He Who Plays The King

by MARY HOCKING

  No one minded the children for the time being. Their mother was consumed by grief. She had borne the brunt of much trouble during her husband’s lifetime and had done it gladly; but now that he was dead there was only the trouble left and no more joy of him. This night, she had little thought to spare for her children.

  In their bedchamber, George, who felt that his performance had not been fully appreciated, gave an encore for the benefit of his brother. The two children felt no intimate grief for a father they scarcely knew; but they had a sense of the harm done to their line and they experienced a burning resentment, the rousing of the primaeval anger of the clan. To die in battle was an acceptable fate, but the ignominy of that head crowned with paper and straw was not to be borne! George trembled with fury and pronounced the punishments he would mete out when the perpetrators of this crime were at his mercy. Richard, being more frugal of his resources, contained his fury until such time as it might be profitably spent.

  ‘Edward will see to it.’ Richard spoke with assurance that this was an achievement well within Edward’s capacity.

  George said, ‘Edward!’ with a show of disdain, and stamped around the room, lunging with great ferocity at his own shadow, the performance being intended to convey that were he eighteen, and the Earl of March, no such calamity would have befallen his family. Richard watched uneasily, torn between affection for the handsome George who was his constant companion, and admiration for Edward who, being less well known, assumed godlike proportions.

  ‘You do not need to think so much of Edward,’ George said.

  Richard looked away, awkward, but by no means irresolute. He absorbed ideas easily; but the mechanism of selection was remarkably well-developed and though he was so quiet, he was not easily influenced. But he was, after all, only eight and the night had brought many shocks. So after a time, he rather spoilt his obstinate stand for his brother Edward by yawning and pummelling one eye with a fist.

  ‘The fault is,’ George, too, was tiring, but still had energy enough to give his brother a history lesson, ‘there are too many of these great lords . . .’

  George talked, enchanted by his own wisdom. Below the window, distant sounds came to their ears, hammering, the jingle of harness, the busy tramp of men coming and going. Much was in preparation, though for what purpose they did not know. Richard leant out of the window, but could see little except hurrying forms in torchlight. Immediately below the window, ivy grew from a crevice in the stone; momentarily distracted, he leant down to see if he could reach it, but his straining fingers dislodged only a handful of dust.

  ‘You aren’t listening,’ George complained.

  But Richard had no need to listen. He knew about the evils of the long protectorship, the decline of law and order as the great lords warred one with another, the weak-minded king not entirely to blame, for after so long a minority it would have been difficult for a strong man to wrest the reins from the hands of the power- greedy lords. These things had been talked of ever since Richard first opened his eyes on the world. The lesson was engraved on his mind: woe to that realm which has a child to its king.

  At last, they went to bed. George, whose comfort meant a great deal to him, could so arrange his mind that things unpleasant should be put aside until morning. But Richard slept and woke and drifted sometimes half in and half out of sleep; and in this half-dreaming state voices came to him as men paused from their labours in the courtyard and talked.

  ‘I’m old . . .’ one of them said, and hawked prodigiously to prove it. ‘I remember Harry the Fifth: I saw him once. Now, that was a man! Knew what he wanted and how to get it. That’s the difference between him and men like the Duke.’ He made haste to add, ‘A fine man; oh, a very fine man was the Duke of York. But he didn’t know how to get what he wanted. Honest, he was, and straightforward—too straightforward. He thought everyone was as honest as he was. He didn’t understand strategy. There wasn’t any need for him to be killed, charging off like that without waiting until he had all his men with him. No strategy.’

  ‘Ah, maybe.’ A younger voice. ‘But while you’re messing about with strategy someone steals up and cuts your throat! I reckon his mistake was, he never recognized his enemies until it was too late and they’d slipped through his fingers.’ But I shall recognize my enemies, Richard thought, and he listened intently. ‘If I’d been the Duke of York, do you know what I’d have done? I’d have got rid of men like Pembroke while I had the chance. I’d have struck them down in front of me the very first time I saw a gleam in their eyes I didn’t much like.’

  ‘You got to have cause . . .’

  ‘Oh no, you haven’t, Grandad, don’t you believe it! Not if you’re a Duke you don’t need to have cause. It’s only the likes of you and me that has to have a good reason to show for cutting each other’s throats. The Duke should have struck hard at the first sign of danger! A man’s got to know when to stop talking and act.’

  Later in the night, it was a woman’s voice mumbling to herself, ‘We shall all be murdered, oh Lord ha’ mercy, they’ll come and we shall all be murdered . . .’ The voice came from the corridor. Richard got out of bed and opened the door quietly. She was kneeling in front of a chest from which she was taking out linen and folding it, and all the time rocking to and fro and crying: an old, crumpled creature whom he had never seen before. He went back to bed and drew his knees up to his chin. As a result of his restlessness he had cold air for bedfellow and he could not prevent himself from shivering violently. He had heard people wailing that they were to be murdered often enough and this aroused no terror in him. But everything was muddled in his mind and sometimes he thought he heard that terrible cry ‘Treason!’ which had so disturbed his father and which he associated with all the ill that had befallen his family.

