For there was no more disbelieving. This was hard, black fact. Hotspur was in Cheshire, with a strong force from Northumbria, and recruiting from among the conservative Cheshire nobility as he came. The confederacy embraced the Welsh rebels, and Sir Edmund Mortimer with his feudal force, all these lately engaged in ferocious sorties into South Wales which were now seen to be a calculated diversion, damaging though they had been in their own right. All eyes upon South Wales, and in the north the standard of rebellion had been raised almost silently, almost invisibly. Moreover, the Percies had issued in Chester a long manifesto setting out their complaints against King Henry, and the list was long and bitter, meant to canvass support among a nobility always discontented enough. They accused him of exacting taxes and tallages he had sworn not to demand, and putting the money to other uses than the right keeping of the realm and the due protection of its borders; of having broken the oath sworn at his muster at Doncaster on his return from exile, to claim only what was his by right, to make no bid for the crown, but only to ensure that Richard should continue to rule under the guidance of a properly constituted council; of manipulating parliament by ordering the county sheriffs to return only knights favourable to the royal interest; of having, out of personal malice, refused to ransom or countenance the ransom of Sir Edmund Mortimer, and of keeping the younger Edmund Mortimer, acknowledged heir to King Richard’s throne, a prisoner and deprived of his right. And clearly they said that they had done amiss in supporting Henry of Lancaster’s claim to that throne, and could no longer continue in so flagrant an error. Their avowed aim now was to set Edmund, earl of March, upon the throne of England.
Only in that last abrupt declaration could Henry recognise the voice of Hotspur. The rest surely came from another and a different mind, subtle, legal and cool. Who, in any case, could imagine Hotspur sitting down at a desk to compose such a document? Yet not Northumberland, either; the language was not his. Nor, so far, had anyone brought in evidence that Northumberland himself was in arms, or meditating action. Reports said he was certainly not with the host in Cheshire, though it was natural enough to assume that he might follow on to reinforce his son’s numbers with his own.
From Burton, upon the assessment of all this evidence, the king wrote in frantic haste to his council, urging all its members to join him at once, except for the treasurer, whose task it was to raise hurried loans to support an inescapable campaign; and to all the sheriffs of the midland counties, ordering them to raise their musters instantly and prepare to go with him against the rebels. He had more details by then. Another formidable ally had joined the conspiracy; for Hotspur had released his captive, the earl of Douglas, and the Scots knights he had held since Homildon, and they had enlisted gladly under his banner to march against the crown of England.
The muster letters were not yet despatched, when a squire in the livery of the earl of Stafford rode in with the most shocking news
of all, and was brought in, soiled and sweating as he was, to the king’s cabinet.
“My liege lord, the rebel forces are not far north of Stafford. We judge them to be something more than twelve thousand men—and strong in archers. And, my lord, Sir Henry Percy has reinforcements now from another source. It is truth, I swear,” panted the young man, trembling, “we sent out a scout who has seen the pennant with his own eyes! The earl of Worcester has drawn off more than half the forces the prince had with him in Shrewsbury, and taken them with him to join his nephew’s army. The prince is left abandoned in Shrewsbury with only a small force to hold it—and Sir Henry Percy is marching on the town to secure his Grace as prisoner and hostage!”
* * *
The Scottish earl of March found him sitting alone and inert, after the last of his couriers had ridden out, his hands empty on the table before him, the mulled wine they had brought him cooling unnoticed at his elbow. A gust of the outside world came in with the earl, the dust and heat of a long ride, in which he had worn out a whole relay of mounts, and the sudden bracing impact of a powerful and persuasive personality. He had hardly rested on his journey south, and he arrived still vibrant and alight with energy. What was a mortal peril and a shattering shock to Henry was his best opportunity to George Dunbar. He still had his reputation to make on the English side of the border.
He bent his knee almost perfunctorily to the king he had chosen for himself, and was in no position to betray. He had never hesitated where to choose, for with the Percies he would stand no chance of favour; it was stand or fall with this one.
