We Speak No Treason Vol 2 (18 page)

The Protector’s breathing shuddered and slowed. His eyes were still fixed on the Bishop.

‘Have done with this,’ he said in a tight voice. ‘Speak now. And, by the Blood of Christ, speak plain.’

Stillington bowed his head. ‘I do not, dare not, question the royal lineage of King Edward the Fourth,’ he said. ‘The bastardy is rooted in his heirs. The young Princes, and the maidens. Bastards all, and unfit to reign in the sight of God and man.’

‘Unfit to reign?’ whispered the Protector.

The Bishop’s eyes were closed. ‘How should they reign, my lord?’ he asked. ‘They are all issue of an unholy union, contracted in a profane place, between Elizabeth Woodville and a man already trothplight to another. The King, my lord, was wedded when he took Elizabeth to wife.’

‘Say on,’ said Richard in a frozen voice.

‘Her Grace the Duchess of York wrought all she could to prevent it,’ said Stillington gently. ‘I have myself seen letters where she implores the King not to commit this sin. For the sake of his immortal soul and for his heirs.’

‘And for England,’ said Richard dully. ‘Yet he would have his way. Always...’ He looked sharply at the Bishop. ‘What proof have you of this union? There are ever strumpets ready to court perjury for gain. Who was the woman? Was it Elizabeth Lucey? She bore him children... O, Jesu!’ he laughed harshly. ‘Not the creature Shore! Nay, she would be but a little maid... who was this wife of Edward? And who the priest that joined them?’

Smiling faintly, Stillington opened his eyes.

‘No strumpet, your Grace,’ he said. ‘None but Great Talbot’s daughter, the Lady Eleanor Butler.’ Under the burden of gasps ringing round the chamber he said: ‘And I it was who, in the first year of Edward’s reign, bound them until death.’

Sir John Howard spoke, harshly. ‘The mighty Talbot’s wench,’ he said. ‘Where is she now?’

‘Dead, these fifteen years,’ answered the Bishop. ‘In the house of the Carmelites at Norwich, of a strange melancholy.’

‘Was he mad?’ said Richard softly, as if to himself. ‘Some battle-blow at Towton might have loosened his senses for a while... How could he do this thing? Tell us, my lord Bishop. Tell us all.’

‘He was bewitched,’ answered Stillington. ‘By Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford, mistress of the Black Art, and her daughter. They fed him potions to drive reason out and lechery in.’

‘Who knows of this?’ said Richard, crossing himself.

‘There are half an hundred witnesses whose lips were sealed,’ said the Bishop steadily. ‘Persons of no account, clerks and nuns—but men have died by this knowledge... Elizabeth was sore afraid.’

Richard looked straight at the Bishop’s eyes.

‘My brother...’ he said haltingly.

‘Yea, my lord,’ Stillington nodded. ‘Your brother of Clarence knew all. I was more fortunate, being cast in gaol.’

The ruby upon Richard’s finger struck spears of light as he twirled it round. ‘By God, this is an evil day,’ he said.

Upon this hill I found a tree,

Under a tree a man sitting;

From head to foot wounded was he;

His hearte blood I saw bleeding.

A seemly man to be a king,

A gracious face to look unto.

I asked why he had paining:

Quia amore langueo.

XIVth century: Anon.

Now, strangely, only swift bright thoughts like birds. For the days thereafter moved too fast, though I lived through them as knowingly as he did, and heard the same voices; above all, the brassy note of glowing Buckingham, come into his own at last. Buckingham, now no longer dead Clarence, but dead Warwick, the makers of kings. Buckingham’s marvellous address to the mayor and burgesses of London, eloquent, and florid as a pierced vein’s yield.

‘Know you not, good citizens, that this noble Prince is true son and heir of Richard, Duke of York? That he, England-born, is by blood and birthright truly English!’ Lightly he leaped on Edward’s evil diet, then as the wine of oratory touched his soul, he gave them Stillington’s sad secret, like one who throws a whole fresh beast to starving dogs.

The witchcraft moved them. Powerful fear lashed the stout merchant men; they muttered.

‘Know you not that there is none other to defend this realm against such evil than Richard, Duke of Gloucester, most mighty Prince, skilled in wise counsel, and in battle Hector’s kin?’

