A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury

by Edith Pargeter

  “Don’t underrate him, however. Even a broken worm can kill, if it happens to be an adder. And he is not yet so low that he cannot bring down many a better man. For with all his rectitude,” said Iago, coldly considering, “I think him but very small in goodness, and very drear. He is a winter man, and his frost drives away even those who most willed to warm him.”

  “He was not always so,” said the greatest of those he had yet alienated and turned into enemies. “It is a part of his malady. And now there is no cure. He must live with his disabilities as we must live with his abilities. We shall see who calculates most accurately. The twenty-seventh of August! And you say he plans a three-fold advance, from Chester, Shrewsbury and Hereford?”

  “That was the talk of his camp. I think it could well be true. Certainly they are victualling all three towns.”

  “Then the prince will move in from Chester. It is his headquarters.” He who was the effective prince of Wales spoke easily of “the prince,” and never grudged him his courtesy title. “Henry will take Shrewsbury for himself, the central base. And Hereford—that will be either Worcester or Stafford.” He had already noted all Henry’s new appointments. The young earl of Stafford was coming early into prominence, for he was one of the new knights Henry had made on the eve of his coronation. “Well…well,” he said, narrowing his far-sighted eyes upon the beloved map in his mind, “they shall be somewhat too far north by then to find any trace of me. And while they feint at shadows, I will be busy with the substance. For it’s time they saw more of me in the south, Iago, where I shall not be expected. I have a fancy to show myself as far as Newport and Cardiff, while they lose themselves in the mountains of Maelienydd and Brecon.”

  “And I, my lord, what shall I do?”

  “Go back to Shrewsbury. It is his main base, and where the news will be. I’ll send letters by you to Rhys and Gwilym, and they’ll have a man waiting across Severn at Guilsfield, ready to pass on any word you send him. Go and be a hanger-on at Henry’s storehouses, and pick up what grain you can. As for me, I shall move south by Usk and Caerleon. And I warrant I shall be ready for the twenty-seventh of August before Henry will. It will be a testing month,” he said, smiling a little to himself, “more ways than one.”

  Iago rose to take his leave, but the prince called him back for a moment. “Will Percy come south to Wales, think you, or stay on the Scottish march?”

  “He’ll stay in the north, my lord. He must. There’s not a mile of that border safe if he turns his back now, and they know it.”

  “You think he knows yet that I have Mortimer? But he must, surely. He’ll be pinning his faith on Henry and his autumn parliament to raise the money for the young man’s ransom, no doubt. Should you, by some far chance, rub shoulders with him again, Iago, let him know his brother is well healed of his wounds, and in good fettle. He had a zealous nurse,” said Owen, and laughed at some thought of his own.

  “And will you let them go for ransom? Mortimer and Grey both?”

  “What use is Grey to me now? I cannot fight him while he’s my prisoner, I cannot kill him until he’s free to face me again in arms. And his price—his price can be of enormous use. Ten thousand marks it shall cost them, if they want him back. And as for Mortimer, they shall pay dearer still for him. But whether in money or kind,” he said, a suppressed smile tugging the corners of his mouth inward in very private amusement, “may well be another matter. I doubt if it rests altogether with me or with Edmund.”

  * * *

  The entire vast enterprise lurched into uneasy motion at last, in the first days of September, in the strange, ominous hush of the end of that disastrous summer, while France sat mute and made no sign, and the Scots, for all their gadfly raids, seemed to hold off from testing the defences of the north. It was King Henry’s one great gesture against Glendower, and nothing had been spared of loans, and exhortations, and massing of stores, to ensure its success. It was his misfortune to envisage every such encounter as a matter of life and death, though by now he should have been used to anticlimax, and to the survival and tenacity of both parties to fight another day. He wanted an ultimate solution, and life does not deal in such simplifications.

