Yet Sir Peter knows, without needing any financial expertise, that if he is to honestly try to improve the state of the nation’s finances he will need to present to the Parliament he will lead a charge sheet that features something more precise than vague accusations against a woman of known loose morals with ideas above her station, and a foreigner. They’re such obvious scapegoats. They can’t, alone, have brought England to the pass it’s in. He’d be a laughing-stock if he settled for that trite explanation. There’d be people snickering behind their hands up and down this London river. And it wouldn’t improve the finances or cut out the moral rot he senses everywhere if he did take that easy option.
But that’s just the point of principle. It doesn’t help him with the detail.
If only he could find an ally, an insider. If only someone who understands these matters from close up could talk him through exactly how the government’s accounts translate into reality. Who takes what, how and why; who has to nod and wink when.
Without that…
He sighs again.
When the boat comes to take him to his final interview of the day, it’s a moment before he can summon the strength of purpose to disengage himself from the post he’s leaning against, and step down.
Lord Latimer’s face is splendidly relaxed as de la Mare walks into his office. He’s at his desk, writing, but that doesn’t diminish his animal vigour, the rippling power of his shoulders as the pen scratchily chases words across the page.
A magnificently furred dark green velvet coat, thrown over the back of his chair, slips down as he straightens. Lord Latimer turns, raises an eyebrow, and, with a powerful movement of his arm, pushes the offending item down out of sight.
De la Mare is too much of a gentleman to do anything so obvious as to suppress a sigh at being called in and then kept waiting. He knows the virtue of discipline.
So he waits. But the hair on the back of his neck is prickling, as it always does in Latimer’s presence. Discipline is one thing, but you can’t altogether suppress instinctive dislike. Latimer was a good soldier once, de la Mare has heard. But back then he probably didn’t cultivate this deliberately splendid, sun-kissed, jewel-winking appearance, or have that hypocritical smile forever on his lips.
‘Ah, Sir Peter,’ Latimer finally purrs, looking up at the gentleman from Herefordshire as if he’s only just noticed his guest’s arrival. ‘Do take a seat.’ And he gestures. But he’s still fiddling with the papers on his desk, demonstrating the amount, and the importance, of the work before him. De la Mare is increasingly certain that the lord chamberlain is nervous.
‘Now, to business,’ Latimer says, bestowing a joyous, sharptoothed smile on de la Mare. ‘You’d like to see the schedule of the treasury’s Italian debt repayments, I understand?’
De la Mare nods, and bows. His letters of introduction from the Prince of England have opened many doors. A clerk is dispatched for the books.
Latimer, meanwhile, rises, and, with great affability, leads de la Mare over to the window for a little sack while they watch the sunset and wait. The chamberlain lets his arm linger, warm and confiding, on the Herefordshire gentleman’s unrelaxed back. He sips, and gazes into de la Mare’s eyes, and asks solicitous questions in a velvet voice. Are his rooms comfortable? Are his preparations advancing for the Parliament? Does he have any idea, yet, when it will be?
Leaning even closer, Lord Latimer murmurs, ‘I don’t envy you the task you’ve set yourself, Sir Peter. It’s never easy to find the source of corruption anywhere, of course. But in London, where every merchant is so very private in his dealings, and yet so demanding of respect and courtesy, it must be all but impossible…’ The chamberlain’s face expresses utter admiration for de la Mare’s dedication to duty, but also an invitation to share a bit of a sly laugh at the merchants.
De la Mare allows himself a smile. ‘I hope to make progress,’ he says evenly.
‘I know more now, after all these years,’ Latimer goes smoothly on. ‘But oh, how deceptive I found appearances in London at first.’ He chuckles. Then he starts shaking his head, as if some highly amusing memory has come back to him, quite by chance. He continues, reminiscently: ‘For instance, I remember how utterly astonished I was to hear that William Walworth’s air of angelic innocence didn’t stop him running his little sideline in brothels, over Southwark way. Flemish tarts: less talk that way than with London chatterboxes.’ He looks brightly at de la Mare, like a fisherman at a fish, to make sure Sir Peter’s swallowed the hook inside that bit of bait. He shakes his head again. ‘You’d never guess he was that type to look at him, though, would you?’