There were men in Gildhall who had fought by him, at Barnet, at Tewkesbury. The murmurings swelled; there came bench-rappings, shouts of ‘Yea, yea!’ and ‘
Bene
!’ from the lettered, as if they attended a tutorial in dialectics. My sight grew keener. The conserve of rue I habitually ate strengthened not only my eyes, but gave me an inner seeing. Thus, watching Buckingham, I saw not only his bright mouth and blazon of the flaming wheel, but also the grants which Richard had already heaped upon his loyalty. Constable of Shropshire, Hereford, Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire was he; Chief Justice and Chamberlain in the north and south parties of Wales; Constable and Steward of all the Welsh manors of Lancaster and March. I saw his eyes on the Protector, saw his greedy love.

‘The great wit of this Prince, the prudence, justice and noble courage!’ On and on. And Richard, unsmiling. I saw his brows draw up once, when Buckingham alluded to Edward’s past lecheries and unwisdom, and to Clarence’s attainder for high treason...

‘There is none other living who is fit to rule! The issue of George, Duke of Clarence; attainted in the sight of God and man...’

Young Warwick at Baynard’s Castle. Frail Isabel’s child, clinging to his aunt, the spittle dripping off his chin. His vague, empty laughter. Anne Neville’s soothing hand upon the overlarge skull. And little Edward, Richard’s son, a faery child, looking up amazed from the lessons that Warwick could not grasp. Young Warwick, screaming in fright before the motleyed fool who sought to cheer him.

Richard had not his Middleham fool with him; the one whom I had ever reckoned so wanton and dangerous a fellow, and marvelled that he kept his head—that one had gone, all fury, to sit at the feet of Princess Elizabeth in Sanctuary. He vowed he loved her more now she was bastard; he caused much mirth among the other players by his departure.

A hot July the first, licked by the smouldering heat of June’s last day, and bursting into flame. Anne Neville paler, with a dangerous bright spot on each fair cheek. Her cough, dry as the roads. Her swoon one evening at the feasting board; the white neck snapped forward, a broken flower. And Richard himself lifted her in his arms, leaving the Spanish and Portuguese ambassadors and his stern old mother. He carried her weightlessly away, pursued by anxious, twittering gentlewomen. Her pale returning; and his kiss upon her hand, that left a mark...

Bishop Shaw’s sermon from the erection on Paul’s Cross: ‘Bastard slips shall take no root.’ The people. Scrivener, cordwainer, fletcher, cooper, lodging-house keeper, tapster, silversmith, mercer and cook. Whore and beggar and cutpouch. Gaping, gaping upward. Alderman and priest and friar. Black gown, red and grey. The turnings and noddings as they, good London folk, sucked in the sense of their country’s new design.

The men of York, four thousand strong, who came at Richard’s bidding—the Londoners jeered at their ramshackle harness, their outlandish speech. Yet the tongues were hushed when Richard rode out to greet them. They were all drawn up in a great circle in Moorfields. He passed among them on foot, with bowed head. Some towered over him. I saw their looks of love. ‘Dickon, God bless him!’ they said.

And the long bright hill down which we all rushed, into the unknown enclosure of a new reign. Margetta and I went out in it, to catch its humour. Into seething London.

‘King Edward kissed me once—he said I was fair, a hinny.’ Stout bosom heaved with old conceits.

‘And took twenty marks from your pouch straightway, for his archers’ folderols.’ Blue buskins beneath a worsted gown. Squinting eyes, one looking east, the other west.

‘This one’s a sober man. There’d be no kissing...’

‘Well, mayhap no benevolences!’ said the squint-eyed witch gaily.

‘Bastard slips shall take no root,’ said her husband, and spat.

‘What of Clarence’s son—he’s no bastard, is he?’ demanded the fat one.

‘He is an idiot—and attainted—by your King Edward,’ said the witch-woman with triumph.

‘Did we but know Gloucester... he was ever up in the north country.’

‘Dust’a speak of my lord?’ enquired a grim voice. ‘I’m from Knaresborough. I know him. The best good lordship York ever had...’

At court, an emissary from King Louis, sent obviously to spy. And the French chronicler, Commynes, scratching away like a clerk, watching everything and everybody, and suiting it doubtless to fit the designs of his spiderly master.

