Within the Hollow Crown

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  That serfs should clamour to be freemen, paying money for their strips of land, seemed understandable. They were willing enough to work for their landlords, it seemed—even to fight for them if need be—but they were determined to work for a wage and hold their fields by rental and not body service. Richard had learned enough of economics to realize the power this would give them, particularly in a land suffering from a war-depleted population where wages were already soaring. But by some intuition of his own he perceived that somehow it might put new vigour into the exhausted country and raise the whole standard of living; so that he soon found himself discussing the average value of land and what the average peasant could afford to pay for it. With the impulsive quickness of youth he referred the matter there and then to some of the rich land owners who were with him so that it could be practically settled before submitting it to a lot of long-drawn-out legislature. And before he left, a standard price of four pence an acre had been agreed upon, which seemed fair enough to all.

  In the same friendly spirit he promised the insurgents written pardons. And, realizing that his uncle and the Mayor were far more concerned about getting the mob away from London than with any agricultural matters, he promptly had a number of his personal banners distributed among the leaders so that they might begin to march home immediately, feeling themselves to be under his protection.

  Bitter grudges which had been growing for years had been wiped out with a little common sense and co-operation in a few hours. The crowd had cheered him again and again with a spontaneous gratitude which made all the hostile demonstrations around the Tower seem like a forgotten dream; and he had been able to look back at Mile End village and see the surrounding meadows almost cleared.

  "A good morning's work, sir!" Nicholas Brembre had declared. And Salisbury, Walworth and the rest had given him credit, congratulating him with a sincerity which made him blush with pleasure. Only his uncle and some of the older lords had hung back a little, shamed and disapproving.

  But Richard cared little for their disapproval now. He even hugged himself to think how much Uncle Thomas must he hating it all. The cheers of the people were still ringing in his ears as he passed through Aldgate, tasting for the first time what it felt like to be a real king.

  He and his supporters would return in triumph. No more sneaking out at back entrances for him. They would go past Barking church and round by the main gatehouse of the Tower. Already all the malcontents seemed to have melted away from St. Catherine's. Looking towards the wharf one saw only blue sky and the masts of shipping bobbing on a full, slapping tide.

  The sight of ships reminded Richard of Sudbury. No need now for the poor old man to go slinking off to some Flemish port. Hadn't he—Richard the Second—settled it all? Brought back safety and peace of mind to London and to all his friends? Now that the actual work was done a happy sense of drama enthralled him. Too bad that Robert and Burley couldn't be there to see him returning to the city he had saved—bareheaded and valiant in his gold damask tunic with the new-fashioned up-standing collar and his fine green worsted hose. And what a pity the bells weren't ringing as they had been for his coronation! Richard loved it when St. Paul's and all the other churches clashed their bells, filling the narrow streets with a delirium of sound. But his mother would be sure to come out to meet him. There would be the warm welcome of her laughing embraces and the adoring glances of that doting minx Lizbeth. And the guards would cheer from the battlements as they heaved on the winches to let the drawbridge down…

  But nobody seemed to be about. The tall houses mirrored in Barking Creek had a blank, deserted air. Doors were bolted and windows shuttered, and the only sign of life was a mangy cur routing among the gutter garbage. Rounding the Tower wall, Richard noticed that the drawbridge was already down. But no one was watching from the battlements, nor were there any sentries by the gatehouse. The great oak doors stood wide. The gatehouse itself yawned open—with a broken pike lying across the flagstones and the twisted iron of a torch sconce banging in the draught.

  His retinue reined in against the moat and stared aghast.

  "It looks like a house that has been burgled," said Brembre, who must have seen plenty of them during the past few days.

  "No one could possibly break into the Tower!" scoffed Salisbury.

  "Unless they were helped in," said Walworth, remembering how the insurgents had been helped over London Bridge.

  The word "Treachery!" sprang to men's lips. Only the Duke of Gloucester, who for once had been keeping himself in the background, made no comment.

  Like Salisbury, Richard couldn't believe it to be true. He tried to shake himself out of such a ridiculous nightmare. He wasn't going to have his beautiful bubble of a day rudely pricked like this. "Send for the Lieutenant and I'll have him answer for those defaulting sentries—and this morning's watchmen," he ordered, in a fair imitation of his grandfather's angriest voice.

  Before anyone could obey, Standish had scrambled from his saddle onto the wall of the moat. "Look, they're coming out to meet us now!" he called down from his vantage-point.

  But it was ragged peasants, not soldiers in the King's livery, who came swarming out across the bridge. Most of them were drunk, and all of them yelled, hoarse with excitement, as they came. Some clutched golden bowls and some brass candlesticks. They trailed and tripped over precious tapestries they had looted. And leading the way were brawny, bare-armed men carrying something aloft on a pole. The rest danced round it and clawed up at it with obscene gestures, and as the whole bacchanalian rout wedged itself to a momentary standstill on the drawbridge it was possible to see what the thing was. For a moment or two it mopped and mowed in the direction of the silent spectators—a battered, sightless head with the merciless sunlight glistening on a silver tonsure matted with blood.

