A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury

by Edith Pargeter

  So then they were man and wife, no less than king and queen, and in the midst of the hectic splendour they were islanded alone; and in the night, in the blessed quiet of their bed, they lay wreathed in each other’s aims, released from the daylight necessity of being royal, a man and a woman meeting in some field of half-glad, half-sorrowful tenderness and restraint. They loved, and she pitied. It was not the best of grounds for a marriage, but it sufficed. She had, after all, had to make do with less. And he, she hoped, found a measure of happiness that somehow redounded to her pleasure, as well as her credit.

  Her little girls were shy and uneasy with him. He did his best to unbend, but he was too stiff and sombre for them. He was happiest when they were out of his sight, and he could forget that they existed. She was early aware that she must always have an eye to their interests, or they would be without advocate. And girls are vulnerable in this world, and need a protector, as she knew, having been born a girl. Her loyalties, though staunchly reinforced, began to be in some sort divided; she balanced her priorities and held her peace.

  After the wedding Henry and Joan journeyed together in state to London. At Blackheath a deputation of the citizens came out to meet and escort them into the city. Through Cheapside they went in procession to Westminster, and there, in mid-February, the queen was crowned and feasted with much splendour, with jousting and banqueting and every mark of reverence.

  One of her stepsons, Thomas, was busy in Ireland, acting, under tutelage, as his father’s viceroy. She divined, from her husband’s way of speaking of his children, that Thomas was his favourite, perhaps the one most like his sire, and easiest for him to understand. The younger ones were no trouble to her, they were eager and excited, and took delight in all the ceremony and splendour that surrounded her coming. The eldest, the heir, as preoccupied in Wales as Thomas in Ireland, she had yet to meet; but Wales, after all, was not so far a journey, and did not entail a sea crossing, and her cool senses told her that he could very well have been in Westminster to greet her had he been so minded. He was the one of whom she was a little afraid. A boy of fifteen, and by all accounts alert and adult some way beyond his years, can be a formidable opponent.

  He came at length, early enough to make his excuses acceptable, late enough to confirm in her everything she had decided about him in advance. And he came, not to his father’s palace of Westminster, but with his own very handsome retinue to his own house at Coldharbour, in the City, and from there paid his new stepmother his first visit in great state, like a native prince making an imperial gesture towards a foreign visitor. His gift was generous—and paid for, for he had learned to be a good manager of his personal funds—his approach reverential, and his conversation adult and graceful. His father was charmed and relieved, conceiving that the boy felt the need of all this ceremony to support a natural youthful shyness. Joan made no such mistake. She had marked no less that Prince Henry’s face was stiff and cool—which could also have been a sign of shyness, but was not—and his eyes aloof and hostile. She knew then that she would never win him; effort would be wasted. All she could do was behave with patient gentleness towards him when they were together, will him no harm, and be ready to defend herself and hers; and, perhaps, encourage every move that might keep him permanently apart from her and from the king. He had Wales to care for, had he not? It was his own particular principality, which could not be taken from him. And the more he was married to it, in turmoil as it was, the less time he would have for undermining her position here in London. She did not conclude at once that he had any such purpose; it was entirely possible that he would welcome the means of remaining at a distance as much as she would, and make no assault upon her if she made none upon him. But she had to be prepared for his enmity, and take measures appropriately.

  She was the more inclined to be wary of closer contact with him because she, a woman and a stranger, saw with peculiar clarity his attraction, his ability, and his stature. Of all these children of the royal house—though John was engaging, able, and intelligent—this Hal was the only genius, the only creature dauntingly above life-size. A little larger—she was woman enough to see and acknowledge it—than the father who begot him. Perhaps even more than a little!

  So she praised him, whenever his name arose between them, even after he had taken himself off again to his headquarters in Chester. She assuaged Henry’s anxieties whenever he fretted about his heir, and told him that the boy was chafing against his leading-strings. He was obviously far ahead of his years, and this year he would be sixteen. What did he need with these lieutenants of Wales set over him? It was time to give the boy his head, and entrust the total command in Wales to his discretion, clear of restraints.