  The prince, who took his force into Wales from Chester in good tight order, and at every mile ensured his lines behind him, was on his guard against his own instinctive enthusiasm as well as against Welsh armies, and knew enough about them by this time to feel no surprise that he should probe ever more deeply and carefully into North Wales, and never touch hands with anything more than a darting patrol, gone almost as soon as sighted. He threw out no sounding parties too weak to guarantee their own safety, and he lost none of them. Past Ruthyn and Clocaenog and into the Cambrian mountains and the Berwyns, hampered by vile weather, and impeded by swollen streams and misty hills, he moved methodically on the lines laid down for him, and made no contact with any substantial enemy. He made no attempt to touch Owen’s ancestral hold of Carrog, because he had no orders to do so. His advance had been laid down for him in definite terms, and he held to it, but taking his own precautions along the way. In any case, he knew who would be in Carrog—the women and children and those unfit for warfare—and he knew how quickly they would remove before him if he went near them. There would be men enough left with them to ensure their safe withdrawal, not enough to make it worth his while disabling them. What he wanted was the main force, mobile and sudden and a prize fit for his steel. Some day there might be a time for setting light to both Carrog and Sycarth, and driving their households homeless into the hills; but not now, that was to fritter away all these preparations upon a minor consideration.

  He went his way across North Wales, probing as he moved, but he never saw hide nor hair of Owen.

  The force from Hereford had the choice of two ways in, the more northerly by Hay and Brecon, the more southerly by Abergavenny, and by ill-luck chose the first. At Talgarth they got wind of skirmishes in the south, and set off southward over Mynedd Troed for Tretower; but because of the time they had lost they were always too far behind their quarry even to realise the magnitude of the chance that persistently slipped through their fingers. By the time they reached Abergavenny, Owen was at Cardiff, and while they were pressing hard from Usk to Caerleon, Owen was withdrawing in excellent order into the wilds of Brecknock. They never got so near to him again. They had suffered less than the other armies from the evil weather up to then, but in the days that followed Wales and September did their worst, and it was difficult to keep open their lengthening supply lines.

  King Henry himself, with the third army, struck due west from Shrewsbury for Welshpool, strongly garrisoned and lavishly provisioned as an advanced base. From there they moved on into the Cambrian mountains; and for three days they toiled through the worst storms of the year. Every brook coming down from the heights was swollen into a torrent, every valley river gulped these tributaries into its heart, and burst out over the narrow meadows into languid shallows, while in the centre it rushed ahead with treacherous force. Some of their stores were swept away, some of their mounts and pack-horses were bogged, or foundered and damaged themselves in the stones of the river beds. In the upper levels of the hills the occasional pools had grown to three times their normal size, and turned every bowl of rushy upland into marsh, where the army laboured perilously for every half-mile of painful progress.

  On the seventh of September the clouds broke for the first time, the wind subsided, and the sun came out. That evening they pitched their camp on a shoulder of dry ground above a valley, thankful for the respite. The king slept half-armed in his tent, the remainder of his plate-armour massed just within the entrance, and his lance with its pennant fixed upright in the turf outside. Strung out along the shelf between hill and vale, with outposts covering every approach, the army settled down for the night.

  In the third hour of darkness the climactic storm seemed to materialise overhead out of a sky barely dappled with clouds. Those who were waking said afterwards
that it did not move towards them across the sky from any direction, but burst suddenly, directly above them, in a great whirlwind and a peal of thunder. Then every star vanished, and the sky was instantly one piled mass of black cloud, out of which lightnings flashed and rain streamed in a circling torrent, swirled by the terrible wind. One sentry almost drowned on his feet, for the wind had pinned him against a rock, and he could not free himself or even turn his face into shelter, while it dashed into his mouth and nostrils unceasing volleys of rain so heavy that he could not get his breath; and if two of his companions who had their backs turned upon the blast had not been cast against him, and so afforded his face shelter enough to breathe, he must have died spread-eagled there. Some in the low-lying places, who were heavily asleep, did drown as they lay, the water gathering so rapidly in every hollow.