More rueful headshakes. Then there’s another story, this time about the King’s man in Ireland, William of Windsor, who, according to Latimer, has been taking vast sums from London to pay for the defence of Ireland, and, at the same time, wringing vast sums out of the locals – with nothing much to show, in terms of castle walls or soldiers, for either input of money. ‘All vanished,’ Latimer says. He opens bewildered arms. ‘You’d never guess it to look at him, either. Soldierly type. Seems honest as the day is long.’ He smiles. ‘No, you never can tell.’
At last the books come. Latimer retreats, after solicitously settling de la Mare at a table, with light, and wine, and a clerk to hand. ‘Take all the time you need,’ he breathes, as he withdraws. And: ‘If there’s anything further I can do, please don’t hesitate…‘
‘Thank you,’ de la Mare says shortly.
But he leaves an hour later, and has himself rowed back to Kennington, without further comment. He’s searched the accounts thoroughly. He’s been unable to find even a hint of dishonesty. Again.
He just has two new random rumours to add to the collection of slanders that everyone living in these overcrowded buildings on this stinking river seems to spend their time passing on. Walworth was just as bad, earlier on. Telling him Lyons the Fleming was illegally using his heavies in the ports to confiscate imported spices from the grocers’ ships, so he could do Brembre and Philpot out of business by letting scarcity force up the prices, then selling the stuff on himself. Telling him, too, that Alice Perrers and the Duke of Lancaster were secretly and illegally funding a mercer candidate for mayor, to get him and his cronies out of office. But then everyone’s got a rumour to tell about Alice Perrers.
De la Mare has heard that she’s getting a cut out of the treasury thefts, too. He’s heard that her property holdings have trebled in size this year alone. Walworth thinks she must have spent three thousand on houses. He’s even heard that she goes and sits on the King’s Bench, in the King’s own place, and dictates the outcomes of court cases. To hear them all talk, she’s the mastermind. In league with the Duke. In league with Lyons. In league with the Devil himself.
They don’t seem to realise that he’s not unaware that she’s the easiest person to blame.
Peter de la Mare is a man of principle. He’ll carry on working at this task until he succeeds. But he’s so weary of all this London dishonesty. Court, City: each lot as bad as the other. Rotten to the core, all of them; scampering around like human rats, growing fat on what they’ve stolen.
He can hardly bring himself to bow to the preoccupied-looking official who walks him back out to the jetty. Baron Scrope, the treasurer: tall and stooped and furrow-browed.
‘All was well, I hope?’ Scrope murmurs, as de la Mare steps stiffly down into the boat. De la Mare closes his eyes. His head aches. He just wants to be away, over this river of sewage, and into the privacy of his room. Through thin lips, he replies, ‘No discrepancies.’ Then, as the boatman turns, and Scrope tightens his cloak, ready to go too, de la Mare adds: ‘…that I could see.’
He feels Scrope’s eyes, steady on him, as the boat pulls out.
Peter de la Mare has felt honoured, ever since he was elected to Parliament as a Herefordshire knight, to represent the people he lives among, and to lead them. He’s been waiting two years since then for the King to actually call th
e Parliament, true; but when the time finally does come for the assembly to meet, here, he wants to be ready to speak out in the name of justice for his kind.
Peter de la Mare has no pretensions to earthly greatness. He doesn’t want a life at court, or in the King’s armies – the dangers of both seem to him far to outweigh the advantages. He’s not interested in fabulous wealth. He doesn’t really understand the courtly lords, like Latimer, who, while of not much greater estate than himself, make it their life’s work to better themselves, and absent themselves from their country homes for years on end, as if they were no more than landless, rootless merchants, interested only in money. He’s more than content with the life God has sent him to this earth to lead, out on his lands. What Peter de la Mare wants to achieve, from the Parliament he’s preparing so carefully for, is the preservation of that way of life for country gentlemen like himself. For, as he sees it, the activities of the lords of the court have become noxious enough to threaten the destruction of the modest hopes and dreams of the country gentry. And he’s a brave enough man to want to root out the evil.