  "Simon Sudbury! Oh, my poor Sudbury!" shuddered Richard, covering his face with both hands and letting all the bitter mockery of his triumphal summer day wash over him.

  There were other heads on other poles. "Hales—Legge—some unfortunate clerk in Lancaster's livery—" counted Brembre, between set lips. But the whole venom of Tyler's men was concentrated on the prelate who had imprisoned John Ball, the creator of their dream. They never even noticed the royal party. "To the Bridge! Stick them up on London Bridge!" they yelled, and bore their horrid burdens westwards to the river behind the smouldering wharves.

  "If they have done that to Sudbury, what must they have done to my mother?" cried Richard, spurring forward almost before they had passed. A dozen hands caught at his bridle. He fought wildly to get past, striking at them indiscriminately with his riding whip. "I've got to get in…I must see for myself. I must find that damned Lieutenant—he'll know…" he raged hysterically. But for some reason best known to himself, Gloucester was equally determined that he should not see the Lieutenant. "Don't be a young fool!" he shouted, wedging his great Flemish roan across the boy's path. "Half those maniacs are probably still in there. They're drunk with power and blood as well as wine. You don't want to come out with your head on a pole like Sudbury, do you?"

  It was sound sense, of course, but in his frantic anxiety Richard slid to the ground and tried to slip beneath the mare's body. He even drew his dagger and would have struck at the friends who detained him had they not made way just then for Geoffrey Chaucer, whose everyday aspect appeared to pull things back into the realm of sanity. He had come walking up from one of the wharves, staff in hand, just as Richard had seen him dozens of times coming from his daily work at the Customs office. Chaucer of the shrewd, kind eyes—Chaucer who always understood. "The Princess is quite safe," he said at once, in that soothing voice of his.

  "Where, Geoffrey? Where?" In his relief Richard leaned against him, clutching at the familiar texture of his brown livery gown.

  "We took her to the Wardrobe in Carter Lane. To the house you gave Mundina Danos when she married your Grace's tailor. It was the only place I could think of."

  "Then Mundina
is with her?"

  "Yes, sir. Plying her with her famous remedies. The poor lady fainted when she saw that vile rabble surging into the private apartments. They were tearing down the hangings and disporting themselves on the beds. But that pert, dark de Wardeaux girl has the courage of a tigress. She bethought her of the boat the poor Archbishop had hoped to use and we got the Princess away in that."

  Richard sheathed his dagger shamefacedly. "Oh, Geoffrey, Geoffrey, what should we all do without you?" he said, feeling rather like fainting himself. He was thankful beyond words for his mother's safety; but it had all been such a shock—such an ugly ending to so promising an adventure. Couldn't Life ever let him play his fine ventures to a conclusion? He heard Salisbury asking sternly what the guards had been about and his uncle inquiring with genuine anxiety for his nephew, Henry Bolingbroke, and felt how much more dignified it would have been to concern himself with these matters than to let himself get all worked up and behave like a hysterical idiot.

  "About the guards, I can't say, milords," he heard Chaucer answering in his unruffled way. "None of us saw the beginning of it. I was checking up accounts with the King's steward and when I opened the door the rabble were upon us and my one thought was to hurry to the Princess. But, looking back, it seems to sit in my memory that on some of the stairs the guards stood back and let them pass." He paused a moment and looked strangely at Gloucester. "And when I got to the Princess's room milord Derby was there, about to leave by some backstair. That squire of his, John Ferrour, was bundling him up into one of her women's dresses and said he could hide him in his own home somewhere in Southwark. I think they must have got away while those brutes were murdering the Archbishop and the Prior at their prayers in the chapel."

  Richard had forgotten all about his cousin, but he had the

  decency to try to strangle an involuntary wish that Sudbury might have been spared instead.

  The morning's work at Mile End must have been more of a strain than he had realized. He was suddenly terribly tired. Almost with indifference he heard Chaucer telling them that it would be impossible to lie in the Tower that night—that Tyler's men were tumbling the kitchen wenches in the King's own bed. And loyal old Salisbury swearing that he would string them all up before they could live long to boast of it.

  Was everybody going to stop in an ignominious huddle all afternoon, discussing what they were going to do, he wondered irritably. For himself, he was going to Carter Lane. To his mother and his beloved nurse, whose lovely tenderness beckoned like the only lighted candle in a drab and cruel world. He mounted without a word. Dejectedly he rode off down Thames Street, and dejectedly most of the others followed.

  Probably they had nowhere else where they dared go. But Richard didn't want them. He would have given anything to go to his own womenfolk alone. And after talking with men who sweated for their daily bread he felt ashamed of the way his uncle and other rich lords took Jacot's and Mundina's hospitality for granted, crowding their house and straining the unwarned resources of their larder. He himself could eat but little. The sight of those mangled heads had turned him sick. But he sat watching his mother who, with her usual resilience, was recounting her experiences. And he let Mundina's ministrations flow over him and heal him.