And sorrow in the Garden Tower. The sorrow and the hate. Prince Edward, the once and never King, receiving his uncle with white dignity. They stood to face each other, and there was little they could say, in truth. Richard spoke of the Law of God, the Law of Nature; that their position as royal bastards would rank them high within the court, but Edward stiffened and looked on him with his mother’s eyes, cold, outraged... ‘Is there aught you require, my lord?’ asked Gloucester.

‘Naught, sir, for what was mine you have already... the Crown of England.’ The gracious turning from him to hide tears. Little York, the merriest of men, resorting to rude faces at Buckingham’s back.

And in Chepe, where Buckingham’s lieutenants bawled of Richard’s birthright, I saw Hogan again, together with his woman, who had wept beneath the hawthorn tree. She was not veiled that day; I saw her face and the great purple wen that disfigured it, a fleshly curse from mouth to eyebrow. A press of people blocked me, and over the shoulder of a mighty fletcher, I saw Hogan look me-ward. And he nodded, once, twice, with an expression on his face that chilled me, while the scarfaced woman followed his gaze so sadly that I would fain have crossed myself had I had room in the crush. I leaped through the crowd. A swirl of people withstood my buffeting, and when I finally gained the place where he had stood, with his malevolent half-smile, he had vanished as if he had been there only in my own mind.

A dozen Woodville agents were brought before the Protectorship. The many-mouthed monster still moved under cover of night. Scant news of Sir Edward, or Dorset, but their names augured the looming of a longer shadow. That barren twig of Lancaster, that impudent son of Margaret Beaufort, that Henry... Tydder. Duke Francis kept him snug in Brittany—‘Till he is strong enough to fight?’ Richard asked the weary messenger with an ironic smile.

Then all these sundry sparks together kindled a great flame in the Parliament. The lords spiritual and temporal assembled with most of the barons of the realm; the Lords and Commons, bent on the one and only course left to them, swimming desperately in that uncertain sea towards the last harbour: man, not child, true-born, not bastard...

The great roll of supplication drawn up for him, stating his claim in plain words... ‘that the said King Edward was married and trothplight to one Dame Eleanor Butler, daughter of the old Earl of Shrewsbury... his said pretended marriage with Elizabeth Grey... they lived together sinfully and damnably in adultery... that all their issue have been bastards, and unable to inherit or to claim anything by inheritance, by the law and custom of England...’

They wrote of the great noblesse of his birth and blood. ‘You are descended of the three most royal Houses in Christendom, England, France and Spain... By this our writing choose you, high and mighty Prince, unto our King and Sovereign Lord... according to this election of us the three Estates of this land, as by your true inheritance... accept and take upon you the said Crown and royal dignity.... We promise to service and to assist your highness, as true and faithful subjects and liegemen, and to live and die with you...’

So ran the Act of Titulus Regius, a great unwieldly parchment sealed in state, with haste, and with many a backward glance to France and Brittany, and secret thoughts, no doubt, of the creeping Woodville net, in every town, on either shore.

His countenance at Baynard’s Castle, so stern and white that the amorous stout one, who cherished foolish memory of Edward’s lips, would surely have retreated in disgust. He stood on the great stair-head, while Titulus Regius was read by a hoarse herald who took full half an hour in the reading, and outside the walls came the buzz of the commonalty, stirred at last; and my own mounting joy and longing for his acceptance.

Three times they offered him the Crown. He said:

‘Yet for the entire love and reverent respect I owe to my brother deceased and to his children, you must give me leave more to regard mine honour and fame in other realms. For where the truth and certain proceedings here are not known, it may be thought ambition in me to seek what you voluntarily proffer, which would charge so deep a reproach and stain upon my honour and sincerity as I would not bear for the world’s diadem...’

I saw him glance downward at his son. Then, as he listened to the solemn talk of the ancient laws and customs of the realm, and I stood, hand clenched upon my dagger and ready to live and die—the pallor faded from his face and it waxed rosy, as he bowed his head. And Buckingham hastened to his loudest henchman, who slipped outside... came the cry, after a moment’s silence of ‘Richard!’ The buzzing hive turned loose, as though in full flight.