Georgette Heyer (28 page)

Mowbray began to stammer his thanks, but the King said, ‘Give me no words! Go, now!’

The Bishop told John of this, and John said hopefully: ‘If Father could pardon a Mowbray, he must surely pardon Edward!’

‘That,’ said the Bishop dryly, ‘is another matter! This is not Edward’s first venture in treason.’

‘Oh, I know!’ John answered. ‘But Harry wants him back on the Marches, and what he told me once was sooth! One
can’t
be angry with Edward above a paternoster-while! Harry has written to beg Father to pardon him, and to Thomas and me, to use our endeavours – ’

‘Also to me,’ interposed the Bishop. ‘I have advised him, as I advise you, John to let it sleep! You will only anger the King if you take Edward’s part against him.’

‘What does he mean to do with him?’ demanded John.

‘That has not yet been decided,’ replied the Bishop. ‘The King is very much araged, but he was within ames-ace of laughing when that fat buffard stood before him!’

If King Henry meant to head his cousin, it was Thomas who saved Edward from this fate. Thomas was Steward of England, and it fell to his lot to arrest Edward. Both his brothers advised him to counterfeit sickness, for it seemed to them unthinkable that he should not shrink from such a task.

‘Tell Father you’re crapsick!’ recommended Humfrey. ‘If he saw how many lamb tarts you ate at dinner he won’t wonder at it!’

Thomas cuffed him, but goodnaturedly. ‘Why should I?’

‘Thomas, you
can’t
force your way into Cousin Edward’s inn, and carry him off to the Tower! Why, he must be nearly as old as Father!’ said John. ‘You’ve served under him, too. You can’t do it!’

‘Oh, yes I can!’ said Thomas cheerfully. ‘Edward will take no force of that!’

In this hopeful view he was mistaken, but nothing could have served Edward’s turn better than the scene that was enacted within the walls of his inn, for Thomas faithfully reported it to the King; and the King, after a struggle to keep his countenance, nearly laughed himself into an accesse.

Only Thomas could have executed his commission with such an entire absence of ceremony. Ushered into Edward’s presence, he had greeted him with his engaging smile, and had said: ‘Cry you mercy, cousin! I arrest you, in the King’s name!’

‘A malapert jape!’ said Edward severely. ‘What do you want of me, mam’s foot?’

‘But I’ve told you!’ said Thomas. ‘I’m not bejaping you – faith of my knighthood!’

‘What?’ gasped Edward. ‘Why, you airling, you upspring, you popinjay – ! If I do not swinge you for this!’

‘You can’t do that,’ objected Thomas. ‘I’m the Lord High Steward!’

‘Lord High Gadling, Lord High son of Perdition!’ choked Edward, his face alarmingly red.

‘Le douce, mon amy, le douce!’ said Thomas. ‘That must be treason!’

‘A puling brat I’ve jounced on my knee!’ Edward raged.

‘Never!’ declared Thomas. ‘When I was a puling brat you paid me not the least heed!’

‘And I pay you none now, nor ever shall!’ retorted Edward.

‘But you must heed me!’ Thomas pointed out. ‘If you won’t, I shall call in my escort, and carry you bound to the Tower. The prentices will think it as good as a Corpus Christi possession!’

Edward sat staring stockishly at him. ‘Thomas!’ he said. ‘If I didn’t jounce you on my knee, at least I taught you how to speak of venery! Why, the first time you went hunting with me you saw the steps of one of the stinking beasts and called them
traces
, as though you had been talking of a hart! God’s dignity, it’s importable that you should be sent to arrest me!’ His feelings almost overcame him; but after a fulminating pause he said bitterly: ‘After all the services I’ve rendered the King! And I knew nothing about my sister’s plot, nothing at all!’

‘Edward, you’ve confessed already that you were a party to it!’ said Thomas reproachfully.

‘Well, if I was, I repented me, didn’t I? If I hadn’t dropped a hint in your father’s ear, he would have been keycold now, and you too, I daresay! And what is my guerdon? Unthank! And in all belikelihood my head set up on the bridge for the crows to peck at!’

