Queen of the North

by Anne O'Brien

  Rejecting the hard words, I had no wish to discuss Harry’s impetuosity or his death. Instead, taking a stance on grounds where I was sure of my argument:

  ‘As you say, why was there need for such a battle? Lancaster refused to negotiate. Could he not have come to terms? Could he not have offered to parley, to prevent the bloodshed? The blood that soaked that battlefield was Lancaster’s doing.’

  ‘That is not so.’

  ‘But it is.’

  ‘I know what happened, Elizabeth. I was there, at the battle, and in the morning before the battle.’

  I had not known it, but what would that matter?

  ‘Henry moved heaven and earth to bring the rebellion to a peaceful conclusion.’

  I frowned, shrugging off Thomas’s hold, which he allowed, his hands falling to his sides, since I had long since stopped wishing to pace.

  ‘There was no negotiation offered.’

  ‘There was. Who was it who met with the King on that morning, to debate the offer made?’

  I frowned. ‘Worcester. Worcester was there. He said there was no value in what was offered.’

  ‘Worcester lied.’

  ‘But when I accused Lancaster of desiring Harry’s death, he did not deny it. So what do you say happened, since you were there to see and hear?’

  ‘They negotiated. The King did not want to fight. He did not seek all the death and had too much admiration for Hotspur to wilfully have him dead. I think he hoped to win his friendship again, to settle all the enmities. How would I forget it – the King spending the whole morning trying to hammer out a settlement? He sent the Abbots of Shrewsbury and Haughmond to Hotspur, offering safe conduct. Hotspur sent Worcester with the Percy response, a defence of their rebellion, listing all the reasons why they felt a need to challenge the King’s authority. You know them all. They were promised peace and pardon if they would negotiate rather than fight, but what room was there for negotiation in such a list of the King’s supposed crimes? Worcester refused to consider any grounds for a settlement. He said he did not trust the King. What more could King Henry do? He offered conciliation, but Worcester would have none of it.’

  I could not believe it. It was not in Worcester’s nature to refuse negotiation. Surely he would not.

  ‘Worcester told Harry that Lancaster had refused to negotiate,’ I said.

  ‘Then, for whatever reason he had, Worcester lied. The King had done all he could. Battle was the only recourse, before the armies of Mortimer, Glyn Dwr and the Earl of Northumberland could join together to smash the royal forces to pieces.’

  I thought about this, suspecting that Baron de Camoys would not lie to me.

  ‘Do I believe you? How can I believe you?’

  ‘I was there when they met. I was as baffled at Worcester’s manner as the next man. I would not lie to you. What would be the value in my doing that?’

  My thoughts unpicked what I had been told about the battle.

  ‘Harry did not question his uncle’s rejection of the negotiation.’

  ‘No, Hotspur did not question Worcester’s version of events. Hotspur wanted that battle. The battle fire was in his blood by then. You know what he was like.’

  ‘Yes,’ I whispered. ‘Yes, I do.’

  Thomas turned away from me, allowing me space to absorb these new facts.

  ‘The battle was as much Hotspur’s fault, and certainly Worcester’s, as it was the King’s. As for the Earl’s absence, who knows? We never shall now. A diplomatic illness, as the rumours said? Perhaps. But we know that Westmorland and Sir Roger Waterton both had armies in the field, sent deliberately by the King with orders to keep Northumberland pinned down in the north, to stop him from marching west. Is that not so?’

  ‘I did not know. The Earl would not give me the reason.’

  ‘He had too much pride, Elizabeth. But if in truth he could not march, hemmed in by hostile forces as he was, then you must allow Hotspur to take some blame for the outcome.’

  Anger flared again.

  ‘So I am unreasonable. But you are too damned accepting of your King’s motives and actions!’

  Lord Thomas swung back towards me. ‘My acceptance, as you put it, is growing less by the hour.’ The dark brows had become a level line.

  ‘Well? Of what other would you accuse me, as well as poor judgement?’