  In the morning, the world had settled itself again. They were put to their studies as though nothing had happened. Weeks passed. February brought good news. Edward had defeated a Lancastrian army at Mortimer’s Cross. But the fruits of this victory were squandered. Warwick tarried overlong in London and when eventually his forces met those of Queen Margaret at St Albans, he was defeated. He had taken King Henry with him, which was ill-advised, and had lost him to Queen Margaret, which was careless.

  Warwick fled westward leaving London undefended as the Lancastrian horde approached. The citizens of London were known to look to themselves and be damned to everyone else, and the Duchess of York did not trust them to stand firm. She decided to send George and Richard to Burgundy where they would be safe from Queen Margaret. George, who liked London because it was so full of people, was downcast. Richard was not displeased. He felt suffocated in this city with its press of people, garrulous as monkeys, and its maze of narrow streets from which the foulness of the open sewers was never dispersed even in winter. He would be sorry to leave his mother but glad to quit London.

  The voyage was represented to the boys as a great adventure and this they accepted all too readily. They were excited as children dressed up for a carnival when they donned the clothes of their servants’ children, and they could barely contain their exuberance when they bade farewell to their mother. The Duchess, who had waved her men to battle without a sign of weakness, was almost overcome when she saw the young, excited faces uplifted to her. It was as though the grief she thought she had conquered had waited for this moment. She would have clutched these last treasures to her and refused to part with them had not the old mastiff come loping up, wagging his tail, and prepared to join in this strange frolic, George noisily berated the faithful creature for recognizing him, and the Duchess found relief in berating George in his turn.

  ‘If you use that tone of voice, no disguise will be of help to you! If you cannot speak meekly, then learn from your brother here who at least knows when to hold his tongue.’ She embraced Richard warmly. ‘You are like your father, brave and staunch. Be always so.’ She scarcely knew what she was saying, but Richard took her words seriously and imagined himsel
f to have charge over George.

  It was a bitterly cold evening when they set off and a fine drizzle was falling. The Lancastrians were already in the suburbs and there were those who would not scruple to ingratiate themselves with Queen Margaret by making her a present of the two young sons of the Duke of York. It was decided, therefore, that the boys should be conducted to the wharf on foot accompanied by only a few attendants.

  The driving rain made it natural that they should shield their faces, but after a time naturalness began to pall on George. He felt that the adventure lacked excitement and it annoyed him that his presence should attract so little attention. He took to pantomiming secrecy, clutching his hood, plucking at Richard’s sleeve, exclaiming, ‘My goodness, that was a near thing!’ and ‘That gust of wind very nearly blew this hood right back!’ and ‘I had better walk on this side of you so that I can’t be observed.’

  ‘What about me?’ Richard asked.

  ‘No one will know you.’

  No one appeared to know George, but he was behaving so oddly that attention was inevitably directed at the party. One of the attendants told him to quieten down, whereupon he turned about, bellowing, ‘I am not to be spoken to like that!’ A derisive cheer went up from men standing in the doorway of an inn. This piece of folly so infuriated Richard that he turned on his brother, kicked him in the backside, and told him to get on and not to be so stupid. Before the attendants could intervene, George had slapped Richard across the face. Richard was not much hurt, but the hood slipped back from his head and a man in the inn doorway shouted, ‘There’s a burning bush to go with that temper!’

  After this, the attendants had no further trouble with their charges. George occupied the reminder of the walk in berating Richard. ‘You should have had the sense to keep your hair covered.’ He was deeply offended that it was Richard who had attracted the attention if only by the colour of his hair. Richard, more worried about the colour of his temper, accepted the tirade meekly.

  By the time they were on the boat the wind was so strong that Richard had to turn his back to it in order to draw breath. George, forgetting his anger, turned his attention to one of the seamen.

  ‘Does this wind never cease?’ he shouted.

  ‘Never.’

  The thought of so much opposition from the elements was not pleasing to George and he continued to shout questions more because he refused to be silenced than because there was anything he particularly wanted to know.

  ‘How long will the voyage last?’

  The seaman began to talk of currents and of rocks to be negotiated, to say nothing of sea monsters which sometimes reared up to prevent the passage of a ship and of an island which was sometimes visible and sometimes faded away. Richard, sensing by his tone that the man did not know what he was talking about, turned away; but George, who liked a show of knowledge whether soundly based or otherwise, listened admiringly.

  Richard huddled in his cloak. Waves broke over the ship and drenched him with spray which left a white crust on his cloak when it dried. He could taste salt on his lips. He looked up at the mast, which dipped and rose against a moving background of cloud. His eyes seemed nailed to the mast; he watched it dipping and rising, dipping and rising, dipping and rising, and soon he was very sick and continued so for the rest of the voyage.

