Queen of Trial and Sorrow (21 page)

The following day a cart arrived containing two simple coffins and wended its way through the streets to St. Paul’s, where the bodies of Richard and John Neville were exposed for two days.

I went to view them.  I’m not sure why, except that it was a compulsion I couldn’t resist.  I wanted to see them dead, laid out on their biers, pieces of meat already cool and reeking faintly of putrefaction.  I had to see it with my own eyes if I was truly to believe. Some have said I am responsible for the rift between Edward and Warwick.  As anyone who reads this can attest, this is not so.  True, their first quarrel was over the king’s marriage but that had nothing to do with me.  Whomever the king married, saving only his own choice, Bona of Savoy, would have induced in Warwick the same resentment.  No, what caused the breach was their differences over policy: Burgundy or France, and in that the king was surely in the right.  Had he only accepted that Warwick would not now be laid out on a cold slab wearing only a loin cloth. 

The wound that had penetrated his brain was no more than a brownish crust on a sunken eyelid, while his brother’s white body was pierced with many wounds showing the pinkish-gray flesh underneath.  Death is the great conqueror, and how He diminishes us.  He strips us of pride and dignity; He shrinks us and makes us a travesty of what we once were.  We become a sack of refuse to be put away.  We are nothing more than a fading memory.

Edward said he should not have ended like that, brought down and held helpless by scavengers for the sake of a few rings, a pair of gauntlets.  Not great Warwick.  But I felt no stirring of pity for him.  His end was ignoble but that was what his life had become. 

I did not go to gloat and I found I could view his body with detachment.  It was a pitiable end for two great men.  “God give your turbulent spirit rest, Warwick,” I whispered, crossed myself and left.  

Our celebration and relief were short-lived, for here came Margaret.  She had used up every possible excuse for delaying her departure from France, fearing to trust her beloved son to Warwick’s England.  By one of those cruel twists of fate that seemed to be a facet of her life, she landed at Weymouth on the very day her ally’s death in battle put her whelp in the greatest possible danger.  Edward took it to be further evidence of his good luck.

So there was another campaign to fight.  There was a sense among us that this would be the last battle, the final reckoning between York and Lancaster.  Like Towton, it would be a fight for the crown itself. 

Edward went to Windsor, both to celebrate St. George’s day and to muster a new army, for he had already begun to disband the one that had given him such sterling service.  With him were his two wounded commanders.  When I had last seen Gloucester he no longer wore a sling but his arm moved stiffly.  Hastings still wore a white bandage around his head.  Also there was Clarence (doing his best to make amends, according to Edward) and sundry lords and knights. 

My children and I were still at the Tower and Anthony, wounded in the thigh, was left behind to guard London and us, so I saw him frequently and he kept me abreast of the news.

“The first question that faces the king is which way will Margaret go.  Will she make at once for London, in which case she will march through Hampshire and Sussex into Kent where she can hope to pick up some of Warwick’s adherents, and from where, if the king hasn’t succeeded in bringing her to battle, she will be well placed for an assault on London?  Or, will she hope to avoid battle, and march for Wales to join forces with Jasper Tudor?  From there she can pass into Cheshire and Lancashire where friends of the house of Lancaster are still numerous.”

“It will be Wales,” I said, and he smiled at me, as if at a clever student.

“No matter that they detested Warwick, his death and the loss of his men will have thrown a scare into them.  They’ll want to be as strong as they can possibly be before they face the king and at the moment they’re not.”

“Is it possible she’ll turn tail and run back to Louis?”

“She may want to,” he said thoughtfully, “but I doubt her son and their lords would agree.  They won’t want to return to exile and poverty.  Only with a victory will they ever regain their former prominence, their estates and riches and honor.  What they should have done is to strike out for London at once, raising men as they went, but with little delay.  They might have caught us unprepared.  The least they would have accomplished would have been to drive us off and take possession of the city.  But they didn’t do that and it’s too late now.  What is certain is that they must be prevented from linking up with Jasper Tudor.  That means Edward has to stop them crossing the Severn.  On the other hand, if he marches to an interception point, he must make very sure they don’t slip past him and make for London.”

He had a map spread out on the table between us and his finger followed the snake of the River Severn.  “The most likely crossing point is here at Gloucester.  Failing that they’ll have to come further east.  They have a head start, but if his Grace moves quickly he stands a good chance of intercepting them.  If he takes a direct route to Cirencester, he can cut them off there.”

“It seems impossible he can get there in time,” I said looking at the distances.

“Oh, he’ll get there,” Anthony said confidently.