  The king awoke out of his sleep to a frightful sound, like a great crash of thunder and the hissing flight of a thousand arrows. He sprang up with a cry, and in the same moment the tent collapsed upon him, pinning him to the ground under its heavy folds, and the hammering rain held it there, flattened crushingly over his breast, moulding itself to every feature of his face, so that he was nearly suffocated. And yet the place was drenched, as with water, so with a fearful smell of burning. He had laid by his sword, but he had a dagger still upon him, and managed to draw it and slash through the folds that smothered him; and Norbury and Erpyngham and half a dozen others of his own people came plunging and splashing through the storm to help him out of these ominous grave-clothes.

  Then they all saw that the royal lance, which had stood upright at the door of the tent, had been flung down so violently that its point had pierced the breast-plate of his piled armour; and the shaft of the lance was twisted and discoloured, all the armour dinted, and the royal pennant charred as if it had been burned. They began to shake, for this was too close to hell-fire and witchcraft. No one then had time to utter what he dreaded; but afterwards, though those about the king held their peace doggedly, and spoke only of phenomenally bad weather against which no man could guard, in the ranks men were saying to one another that this was no natural storm, that there had never been known so strange and violent a tempest, that it was sent out of malice against them, either by Owen himself, or by those stiff-necked Franciscans of Llanfaes whose house the king had burned, and who were allies of Owen and the devil to the last man.

  But this was afterwards. There was no talking that night in the darkness, men had enough to do to stay alive, and salvage something out of the ruin. For after the rain came hail, to batter and crush what the water had left undamaged, and after the hail, snow, sudden freezing squalls that piled white drifts in every cranny and across every open space. And towards morning, when the snow turned again to rain, the whole hillside under which they were camped had become furrowed and scoured by a hundred brooks scurrying and leaping downwards into the river valley, till the level of the flood crept up towards their outposts, and its tributaries carried down into it everything movable that came in their way, including some of the hobbled horses, and the wreckage of tents, and drowned men.

  When the light came they mustered what was left to them, and knew without many words spoken, even when the storm subsided at last into mere mist and drizzle, that they could not advance further. Half their provisions were lost or ruined, many of the horses dead or hurt, and a number of men drowned. They had little hope of bringing up fresh provisions in these conditions, and if they lengthened their lines by a few more miles they would have no hope at all. The army turned back in drenched and miserable retreat towards Welshpool, without having so much as sighted a Welsh force of any kind. And the soldiers muttered to one another as they limped and splashed back towards England that the black friars had not only sent the terror, but withdrawn it from them as soon as they turned back, and the devil their master could call it up again in an instant if they so much as looked over their shoulders.

  In Welshpool they halted to rest, and make good what losses they could, to dry out their arms and reflight their arrows; and there was a brief council of war. But the issue was never in doubt. Some said the king was gravely shaken by his narrow escape from death, and the implied threat that still hung over him. Some said merely that the money was not available to fit out such an expedition a second time, even if the spirit had been willing; and that was certainly true. But all agreed, even before the order was given, that when they moved from Welshpool it would be back to Shrewsbury. And all agreed most bitterly, though no one uttered it, that they would be going back derided and disgraced.

  No one knew it better than the king; and no one felt it more corrosively.

  * * *

  It so happened that on this same 7th of September the inner circle of the royal council was meeting in a small room in Westminster to hear the report of the treasurer, the king’s old and loyal servant Henry Bowet, now bishop of Bath and Wells. Among those present was Master John Prophet, dean of Hereford, who among his pluralities numbered also the deanery of St. Chad’s at Shrewsbury, the king’s privy clerk, and soon to be his secretary.

  The treasurer’s lament was not new to any ear; it was the unceasing accompaniment of every expensive undertaking. But this time it had a note of desperation which rendered it almost novel even to those who had heard it so often.

