He Who Plays The King

by MARY HOCKING

  2

  Henry Tydder was still living at Pembroke Castle. While the Countess grieved for her dead husband, Henry walked on the castle ramparts and wondered what would be his future now. Would the Lancastrians come and take the castle and restore it to his Uncle Jasper? He hoped so. Henry was twelve and he had learnt not to invest his resources in others; he withdrew from personal affection as a snail will withdraw its feelers into its shell at the first hint of danger. So he did not long for his uncle because he loved him as a man but because he was the most permanent feature of his life and he had a need of permanency.

  As Henry walked on the ramparts he looked at his kingdom. Ever since he had ridden through the Welsh hills on his flight to Pembroke, he had been in the habit of regarding that area which his eyes could compass as his kingdom. It had started with a range of barren hills: the view was hardly more promising now. Mist curled over the woods and fields gradually isolating the castle. He was king of the mist and rain today.

  Days passed and Uncle Jasper did not return. A change of a kind did, however, take place in Henry’s life towards the beginning of September. It was a fine, warm day and he had gone riding with his tutor. The tutor talked volubly in a good-natured attempt to provide the lonely lad with comradeship. Henry, who was not a comradely lad, found this irksome. It was a still day with an autumn haze blurring the landscape and Henry gave way to a rash impulse. As they rode through a wood, he stopped his horse at a point where the undergrowth had almost obliterated the path. The tutor was riding ahead and Henry waited until he had gone some little distance before he called to him, ‘Roper doesn’t like the tangle. I’ll take him down the other path and meet you on the far side of the wood.’ There was no other path; he simply turned his horse about and rode back the way he had come. When he reached the edge of the wood, however, there were two tracks from which to choose and he chose the one to the left. At first it seemed familiar, but after a time the ground became stony and began to descend sharply. ‘I am going the wrong way,’ he thought and reined in his horse.

  Insects droned in the bushes but even they seemed drowsy. There was no other sound. In all his adventures he had never before been completely alone. Prudence dictated a hasty retreat the way he had come. His horse, plagued by flies, twitched its ears and lashed its tail. ‘This path is descending steeply and there is probably a stream down there,’ Henry told Prudence. ‘The horse is thirsty and I am very hot.’ Also, there was a smell of wild thyme which filled him with a longing he could not explain but which urged him on. Soon, imprudence was rewarded by a glimmer of water below. The path was very steep now and Henry had to dismount and guide the horse down to the stream. The land rose high and densely wooded on the far side of the stream. Not a breath of air stirred. It was a strange, secret place. Henry let the horse drink while he sat on the bank and removed his boots. ‘I am quite lost,’ he thought as he dangled his feet in the water. He marvelled at his folly.

  Soon, he heard the sound of stones moving and realized that someone else was riding down the path. It was not his tutor; his tutor would have had to dismount and lead his horse down. Horse and rider, when they emerged belonged so well together that Henry seemed to see a creature that was half man, half horse. The man-part called out to Henry:

  ‘You, there! Where is Pembroke Castle, do you know?’

  ‘I was wondering that myself,’ Henry said.

  ‘Then you’re not much good to me, are you?’ He sounded cheerful; it was obvious that being lost held no terrors for him. He dismounted and, sitting beside Henry, he, too, took off his boots and dangled his feet in the stream.

  ‘Is that your horse there?’ he asked Henry.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Nice bit of horseflesh. How did you come by it, steal it?’

  Henry wondered whether it would be more interesting if he said he had stolen Roper, and while he was debating this, the stranger laughed and thumped him on the back. ‘I might be able to sell it for you at a better price than you’d ever get.’

  ‘What would I do without him?’ Henry asked.

  ‘What you usually do!’ The stranger laughed and stretched himself out on the bank, his arms folded behind his head.

  He had blue-black hair but his skin was surprisingly fair, pebbled with freckles across the bridge of the small, fine nose. The mouth was wide and confident, the eyes a light blue like spring water with only a dash of colour in them, and, in spite of their merriment, something of the water’s coldness. The eyebrows were dark and heavy and curved upwards, giving a touch of the demonic to the face. Henry thought it was the most attractive face he had ever seen; not the face of someone to be trusted, but one that waived the question of trust and made it irrelevant.

