We Speak No Treason Vol 2 (28 page)

What man could fail by such courage, I thought, as Richard, looking from Nottingham keep at the thunderous sky, said: ‘Pray Jesu this foe of mine comes soon! Oh, sweet chance! the time is full to crush him.’

His prayer answered. Fair winds, that swept the enemy fleet round the western tip of England, while to north and south sped the commissions of array—the call to arms, for England, and Plantagenet.

Then came Thomas, Lord Stanley, in August, this August, month of death and sorrow, with his thin shrewd face drawn in a mask of regret. A thunderstorm grumbling outside the castle walls. I recall how Stanley remained on his knees throughout the whole of his talk with Richard, a gesture, in all its servitude, oddly contemptuous: I wondered at my own strange thought. Cordially Richard informed him of the royal force’s disposition, the flow of armed men streaming in great puissance to his side, and then expressed his hope in Stanley’s support.

‘You are, no doubt, defensibly arrayed to do me service.’ He meant, of course, the marshalling of Stanley’s great levies, from Denbigh and the Welsh Marches, of his force in Cheshire and Lancaster. And Stanley, wagging his eyes up and down, his lean face leaner, his body still obedient, saying:

‘Your Grace is assured of my devotion,’ and in the next breath, begging leave to retire to his estates for a time.

‘I am unwell; I would rest and refresh myself,’ he said.

The long moment of thunder-broken quiet, and the infinitesimal change of Richard’s mien, as if he greeted a familiar acquaintance, a guest unwelcome yet inevitable, and his smile like a chilling wind.

‘I trust you will ride with us on this campaign,’ said the King.

‘As soon as invasion takes place, I shall be close at hand.’

Richard said, as he had said to me, his fickle lover, ‘You serve me well,’ and the next instant Stanley was gone from the chamber, while Lovell, Kendall, Norfolk, Metcalfe, converged about the King, in a full spate of protest.

‘Your Grace, for the love of God! Call him back!’

‘Sire, with his command of
Wales
!’

‘Dickon, he wavered ever! I pray you...’

‘Pray
for
me, Francis,’ said Richard, still frozen in a smile. ‘Nay, good friend. I do not trust him, have no fear. Any more than I trust Dame Grey. But I would trust him, and have his love.’

‘Sire, command Lord Stanley,’ said Norfolk fiercely.

‘Command him naught,’ replied the King. ‘Yet...’ he turned to me, asking: ‘Is his son still in the castle?’

From the window, I could see Lord Strange and his father, preparing to mount up. They smiled at some jest.

‘Delay Lord Strange at my pleasure,’ said Richard. ‘He shall be surety for his father, and may Jesu pardon my mistrust.’

‘Madness!’ some voice said quietly.

‘Yea, perchance I am a little mad,’ Richard said, turning away. ‘The evil noised against me is food for madness.’ Following his own thought, he said: ‘I have sent Bess to Sheriff Hutton... they would not find her there.’ A hiss like a drawn sword, of breath intaken at the first hint that matters could go awry. Then Richard spoke of the Tydder’s advance round the cheek of Pembrokeshire.

‘He hates the Plantagenets,’ he said, without emotion. ‘The enmity of envy. In my soul I know that he would give no quarter. Because he is of bastard, mongrel stock.’

Sherwood Forest, lonely and green in the waiting. His new Icelandic gerfalcon, winging, winging. A sure strike over the treetops, and the bells on its legs a sweet thin music on the heavy air. He looked at me and smiled, saying it was a fair omen. One night he dreamed, in the Castle of Care. Rolled in the bed and cried of Anne. A white owl drifting near the battlements mocked at his cry.

Brackenbury’s coming south with a force of knights and gentry, gorgeously equipped, and tall fellows in jacks and sallets; a goodly, half-forgotten sight, the brave long-bows, the sparkling brigandines. And Brackenbury saying:

‘Dickon thrives, but the Lord Edward is ailing. ’Tis an obstruction in his jaw that gives him much pain,’ and I realized that he spoke of King Edward’s sons. I saw the subtle, warning look pass ’twixt Brackenbury and the King, who could trust none with the secret of their safety. Richard asking: ‘Liked he the new clothes?’

In March I had seen that bill made out, two doublets of silk, one jacket of silk, one gown, two shirts and two bonnets, for my Lords Bastard: I had thought them to be for John.
*

At Beskwood Lodge, where the trees brushed the roof, two men arrived. John Sponer, Macebearer of York, and his messenger Nicholson, dusty, troubled. Richard asking: ‘Where are my troops from York?’