‘But I hope you won’t head him, sir,’ said Thomas, concluding his story. ‘For bonchief or mischief we must keep fat Edward on life!’

Five

Shipton Moor

1

The King spared Edward’s life, but he deprived him of his estates and his offices, and sent him to safe keeping at Pevensey. Those who knew this hold prophesied that he would fall into a melancholy there. A large part of it was in a ruinous state; there was nothing to be seen from its slit windows but water, the sea on one hand, and swamps on the other; and nothing to be heard but the crash of the waves, and the screams of the gulls which wheeled and soared day-long above the battlements.

The Despenser plot might be scotched, but the King had little other cause for satisfaction. Parliament had been summoned to assemble at Westminster, at the beginning of March, but whether Northumberland would sit amongst his peers was doubtful. He had already excused himself from attending the Council. In an affectionate letter to the King, he pleaded age and infirmity, which made it impossible for him to undertake the winter journey to London. He signed himself ‘Your Mattathias,’ for it was his favourite conceit that he and his son might have been likened to the Maccabean heroes who led the revolt against Antiochus Epiphanes; but the King read the letter with an unmoved countenance, and acquiesced in Ralph Neville’s determination to return to his post immediately.

The mercy King Henry had shown Mowbray bore only sour fruit. The young Earl of Nottingham would never be appeased until his father’s Dukedom had been restored to him; and his first act on emerging scatheless from the Despenser plot was to pick a quarrel with Warwick on precedence. The King was forced to adjudicate between them, for Richard Beauchamp’s haughty temper took fire, and he brought the matter before the Council. The question was never in doubt: the Earldom of Nottingham had been created by King Richard II, but Warwick could produce a writ of summons to Parliament issued to his great forefather, Guy, as far back as the reign of the first Edward. Nottingham left the Council Chamber with a black scowl on his face, and at once withdrew from the Court.

Richard Beauchamp was now twenty-three. John would not reach his sixteenth birthday until June, but the gap of age between them seemed to have shrunk. John, who had always looked up to him as his elder, and a most worshipful knight, found that he no longer looked up. Richard was still the model of chivalry, but John’s brain had outstripped his. He remembered that Richard had never been quickwitted; discussing with him Harry’s difficulties in Wales, he now thought him sometimes a little stupid, and never very farsighted. He was of so autocratic and intolerant a disposition that he could not like Harry’s policy of conciliation; but he had so deep a respect for Harry’s genius that he never criticised him. He told John that no one on life had ever seen Harry’s equal in the field. Give Harry opportunity and a handful of men, and he would put to rout five times his number, Richard said. Before John left for the North his words were proved: Harry, with a force which he described as a small body of his household, had vanquished more than eight hundred rebels at Grosmont.

This was good news for John to carry north with him. He had further cause for satisfaction in the power granted to him to negotiate short truces with the Scots. If he could get ransoms paid and prisoners released, he knew that one cause at least of dissatisfaction would be removed.

Northumberland, to the relief of the anxious, had answered the summons to Parliament; Bishop Beaufort had been translated to the See of Winchester, and had relinquished the Great Seal into the hands of one of the King’s most devoted adherents, Thomas Langley, Dean of York. Langley was not as witty a man as Beaufort, but he was more agreeable to the King. His eyes were not always turned towards Harry; nor did he live at loggerheads with Archbishop Arundel.

The Bishop had not been nominated to Winchester by Pope Boniface, but by his successor, Innocent VII, whom the countries in obedience to Rome had recognised. Boniface, or, as the irreverent had called him for the fifteen years of his rule, Maleface, had died of the stone; and his successor was a well-meaning, unwitty Neapolitan, fond of singing and of books, and subject to apoplectic fits.

His election followed a scene of the greatest disorder. No sooner was the death of Boniface made known than riots broke out in Rome, rival factions carrying on a sanguinary warfare in the streets, and the envoys whom Pope Benedict had sent from Avignon to discuss the question of union being cast into the Castle of St Angelo.

