The Lady of the Rivers

by Gregory, Philippa

  The queen rises from her chair. ‘Who is it?’ she asks eagerly.

  ‘I cannot advise my friend to come to you unless you, yourself, guarantee his safety,’ Richard says tightly. ‘Do you promise him your pardon for serving against you, Your Grace? Can I trust to your word of pardon?’

  ‘Yes! Yes!’ the queen exclaims. ‘Who will join us?’

  ‘Andrew Trollope, and the six hundred trained and loyal men under his command,’ Richard announces, and steps aside to allow the slim hard-faced man into the royal presence. ‘And that,’ Richard says to me, as he comes to stand beside me, ‘has just decided the battle.’

  Richard is right. As soon as they know that Trollope has turned his coat and come over to us with his men, the three York lords disappear, like mist in the morning. They slip away, overnight, abandoning their men, abandoning their town, even abandoning Cecily Neville the Duchess of York, the wife of Richard the duke. When our army pours into the town of Ludlow, and starts to strip away everything they can carry, she is standing there, with the keys of the castle in her hand, waiting for the queen. She, who has always been a proud woman, married to a royal lord, is most terribly afraid, I can see it on her white face; and I, who had to wait in Mucklestone for their victorious army to sweep by, take no pleasure in seeing such a proud woman brought down so low.

  ‘You have the keys of the castle for me,’ the queen sings out, looking down on the duchess from high on her great horse.

  ‘Yes, Your Grace,’ Cecily says steadily. ‘And I plead for my own safety, and for the safety of these my children.’

  ‘Of course,’ the king says at once. ‘Sir Richard – take the keys and escort the duchess to a safe place, her children with her. She is under my protection.’

  ‘Hold a minute,’ Margaret says. ‘What children are these?’

  ‘This is my daughter Margaret,’ Duchess Cecily says. A tall girl of thirteen blushes painfully red and curtseys low to the queen, recovers from her mistake and curtseys again to the king. ‘This is my son George, and my youngest boy Richard.’

  I would judge George to be about eleven years of age and Richard about seven. They both look stunned with shock, as well they might; for they are boys who yesterday thought their father was heir to the throne of England, likely to fight his way through to the throne, and today find themselves facing the king’s army and their father run away. A crash from a house behind us and a piercing scream from a woman, begging for help as she is pulled down and raped, reminds ul that we are in the middle of a war, talking in a battlefield.

  ‘Take them away,’ the king says quickly.

  ‘And your husband has left you here?’ the queen torments the defeated duchess. ‘Do you remember how you insisted that you be admitted to my chamber when I had just given birth to my baby, and you told me that your husband must visit my husband when he was ill, in the time of our travail? He forced his way into the Privy Council once, but now we see he just ups and goes. He is present where he is not wanted; but when he is needed, he just abandons you. He declares war and then disappears from the battlefield!’

  The duchess sways on her feet, her face as white as skimmed milk. Smoke drifts across the market square, someone somewhere has fired a thatch. The woman who screamed for help is sobbing in rhythmic pain. I see the little boy Richard look around at the sound of someone smashing an axe into a locked door and the babble of an old voice praying to be spared, calling for mercy to someone who is not listening.

  ‘Your Grace,’ I say to the queen. ‘This is no place for any of us. Let us leave the lords to regain control of the men and get out of this town.’

  To my surprise she smiles at me, a gleam of malice that shows clearly before she drops her eyes to her horse’s mane and hides her expression. ‘It’s a very blunt weapon: an army of uncontrolled men,’ she says. ‘When York raised an army against me, he cannot have imagined that I would bring my army against him and that it would be like this. He has taught me a lesson that I have learned well. An army of poor men is a terror indeed. He nearly frightened me. He must be sorry now, now that there is an army of poor men tearing apart his home town.’

  The little dark-haired boy Richard flushes in temper, looks up, opens his mouth as if to shout his defiance. ‘Let’s go,’ I say swiftly, and my husband calls a couple of horses forwards, lifts the duchess into the saddle without ceremony, settles her children in the saddle before three cavalrymen, and we leave the town. As we clatter over the bridge I can hear another woman scream and the noise of running feet. Ludlow is paying the price for the flight of their lord, the Duke of York.