‘Delayed, Sire, but they come, as many as they can muster.’

Richard giving thanks, but asking, warily, why the delay? Sponer shuffling, down-looking.

‘My Lord of Northumberland, Sire. Because of the plague, he said it was improvident to summon the levies.’

‘York has plague? How bad is it?’

More fidgets, a look of suffering allegiance.

‘I’ve seen it worse, your Grace.’

The deep sigh from Richard and his: ‘So! Northumberland!’

Northumberland, the shame of the North.

Lord Strange, handsome, frightened, calling for Norfolk in the middle of the night.

‘Tell the King my father and uncle mean to forsake him; they are pledged to Henry Tudor.’

And Richard, unwilling to believe what was writ plain, saying: ‘Send your father a letter—remind him of all that is gone.’

Lord Strange, with juddering pen, touched not upon the past honours granted by the King to Stanley, but only of his own terrible danger.

‘He will not betray you now,’ he said, looking at Richard with tearful, haggard face.

An end to writing.

A courier, sweating excitement. Young Harry again, under the grime, witness to an invasion. A dead mare outside.

‘When the Tydder landed, he knelt and kissed the shore of Milford Haven, tongued a psalm... “
Judica me, Deus, et discerne causam meam
...” He lay last night without Lichfield town... Shrewsbury opened to them. He marches under the Dragon of Cadwallader...’

‘Already, they have penetrated my kingdom to the heart,’ Richard said slowly. ‘Who are his allies?’

‘Rhys ap Thomas, Sir John Savage...’

‘The Welsh chieftains!’ Richard’s stark cry, clipped short. He had known them well, ruling them when he was nineteen and Lord of the Marches. Only lately, Rhys ap Thomas had vowed the rebels would need pass over his belly to enter...

‘The Earl of Oxford...’

Naught surprising there, nor with the others, Sir Edward Woodville, Piers of Exeter, Jasper Tydder, now calling himself Earl of Pembroke.

‘Reynold Bray, servant of Lady Margaret Beaufort.’

‘Yea.’ Richard’s faint smile again.

‘John Cheney, William Brandon. Arundel, Guildford and Berkeley.’

The rebel force numbered some two thousand, said Harry. And they were the sweepings of all the gaols in Normandy. Poxy, scrofulous, Breton-Welsh, born in the gutter, ragged, lousy, some armed only with rough baulks of timber, at each scrabbling step cursing the King they had never seen.

‘My Lord Stanley and his brother—ride they in this distinguished company?’ Harry’s headshake, and a lightening of the King’s stern face.

‘They are encamped between Lichfield and Leicester—a little apart. I fancy they await your Grace’s coming.’

Richard’s glance, pert, mischievous almost, sweeping all of us. Mark well, said his eyes. Stanley will not betray me. I looked for the loyalty in him and I shall find it.

The sun shone greenly through and touched Harry’s steel, lifted in salute. Tenderly the King looked at him.

‘Will you ride with me?’ he asked. ‘You, and men like you?’

‘Yea, your Grace,’ I said, speaking out of turn. ‘To the world’s end.’ And my throat felt tight, as if there were a rope round it.

Southward, to meet with the enemy. A cramped, busy night at the White Boar Inn in Leicester. My weapons in good order—how bright my bow, how sharp my sword! In square battle order we marched from the town, the good and the bad mingling. On the King’s left side rode Howard of Norfolk, the Silver Lion glaring savagely from his shield, his hawk eyes blazing through his visor slits; on Richard’s right, Northumberland; come lately in a feigned lather of speed, full of charming apology for his tardiness, sweeping, magnificent, with an ostentatious kiss on the King’s hand. Forming the vanguard, the men at arms and archers were screened by the cavalry and backed by the trundling baggage-wagons. Behind Richard rode Lord Zouche, Lord Scrope of Bolton, Scrope of Upsale and Dacre, Greystoke and Ferrers of Chartley. Lord Strange, under guard. Far behind the van, Northumberland’s men.

The people of Leicester were out to see their King. Mailed and bareheaded save for the golden crown, he was worth the seeing. White Surrey’s coat shone like cloth of silver. Our train blazed with light. The colours of England flamed on tabard and drum and banner. Flailed by the sun, the air was alive with spanking hoof and jingling bridle, and the tramp, tramp, rat-atat-tat of drummers on the march, their lilies and leopards like jewels, beating out Death! Death! Woe to the foe! sang the drums, in a low, sonorous voice of warning, and the clarions caught it, with a wild bray, shrill to split the ear, to fire the brain under a brassy sky, through a warm wind, while the people, the treacherous, fickle people, came running into Swine Market to see their King.