It seemed unlikely that Innocent, a slightly feeble old man, would be capable of handling the situation in which he found himself. What with the republicans in Rome, the highhanded behaviour of the Emperor Sigismund in Germany, and the duplicity of Pope Benedict in Avignon, who, while making bland suggestions for a conference, was quite openly preparing to make war on him, it was generally felt that he would be fortunate if he was still in the Chair of St Peter at the date he had appointed for a meeting of the archbishops under his control.

Only very devout Englishmen felt any particular interest in Rome’s troubles; and quite a number of the younger men looked upon the Schism as an established thing. It had lasted for twenty-three years; and for seventy years before the Holy Church had been falling into disrepute. From the moment that Clement VII removed his court to Avignon, papal influence, never as strong in England as might have been desired, waned. The Pope had become a vassal of France: the Babylonian Captivity was the mocking title given to those years of luxurious enslavement. There was a rival Pope in Rome, and matters had gone from bad to worse. The whole of Europe was shocked by the behaviour of Urban VI in Rome and Clement in Avignon, for they never ceased to revile one another. Anathemas, excommunications, and the foulest accusations hurtled from one to the other, until not the strictest Churchman thought it blasphemous of John Wycliffe to liken the Popes to two dogs snarling over a bone.

‘I remember,’ said Ralph Neville, ‘that your elderfather, John of Gaunt, whom God assoil, once said that both Popes ought to be deposed. Well, how should sely men forbear to make garboils when the Holy Father demeans himself like any jack-eater? This Innocent sounds to me like a niddicock; and as for old Maledict, he’s a snudge-snout, and there’s an end to it!’

2

On the surface, things were quiet in the North. John met with fewer black looks, and even, sometimes, with signs of approval. The Scots had so devastated the Border that he had recommended to the Council an entire redemption from taxation for the three northernmost counties; and once this became known the Borderers began to look upon him with friendlier eyes. He received one or two presents, offered by men half-sheepish, half-surly: a tawny spaniel whelp; a cast of eyas hawks; a prickeared alaunt of volatile disposition and evil understanding which harried sheep, bit his horse, and laid unsavoury trophies at his feet. He remembered that Edward condemned all alaunts, saying that they were giddy in their natures, sturdier and more foolish than any other hound. However, John liked the hound, and kept him. He called him Butcher, not so much because he belonged to that branch of the breed known as butcher-alaunts, but for other and quite obvious reasons. His groom, binding a clout round his hand, took what comfort he could from the reflection that Butcher was prepared to defend his master against any peril, real or imaginary.

John thought that if only Northumberland had parted his life he could have been happy on the Border that springtide. But Northumberland was not yet at his last end; and over the whole countryside hung an air of unrest. He had returned from Westminster at the beginning of April, and a disquieting rumour that messengers from Wales had met him at Warkworth came to John’s ears. Nottingham was also in the North; he owned estates by Thirk, so perhaps there was no need to see danger in that. John reported his arrival to the Council in a letter that told also of the many signs of insurrection which he found wherever he went. These tallied so exactly with every other report received in London that on April 15th the King sent the Chief Justice, Sir William Gascoigne, and Sir Henry FitzHugh into the North to make strict enquiry.

The King was at St Albans, mustering his forces for an expedition into Wales. Since autumn of the preceding year the French had been making great preparations for an invasion. There could be little doubt that Harry was right when he said that a treaty had been signed between Glendower and Orleans, but owing to the pleasure-loving habits of the Count de la Marche, who had been appointed to lead the expedition, the ships were kept for so long at Brest and the men-at-arms (unpaid) at St Pol de Léon that the formidable host soon began to dwindle. Ribalds said that the Count saw the sea and fled; but in November he had actually embarked, in command of twenty vessels, reached Falmouth after eight unhappy days at sea, burned the town, and retired again. Now, in the spring of 1405, it was reported in England that the Lord of Hugueville was taking matters in hand, and was engaged in raising men for a voyage to Wales.

With the King committed to the Welsh venture, Northumberland judged it to be time to strike his blow. The arrival of his friend the Lord Bardolph in the North was the signal for the uprising. Sir Robert Waterton, sent to Warkworth with a message from the King, was cast into prison; and in York the saintly Archbishop Scrope put himself in arms against the King he had helped to crown. His manifesto was couched in pious language, but no one with the least kind-wit could doubt that the mainspring of his conduct was the late threat to the wealth of the Church. With him was joined the Earl of Nottingham; and the pair of them rode about York, the Archbishop with the crozier in his hand, exhorting the citizens to enlist under his banner.