  ‘Yes, but not his death,’ my son Anthony observes. The three of us are riding home to Grafton together, our men straggling down the road behind us. I observe, but try to make it clear that I have not seen, that they are weighed down with loot; every one of them has some cloth bound tight in his pack, or a piece of plate, or a cup of pewter. They were our tenants but we put them in the queen’s army and they fought by her rules. They were told that they might loot Ludlow to punish the treasonous York lords and we will never muster them to ride out for us again if we spoil their sport and demand that they hand back the goods they have thieved. ‘While York lives, while Warwick lives, while Salisbury lives, the wars are not over; they are only put off for a little while longer.’

  Richard nods. ‘Warwick is back in Calais, Richard Duke of York back in Ireland. The kingdom’s greatest enemies have returned to refuge, safe in their castles overseas. We will have to prepare for an invasion again.’

  ‘The queen is confident,’ I say.

  The queen is tremendously confident. November comes and sill she does not return to London, hating London and blaming the London ballad-makers and chap-book sellers for her unpopularity in the kingdom. Their tales and songs describe her as a wolf, a she-wolf who commands a Fisher King – a man reduced to a shell of what he should be. The most bawdy rhymes say she cuckolded him with a bold duke and popped their bastard in the royal cradle. There is a drawing of a swan with the face of Edmund Beaufort, waddling towards the throne. There are songs and ale-house jokes about her. She hates London and the apprentices who laugh at her.

  Instead she orders the parliament to come to Coventry – as if parliaments can be ordered by a woman like outriders – and they obediently come as if they were her messengers, bound to do her bidding when she orders new oaths of loyalty to the king but also to her by name, and to the prince. Nobody has ever sworn loyalty to a queen before – but they do now. She cites the three York lords for treason, takes their lands and fortunes, and hands them out as if it were all the twelve days of Christmas come early. She orders the Duchess Cecily to attend so that she can hear her husband named as a traitor, and listen to the death sentence passed on him. Everything the York lords owned, every rood of land, every banner, every honour and title, every purse of gold, is stripped from them. The poor Duchess of York, now a royal pensioner and a pauper, goes to live with her sister, the queen’s loyal lady, Anne the Duchess of Buckingham, in something between house arrest and torment; a half-life for a woman who was once called ‘Proud Cis’ and now finds herself a married woman with a husband in exile, a mother missing her oldest son, Edward, the daughter of a great house who has lost all her lands and her inheritance.

  SANDWICH, KENT, AND CALAIS,

  WINTER 1460

  Richard is ill paid for warning the queen that the Warwick ownership of Calais has put an enemy on our shoreline, for as soon as the fighting is done and the peace won, she asks him to go to Sandwich and reinforce t

  he town against attack.

  ‘I’ll come too,’ I say at once. ‘I can’t bear you to be in danger and me far away. I can’t bear for us to be parted again.’

  ‘I’m not going to be in danger,’ he lies to reassure me, and then, catching my sceptical expression, he giggles like a boy caught out in a blatant falsehood. ‘All right, Jacquetta, don’t look at me like that. But if there is any danger of an invasion from Calai
s you will have to go home to Grafton. I’ll take Anthony with me.’

  I nod. It’s useless to suggest that Anthony is too precious to be exposed to danger. He is a young man born into a country constantly at war with itself. Another young man, of just his age, is Edward March, the Duke of York’s son, across the narrow seas, serving his apprenticeship in soldiering with the Earls of Warwick and Salisbury. His mother, the Duchess of York, held in England, will not be able to get a word to him. She will have to wait and worry, as I wait and worry. This is not a time when mothers can hope to keep their sons safe at home.

