“Why do you think? To force the king to bend to their will. So we need to raise forces of our own to bring to Leicester.” He stared disapprovingly at me. “We need you to help us, instead of gadding about London, drinking and gaming and God knows what else. Why, you’re still in yesterday’s clothes.”
“I wasn’t drinking and gaming,” I said. This was true: Joan and I had spent a very decorous evening at her house before retiring to bed and behaving rather less decorously.
Father did not overlook my reminiscent smile. “I suppose that means you’ve a trollop, then, but you’ll have to give her up for the next little bit. We’ve got business to take care of before we go to Leicester.”
It wasn’t like my father to be this brusque and stern with me; if anything, he’d been overindulgent toward his offspring, especially me, in the years since he had surrendered Rouen. I had so much pocket money, I was one of the few young men I knew who had no debts. “They want you, don’t they?” I said suddenly. “York and his cronies want the king to hand you over to them.”
“Quite possibly,” conceded my father. “Now get busy.”
***
Getting busy meant writing to my father’s retainers, demanding that they send men to St. Albans, where they were to join us on our journey to Leicester. As a clerk put the finishing touches to a letter I’d dictated, I sat with my chin in my hand, remembering a day six years before.
I was thirteen on November 4, 1449, the day my family left Rouen, which my father had agreed a few days before to surrender. Under the terms, we could take our possessions with us, and all of my coffers had long since been hauled down to the carts by our servants, who carried out their task as silently as if they were disbanding our household after a funeral. So when my half brother Thomas, Lord Ros, came looking for me, he found me in a bare room huddled in a window seat. “Hal, it’s time to go.”
“I don’t want to go! They can’t make me.”
“Can’t make you? King Charles himself will be here in a few days. Do you think he’s going to adopt you as his heir?” Tom, two-and-twenty, sat beside me. “It’s time, Hal. Your staying here isn’t going to change a thing.”
“Why hasn’t Father come to get me? Is he afraid to face even me?” I turned my face, which was embarrassingly tear-stained, toward my brother. “He wasn’t man enough to stand up to the French. Why should I think he’s man enough to stand up to me?”
“Hal, don’t speak like that of your father.”
“Why not? I can speak any way I please about him. He’s not your father.”
“He’s been good to me since Mother married him, and I respect him.”
“How can you do that after what happened? He caved in to them, Tom! He caved in! He’s a damned coward, and you know it!”
Tom dealt me a stinging blow across the cheek. As I blinked at him, he said calmly, “Your father’s no coward. I don’t like what happened here any more than you do, especially since I’m to be a hostage.”
“Yes, and that’s so unfair—”
“Shut your mouth. Things aren’t always as simple as they seem when you’re thirteen, Hal. The duke’s been under immense strain; he’s had others to think of besides himself. How long could he have withstood a siege here? Just because we’ve given up Rouen doesn’t mean it’s the end of Normandy for us.”
“You know it is.”
“Not necessarily.” Tom’s eyes did not match his words. Quietly, he said, “Hal, it will take a lot of courage for your father to face down the anger that’s going to greet him when this gets back to England.”
I nodded. “Yes, it is. And that’s why Father’s not going straight to England. He’s going to Caen first.”
“How did you know that?”
“Eavesdropping. How else? I heard him talking to Mother.” I was silent for a few moments. “He was crying about it, Tom.”
Tom put his arm around my shoulders. “Hal, you know what happened to his older brother when he had a reversal like this.”
I nodded; what had happened to John Beaufort, the first Duke of Somerset, after a blundering military campaign in France was the shame of the family. “He made away with himself. You don’t think that Father—”
“No. He’s too strong, and he’d never give his enemies the satisfaction. And that’s why you should be supporting him instead of sulking in your chamber.” He looked around. “Besides, where the hell are you going to sleep tonight, with your bed gone? Come with me, Hal.”
I let Tom lead me from my chamber to Rouen Castle’s great hall, where my parents and my brothers and sisters stood, plainly having been waiting on me. They said nothing, however, and my father merely nodded at Tom in thanks as he took his place among the men who were to stand hostage for the terms of the agreement my father had made. “Ready, son?” he said softly.
“Yes.” I managed to look my father in the eye, though I really didn’t want to.
Father patted me on my shoulder. “Someday I’ll make this up to you,” he said, so low only he and I could hear.
Instead, eight months later, he had surrendered Caen, though at least that time he’d resisted as long as he could.
“My lord? My lord? Are you ready to dictate another letter?”
“Yes,” I said. “Sorry. I was daydreaming.”
***
On May 21, we left Westminster, anticipating the arrival of our reinforcements at St. Albans. We needed them: without them, we were ready only for a council, not for a battle. Whether we were going to be faced with one was something we didn’t know: the king demanded that York and the Nevilles disband their armies, but whether they would obey the order was something about which we were all pessimistic.
Where York’s men were, I don’t know, but one thing was clear: they had pen and ink with them. Before we even got within spitting distance of St. Albans, the Triumvirate (my own term; sadly, I couldn’t get anyone else to adopt the usage) had sent us two letters. They laid it on thick. After calling for the excommunication of the enemies about the king—that is, of course, my father—and terming themselves King Henry’s true and humble liegemen, they protested, in injured tones, against the mistrust of them and hoped that they would be cleared of it. How they expected to be trusted, while at the same time they were raising troops, was a matter about which they were less clear.