  ‘You still don’t see it, do you? In all the sorrow and death and loss of those miserable years, I don’t think you have ever acknowledged your own culpability.’

  Which effectively silenced me. When finally I spoke, my voice was little more than a harsh raven-croak.

  ‘Explain to me, then, my blame in Hotspur’s death.’

  Thomas was without compassion. ‘You do not need me to tell you. You are quite capable of working it out for yourself, if you will allow yourself to see the truth beneath all the dross. If you are willing to weigh and judge your own actions.’

  I felt temper begin to rise, but Thomas was choosing his words with cold insight.

  ‘You lived in a household of high-tempered, ambitious men. You lived there from a child. Did you learn nothing? Did you never consider being the voice of reason, of offering well-balanced advice? Of course you did not. The Percy support for Lancaster was crucial when he returned to claim his inheritance. The Earl and Hotspur made Lancaster’s crown a reality. But you were not satisfied, were you…’

  It was like clawing my way through a thicket, the thorns catching on my hem, my sleeves, my hair, at every step. ‘Neither was Harry satisfied. He regretted trusting Lancaster to keep his oath…’

  ‘But yours was the Mortimer blood. You were the one who desired above all else to see the Earl of March on England’s throne. Did you see yourself in a position of power, as aunt to the Mortimer King?’

  ‘No. Never…’

  ‘I see the ambition in you.’

  ‘Yes, for my nephew, for my son, not for me.’

  But Lord de Camoys was intransigent.

  ‘Did you never try to dissuade Hotspur from taking up arms against his King? Were you the one to sow the seeds of rebellion when Henry of Lancaster took the crown that was not his? You were the Mortimer voice in that tempestuous household. You were as keen to win recognition for your nephews as Harry was, if I know you as I think I do. Is that not true?’

  He barely waited for me to answer, which I did not. I could not.

  ‘When your brother clasped hands with Glyn Dwr, did you not see it as a miracle worked by God to aid your cause?’

  ‘No…’

  But Lord de Camoys, a man of such diplomatic skills, gave no quarter as any diplomacy was shredded into pieces, as smoothly as a knife slicing through fine silk.

  ‘We all must carry the burden of blame in the horror of war within a country, subject against subject. It is a terrible thing. You must accept your part in it too, or the future will hold nothing for you but dissatisfaction and bitterness that will grind you down. You will be angry and frustrated, gnawed at by ghosts from the past, until the day of your death. Is that what you want?’

  I retreated to the old cry in my heart.

  ‘I cannot forgive Northumberland.’

  ‘Why not? Because he made his own peace with King Henry on the back of his son’s desire for retribution?’

  ‘He sent my son away.’

  ‘Have you ever asked yourself why? Better the Percy heir with some element of freedom in Scotland than rubbing shoulders with the Mortimer heirs, locked in Pevensey Castle!’

  I retaliated, but there was a hesitation before I spoke.

  ‘Northumberland brought us all down.’

  ‘Well, I can’t argue against that, because he was a man of pride and ambition that had never been curtailed. He would never rest, until death forced him to do so. As it has now. He fought until hacked to death at Bramham Moor to restore Percy power in the north. Of course he was King of the North and fought for the right of your son to replace him. You would expect no less from a man of hi
s demeanour.’

  A little silence hung about us.

  ‘I have no guilt,’ I said.

  ‘Then you are a fortunate woman. You can tell me that the dread signs and portents foretold the death of Hotspur. Maybe they did. A star racing across the heavens or the terrifying blotting out of the moon in blood red can be made to answer for any dire occurrence. I would question their role in the death of a man on a battlefield. I would look elsewhere for the driving force that sent a man of Hotspur’s ambition to his death.’

  ‘I cannot.’

  ‘You must.’

  His words were searing as if they cut into my flesh.

  ‘What do I do?’

  Different emotions had replaced the anger, but I would not weep on his breast.

  ‘You search your own conscience, Elizabeth.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then I will stand with you, whatever it is that you decide to do.’

