Rebellion (47 page)

The queen looked for a sign of Lord
Wenlock's men. But she couldn't see him either.

What she could see was the hail of arrows
raining on the Duke of Somerset's party, then the duke manoeuvring himself out of line,
the shape of his battalion altering, veering round and up the slope of a hill.

Then he launched into a headlong charge.

The queen leaned forward in her saddle.

In the fierce combat that ensued she saw the
Duke of Gloucester leading his men in a great wave to join his brother. Then they
sounded a retreat.

The queen gripped the reins of her horse as
if she would ride down to join them. All the blood drained from her fingers.

But it was a ruse, a trick. The Duke of
Gloucester only pretended to withdraw, then attacked again. Somerset's army, having lost
their defensive position, crashed fully into the Yorkist left flank.

And she could see, as her army could not, a
contingent of spearmen emerging from the wood.

The said spears … came and
broke upon the Duke of Somerset and his vanward all at once … whereof they
were greatly dismayed … [and] took them to flight in the park and the meadows
that were near and into the lanes and dykes where they best hoped to escape the
danger …

The Arrivall

Dr Morton caught
hold of the reins of her horse. ‘We must go,' he said. On his face was a look of pity,
or fear.

‘No,' she said, but he pulled her horse
round.

‘There's no time,' he said, and she tried to
object but he was tugging the reins. ‘You can do nothing here,' he said and, overtaken
by a sudden weakness, she allowed him to lead her down the track to where the rest of
their company were waiting.

Perhaps it was the strain of the last two
days, or the trepidation of battle, but she could feel her limbs juddering.

She could not remember whether she had told
her son that she loved him, or had only said it in her heart.

Of the queen's forces, either on the
battlefield or afterwards by the avenging hands of certain persons, there were
killed Prince Edward, King Henry's only son [and others].

Crowland Chronicle

This then done and with God's might
achieved the king went straight to the abbey [at Tewkesbury] to give praise to
Almighty God … and there were fled into the same church many of his rebels in
great number, hoping there to have been relieved and saved from bodily harm, [and
the king] gave them all free pardon. So in that abbey were found Edmund, called Duke
of Somerset, the prior of St John's called Sir John Langstrother, Sir Thomas Tresham
and other notable persons which all were brought before the king's brother the Duke
of Gloucester, Constable of England, and the Duke of Norfolk, Marshal of England and
… were executed in the midst of the town upon a scaffold therefore made,
beheaded every one without any dismembering …

All these things being done, the
Tuesday the 7th day of May, the king departed towards his city of Worcester and on
the way had certain knowledge that the queen was not far from there in a poor
religious place …

The Arrivall

They had come here, some fourteen miles from
the battlefield, because after the messenger had arrived at the manor where they had
taken refuge, Dr Morton had said it wasn't safe to stay.

The queen didn't want to move. The battle
might be lost, but there was still no news of her son, she said. But Dr Morton said
there would be news soon enough.

It was a difficult journey. All the women
apart from the queen were weeping and stricken. The queen rode very straight in the
saddle, head tilted, muscles braced as though to bear incalculable loss.

She entered the priory and refused to leave.
This was as far as she was going, she said. They were all free to travel on without her.
She would wait here until she had news of her son.

Dr Morton, for the first time in their
acquaintance, seemed not to know what to do.

‘Well,' he said, ‘we will stay here this
night. In the morning you may think differently.'

But in the morning Sir William Stanley
arrived with the king's men.

She had never liked the Stanleys. The older
brother, Thomas, was only interested in saving his own skin. Sir William was little more
than a henchman.

‘Come, my lady,' he said, ‘your son is dead.
It is time to leave.'

She would not sit down,
she would not fall. She stared at him and would not lower her gaze.

‘You lie,' she said.

Sir William glanced back towards his men
with an unpleasant smile on his face.

‘I do not have his corpse with me,' he said,
‘but perhaps King Edward will let you attend the burial. If he
is
to be
buried,' he said, and there were grins all round from his men.

Behind her there was the sound of sobbing.
She took a step towards him and Dr Morton laid a warning hand on her arm. ‘You are the
low-born son of a filthy whore,' she said.

She did not know if she had spoken in
English or French, but Sir William's face changed. He nodded. Then he advanced towards
her, stepping too close, much closer than was permissible, and put his mouth next to her
ear.