Having encamped at Watford for the night, we pressed on toward St. Albans, only to hear just minutes after we had begun moving that York’s men were already just outside the city, with over a thousand more men than we had. And many of those with us were not fighting men, but clerks.
“We should stay here,” Father said to the king. “Stay here, and fight when they arrive. The reinforcements—”
“We should negotiate,” the Duke of Buckingham said flatly. “They’re traveling quickly; what if the reinforcements don’t reach us in time? It’s a battle we could lose. And—” He hesitated. I knew he was thinking that some of our number might throw in their lot with York were battle to be joined, but he could hardly say it aloud. Instead, he repeated. “Negotiate, your grace. York may have a genuine misapprehension of your intentions. Perhaps he fears arrest, like the Duke of Gloucester so many years ago. If so, he can be reassured that your grace’s only intent is to see to the greater security of the realm.”
“York can’t be trusted,” Father said. “Negotiation with him is a waste of time.”
The king hesitated. Finally, he said softly, “Peace is always to be desired over war, my lords. Buckingham, I appoint you Constable of England.”
My father, who held that office, began to sputter. The king cut him off. “The constable is the best person to conduct the negotiations, and you, Somerset, being the person York wishes me to give up, are hardly suited to enter into them yourself. Come. Let us move on.”
Father opened his mouth, closed it again, and shook his head. Buckingham’s son, the Earl of Stafford, who was married to my sister Meg, saw the expression on my face. Too softly to be overhea
rd by our fathers or by the king, he said, “Hal, don’t worry. If anyone can make York see reason, my father can.”
I did not like the sound of that qualifier.
***
If—speaking of which word—this had been a normal journey, the king would have lodged himself at St. Albans Abbey and no doubt been treated to a discourse by Abbot Whethamstede on the myriad virtues of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the abbey’s greatest patron. But this was no normal journey; York’s men were already encamped in Key Field. So instead, Henry set up his headquarters near St. Peter’s Street, in the home of a citizen who could not have looked less excited by the prospect of a royal guest. Lord Clifford and his men went out to bar the roads that led across Tonman Ditch into the town, while Buckingham and York negotiated through heralds—a three-hour process that was hopeless from the start, for all the high-flown words came down to one point: York wanted my father turned over to him, supposedly for trial, and the king refused to give him over.
“This could go on all day,” I told Stafford. Standing with most of the other nobles near the king, we were only half clad in our suits of armor; with the negotiations dragging on as they were, it had hardly seemed worthwhile to arm ourselves head to toe. I glanced at our fathers, who were conferring together. Then I pointed to a tavern. “Why not get an ale? They don’t need us. We’ll be back before they’ve even miss—”
“To arms!” One of Lord Clifford’s men ran up, coming from the direction of our barriers at Shropshire Lane. “To arms! York has begun attacking!”
Gabriel, the bell in St. Albans Clock Tower, began to ring frantically as our pages, who had been dicing nearby, raced to help us into our remaining armor. The townspeople, who had been leaning from their upper windows as if watching a particularly dull pageant they kept hoping would get better, screamed warnings to each other and slammed their shutters tight. Men ran out of taverns, dropping in the street the ales they’d been drinking.
York’s men were attacking the barriers at Shropshire Lane; Salisbury’s, we learned just a minute or two after the first man had arrived, at Sopwell Lane. King Henry looked to his left, then to his right, stymied—at age thirty-three he’d never fought in a battle. As his servants frantically tried to get him into his armor, the king’s face changed, and he lifted his arm, as if he had suddenly recalled that he was Henry V’s son. “Unfurl our banner! I shall destroy them, every mother’s son, and they shall be hanged, drawn and quartered that may be taken afterward!”
Then an arrow hit the king in the neck.
Men were swarming into the marketplace, pushing their way in between buildings, knocking down market stalls, forcing their way through houses and into the street, their way assured by the arrows that were whining through the sky. Buckingham caught one in his unprotected face; so did my brother-in-law the Earl of Stafford. The Earl of Northumberland was down.
And I was fighting for my life, side by side with my father.
At St. Albans that day of May 22, 1455, armed scarcely better than a common soldier, taken completely off guard, and outnumbered, my father fought as I have never seen a man fight before, or since. As the few archers we had with us desperately tried to fend off Warwick’s men, he and I took down as many men as we could, our desperation lending us strength. But it was a hopeless task. Our men were falling, others were running, and when it became clear that all was lost, Father threw himself against the door of the Castle Inn, hard by the marketplace. It gave and we tumbled inside as the innkeepers—an elderly couple who hadn’t had the strength to drag furniture to barricade their doors—ran shrieking up the stairs.
For what seemed an eternity, we remained side by side by the door, doubled over and gasping. There was no doubt a back way out of the inn, but if York’s men had any sense, which I decided on reflection they probably did, they would have blocked it by now. And my father wasn’t looking for an exit anyway. He got his breath, then straightened and laid his arm across my shoulders. “Son,” he said. “About Rouen and Caen. I disgraced myself with that, and I disgraced your name as well.”