  “You have great confidence in this youngster of mine,” said the king, astonished and gratified, smiling at her with absolute trust in her sincerity and her judgment. “Do you truly think him ready for such a charge?”

  “It may be,” she said, returning his smile with indulgence, aware of her power, “that I see him clearly because I see him with new eyes, not as a parent. I do believe he can do whatever he sets out to do. And I counsel you, give him the opportunity and he will soon show if he can use it.” She leaned and touched his hand, her long fingers grown expert in caressing thus discreetly. “Do you think you can breed small, fearful sons, my dear lord?”

  He had every hope, then, of more sons by her, for she was hardly turned thirty, and had proved that she was not barren. He had lost the nervous habit that brought out that ugly blotching upon his face, and inclined him to look morbidly to his health and think upon his end. He responded ardently to her every touch, folding his hand upon hers with passion and desire.

  “My love, you do convince me. Hal shall have his chance to show his mettle.”

  She convinced him of other matters, also, for she, too, had needs, for her daughters and for her own peace of mind. It was essential for his new queen to have a jointure of her own—she did not say in so many words, but mercilessly she made it plain to him that even kings are mortal—for her protection in time of misfortune or bereavement. He listened devoutly to all she had to say to him. And for payment, she loved him as women do the husbands who are utterly dependent upon them for all their joy, for what little joy there is to be had in this world, and gave him all she had to give that was available to man. He was the only love of her life in the marital way, and she valued him accordingly; but she had daughters, defenceless creatures in a male world, and she balanced her responsibilities as best she could. She had many dependants to provide for, all victims, all with rights. She did her best for all of them.

  On the 8th of March, Queen Joan was granted in council an income of ten thousand marks annually, dating from the day after her marriage. The king immediately began to grant her lands to the same value, to ease the drain upon the exchequer, transferring the burden from the royal monies to the queen’s own land revenues as soon as he might. Joan was assured of her income, from whichever source, and could breathe easily again.

  On the same date Prince Henry of Wales was made officially lieutenant of the whole of that grand principality in his own right, as an adult prince, clear of all tutelage and entrusted with his territorial administration for all time thereafter.

  In this same month of March, moved by certain impulses of shame and indebtedness towards the house of Percy, the king formally granted to the earl of Northumberland, for the use and advantage of his house at his pleasure, all the forfeit lands of the captive earl of Douglas, to wit, all the land of Scotland south of the Tweed, with the addition of the lands of Galloway, in requital of the surrender of the earl’s Scottish captives from Homildon Hill, and in recognition of the services rendered by the illustrious house of Percy to the cause of Lancaster. The said territories were not, in practice, in the king’s gift, being held and garrisoned, where castles existed, by the Scots. The gift was a gift to be won in arms, or not at all; but capable, upon exertion, of being turned into a reality. And the Per
cies were expert in turning visions into realisations.

  It was the first gesture of conciliation, the first acknowledgement that he had robbed Northumberland and his son of a source of revenue they could ill afford to cede to him. It looked well, and it cost him nothing; it even promised him substantial gains, for if the Percies set to work to secure what he had merely offered as hypothetical bait, all that noble tract of land would be added to the territory of his realm. Northumberland, with his shrewd sense of values, might think it well worth his while to make good his claim, and with his hard efficiency might very well establish it; if he did, he could not but extend his liege lord’s domain, and enhance his stature.

  It seemed a very adroit move; and Henry was gratified when he received the first reports from Northumbria, indicating that the earl was taking him at his word, and making his dispositions to possess himself of his new lands by conquest. All would yet be well. He saw a future of hope and accord, a reunion with all his old associates, the beginning of something more than a domestic happiness.