‘Your son died weeping and begging for his
life,' he said. ‘He cried out to the Duke of Clarence to save him. He did not stop
begging or crying as they butchered him like any animal. From what I saw,' he said, ‘it
is just as well that he will never be king.'

There was a rushing noise in her head where
his words had been. Perhaps she swayed or stumbled, or lifted her hand to strike him,
for Dr Morton had caught her arm again.

‘Tell King Edward that we are at his
commandment,' he said.

Queen Margaret was captured and kept
in security so that she might be borne in a carriage in front of the king at his
triumphal procession in London …

Crowland Chronicle

And in every part of England where
any commotion was begun for King Henry's party they were rebuked so that it appeared
to every man that the queen's party was extinct and repressed for ever without any
hope of revival.

The Arrivall

Yesterday King
Louis heard, with extreme sorrow … that King Edward has not only routed the
prince but taken and slain him. He has also taken the queen and sent her to London
to keep King Henry company, being a prisoner there.

Newsletter from France

It had always seemed to King Henry that each
man suffered not only on his own account, but collectively; that the sins of the many
fell upon the few. One man could offer himself in expiation, for all humanity to be
washed in his blood.

It was a necessary oblation. Also hard,
beyond the capacity of language to express.

Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani!

But if it was hard for him, he knew it must
be so much harder for his wife.

If he had never loved her he would never
have known that wound; the suffering that comes from witnessing suffering. The
helplessness as they travel on their destructive road, because it is the only road they
can travel.

If he had never loved her he would never
have known that love would not redeem either of them. But he had always loved her, from
the moment he'd seen that tiny portrait.

There were those who'd doubted it, who
thought it delusion, but he remembered that moment; he remembered that his heart
shook.

His heart shook, there was no other way to
put it. There was that sense of knowing, of always having known.

It was a mystery, great and impenetrable,
like the mystery of God.

The more time he spent on
his knees, the more he saw there was only the mystery.

His wife knew he loved her. It bound her to
him, despite everything, so that she could not entirely let him go.

Many, many times he had wished that for her,
that she would let him go.

But there was their son.

He did not know how to even think about his
son. His hand trembled as he lit a candle for him; his head emptied of prayer.

All that was required of him was that he
should pray. And prayer was very often not of words at all. He could feel his tongue
moving, groping towards familiar words.

At the same time he thought he could hear
movement in the corridor outside his room; his cell, as he had come to think of it,
because it was like a hermit's cell.

Thou knowest what thou will do with me …

That was the knowledge that He kept secret
from man. Necessarily secret.

There were footsteps now, approaching.

Deal with me according to thy most compassionate will …

The footsteps had stopped outside his
room.

King Henry VI opened his eyes. He could see
the candle flame with its halo of light, and the crucifix with its wounded Christ. He
could not remember any more of the words of his prayer, though he had said them most of
the days of his adult life.

It seemed to him best to remain kneeling,
facing away from the door as it opened.

The same night that King Edward came
to London, King Henry being … in the Tower of London was put to death, the
21st day of May, on a Tuesday, between 11 and 12 of the clock, being then at the
Tower the Duke of Gloucester, brother to King Edward, and many others, and on the
morrow he was chested and brought to St Paul's and his face was open so that every
man might see him and in his lying he bled on the
pavement there
and afterwards at the Blackfriars was brought and he bled new and fresh …

Warkworth's Chronicle

I shall pass over the discovery of
the lifeless body of King Henry in the Tower of London. May God show mercy and grant
sufficient time to repent to whomever it was who dared raise a sacrilegious hand
against the Lord's anointed. Let the perpetrator deserve to be called tyrant and the
victim to be called martyr.

Crowland Chronicle

King Edward has not chosen to have
the custody of King Henry any longer though he was in some sense innocent and there
was no great fear about his proceedings, the prince his son and the Earl of Warwick
being dead, as well as all those who were for him … as he has caused King
Henry to be secretly assassinated in the Tower where he was a prisoner … He
has, in short, chosen to crush the seed.

Newsletter from France, 17 June 1471

This unhappy plague of division had
spread not only among princes but in every society … the slaughter of men was
immense, for beside the dukes, earls, barons and distinguished warriors who were
cruelly slain, innumerable multitudes of the common people died of their wounds.
Such was the state of the kingdom.

Crowland Chronicle

There is many a great sore, many a
perilous wound left unhealed.

Rotuli Parliamentorum