  “I have employed every way I know,” said Bowet wearily, “to procure money for his Grace’s needs. I have offered bonds under my own seal, as well as the royal seal, but without result. They will not lend any further sums unless they hold jewels as security, and more, unless they may have letters patent to give them the right to sell if they do not get repayment by the date appointed. We have no authority to issue such letters, yet the matter is urgent, all the more as his Grace is absent in such a vital cause. He cannot be reached at this moment, and the question cannot be shelved. The money must be raised, and at once. I ask the council to advise.”

  They debated unhappily, reluctant to commit themselves to an opinion, until John Prophet suggested sadly that in the circumstances it might be well to consult the archbishop of Canterbury, and in some relief they agreed on this course, and carried their problem that same afternoon to Lambeth; where Thomas Arundel, on the force of whose word and influence they could rely, advised them, in consideration of the desperate need, to issue the required letters patent, and he would be responsible for defending their action to the king, should it need any defence.

  Accordingly the lenders got their security, and leave to turn it into good cash if no other cash redeemed it in time. There was a proviso that should the value of the jewels exceed the amount of the debt, the excess must be paid over to the king’s treasury. But no one wasted much attention on that. It was a practical certainty that he would be trying to raise more loans long before these were ever repaid. But at least they could hold off within the value of what they now held, and were empowered to dispose of to advantage.

  So low was King Henry’s credit fallen with those who lent money to him. But lower still, infinitely low at this moment, with himself.

  * * *

  The news of the retreat came into Shrewsbury only a day ahead of the returning vanguard, and filled the town with rumours and counter-rumours. Some said there would be no more than a brief lull to refurbish and reprovision, and then another attempt; others maintained that the troops would be paid off—if they were so lucky as to be paid!—and disbanded from Shrewsbury, for it was too late in the year now to favour an invasion. And many whispered of witchcraft; and some, in very low voices and in trusted company, said that the judgment of God was sometimes miscalled the malice of the devil, by those who must pass off their devil as God. There was even some whispering, in secret and in Welsh, of birthrights; for the lord of Glyndyfrdwy was the lawful living heir of the princes of Powys Fadog, and his mother, Helen, was great-grand-daughter to Llewelyn ap Griffith, the last revered and lamented prince of North Wales; and Henry of Lancaster was the son of a younger son, and the stars and the
elements could not be deceived.

  But those who could speak English spoke no Welsh aloud in Shrewsbury in those days, for feeling was running all the higher because the two races bred and mingled so closely here, and it was well to be known as a loyal king’s man, and indulge other sympathies only in low voices round the hearth, or better still, in silence within the heart.

  But Welsh and English alike took care to put their valuables and their armour, if they had any, safely under lock and key, for if the returning troops were to be billeted in the town, even for a few nights, there would certainly be some looting, and no sane burgess was so loyal a king’s man as to be complacent about losing goods and gear without a struggle to preserve them.

  And some, and among them Rhodri Parry, had more dangerous and precious things to hide from the retreating soldiery. A town filled with disgruntled men-at-arms, more than ready to pick an easy quarrel to pay for the hard one they had lost, was no place for a fugitive Franciscan friar escaped from the Leicester convent, and suspect of treason along with several others of his house, some already executed. He had lain in one of the lofts above the storehouses for several days, weak and sick after zig-zagging cross-country ahead of the hunt, moving by night in this foul summer, and lying up in woods and trees by day. Iago had brought him, and Iago should have been here within two more days to take him away, somewhat recovered now and strong enough to continue his flight into Wales. But the disfavour of heaven had driven the royal army back too soon, and there was no Iago here to relieve the house of its dangerous guest. And within a day there might well be ten men-at-arms bivouacked in the house and the store-rooms.

  “He must go,” fretted Rhodri, tramping the length of his solar like a caged wolf, “or he’s a dead man, and his blood will be on our heads. By tomorrow night it may be too late. And how are we to get him past the gates, with the town in this ferment? The guard will be on its mettle, with the king not a day away, and the sheriff alerted to expect him. I would not give a solitary noble for his chances by the Welsh gate. Where is Iago, for the love of God, when we need him most?”