  Thomas’s condemnation hung over me with the density of a funeral pall. What right had he to strip bare what he saw as my treacherous blindness to the truth? He had no right. What’s more, he was wrong. I was not blind.

  You search your own conscience, Elizabeth.

  His words lashed at my thoughts again and again, while my heart was squeezed with hurt, not through the loss of shared love, which we did not have, but through the loss of that even platform of respect that I thought we had achieved. I had not been prepared for such an attack when my spirits had been at their lowest ebb, drained through damning the Earl’s soul to everlasting torment and his body to destruction on the gates and bridges of the north. Through his unclouded vision, Thomas de Camoys had torn apart all my convictions.

  The chamber was too constraining for me. Where I stood alone on the wall-walk, the breeze rippled across the river causing little wavelets in the metallic expanse. Gulls flying inland for the rich picking along the edges wheeled, their cries harsh. Small craft plied their trade this way and that. It was the world managing its own affairs with ease; when all within me was turmoil.

  ‘Blessed Virgin! I did not deserve that! Why would he hurt me?’

  My voice caused a soot-black crow to rise from the coping stones, cawing its disgust. I watched it rise and fall on the air, its mastery supreme, and as I did so, some measure of uneasy calm was restored to me so that I could think, rather than simply react with anger. Perhaps the Blessed Virgin had taken pity on me after all. My thoughts began to untangle themselves, to run more fluidly as the water lapped against the embankment.

  I studied my hands, my knuckles white where they gripped the stone.

  Thomas would not wound me out of malice. What he meant to do was open my eyes to what he saw as the truth in the violence and death of the past years. But was his truth more viable than mine? I had lived through the years of achievement and failure. I had known the heights of victory and the true depths of despair. What did Lord Camoys know of either?

  I would banish his words if I could, to be washed away in the tide that was now turning, beginning its race towards the open sea. There they would be lost for ever, with the noisome debris from the city. But I could not banish them. They lingered, Thomas’s words driving home in my mind.

  ‘Do you ever blame Henry Percy?’

  ‘For what should I blame him?’

  ‘His impetuosity…’

  What an image Thomas had painted of Harry’s urgency when in the thick of the fray, of a man with no thought for his own safety or for the careful planning of the attack, only for the desire to charge at the enemy and lay them low. Was it true? I opened my mind to his feats in battle. His courage could not be questioned but his judgement could. Was it Harry’s fiery temper, when he no longer saw with clarity, that had driven him to immoderate action?

  I allowed the one image to form, blotting out the river scene, of Harry at his most flamboyant. Impossibly flamboyant, with all the recklessness that could fall upon him when his blood was up. Not that I had seen this clash of will for myself, nor any of his battle successes, but there were songs sung of it by our minstrels when supper had been eaten and much ale drunk. It made Harry flush with embarrassment at his youth and impetuosity as the rafters rang with this tale of an affair of lost honour. Of revenge for what he saw as his humiliation.

  Deaf to the raucous calls of the herring gulls, it was as if I were there with him, at Newcastle in the days before Otterburn, the Scots Earl of Douglas well dug in around us for a long siege. After a day of skirmishes and a confused melee which achieved nothing, Harry was out of all patience.

  ‘I’ll fight you for this fortress,’ he announced from the height of the barbican, looking down on his assailant. ‘Single combat.’

  ‘And I’ll accept.’ Douglas a man after Harry’s own heart.

  So they fought, lance against lance. Harry would risk death. He would risk well-nigh anything for the glory of action.

  But Douglas, older and stronger, unhorsed Harry, snatching up the silken pennon from the tip of one of Harry’s lances; to Harry’s fury, dust-coated as he was, under that critical gaze of the whole garrison ranged along the walls. Douglas was joyous, waving the trophy with its gold stitching.

  ‘I’ll take this back to Scotland with me and set it on high on my castle of Dalkeith. Everyone will see it for miles around and know of Hotspur’s nose being ground in the mud.’

  I could all but see Harry’s rage, a shimmer of heat around him. ‘By God! You’ll never get my pennon out of Northumberland!’