Thanks to his marriage, he’s well off: a lucky turn of events for a younger son, and one for which he is thankful to God. He’s master of a compact, efficient estate of three thousand acres, with woods, and fishing, and a rabbit warren, and a park, and corn, and sheep, centred on Yatton, in the Wye Valley, where he lives with Matilda and young Roger and little Janey. He also owns a second estate, bigger yet at five thousand acres, and given over almost in its entirety to sheep and cattle husbandry, over at Little Hereford. His net income has shrunk, as everyone’s has, with the rise in wage demands from the peasantry, from near £400 a year in his youth to just over half that now. But he still has no serious financial worries for himself, even if, every time a Parliament has taxed him one-fifteenth of his movable property to pay for the war, he’s been forced to sell off a few more fields, to raise the cash money, and whittled a bit more off the estate he hopes one day to leave to Roger.
But his years as the Earl of March’s seneschal (another piece of divine providence, for which he gives more thanks), riding out as far as the Welsh border with the county elite to negotiate disputes over land rights, and collecting iron ore dues from the mines in the Forest of Dean, have given him first-hand knowledge of the parlous state other gentlemen of his county find themselves in.
There are fewer and fewer knights today who can afford the privilege of kitting themselves out for war, which, when Peter de la Mare was a young man, was the surest way of earning yourself advancement in life and a profitable lifelong allegiance to a greater lord, such as he himself now enjoys, with its fees and annuities in return for duties done. Now, he sees fathers everywhere, especially the poorer ones, saying, What’s the point? All that expense, and then all you do is twiddle your thumbs and polish your plate armour and wait for a call-up that never comes…or, if it does, brings you no financial reward, since there have been no victories, and no spoil, for so many years. For a knight whose landed income from rents is already down near twenty pounds, the minimum needed to qualify for shire offices, it’s a finely balanced question, these days, whether there’s any advantage at all to be got from laying out money to equip their sons for war.
Yet there’s not much point, either, in hoping for wealth from farming, when the peasants demand as much as fourpence a day in labour, and the price of corn is dropping every year.
Some of the lesser knights have chosen to seek out tenant farmers, rather than manage their fields themselves. But the tenant farmers are stuck in the same double bind of paying more for labour and earning less from their crops; and if your tenant farmer’s a reliable man, but his crop’s smaller than he’d hoped, and has sold for less, what can you do but accept two-thirds of his rent, or less?
So there are gentlemen all over Herefordshire facing decline. Men who hold manors on boggy land that won’t quite do for pasture; men who find their position undermined by vacant tenancies and mounting arrears of rent. Men who’ve given up hope that the war will save them. Men, like Sir Peter’s old friend Sir John Verney, driven distracted by the fear that their meagre estates won’t provide a living for their younger sons; any more than war will, or the legal education they can’t afford, which might turn a boy into a good administrator, or the Church, which will swallow the child up. Men forced to entertain the thought that beloved sons like Roger Verney, with his fresh pink cheeks, schooled in the rudiments of church Latin and a good deal more chivalric literature, may, one day, if a willing heiress can’t be found (and where can a willing heiress be found, if you can’t afford to leave your dwindling lands?), be forced to follow the plough.
Peter de la Mare has spent so many years thanking God for his own lucky escape from genteel poverty – in the shape of Matilda’s blue eyes and lavish marriage portion – that he’s only recently realised, as his own son grows up, how much worse things are getting for the country gentry of today.
His class is the backbone of England, he’s always known. He’s always been proud of that fact, and deeply aware of his duty. But it’s only in his middle years that he’s understood what this now means to the officials who rule the land in the King’s name: that his is the class on whom England’s tax burden must fall.