“My liege lord, I quit the siege as soon as I heard the way of it. You have more need of me here.” He stooped his red head close over the table, the glitter of his blue eyes narrowed and keen. “My lord, you must move fast, as fast as I’ve moved since two days gone. And you have not as far to go as I had. As I heard it, Percy’s aiming for Shrewsbury. It’s a link with Wales, a safe river crossing, a well-victualled town, and left with barely a garrison worth the name. And your son—yon’s a bonny hostage to pick up so cheap. The heir to the throne, no less!”
“You tell me what I know,” said Henry with bitterness. “Do you think I’ve not been exerting myself about this business? But it was good in you,” he said, softening, “to ride in such haste to join me. Indeed I value it.”
“But, my lord, your foot soldiers should be on the march this minute, if you mean to be there before him! You may rest, and ride after, but your slow-moving companies should go night and day, and your supplies. This Percy moves fast, and we must move faster yet. You have three days at the most to be in Shrewsbury.”
“It cannot be done,” said the king, aghast.
“There’s nothing in this world within arm’s-length of possibility that cannot be done, when a man must. I could get you there in two, if you’d heed me, but three may do well enough for us—Three he’ll not expect of mortal man.” But he meant: “of you!” and the criticism, so close a reflection of the king’s own thoughts, hurt and goaded, rearing Henry’s head indignantly and stiffening his back.
“I know very well I have two choices, and both risky. To strike immediately, and at a disadvantage, or to wait to make up my numbers before I act, and lose Shrewsbury. I was debating the same choice.” And indeed all his martial memory had cried out on him to strike at once, before the enemy had time to organise and consolidate; but his limbs were lead, and his very hand moved with the slowness of an overladen cart. For as surely as he felt plain, clean rage mounting in him, and cried out at Hotspur: “Traitor!” like any honest monarch thus confronted, he heard the echo cast back into his own face, and Hotspur’s voice answering: “Traitor to whom?” Whatever he could urge in his own defence, so could Hotspur urge it in his. Only when he protested: “I never meant to seize the throne, events forced it upon me!”—only then did echo ominously inflect the utterance into a new shape: “I want only to place the true king on the throne and maintain him there.” For even at this pass Henry could not make himself believe that Hotspur was greedy for a throne himself. Not because he had not enough pride, but because he had too much; too vast, too singular a pride to contain any ambition. He was already Hotspur, what was there to aim
at beyond?
“It’s no choice at all, my lord,” Dunbar urged vehemently. “Numbers? You have nigh on twice what Percy can muster at this moment. Fourteen thousand men at the most I give him, and you have twenty-five thousand and more. But if he’s given three days’ grace, he has Shrewsbury, Glendower, Mortimer and all, and the prince for his surety. And Northumberland on his way south by tomorrow to bring up the reserves.”
The king’s head jerked up abruptly; he stared into the subtle blue eyes, under the thick, sandy brows: “Is that certain? Northumberland, too?”
“If you have Hotspur and Worcester, do you think the earl will be far behind? They hold by their own blood, the Percy clan. I stake you my life the old man’s stirring before this!”
They hold by their own blood! The Percy clan—yes. And the Lancaster clan?
He had not thought of it before. Somehow his mind had avoided making that last, logical step, and questioning the inevitability of Hal’s loyalty to him. Now suddenly the horrible doubt opened like an unsuspected wound in his spirit, quick with pain. They did not sound him out, no, he knew nothing, they did not dare go so far. But how if they were mistaken in abstaining? Then, if they take the town, and he falls into Hotspur’s hands, what will he do? Whom will he choose? For he loves Hotspur! It was an admission, abject and agonising, and wrung out of him against his will. And what inevitably followed was worse: Does he love me?
He had never understood children, and this child out of all of them he understood not at all. He would not even have known if he was hated instead of loved. But Hotspur—Hotspur could not fail of love wherever he touched. How could an ordinary man compete?