“Oh, it wasn’t that—”
“Don’t tell me it wasn’t! I saw your face the day when we left Rouen. You thought I wasn’t looking. There was nothing in it but contempt.”
“I was thirteen. Stupid.”
“No. You were a bright lad who knew a stain on a man’s honor when you saw one. I told you then I’d make it up to you. I never have. I will today.”
“Father! You don’t have to make up anything to me.”
“Yes, I do. And I have to make up something to myself as well.” He embraced me for a long time. “Be a good son to your mother, Henry. Give her and the rest my love. And God keep you.” Then he released me, smiling. “Here they are. Good timing.”
Warwick’s voice came from the street. “Somerset! We know you and your whelp are in there. We have possession of the king. All’s lost, you cur. Surrender!”
“Father! Please!”
My father shoved me aside and rushed through the door, sword raised high despite the blood dripping from his arm, and I and the men who remained to us followed. There were ten of us at the most; a hundred or more of them, circling us. My father took out four men, at least, before Warwick himself swung his battle ax and my father fell. As Father struggled to rise, his blood seeping around him, Warwick smiled. “Finish him off, men. Orders from the Duke of York.”
Three men, two with daggers, one with a mace, surrounded my father and raised their weapons as he lay helpless. This was no death in fair battle; this was an assassination.
I rushed with my sword toward the men closest to me, but it was too late. As two other men dragged me back, I heard my father mutter a fragment of a prayer, heard his skull crack, then crack again. As I struggled and cursed, my captors knocked me to the ground with their clubs, and a blinding pain shot through my head and through my arms as I landed next to my father and into a pool of his blood.
Someone was raising his dagger over me, I saw through the blood pouring down my face, but I could not move my arms to resist or even hold my eyes open to watch my killer. Then a panicky voice, close by but sounding miles and miles off, said, “For God’s sake, leave off!”
“You don’t want a brace of Beauforts? You shock me.”
“My quarrel wasn’t with the younger one. I’ll not have unnecessary blood on my hands. It invites trouble.”
“I should think leaving the whelp alive would invite even more trouble, but they’re your orders to give and mine to follow. In any case, I suppose it wouldn’t accomplish much anyway, as there are two more at home where he came from. Somerset was capable in one respect, anyway.” Warwick chuckled. “Fine armor he brought here too, what there is of it; it was a stroke of luck that the fools hadn’t fully protected themselves, wasn’t it? I trust my men can have it, or would yours prefer it?”
“Yours,” said York.
“Where’s Clifford?”
“Dead. It wasn’t necessary to see to his death. He was killed fighting at the barricades. Northumberland is slain too.”
Another pair of feet halted near me. A youthful voice asked with interest, “Father, is he dead too?”
This had to be Edward, Earl of March, York’s thirteen-year-old son, who no doubt had been brought here to wait upon his father and to get a taste of battle from a safe distance. In reply, York bent and prodded me. “He’s alive. Post a guard here so no one harms him further.”
“You’re not going to kill him?” asked the Earl of March. The brat sounded vaguely disappointed.
“We’ve been through that,” snapped York. “No. Go see to the horses as I ordered you to.”
Warwick gave me a casual kick. “He probably won’t survive anyway, though. Look at the blood he’s lost, or is that all Papa’s?”
“For God’s sake, let’s go to the king and get this behind us. It can’t end well.”
Warwick snorted. “You should have thought of that earlier.”
***<
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After they walked away, I remained lying there, my own blood blending with my father’s as I drifted in and out of consciousness. Then I saw a familiar face staring into mine. “Tom?”
“Yes, it’s me,” my half brother said.
I made an effort to stay conscious. “They killed Father. They murdered him.”
“I know. Hal, don’t try to move. I’ve got some monks coming to take you to the abbey, and I’ll get a surgeon for you once we’re there. York only just gave the word that the monks could bury the dead. They’ll be coming for your father soon.”
I looked at the figure next to mine. Someone had thrown a cloak over it. I struggled to rise but could not move off my back. “I want to see him before they take him away. Move that thing off his body.”
“No,” Tom said. “I’ll not let you see your father like that.” He took a flask from his side and raised my head slightly. “Have a little wine.”
I managed a sip. “Won’t they take you prisoner if they find you with me?”
“Probably.” Tom shrugged and helped me take another sip of wine.
In a few minutes, two monks arrived, carrying a bier. As they loaded Father’s body onto it, not removing the cloak, Tom wrapped his arms around me. I tried to say something, but instead tears just ran down my face.
By and by, two more monks came and gently lifted me onto another bier as Tom superintended. Even so, the pain of my removal must have made me lose consciousness for a moment, for when I next stirred, I heard one of the monks asking the other in a whisper, “Do you think he’ll live?”
“No. Just look at him.”
But he was wrong, I told myself as they carried me away, Tom holding fast to my hand. I would not die; I would live to kill the men who had murdered my father. Vengeance would keep me alive.
The Queen of Last Hopes Page 14