  The strange evening passed in a babble of discussion; but the topic was always the same. How had the insurgents got into the Tower?

  Was it the Lieutenant's fault? Had he—as Gloucester suggested—either through slackness or dishonesty left the place too ill-victualled to withstand a siege? Were the men-at-arms themselves really in sympathy with the revolt? Had they been bribed? Had someone promised Wat Tyler access to the hated Treasurer and Chancellor once the royal party were out of the way? And if so, who?

  Probably they would never know. And since the thing was done, thought Richard with an access of his old southern indolence, what matter? But when there came a tramping of mailed feet on the wooden household stairs and his uncle brought in the Earl of Arundel bearing the late Archbishop's Chancery seals, he thought he could make a pretty good guess. Nothing that he would ever be able to prove, of course—since Gloucester had been clever enough to ride with him…But if Sudbury were still alive and the Court not in a state of emergency even Gloucester wouldn't have dared to make his shifty crony Chancellor of England without consulting either Parliament or his elder brothers.

  After Richard had been coerced into signing the necessary documents, he lay awake for a long time in the strange, gabled room upstairs. It was the first time he had ever gone to bed in an ordinary private house. The windows overhung the street and it seemed strange to hear footsteps padding up and down the lane and to see a rushlight burning in the window of the opposite house only a few feet away. But although it was a typically English house he fancied a faint scent of almond blossom hung about the bed linen. Probably the sheets were some that Mundina had brought in her presses from Bordeaux in Aquitaine.

  The nostalgic fragrance carried him back to the carefree days he had spent there in her kind and indulgent company, when his father was away at war and his lovely mother and sometimes his elder brother had come to play with him. He had been a lonely child and loved their visits. Except that his brother Edward had been rather self-opinionated and full of himself. But then he had been heir presumptive to the throne of England and all the French possessions, whereas he himself had been a comparative nobody.

  Lying there in the darkness with the horror of Sudbury's bleeding head before him every time he dared to close his eyes, Richard wished with all his heart that he were a nobody still. And he prayed that Simon Burley or even John of Lancaster might come home soon. For if there was one person he loathed and mistrusted more than his Uncle Thomas it was Richard, Earl of Arundel.

  Chapter Eleven

  Saturday morning dawned warm and cloudless—just like any other June day. Except that London was in the hands of ruthless rebels and the King and all law-abiding citizens virtually prisoners. As Brembre had feared when the gaols were broken open, it was largely criminals who remained behind, and all lawyers against whom they had a grudge were being vindictively murdered in the streets. Trade was at a standstill. Churches were closed and priests afraid to venture abroad to shrive the dying. And instead of busy booths along Eastcheap the extremists, fanned by the growing fanaticism of Ball, had set up an execution block.

  For years all the best brains in the country had been concentrated on Continental wars while sores festered too long at home. Through sheer reaction Richard could see, by that gift of vision which most of his mentors had done so little to develop, that to reconcile the claims of rich and poor would be a finer job than either Crécy or Poitiers. But in the end it was irritation that drove him again to action.

  Such was his antipathy towards Arundel that he could scarcely breath in the same house with him. By every word and gesture the arrogant, tactless earl did his best to make the young king feel of no account; and, like most sensitive people, Richard was apt to become very much what his audience thought him. Yesterday he had risen above himself, cast off the fetters of tutelage, basked in the approval of all. Today Arundel and Gloucester, their nerve restored, behaved as if they had been in charge of everything and talked across him as if he were some witless page.

  "Of course, it's absurd trying to placate these canailles," snorted Arundel, who had never been called upon to come face to face with them. "You think you've made them generous concessions and they crop up somewhere else shouting for disendowment of the Church, a general holocaust of all laws and lawyers and the right to roam about our woods and kill any game they fancy."

  "But they went away reasonably enough yesterday when I talked to them and gave them my charters and banners," objected Richard, realizing as soon as he had said it how childish the words sounded.

  Arundel turned and stared down from his great height as if he had only just noticed that he was there. "What's the use of a few fancy bits of vellum and silk?" he asked rudely. "Hundreds of th
em 'em are still here—killing Flemings and dragging out poor devils who's taken sanctuary in the churches."

  Gloucester reached for the last spiced cake from the little tailor's depleted table. "If you ask me, most of them are staying less because they want more concessions than because they want to make sure of looting London before the scum of half a dozen other counties get in. You always get that when you think you've cleared up this sort of thing," he said, as if he had had life-long experience of dealing with insurgent mobs.

  Richard almost choked over his cup of Rhinish. "Then I sup-ppose you two think everything I did yesterday was w-wasted?" he said, stammering with rage.

  "Well, they say now that this Wat Tyler proposes to make himself King of London and split up the rest of England among his down-at-heel lieutenants!" laughed Gloucester, goading him. The man had got up in too much of a hurry to shave, and his nephew watched the masticating movements of his bristly blue jaw with loathing. "Does he?" Richard said, with dangerous quietness. "Then let's go out at once and find him."