  Richard and I take a house in the port of Sandwich, while Anthony commands the men at Richborough Fort nearby. The town has still not recovered from the French raid of only a few years ago, and the burned-out shells of houses are a vivid statement of the danger fromour enemies, and the narrowness of the seas between us. The town defences were destroyed in the raid, the French fired cannon at the sea walls and captured the town’s own armament. They mocked the citizens, playing tennis in the market square as if to say that they cared nothing for Englishmen, that they thought us powerless. Richard sets builders to work, begs the armourer at the Tower of London to cast new cannon for the town, and starts to train the townsmen to form a guard. Meanwhile, just a mile away, Anthony drills our men and rebuilds the defences of the old Roman castle that guard the river entrance.

  We have been in the town little more than a week when I am suddenly frightened from sleep by the loud clanging of the tocsin bell. For a moment I think it is the goose bell which rings in the darkness of five o’ clock every morning, to wake the goose girls, but then I realise that the loud constant clanging of the bell means a raid.

  Richard is out of bed already, pulling on his leather jerkin and snatching up his helmet and his sword.

  ‘What is it? What is happening?’ I shout at him.

  ‘God knows,’ he says. ‘You stay safe in here. Go to the kitchen and wait for news. If Warwick has landed from Calais, get down into the cellar and bolt yourself in.’

  He is out of the door before he can say more and then I hear the front door bang and a yelling from the street, and the clash of sword on sword. ‘Richard!’ I shout and swing open the little window to look down into the cobbled street below.

  My husband is unconscious, a man has hold of him and is in the act of dropping his body to the cobblestones. He looks up and sees me. ‘Come down, Lady Rivers,’ he says. ‘You cannot hide or run.’

  I close the casement window. My maid appears in the doorway, shaking with fear. ‘They have the master, he looks as if he is dead. I think they have killed him.’

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘I saw. Get my gown.’

  She holds the gown for me and I step into it, let her tie the laces and then put on my slippers and go downstairs, my hair in its night-time plait. I pull up the hood of my cape as I step out into the icy-cold January street. I look around but all I can see, as if engraved on my eyelids, is the man lowering Richard to the ground, and the fall of Richard’s limp hand. At the end of the street I can make out half a dozen guardsmen struggling with a man. A glimpse of his face, as he looks desperately towards me, shows me Anthony. They are taking him on board ship.

  ‘What are you doing with my son? That is my son, release him.’

  The man does not even bother to answer me, and I run across the slippery cobbles to where they have left Richard on the ground, like a dead man. As I reach him he stirs and opens his eyes, he looks dazed. ‘Jacquetta,’ he says.

  ‘My love. Are you hurt?’ I am dreading him saying that he has been stabbed.

  ‘A cracked head. I’ll live.’

  A man roughly takes him under the shoulders. ‘Carry him into our house,’ I order.

  ‘I’m taking him on board,’ the man says simply. ‘You’re to come too.’

  ‘Where d’you think you are taking us? On whose authority? This is not an act of war, it is a crime!’

  He ignores me. One man takes Richard’s boots, he holds his shoulders, they lug him like a carcase. ‘You may not take him,’ I insist. ‘He is a lord of the realm, under the command of the king. This is rebellion.’

  I put my hand on the man’s arm but he simply ignores me and lugs Richard down to the quayside. Behind me, all around me, I can hear men shouting and women screaming as the soldiers go through the town, taking what they want, throwing open doors and banging the precious glass out of windows.

  ‘Where do you think you are taking my husband?’

  ‘Calais,’ he says shortly.

  It’s a quick voyage. Richard recovers his senses, they give us clean water and something to eat, Anthony is unhurt. We are locked in a little cabin at first and then, once the ship is at sea and the great sail unfurled and creaking, they let us out on deck. For a little while we cannot see any land, England is lost behind us, but then we see a dark line ahead of us on the horizon, and as we watch we can see the squat mound of the city and, on its crest, the round walls of the castle. I realise I am returning to Calais under guard, as a hostage, to the town that I once entered as a duchess.

  I glance at Richard and see that he remembers this too. This is an outpost which was under his command. Now he is a prisoner. This is the turn of fortune’s wheel indeed.

  ‘Take care,’ he says quietly to me and to our son. ‘They shouldn’t harm you, Jacquetta, they know you, and they like you. And they don’t make war on women. But the queen’s treatment of the Duchess of York will have angered them and we are quite in their power. No-one is going to rescue us. We will have to get out of this alive, by our own wits. We are quite alone.’