The Lord John, in Berwick, sent off a last message to the Council, informing them that he was now cut off; and prepared to force his way south, to effect a junction with Ralph Neville. The town of Berwick was friendly enough, but the castle was still held by Clifford, and he had lately strengthened it. John had been granted the power to call up all men between the ages of sixteen and sixty, and he put this into execution, and enrolled more than he had expected. He and Robert Umfraville led this force south, evading opposition, and joined the Earl of Westmoreland south of the Tyne.

Ralph Neville was in a towering rage. He had narrowly escaped being taken prisoner at Witton-le-Wear, where he had been the guest of Sir Ralph Eure, an old friend. Four hundred men, wearing the Percy cognisance, had surrounded the castle, but they came too late: the Earl, warned of his peril, was away with his host, and speeding north to the rescue of his royal pupil.

He was extremely glad to find that John was neither dead nor a prisoner; but when he discovered the strength of their combined forces he said that they would all be dead or prisoned soon enough. He thrust a crumpled document into John’s hands, saying grimly: ‘You may read that, lording! Fine matter for an Archbishop to be scattering all over the town! The fellow that brought it to me out of York might have had a dozen copies or more!’

John rapidly scanned the manifesto. It made no mention either of King Richard or of the Earl of March, but complained of misgovernment, and the need for reform. Particularly did it complain of the burden of taxation, and the injustice with which the clergy were being treated. John passed it to Umfraville, saying contemptuously: ‘Pope-holy! What else?’

‘Enough matter to make your blood boil!’ Ralph said. ‘Percy, and Glendower, and Mortimer – no, not young March! His precious uncle, that was taken prisoner by Glendower, and married his daughter! – are all entered into a bond to portion the realm between them, and are calling on the people to rise up against the King’s grace! Wait, I have it writ down here, and you shall see for yourself ! Such a piece of knavery I never beheld!’

Deciphering the Earl’s angry scrawl, John found it almost as bewildering as it was knavish, for it was couched in strange language. A Dragon, a Lion and a Wolf were to divide the realm between them, according to an ancient prophecy. ‘What prophecy?’ demanded John, his brow creased.

‘That damned Book of Brut, no force!’ growled Ralph Neville. ‘Did you never hear of a warlock called Merlin? There hasn’t been a prophecy yet that didn’t issue from his mouth – or so those Welsh scrubs say! How is a honest Englishman to know? Such harlotry!’

‘Merlin!’ John looked up, as memory stirred. There had been a Hainaulter who told wonderful stories: a clerk, speaking English as one long unaccustomed, who had talked to Bel sire of a prophecy that concerned the house of Lancaster. He snatched at a name, and pronounced: ‘Froissart!’ He saw that Ralph was staring at him, and said quickly: ‘Nay, no charge!’ He saw that it would never do to tell these puzzled lords that it had been prophesied by Merlin that the crown of England should fall to the house of Lancaster. He bent his gaze to the paper again, and said: ‘What, a’God’s half, do all these frothing words mean?
After Richard shall come a Mouldwarp, cursed of God.
My father?’

‘I told you it was a knavish piece of work!’ said Ralph.

‘Japeworthy too!’ said John, in a voice brittle as glass, ‘for I perceive that this Mouldwarp is called a caitiff and a coward!
How
many men did my father slay with his own hand at Shrewsbury?
An eldritch skin, as a goat
– He was in good complexion when last I saw him! Oh, a Dragon is to come out of the North, and war with this Mouldwarp upon a stone!’

‘Percy, of course!’ said Ralph.

‘I have heard that dragons are akin to snakes. Who is this Wolf from the West? Edmund Mortimer? If he means to
bind his tail
with Percy’s he
must
be a jobbard!
To rule all England from Severn to Trent!
Ah, but not before the Thames is choked with corpses, and my father fled! That will be long enough! Who, devil-way, is the Lion out of Ireland who shall be linked with this precious pair?’