Though he would have liked to have time to muster more men, Edward left Windsor on April twenty-fourth, just ten days after the battle of Barnet, marching fast and light.  In spite of the need for haste, by the twenty-eighth he was no further than Abingdon near Oxford and perplexed because reports from the scouts had parties of the enemy on the road to Reading, suggesting as Anthony had feared that they intended to slip past and would be in London before he could double back.  He didn’t panic, though, and further reports cleared up the confusion.  It was a feint and they were at Wells.

That woman was incapable of learning a lesson.  She allowed her soldiers to plunder the Episcopal Palace at Wells.  It was the behavior of her men in ’61 that turned the people against her and Henry.  But I suppose all that mattered to her was that Wells was the diocese of Edward’s chancellor.

After an incredible forced march of thirty-six miles in one day, the royal army brought the Lancastrians to bay at Tewkesbury, and still had spirit left for a fight.  Margaret’s son was slain in the battle.  Curiously, some kind of quarrel had broken out between Lord Wenlock and Somerset and ended with Somerset burying his battle-axe in the older man’s head.  No one could say what had occasioned this extraordinary event.  Was Somerset incensed that Wenlock had failed to come to his support?  Did it make a difference that Wenlock had been Warwick’s friend, mistrusted and expendable?  Just as at Barnet, I found myself thinking that with such unnatural allies, such incidents were inevitable.

Somerset and several others had taken refuge in the abbey church, and Edward went there at once, still in his bloody armor and with his sword a shimmer of crimson.  He might have committed murder in the church itself, but the abbot and some of the monks intercepted him in the nave.  The abbot claimed the men were in sanctuary and begged the king as the fount of justice in the land to leave them in peace.  Edward was having none of that.  In no mood to be merciful, he reminded the abbot that the church had not been granted a charter to shelter fugitives and they would have to come out to stand trial.  If they did not do so of their own volition, he would send his men in to drag them out.  It made me shudder to think how my husband’s desire for vengeance had brought him close to committing the most awful sacrilege.

As it was, they came out and were led under guard to their trial before the Duke of Gloucester, the Constable of England, and the Duke of Norfolk, the hereditary marshal, whose duty it was to try cases of treason.  Sentence was carried out that same day: fifteen men in all died under the axe.  There was no desecration of the bodies, or displaying of heads on London Bridge.  All were interred in the abbey church or churchyard, including Edward of Lancaster, who would rest under the choir, but with the exception of the Prior of St. John who asked for and obtained permission to be conveyed to London for interment in the church of his order.  Somerset asked to die last and his request was granted. 

……….

On May twenty-first, Edward entered his capital in triumph for the third time since landing at Ravenspur. Waiting to receive him in the suburb of Islington were the mayor and aldermen, whom the king honored by having them kneel in the dusty road and bestowing knighthoods on them all.

I heard later that Gloucester had protested against the knighting of Stockton, who had abandoned his responsibilities at a crucial time, but Edward said that he could not fail to honor him without grave insult, and to insult the mayor was to insult London itself.  Whereupon the Duke of Clarence quipped that the king might have given the mayor his due by letting the sword slip a little.  Coming from him, it was a poor joke.    

The new knights took their places in the procession.  Trumpeters blew a fanfare.  The Duke of Gloucester led off at the head of other lords, and Lord Hastings also had a place of honor, riding directly before the king. London gave them a tumultuous welcome.  The walls were lined with merry faces.  The streets were so crowded that citizens were in danger of being trampled beneath horses’ hooves.  Women hung out of windows, tossing ribbons and flowers and blowing kisses to the young knights and squires.  Some enterprising souls had climbed into trees or were perched on roofs and gables like so many multi-hued birds.  London was in a joyous mood.  The citizens had awarded themselves a spontaneous holiday.  After years of upheaval, they could look ahead to a period of peace and security.  There wasn’t a cloud on the horizon.

At the tail end of the procession was an open carriage, and when it came into view the mood of the people changed.  Margaret had been found in Little Malvern Priory, near Tewkesbury, along with her long-time companion, Lady Catherine Vaux, her daughter-in-law, Lady Anne Neville and the Countess of Devon.  All three of these ladies had been widowed at Tewkesbury. 

Even in the century that had produced Jeanne d’Arc, such a warlike and uncompromising woman was an anomaly:  She had led troops (though never actually in battle) and made decisions that were properly the purview of the king and his council.  She had dominated Henry and ruled through him.  Her hatred and fear of the Duke of York had generated sixteen years of civil war and brought ruin and destruction to the land.