It happened as we came over Bow Bridge. I was thinking: pray Jesu the wooden joists will stand our weight! when there was a commotion up ahead and I saw White Surrey’s ears and head rise up in a wild terrified plunge across the bridge, halting the whole train, prancing sideways until I feared he might leap the parapet into the River Soar. Richard held him with firm ease—then I saw what had made the destrier shy. Quietly sitting on the bridge was a woman, a harpy, ragged, ageing, with a great purple wen disfiguring her face. I could scarcely credit it, but in truth, it was she, Hogan’s woman, still wearing that dreadful, dolorous look.

White Surrey hated her. Rearing and sidling, he leaped close against the opposite side of the bridge; Richard’s mailed foot struck fire and harsh music from the stone. The woman left her perch and ran alongside, shouting.

‘Turn back, Plantagenet!’ she cried. ‘’Tis the sign!’ and she pointed at the long gash made by Richard’s spur in the stonework of the bridge.

‘Your head, Plantagenet, when you return!’ she screamed. They called her witless, poured on over the bridge. But Hogan returned to me, clear as day, mouthing his old riddle. ‘The foot that strikes the stone shall turn into a head...’

I too, deemed her witless, for I would fain believe her so.

So we came from Leicester, through the lonely, smiling fields of Kirkby Mallory, towards Sutton Cheney and Market Bosworth. And to the old Saxon hill, called Una Beame. Ambien Hill. The hill of one tree.

We halted first at Sutton Cheney, for there, among a sprinkling of cottars’ dwellings and lean, rootling hogs, stood a church whose porch had seen mayhap a thousand weddings. Squarely built by Normans, with no pretence at grandeur, it had a welcoming look. Raising his hand, the King halted the detachment. His swift, turning gesture encompassed his Household Knights and esquires. He sought to dismount; I took his weight upon my hand. Then, with those who lived closest to him, he entered the porch; he stopped, removed the crown, and I took it at his command. The first time I had held it—it glowed red in the climbing sun, a perfect ellipse with the points delicately chased and wrought. Cool and burning, this was the thing over which his father Richard of York had striven in vain, that had sent Margaret of Anjou mad with ambition, had weighed heavy on the skull of Harry Six, had been won in blood, worn like a bauble by Edward Fourth. It lay surprisingly light in my hands as I followed into the dim-lit nave.

He knelt before the altar, with its patched vestments. The vicar was stout, ruddy, incurious. Without haste, he consecrated the Bread and Wine, and ministered slowly to the strange young knight.

‘
In Nomine Patris, Filii, et Spiritus Sancti
...’

There was no choir, no candles. But a single bird spoke questingly outside and a wistful finger of sun pried through to light the King’s bent head, and vanish in a cloud. The church darkened again with promise of more thunder.

As night fell, I stood with my arms in good order outside the King’s tent, from which he appeared briefly at times to receive news...

‘The rebels now number some five thousand. They waged more men at Shrewsbury and Lichfield; they have left Watling Street and advance towards us; they’ll make camp upon the plain called Redmore...’

...and to deliver messages:

‘Go to Northumberland—ask him to draw up his line close to Norfolk.’

I could see their fires, spreading in a long straight glimmer north and south, parallel to our own wing.

‘Send to Lord Stanley—bid him attend me here.’ The messenger, panting back through our lines. ‘Sire, Lord Stanley would lie between you and the enemy—when the time comes he can serve you better thus. So he says.’

‘And Sir William?’

‘Sir William speaks likewise, your Grace.’

Due south, the lights of Stanley’s camp flowered duskily. Beyond the ridge, an answering glow marked his brother’s army, to the north.

In a near-by tent, Lord Strange lay, whistling a mournful tune.

The supper of bread and meat was sour in my mouth. The King refused victuals, stood for an hour gazing at the crouched animal of Ambien Hillock. Once he murmured: ‘A Godsent point of strategy, that mound; it must be ours before the dawn.’

Lovell, Norfolk and Kendall sat with the King, while I fingered the gold-fringed tent flap and wished the morrow here. The darkness disgorged Brackenbury, with a boy. John of Gloucester, saddle-weary, bright with excitement.

Richard raised him quickly from his knees.

‘Sire? Am I to fight at last?’

The disappointment writ quickly on his face as Richard said:

‘I sent for you to hear my counsel. Get you to Sheriff Hutton and stay quiet. If, tomorrow, things should go amiss...’