lady. I have loved two women in my life, and they could not have been less alike, save for one trait. Pure goodness, of which many prate but few observe, for all the Masses that they hear. The court is still full of the small triumphs and betrayals which echo the bigger ones that cost the lives of men, and kings. Under the glitter, the ritual splendours, lie serpents, dormant now, but once they writhed and clung and their fangs bit deep.

Two women. One whom I have loved since she was old enough to run and tug my flaunting sleeve, beg a conundrum or a game. Elizabeth, growing into a tall flower, a beauty, destined to be Queen-Consort of England soon after the battle-blood was sunk into the ground and the dark star of Richard Plantagenet fallen for ever. The Maiden was not a deal older when I gave her my heart, and she laughed at me. She was a one for laughing. Her portrait is a second skin over my mind: her huge eyes of dark velvet, and her tiny swift body, flashing through the forbidden ways, diving with a lilt under the arms of startled guards; dodging the Dowager Duchess of Bedford in all places at once, so that even I with my trained young agility could not match her.

We have had little ado here since the business of Master Perkin Warbeck. I stood in the courtyard the day they brought him in chains to confront the King. He had masqueraded as the Duke of York, my royal lady’s brother, vanished long since in the bloody mist that wreathes the Tower, along with the Prince of Wales, and their uncle’s reputation. Golden-haired Warbeck was a Plantagenet; one glance was enough to show, and the thought that came to me was King Edward’s fondness for a pretty face, and that not always of Elizabeth Woodville. Our sovereign faced the tall rebel. Changing emotions frolicked on his sallow countenance like squirrels on a lawn. He reddened and bit his lips, and under all the just anger and coldness I saw something else, gone in an eyelid’s bat—a glance like a hairshirt, a demon-haunted look.

I lingered near my lady, for I reckoned she might feel sad at the sight of such an obvious relative and a bastard. For a short space she too had known the shame of bastardy, until King Henry, in his goodness, legitimized her for their holy union. I always thought him born under a lucky planet, for had his lovely consort’s brothers still been alive, he would have had to choose between her and the throne of England. Some men truly attain bliss.

I had a little monkey on my shoulder that day, and it clung close, binding its hard scaly tail about my throat. How long since they hanged Perkin? I forget. Kings are no longer addressed ‘Your Grace’—their new title befits better the truly divine, the sons of Cadwallader; His Majesty is negotiating with Spain for the hand of the Infanta Caterina for Prince Arthur. That boy looks more fitted for rest and cosseting than the marriage mart.

I have been married; she died, of the new plague, the sweating sickness brought over by our King’s French mercenaries when they came in 1485. I scarcely remember her; I have loved but two women.

T
here are particular days which seem good, when the sun shines brighter and the cobbles are not so hard under the soles of new shoes with the upturned points; on such a day I strolled down Jewry and up Chepe to visit my mother, like a dutiful son. I had no notion why I felt so gay, unless it was that I had just seen a wench who reminded me of the Maiden; something in her gait and the shape of her eyes stirred me, but when I smiled at her she only swished her gown haughtily past my legs and was gone, into the press of people. Nor did I dwell on her, or on the one she resembled, but went, high-spirited, abroad the bright street. Though we had been out of Sanctuary for nearly a month, the sonorous plainsong of the monks still trod my mind, reminding me of my frailties. I had chosen to bide with the Queen this last time, not only for safety, but so that I could be near the Princess Elizabeth. For her I would play the dragon or the griffon, cavorting fearsomely, while she, leaning on her nurse’s lap, bubbled like my mother’s smallest stew-pot coming to the boil. There was naught could frighten her; in her there was more of her father, less of her mother, that gilded icicle.

Her Grace had first flown into Westminster Sanctuary after the collapse of that ill-starred campaign against Robin of Redesdale, when London hovered on the lip of mob rule and blow after blow rained on the Woodvilles. Warwick had shown no quarter. Hard to say who had been smitten the most: mayhap the Dowager Duchess of Bedford. No sooner had the sorcery indictment been dropped than she had to mourn a husband and a son. Sir John Woodville and Earl Rivers were beheaded outside Coventry. This last had sent her half witless for a while. Men had murmured she wrought witchcraft for many years, but there had been no witnesses to prove a thing. Now she crept about, a murmuring dark mound, widowed, thought-entombed.

Anthony Woodville had embraced the religious life. I do not mean he had taken to cloister, or to going barefoot in monkish garb, for he rode to battle with the rest. Yet the gossiping esquires whispered he wore a hairshirt under his peer’s velvet. Though he still penned verses, he was given to God, he declared. Thus can the breeze of fear blow men heavenward.

After King Edward’s capture by Warwick, he had been taken by George Neville, Archbishop of York, to Coventry to meet his princely adversaries. Warwick and George of Clarence were both well-flown with triumph. His Grace displayed great cunning: he spoke his captors fair, bowed to their every wish, and went with them to Warwick Castle, then north to desolate Middleham, by night. While, in London, chaos blazed. I remained with my mother, barricading the cookshop door, while the cressets of threatening and threatened flickered past the window, and the cookboys tucked themselves under the counter, crying.