The citizens greeted her with hisses, curses and shaken fists.  The carriage stopped outside St. Paul’s so that the king, as had become his habit, could lay the banners of his defeated enemies at the north door and offer prayers of thanksgiving.  The people pressed close, screaming with hate, and some threw rotten fruit and other unspeakable objects.  So threatening did they become that a guard had to surround the carriage to hold them back.  Edward had her conveyed to the Tower, where she would be housed in relative comfort until he could persuade Louis to ransom her.

I never saw her once she entered the Tower.  Those who did said she was nothing but a frail, pale shell, empty of all but a colossal grief and the bones that held her upright; her dauntless spirit was broken at last.  Her son was dead, her husband captive, her house destroyed and her life, to all intents and purposes, was over except for the slow and wretched decline into death.  I could not bear to look upon what the death of her son had done to that once-proud woman.

……….

That night the king summoned all the members of the council then present in London to a late meeting in the Star Chamber.  Anthony had escorted me back to Westminster the previous day and I had had only a brief and public reunion with my husband earlier.  I longed for him to come to me but the council meeting must have gone very late because I was already asleep when I felt his hands on me, his lips seeking mine with an urgency that at first my newly-awakened body fully reciprocated. 

I knew, as only a wife can know, that he was not himself.  His hard thrusts and grasping hands made me wince and long for it to be over.  It took a long time for him to reach his climax and when he finally finished he rolled away and lay on his back with his arms pillowed under his head, instead of gathering me close against him as he usually did.  There was so much to talk about, and yet I felt an odd constraint, as if we had quarreled, that emanated entirely from him.  A brief review of my actions since we had parted revealed nothing I had done that could have displeased him.

Moving closer, I laid my hand on his broad chest, stirring the springy dark hairs with my fingertips.  He pushed my hand away as if it irritated him.  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Ah, Bess,” he sighed, “you have no idea what I’ve done.”

“Tell me,” I said anxiously, but he didn’t answer. 

What could he have done that would keep him from enjoying his coupling with me?  As soon as I asked myself the question, I thought I knew the answer.  What else could it be?  I placed my hand on the side of his face and turned his resistant head toward me so that I could look into his eyes and he into mine.  Light and shadow from the night candle played over his features.  “Tell, me, please.  What have you done?”

He pulled me against him then, and we settled into our habitual positions, with my head pillowed on his shoulder, and his hand resting on my flank. 

“In just nine short weeks,” he began.  “I have fought two battles, marched hundreds of miles, shed barrels of blood.  I have defeated Warwick; I have defeated the Bitch of Anjou and her henchmen; I have even defeated that reprehensible schemer Louis.”  His tone of voice became harder as he continued:  “On the march from Windsor to Tewkesbury, I passed my twenty-ninth birthday.  In those twenty-nine years I have fought in seven battles.  I have known far more of war than of peace.  And yet I have said often that I do not like war.  War is a wasteful business.  War is the enemy of growth and productivity.  It gives me no pleasure to look upon a battlefield because the lifeless bodies that lie there are my subjects.  My people.  No, I do not like war.  And I am resolved that it will never raise its bloody head again in this land while I rule.  We might be forgiven for thinking that our war is won, all our enemies dead and our future unassailable.” I felt him shake his head slowly from side to side.  “We would be mistaken.”

He paused to draw a deep breath and his voice became soft and somber again  “I am not a cruel man, Bess.  From the very beginning of my reign my inclination has always been toward clemency, forgiveness, and reconciliation.  I have lost count of the number of men who have trespassed against me and been pardoned, attainders reversed, property restored.  Some have become loyal servants and some went on to trespass again and be pardoned again. I even forgave Warwick his despicable treason.”

“And Clarence,” I murmured, softly so as not to interrupt his train of thought.

“I want a kingdom at peace. I want everyone to enjoy the fruits of that peace: prosperity, order, the privilege of a tranquil old age and dying in bed – more to the liking, you would think, than the futility, the sheer waste of war.  Yet I sometimes think I’m alone in wanting peace and I’ll be vainly striving after it to the end of my days.  For four or five glorious years I thought I had succeeded.  The only fighting I had to do was against Louis.  That was a good fight, a clean fight.  Now I know better.  The great lords want more than I can give them and my subjects allow themselves to be stirred up by any malcontent with a grudge who goes among them.  A man is granted only so much patience and mine is worn so thin that it will not bear the weight of further encroachments.  My good resolutions have been eroded over time and I see myself in danger of becoming cynical and embittered.