No, he could not let it ever be put to the test, his heart could not bear it. Some men might desire to know, but he desired never to know, never to have to face this defeat of all defeats. Whatever befell him after, he had to get to Shrewsbury first, or at the least place his army in between, and prevent Hotspur from reaching the town. From this moment on, the crown was almost a secondary consideration.
He surged so abruptly to his feet, lifted such a changed, resolute face, that for ever after Dunbar credited himself with instilling a daemon into his king, and prided himself and traded on his influence.
“Come, then let’s set this war in motion, and see who lags behind. By the morning of the twentieth I’ll have my army in Shrewsbury.” He crossed to the door of his private cabinet, and flung it open. “John! Call the earl of Stafford here to me, and send out word for all my captains of companies to muster here on the next hour. Before dawn we move!”
* * *
The march to Shrewsbury was one that none who took part in it ever forgot. This was the tireless, hypnotised, stoic marching of the Roman legions, hour after hour even after the will and the mind were asleep. To keep up foot soldiers, supply wagons, re-mounts, armouries and cavalry in planned, methodical progress, separating and re-forming regularly, without stragglers, without casualties and without complaint, was a prodigy of which no one had ever supposed the king capable. They said that he was either possessed of a devil, or inspired by the direct fire of God. But the devil that possessed him was the spectre of his stranger son turned traitor; and to lay that ghost he was willing to sacrifice even the supreme luxury of proving the prince’s constancy by putting it to the test. Better never to try an issue so likely to be lost! He trusted neither God, the devil, nor the prince. It was better not to know!
* * *
The prince stood leaning between the merlons of the town wall, in that same spot where he had leaned with Hotspur barely six weeks previously, and on just such a still, sunlit day, with haze on all the distances, the lush greens of the fields and woods filmed over with delicate smoke-grey and amorphous gold, the river beneath him a soft blue, silvered with light, and gilded with sunshine where the shoals troubled the still surface. At every bend a pool of deeper blue, rimmed with a shimmer of gold. Last summer had been cruel everywhere; this summer was tranquil and kind. The soft, undulating plain of Shropshire seen from the wall of Shrewsbury was inexpressibly fair and benign.
He was looking out from his vantage-point for the first sighting of an army. One of two armies. If he looked to the left, he saw the neck of land opening out beyond the castle foregate, the one dry-foot approach to the town, from which the roads led north-east. If he looked to the right, he saw the suave curve of the river below him, swerving round the foot of the abbot’s vineyard to sweep under the arches of the stone bridge. Across that bridge—the drawbridge was raised now, though it was nearly midday—lay the abbey and the abbey foregate, all that enclosure of holy ground, and then the great road going eastward to Lichfield. That was why he had chosen this spot. There was nothing for him to do below, until sunlight on steel, on one of these roads, prophesied the future. All defences were manned, all captains had their orders. When the sign came there might be more to be done; not before.
He had known now for three days what confronted him. At first, when the frightened squire brought him word that all but the castle garrison and the town guard had been quietly withdrawn in the night, and that his governor, the earl of Worcester, was gone with them, he had been unable to understand or believe what had happened to him; only later, when the first news came of the Percy manifesto, passed from lip to lip across the county, did he realise all the implications.
The surprise should not, perhaps, have been absolute, but so it was, a stunning shock. Even when he began to salvage from the disastrous debris of his memory of friendship those dim, significant things that burgeoned out of misunderstanding like the seeds of truth itself, when he remembered their last exchanges, the revelation of Hotspur’s knowledge of murder, his own faltering appeal for guidance as to what was forgivable and what could never under any compulsion be justified, and Hotspur’s sombre valediction, he was too near to them yet to find any coherent sense in them. It was like being lost in a fantastic forest where words budded like vines winding about him, inhibiting all action, conveying some truth that might help him if he could but interpret it, yet spoken in an unknown language. Only gradually did something valid and expressive begin to come back to him now, here in this spot where they had had their last interview.