  ‘The Duke of Somerset holds Guisnes Castle, he might come for us,’ Anthony suggests.

  ‘Won’t get within half a mile,’ my husband says. ‘I have fortified this town, son, I know its strengths. Nobody will take it by force this century. So we are hostages in enemy hands. They have every reason to spare you, Jacquetta, and many a good reason to kill me.’

  ‘They can’t kill you,’ I say. ‘You have done nothing wrong but be loyal to the king from the day you were born.’

  ‘That’s why I’m the very man they should kill,’ he says. ‘It will fill the others with fear. So I am going to mind my manners and speak gently, and if I have to swear to give up my sword to save my life, I will do that. And –’ he addresses Anthony, who flings himself aside with an impatient word, ‘and so will you. If they ask for our parole and for our promise that we never take arms against them, we will give that too. We have no choice. We are defeated. And I don’t plan to be beheaded on the gallows that I built here. I don’t plan to be buried in the cemetery that I tidied and cleared. Do you understand?’

  ‘I do,’ Anthony says shortly. ‘But how could we have let ourselves be taken!’

  ‘What’s done is done,’ Richard says sternht="0">

  They keep us on the ship till nightfall, they do not want Richard paraded through the town and seen by the people. The influential merchants of Calais love him for defending them when the castle was claimed by York. The men of the town remember him as a loyal and brave captain of the castle whose word was law and could be trusted like gold. The troop of Calais love him as a firm and just commander. It was the experience of serving under Richard that persuaded the six hundred men to change sides at Ludlow, and support the king. Any troop that has been commanded by him will follow him to hell and back. Warwick does not want this most popular captain to appeal to the people as he goes through the town.

  So they wait till late at night and bring us like secret captives into the great hall of the castle under cover of darkness, and the sudden blaze of torches is blindingly bright after the black streets outside. They bring us through the gateway, under the stone arch and then into the great hall with blazing fires at either end and the men of the garrison at the trestle tables, uneasy at the sight of us.

  The three of us stand, like penniless runaways from a war, and look around the great hall, the vaulted ceiling with the s
moke-blackened beams, the torches ablaze in the sconces all round, some men standing, drinking ale, some seated at dining trestle tables, and some rising to their feet at the sight of my husband and pulling off their caps. At the top of the hall, the Earl of Salisbury, his son the Earl of Warwick, and the young Edward, Earl of March, son of Richard, Duke of York, sit at the head table, raised on the dais, the white rose of York on a banner behind them.

  ‘We have taken you as prisoners of war and will consider your parole,’ the Earl of Warwick starts, solemn as a judge from his seat at the head table.

  ‘It was not an act of war, since I am under the command of the King of England; an act against me is an act of rebellion and treason against my king,’ Richard says, his deep voice very strong and loud in the hall. The men stiffen at the note of absolute defiance. ‘And I warn you that anyone who lays a hand on me, on my son, or on my wife, is guilty of rebellion and treason and illegal assault. Anyone who harms my wife is, of course, not worthy of his spurs nor of his name. If you make war on a woman you are no better than a savage and should be thrown down like one. Your name will be defamed forever. I would pity a man who insulted my wife, a royal duchess and an heiress of the House of Luxembourg. Her name and her reputation must protect her wherever she goes. My son is under my protection and under hers, a loyal subject of an ordained king. We three are all loyal subjects of the king and should be free to go our own ways. I demand safe passage to England for the three of us. In the name of the King of England, I demand it.’

  ‘So much for the soft answer that turneth away wrath,’ Anthony says quietly to me. ‘So much for surrender and parole. My God, look at Salisbury’s face!’

  The old earl looks likely to explode. ‘You!’ he bellows. ‘You dare to speak to me like this?’

  The York lords are seated high on the dais and Richard to look up at them. They rise from their chairs and glower down at him. He is utterly unrepentant. He walks towards the stage, and stands, his hands on his hips. ‘Aye. Of course. Why not?’