  Douglas’s mocking reply was all the challenge Harry needed. ‘Come and get your pennon back tonight. I’ll plant it before my tent and we’ll see if you have the courage to come and take it from me.’

  Nothing would stop Harry from retrieving it. When Douglas’s forces retreated north, burning and pillaging as they went, Harry was in hot pursuit.

  I found myself smiling, as the image shattered into bright particles, my memories smashed into jagged-edged pieces by loss and distance. Perhaps one day I would lose the memories completely. I had been seventeen years old, and knew him not so well. Hotspur, the Scots had well named him. Never had an epithet been so well addressed, so assiduously sought. Harry was proud of it. He would always be Hotspur on the battlefield, and saw it as no detriment. For him to be Hotspur was the height of his fame and his achievement, a fiery star streaking across the battlefield, even more than the Percy lion unfurled above his head.

  But it was a battle plan that would not bring victory, Thomas had said. How could I deny it? Harry’s recklessness had driven him on so many occasions to feats of arms that were ill-considered, leaving me to live in fear. Otterburn, when Harry had ridden like the devil to retrieve his pennon, fighting a battle without formation or planning, conducted over the northern hills in the dangerous, masking shadows of moonlight. A battle which had ended in his being taken prisoner, kept in Scotland for well nigh a year until the ransom was raised.

  Nor was that the only disaster. I knew about Homildon Hill, when Harry had wanted to lead a charge against the Scots, to obliterate once and for all the dishonour of that thrice-damned pennon. Only the Earl and Dunbar, who argued for the use of archers to destroy the Scottish forces, had prevented it. A frontal assault could have led to another disaster rather than a defeat for the Scots.

  No, his strategy was often flawed; denial was not possible. Did Harry not see it? Yes, he did, but that would have been afterwards in cold blood, when there was no cold blood on a battlefield. This was the essence of Hotspur the mercurial hero, the glorious leader.

  Hotspur the doomed.

  You are blind, Elizabeth. You see only his good qualities.

  There were so many exceptional qualities. He fought with honour, with respect for the enemy, conducting himself with chivalry, never brutality or crude violence.

  And to me? There had been a marvellous depth of love.

  But Thomas had damned him at Shrewsbury, for making that final, hopeless charge against the banner of Lancaster himself.


  The battle was as much Hotspur’s fault, and certainly Worcester’s, as it was the King’s.

  I shivered, yet not with the cold, recalling the fear that had drenched me as the moon was hid from my sight.

  ‘You still don’t see it, do you? In all the sorrow and death and loss of those miserable years, I don’t think you have ever acknowledged your own culpability.’

  Was this true? Could I deny all Thomas’s accusations? Mine was indeed the Mortimer blood, the Mortimer interest in that hot-blooded Percy household. I had been chosen as a child bride because of that blood, making an alliance between the ambitions of the Earl of Northumberland and the children of King Edward the Third. Had he seen the Mortimer link that I would bring? That one day the Earl of March would rule England and I would be his aunt, Harry his uncle by marriage? What power that would have given the King of the North. Controller of the King of the South too, if fortune smiled on him. The Percys would reign supreme.

  But that was not my doing.

  My mind snapped back to that other accusation. Would Harry have rebelled against Lancaster, and in Mortimer’s name, without me? I thought that he would. I could not pretend that my influence with him was strong enough to put him on a battlefield, but without doubt I had stood at his shoulder and whispered in his ear. Shouted sometimes. I grimaced at a passing flock of pigeons as I remembered. No, I was not without blame. Nor was I slow in using Edmund’s situation with Glyn Dwr to our advantage. I had gone readily to negotiate, sister to brother.

  I cannot forgive Northumberland.

  Still it rang loud and clear in my mind.

  Forgive him for what? Perhaps it was true that Westmorland and Waterton both had armies in the field and orders to keep Northumberland from marching west. But I was unconvinced. Could the Earl not have sidestepped Westmorland’s forces if he had truly wished to do so? And he sent my son away.