Since Peter de la Mare was a boy, in King Edward’s early years, the national tax burden has trebled. The officials at Westminster now expect to be kept afloat by impoverished gentlemen such as the ones from Herefordshire – even men who can only pay the tax if they sell their land, and lose their status, and, with tears in their eyes, put their sons back to till the soil.
‘If it’s for the good of England…’ de la Mare always used to say to Verney (trying not to see the mute plea in Verney’s eyes, but wouldn’t my Roger and your little Janey, so pretty, so prosperous, be a good match?), ‘then, however hard it seems, we have to pay the King his tax, and keep hope in our hearts.’
But that naive acceptance was before his eyes were opened…
…which they were, three years ago, during his annual visit to St Albans, to his elder brother Thomas, the Abbot there. Thomas, whose obsessive following of the affairs of the nation stems, probably, from his futile lifelong rebellion against their father’s decision to take him out of the world and settle him in the Church. Ambitious Thomas, now almost a prince of the Church, whose frequent court cases and elaborate financial arrangements on his wealthy abbey’s behalf have given him an insider’s view of what’s going on in London, and at court. Well-connected Thomas, whose long-standing friendship with the Prince means his opinions have often been tested against the greatest in the land. If anyone understands what’s going on at the heart of England, Peter knows, it’s Thomas.
‘You think it’s all for the good of England?’ Thomas said, with that hard look that twists his face into ugliness. ‘All the sufferings of good, honest men like John Verney?’
And, without another word, he took Peter off to the scriptorium, to look at the abbey’s chronicle of current events, kept by the young brother with the fat pink cheeks by whom he seems to set so much store.
What Peter read there changed his life for ever. The chronicle’s account, down in plain black and white for anyone to see, talked of the carryings-on at court, the senile King, the grasping Devil’s-spawn whore, and the cabal of courtiers stealing every penny of his own and John Verney’s money that has gone into the royal coffers for years, to spend it on their own ill-deserved comforts and misbegotten brats. As he read it, Peter felt his heart beat faster, and his blood throb in his temples, out of sheer fury at the injustice, the outrageous wrongness, of it.
He went straight back to Hereford and got himself elected to represent the Commons of England – the esquires, the gentlemen, the minor nobility, and the City rich – at the next Parliament.
It’s been his one ambition, ever since, to stop the criminals in their tracks, and make the honest folk of England safe again from that greed.
Not that he can have much
realistic hope that the voice of the Commons will make much difference to the future of England; the Commons are usually told, without excess formality, to know their place and keep to it. Still…Peter draws his hope from this. He knows the King’s a good king, led astray, not the kind to take it amiss if the best and truest of his people step forward to guide him back to the path. Peter’s dream – private at first – has been that, if the knights and burgesses of the Parliament were led by a man of integrity, who’d found out the whole ugliness of the canker attacking the state, who could put the details to them and tell them exactly how to stop the rot, the King would pay heed. Peter wants to be the man who can do that. And his dream seems to have come closer to reality ever since the Princess sought him out.
He’s grateful to Thomas – who, for all his flinty appearance, is a good man deep down, and wants virtue to triumph over evil in this world – for putting him in touch with the Princess Joan. The Princess, with her husband, has been funding his research into government corruption for the past year.
Of course, the Princess has her own ideas about the cause of the corruption. She and her husband believe it’s sponsored by the Duke of Lancaster, who, they think, wants to steal not only money but the very throne of England from their son.
Peter de la Mare is inclined to suspect that the Prince’s fears on that score are no more than the night terrors of a terminally ill man, who knows he won’t be around to protect his child into adulthood. Of course the Prince fears for his little boy, just as Sir John Verney fears for his son, but, in de la Mare’s mind, it’s Sir John Verney who has more reason to fear. Privately, he doubts that there’s much real link between the corruption of the court and the activities of the Duke of Lancaster. But, since it’s the Prince of England who’s paying for him to root out the corruption, he’s willing – more than willing – to keep an open mind.
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