  * * *

  “Say what you will,” said Northumberland, pacing his solar in Alnwick, and pausing at every circuit to peer hungrily at the rough map he had sketched upon the table, “there are prospects here of great enlargement, and if we throw them away, we do so at our own risk. I am no happier with this Lancaster king than you are, but he has made the first offer towards us, and that’s no mean achievement. If he can be bent once, he can be bent again. It would be folly to throw away that advantage without considering it carefully.”

  “He has given you nothing,” said Hotspur indifferently, for neither gifts nor denials had any influence on his mind. “He has merely asked you to get for him what it would cost him plenty to get for himself. You are doing his work for him yet again without pay.”

  “Not so! He’s given me, this time, the needed leave to pay myself, and so I will, with interest, for all I spend in the getting.”

  “But not at his expense! At the cost of such poor souls as inhabit these lands—and for Henry’s greater glory. He stands to gain and gain from you if you prevail, and you to lose and lose without loss to him if you fail.”

  “And am I failing? You know I hold a part of this disputed land already and but for these two fortresses of Ormiston and Cocklaws I could take all at small cost. I think it worth the spending of some few thousands of marks to close the bargain And I think you may trust me to see he does not drain away from me all the good I shall have gained by it. Well I know I led you to believe I would go with you against him—no, that I would be before you in the advance! But this does somewhat alter our interest, as you must see. The main grievance we had against him he begins to acknowledge and amend. Is that a small thing?”

  “The main grievance?” said Hotspur wonderingly, and turned with some difficulty to try and see with his father’s eyes. He smiled. Richard in his grave at Langley was but a minor item, and Roger Mortimer’s children in close ward hardly an embarrassment.

  “Am I asking that you abandon your project for ever? I say only that there is no point in being too precipitate. Caution and patience will bring a better opportunity. Since we are contending for stated ends, what folly not to gather in what fruits offer by the way, and then, and only then, pursue what still remains unsatisfied.”

  “You waste your breath,” said Worcester gently, from where he sat in the embrasure of the window, his head leaned back against the yellowish-grey stone. “If you gave him Scotland now you would not halt him.” And he turned his head a little and looked from one face to the other, still ruefully smiling. The father so bold and shrewd and adaptable, and the son so obstinate, and single-minded, and incorruptible. “He’ll help you to take your two castles,” he said philosophically. “What more do you want from him?”

  “I want his head safe on his shoulders, and my grandchild ensured in his succession to this earldom of Northumberland,” said the earl furiously. “Is that a base ambition in me? I did say, I still say, that we did ill to support this King Bolingbroke, and it would be well to set him down from that eminence in which it was we who set him up. But this is a perilous enterprise, and I am not satisfied that this is the time or the manner in which it can be done successfully. For my part, I say wait, and tread carefully. There’ll be a better time.”

  “And Edmund will have spent his fortune and his life to no purpose, for want of us,” said Hotspur violently. “My uncle has told us how the prince has carried the war into the Dee valley, and burned Sycarth—and praise it is to him, and no blame, that he does his work so well. But what sense is there in waiting until we are without allies? It would be great reproach to me if I failed now of what I have undertaken, for Edmund’s sake and for Owen’s.”

  “It would not so! You could turn back now without harming them. There’s time to give them due warning, and they have the whole of Wales, that sufficed Owen well enough before, for their sanctuary. You’ve waited this long, why not longer?”

  It was late May, and the prince had been in control of his own command for two full months, and made redoubtable inroads, in his new enthusiasm, into Owen’s ancestral lands; though the inhabitants, as always in Wales, disappeared with unruffled contempt into the mountains, and left their frail homesteads to be fired without a backward glance, and for every house thus lost to them had ten yet left to retire to.

  “I’ve waited because Edmund needed time to muster and organise his defences. And because it is now done I cannot wait longer. Nor will I,” he said, with immovable resolve. “When my uncle goes back to his post with the prince in Chester—”

  “In Shrewsbury,” said Worcester abstractedly. “Did I not tell you? He’s moved his main body and his own staff there. It makes a better base for raiding central Wales, and the boy is keen. He has your old trouble, though,” he added, and laughed. “Never a courier goes to London without a letter to the king, begging, bullying, demanding money to pay his men. Those who have the means could buy half that force tomorrow for ready money.”