  Chapter Three

  1

  The Lancastrian army which Edward, Earl of March, had defeated at Mortimers Cross was led by the Earls of Pembroke and Wiltshire. Edward was merciful to the more humble of his enemies but not to their leaders. Jasper, Earl of Pembroke, in particular, had little to hope for from Edward: he was the bastard son of Harry the Fifth’s Queen Catharine, and Edward would have welcomed the opportunity to cut a thread of that tangled skein. The Earl of Pembroke fled westwards. His father, Owen Tydder, failed to make good his escape. He was captured and beheaded in Hereford, refusing until the end to believe that anyone would commit so great an infamy as to sever from its body the head which had once lain in Queen Katherine’s lap.

  The news was conveyed to Margaret Beaufort who had been travelling to Brecknock with her son; she received it calmly, asking, ‘And Jasper?’

  ‘Fled to Pembroke Castle.’

  She nodded her head, well-pleased. She had been little more than a child when she married Jasper’s brother, the Earl of Richmond, and within a year he had left her a widow; but her loyalty to his family was strong. She was soon to wed again and had already decided that her son, Henry, should be brought up at Pembroke Castle. She had not anticipated, however, that the parting would come so suddenly.

  ‘Why can’t I stay with you?’ the child asked when, heavy with sleep, he was summoned from his bed.

  ‘Because you will be safer in Pembroke Castle.’

  ‘Is Uncle Jasper coming with me?’

  ‘He has gone already. He will be waiting for you there.’ She hugged him and told him that he must be brave. He looked at her, solemn but tearless. He had never known his father and he had seen little of his grandfather. Those best known to him were his mother and his Uncle Jasper; now he was to set off on a journey without either of them.

  ‘I think perhaps I won’t go,’ he said tentatively.

  He set out early in the morning with a few trusted retainers. The Yorkist army was known to be not many miles away, so the small fugitive band kept to the hills. There was little to distinguish the four men and the child from others who straggled along the hill tracks, seeking shelter in that part of the country still held by the Lancastrians. The ground was rough and at times they had to dismount and lead their horses. It was a hard journey for a grown man, severe for a child of four. He got very dirty and wet, was often hungry and always uncomfortable; but he accepted this without making undue fuss. Henry Tydder had already learnt to expect little of life.

  In the brief sunlit hours, the folds of the hills were like the full sleeves of a rich mantle, dark green inlaid with bronze, with a gleam of stones caught here and there. They looked deceptively smooth at the summit, but they widened out as the party climbed and what, further down, had looked like a green swathe proved to be a dense knot of brambles and bracken. Late in the afternoon, the party stopped by a tarn, smooth as glass and very cold. While the men struck camp, Henry was left to his own devices. He amused himself wriggling on his stomach through the undergrowth, pretending to be an animal of some sort—not a monster, he had his imagination on too tight a rein for that. After some growling and mewling, which were the animal sounds most familiar to him, he tired of this and, finding himself near the water, inched to the edge and looked down. He beheld his own face, quite adequately reproduced except for a rather long head. He was waggling the egg-shaped head about slowly, and watching the image respond, when a stone plopped in the water; the face wavered and broke apart. Henry looked up and saw a small, dark man standing above him who was certainly not one of his own party.

  The man put a finger to his lips, then reaching his hand into a leather bag attached to his waist, he drew out a small stone and handed it to Henry. The action was accompanied by words, softly spoken. The words made no sense to Henry, but bribery has never needed words and Henry understood perfectly that his silence had been bought. The stone was in fact a piece of quartz which, when crushed, might reveal in its siftings a trace of the riches beneath the earth’s surface. But to the child it was just a stone, pale and colourless. The bright-eyed tatterdemalion who had given the stone was so different from anyone whom Henry had ever met that it seemed possible he might be one of the mountain folk of whom his nurse had told him, people seldom seen in daylight and who had the habit of vanishing before a stranger had the chance of a second look at them. Henry blinked his eyes: the little dark man was still there and quite made up for any disappointment occasioned by the ordinariness of the stone. Henry’s nurse had also told him that he should beware of strangers, but people came and went in Henry’s life to such an extent that he adapted himself as well to strangers as to those who were suppose
d to be his friends. He much preferred this particular stranger to his attendants, who plainly regarded him as something of a nuisance. The dark man was as interested in Henry as Henry was in him; he squatted down and examined the material of Henry’s clothes with wonder. As he fingered Henry’s jerkin, he touched the chain of the locket which Henry wore round his neck. Henry pulled the locket free of the jerkin and the dark man gazed at its intricate workmanship in awe.

  At this point, one of Henry’s attendants called out, ‘What’s that brat up to now? He’s very quiet.’ Something that was no more than a shadow flickered past Henry’s eyes and behind him the thorn bushes moved as though a light breeze had parted them. Then all was still and Henry was alone.

  The attendant’s passage to the tarn was noisy. ‘What are you doing?’ He glanced about him suspiciously and then gazed down into the water as though it could supply an answer. Henry found a heavy stone and threw it in the water; he watched with satisfaction while the attendant’s face wavered and broke apart.