“I do what I do because I cannot do otherwise…for what we do we must be answerable…whenever we may be called upon to pay it, there will be a price…” And: “By your judgment I will gladly abide, and whatever dues you charge me with, I will pay with a good grace.” And last of all, and clearest: “Nothing I do can change the love and honour in which I bear you!”
“Nothing you do,” he said passionately within his own heart, “can change the love and honour in which I bear you!” And of that at least he was sure.
Hotspur had known then what he was about to do. That was why he had come. Perhaps it was even why he would not look into the guardrooms or the armouries, or ask anything about the garrison. He desired to see his charge again before the world turned upside-down, but he would not make use of him, or take advantage of having access to his castle. Yet now, so the scouts reported, he was heading here in arms, to take Shrewsbury and the prince with it. It was a race, and he and this town were the prize. Thank God, he did not have to take any action or make any decision, there was nothing he could do but wait. Nothing, at least, until those sharp terrestrial stars began to glitter on one horizon or the other, and the dim, moving serpent of fine dust marked the approach of the marching men. And then? What was his part then? To post his archers and see every gate fast closed and every portcullis lowered, and have parties standing by to throw down the scaling ladders if entry was attempted? Or to send down orders to open the gates? And to which of them?
He had long ago learned to keep his countenance against all comers, even when his heart seemed to him to be riven bodily into two parts, and drawing him two separate and irreconcilable ways. Was that what was meant by a heart breaking? He could not remember that he had ever in his life been so unhappy, not even when Richard died.
“Your Grace…” One of his squires came out from the narrow doorway of the turret above him on the wall. “The lookout reports sighting steel—a mile away yet, but clear! They’re coming!”
“On which road?” he said. But he already knew, for the young man offered it as good news. He turned to look beyond the stone bridge, beyond the roofs of the abbey buildings and the great tower of the church; but from where he stood, some twenty feet lower than the sentry, there was nothing yet to be seen.
“On the Roman road, my lord, this side Atcham.”
“And on the other road, nothing?” Was he hoping or afraid? For his life he did not know what he wanted. Let God decide! Whatever came, he must accept it as a sign. But his voice, at least, was brisk and calm, like his countenance; no one should find any fault in his bearing.
“Not
hing, your grace!”
Joyful news he conceived it. So, no doubt, would the town, for terrible rumours of imminent Welsh attack were running from street to street, and feeling was high and hysterical against the Welsh inhabitants. The king’s coming would be a calming influence, if it did not actually lessen the danger. But where had his father found this vein of passionate haste and instant decision, to bring that host of his, in so short a time, almost to the gates of Shrewsbury?
He went up to the top of the watch-turret, and looked out where the sentry pointed him. The sunlight found the tips of lances, and the hanging veil of fine dust, tracing the length of the column. It was truth, then; they were here. This could not be Hotspur’s army; such a route would have taken them out of their way with no compensating advantage. They had not been seeking immediate battle, but a base here, and command of the routes into Wales. From Stafford they would come straight. And if they had known how incredibly fast the king would move, they would not have halted to recruit and provision on the way, but come like the wind. Now it was too late.
He turned to look along the road that led away into the countryside from the castle foregate, but there was no moving serpent of dust there, no shimmer of lances, or none close enough to be distinguished from the smoke-blue haze of distance. When he looked again towards the abbey, there were already points of colour to be glimpsed beyond, the brilliance of coat-armour like bright dust-motes sparkling in air. The race was lost and won.
Presently a smaller cloud of dust detached itself from the swaying canopy above the column, and spurred ahead towards the town; and within twenty minutes this advance-guard was lost to sight beyond the abbey, to reappear again as a bright cluster of horsemen emerging at the entrance to the bridge.
“Give them the signal to lower the draw-bridge and open the gate,” said the prince.
“My lord, his Grace the king is with the vanguard, I see his guidon clear. And Blount is there with him…and Stafford…Will you go down, your Grace, and welcome your father at the gate?”
A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury Page 26