  “We are no richer in that than he is,” said Hotspur with haughty distaste.

  “But we are, Harry! I do not go penniless into any venture. I have already withdrawn my treasury,” said Worcester, “both from London and from Chester, and have it always close about me. When the time comes, leave it to me to do the buying. Bring your own men south with you, and pick up what you may in Cheshire as you come, and I shall meet you by the way with whatever force I can draw off from the prince’s army. And if I do not bring you more than the half of it—and not all bought, at that!—charge me with treason to you as well as to Henry.”

  “You don’t urge me to turn back,” said Hotspur, shaken and shocked by the sudden vision of Hal isolated and forsaken in Shrewsbury; and forced, upon that revelation, to look the boy in the face, and contemplate what must be done about him.

  “I know,” said Worcester simply, “that if God himself urged you to turn back now, you would not do it. I doubt if you could. There are thoughts in you that will not let you look back. It’s gone too far, you’ve seen too deeply and understood too much. There’s no going back, and no standing still, only a progress, and that ever more rapid. And to what end we cannot know.”

  “For you,” said Hotspur in a low voice, “there could be a turning back. I don’t ask you to see with my eyes, or judge with my mind. How could I?”

  “Harry, where you go, I go. You are all the remaining sons of my brother, and you are all the son I ever had or wanted. If you think I would let you go into this venture, and stand aloof from you, you are mad. And that being so,” he said practically, “we had better take good care to see that we make a success of what we’re about. You began to say, Harry, that when I rode south again…?”

  “I am coming with you, to see the last letters despatched to GIendower and Edmund. There must be good timing and utter surprise, or the children will be at risk. Once he knows we’re in arms and close upon him, he’ll have no time to threaten them. And I should like
,” he said, his voice carefully level and quiet, “to visit Hal again while I’m in Shrewsbury.”

  Worcester had brought him a letter glowing with confidence and grand intentions, pouring out to him all the prince’s hopes of victory in Wales, undeterred by sympathy, ready to go to all lengths to achieve the task committed to him. A just judge! Hotspur remembered the twelve-year-old face, pale and fixed behind the blue blade of the Curtana at Henry’s coronation, with huge hazel eyes dazed by glory but never wavering from the contemplation of duty. A lovely, terrible child! And a friend of such fierce loyalty that disloyalty to him, however inevitable, was a kind of death. But he did not look too long at that grief. He was about something he had to do, and for all his father’s arguments, there was no choice left.

  “Why go near him?” said Northumberland in exasperation. “You are urgent for sorrow. And all needless—needless! You could call a halt now, warn your allies in Wales, sit close and still, and watch events. But since you will not, I have done!”

  “And you stand in with us?” Worcester asked sharply.

  “Since needs must, yes. If we cannot turn this mad-head, we may well consider how best to turn all other things to account. If we are to strike,” he said, and came back to the table to frown down upon his scrawled plan, “let’s strike as effectively as possible. You say the prince has moved his headquarters to Shrewsbury because of the flare-up along the Dee?”

  “So much the better,” said Hotspur with decision, “for it’s more accessible than Chester. And before we do anything else we must secure the prince, and put him out of the reckoning.”

  Northumberland approved. “Good! If he has but half an army left to him, you may get hold of him and immobilise his men before they can make a move, and you’ll have a garrison town with two river crossings to serve Glendower and Edmund. Yes, you must begin by occupying Shrewsbury.”

  And a royal hostage, he thought, warming almost to the idea of rebellion, to which his subtle mind saw so many practical objections, while his discontented and disaffected heart still desired it. Who put this man on the throne? How could he ever have carried his way without us? Yes, if we do move, if we must move, let him sweat for his heir. It’s good tactics.