Bereft of its King, England went wild. Old enemies seized the chance to settle ancient scores—disturbances flared all over the realm. Ironically, it was such a one that proved Warwick’s first undoing: while slackening his hold on the royal captive to quell a Lancastrian rising initiated by one of his own cousins, he found himself pulled up sharp. Not a soul would answer to his call until they knew the King was safe. Thus, after less than a month, King Edward revealed himself to the people of York. Lord Hastings and Richard of Gloucester rode hot to where the King lay. Neither Warwick nor his brother the Archbishop could do aught but allow these lords to escort the King whither he wished. So Edward came triumphant again to London, with his Lord Chamberlain and his youngest brother, with Suffolk, Henry, Duke of Buckingham, Essex and Arundel, Dacre and Mountjoy, and the one Neville who had remained loyal to him, John, Earl of Northumberland.

With a thousand horse they were received into London’s bosom. All rejoiced, poor fools. I marvel now there was not another torrent of bloody rain to spoil the washing of good housewives, for all the mischief that lay ahead.

Misliking the Woodvilles as I did, it gave me some amusement to see young Gloucester appointed Constable of England for life in place of Lord Rivers. Although this nullified the patent for this office that was implicit in Earl Rivers’s death, the King made no bones about his pride in his brother. Doubtless his Grace compared Richard’s loyalty to the treachery of George of Clarence. As for Gloucester—he actually smiled, on more than one occasion. In his new capacity as chief steward of Wales and the Marches, he quelled risings swiftly, was made Chief Justice and Chamberlain of South Wales, and Viceroy of those entire parts. Irony again, for these powers had lately belonged to the Earl of Warwick, with whom the King then sought to be reconciled. He had gone so far as to betroth my sweet Elizabeth to John Neville’s young son, and had sought in other ways to woo Warwick, to settle the disputes without strife. To little avail though, for there came another upheaval in Lincolnshire, started by Lords Welles and Dymmock, and it was like Robin of Redesdale all over again: another ghostly, rumour-ridden attempt to shake the throne, and again, Warwick and Clarence behind it.

Welles and Dymmock went to the block after a scuffle at Empingham, and at the end of March, in the year of Our Lord 1470, the King proclaimed his brother George and the Earl of Warwick traitors. Some there were who joined forces with the two noble rebels, among them Lord Stanley; I used to see him often at court, and he was another who smiled scantily; he had a long, shrewd face, with gloomy, nervous lips, and a manner all hiver-hover. I had watched him at the board, and he was exceeding hard to please, forever waving away one dish and calling for another, as if unable to make up his mind.

Did I say the King rewarded loyalty well? Unfathomable monarch—in the midst of all the ado, he robbed the faithful John Neville of his earldom of Northumberland, restoring it to Henry Percy, that most arrogant knight. The Marquisate of Montagu seemed a poor substitute, given thus to one who had deserted his own brothers to uphold his King.

One skirmish followed another; Warwick and Clarence rode westward to join Lord Stanley; Richard of Gloucester rode after them and scattered Stanley’s men. Stanley was indignant, and complained to the King! And almost as soon as Edward had proclaimed that peace was to be kept between Stanley and Gloucester, we heard, in London, how the bigger quarry had evaded him.

Warwick, Clarence, and their ladies had fled to France, to be welcomed in princely style by King Louis—‘King Spider’—and to bow over the chill hand of Margaret of Anjou. And the bond to seal the bargain with Lancaster? The fair, frail Anne Neville, for the French Queen’s son, Edward, Prince of Wales.

Then fortunes turned, in the bat of an eye. It was folly that King Edward wrought, robbing the Marquis of Montagu of his earldom, for that one swore he had been ‘given a paltry title, and a pie’s nest to maintain it with’. In September he showed his displeasure, turning on the King when he lay at Doncaster, and the next we knew was that Edward, Hastings, Rivers and Gloucester were fugitives, exiled in the Low Countries. Back to town came Warwick wrenching half-witted Harry the Sixth from his prayers in the Tower to lead the poor wight through London, as a kind of sad harbinger of his French wife’s due invasion. By this time the Queen, great with child, her ladies and her three daughters were crammed into Sanctuary, with Mother Cobb the midwife, and there was a chill corner for the King’s jesters and mountebanks, all among the holy men. I could thank God for my safety—I could play with the Princess Elizabeth, and duly marvel at the new royal heir—and think of the Maiden through the sober quietness. It was not a bad time, yet we ached for news. When we heard that the King and Richard of Gloucester had landed at Ravenspur and gained York through some cunning policy, we were heartened. When we knew that the King offered Warwick and Clarence pardon or the haze of battle, we were hopeful; and when we learned that Clarence at least was reconciled with his brothers, we rejoiced.