  ‘What is your name?’ the man asked.

  ‘Henry. What is yours?’

  ‘Robin. Robin Goodfellow.’

  ‘Robin Goodfellow?’ Henry could tell from the way it was said that this was a joke, but could not see anything very funny about it; his folklore was limited to that of the Welsh people.

  ‘Robin Goodfellow is a sprite,’ the man said. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve never seen a sprite?’

  Henry had to admit that he had not.

  ‘Neither have I. And it’s not good to see them. But I’ve heard them when I’ve been about at night.’

  ‘What business are you about at night?’ Henry asked.

  ‘Business that belongs to the night.’ He made a rueful grimace and sighed, ‘Which is why I’m here, I suppose. I had to quit my master’s service some months ago because there was trouble with a wench.’ He looked at Henry to see how much interest he was arousing and then said, ‘You haven’t had a woman?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twelve.’

  ‘I’d had several wenches by the time I was twelve.’

  He began to tell Henry about his life.

  ‘But now that you have nowhere to go, what will you do?’ Henry asked when Robin brought his rambling history to its present conclusion.

  ‘Nowhere to go! There’s everywhere to go! I shall travel, spending a night here, a month there, perhaps a season in one place. But never as long as a year. One year follows another and that’s the way a man gets snared as I’ve had cause to know.’

  Henry was much impressed by Robin’s audacity; it was a strange, but not unattractive idea, that a man might mount a horse and wander from place to place for the rest of his life.

  ‘And talking of staying,’ Robin said, ‘this is no place to stay. I need food before the night is out and I shan’t come by it here.’

  Henry watched him putting on his boots. He liked the idea of this man riding away owing service to no man; yet something acquisitive in him made him say, ‘I can find you food.’

  ‘I want other things beside food, lad.’

  ‘I can find you a place for the night.’

  ‘I daresay, but there’d be some things missing that I’m much in need of.’

  ‘You asked the way to Pembroke Castle. I can take you there.’

  The man stopped, a boot in one hand. ‘You can?’ For the first time he looked closely at his companion. ‘What would you know of Pembroke Castle?’ he asked, jesting, yet already half-believing. ‘I live there.’

  Robin stared at him, and as he stared the boy seemed to change so that it would be absurd ever to have imagined he could belong anywhere else in this neighbourhood but to Pembroke Castle.

  Henry went on, ‘They will be grateful when I tell them that you found me and brought me safely back. If you wanted to spend a week, or a month, at the castle, I am sure they could find you work, since you know so much about horseflesh.’

  Robin said, ‘I mightn’t mind a month of that.’

  They mounted their horses and when they had climbed the steep hill, they found that the mist had cleared and in the distance they could see Pembroke Castle. As they rode towards it, Henry felt triumphant at bringing this trophy back with him. But when the cas
tle loomed high and its shadow fell across the fields and the two riders, Henry was sad that this encounter, so strange and touched with magic, should resolve itself into a matter of servant and master instead of wanderer and chance-met youth.

  Much later, when his tutor returned and asked him where he had been, Henry replied that he had been playing with the devil. As this was not well-received, he said, ‘It was only a puppy devil.’ After this, he found himself looking out for the devil’s pup who was still at the castle after a week, and then a month, and then two months. After three months, Henry managed things so that Robin became his groom. Robin Goodfellow transformed himself readily into Robin Prithie, groom.

  Chapter Five

  1

  Soon after the execution of Pembroke, King Edward was captured by Warwick and the Duke of Clarence. A few days later, the Queen’s father, Earl Rivers, was captured and later beheaded outside the walls of Coventry. Edward was treated with wary respect by his captors and with patience and guile he managed for a brief spell to reassert his authority. But by September 1470 he was again a fugitive. As he and Richard set sail for Burgundy, Warwick sent word to the Constable of the Tower that his prisoner was once more King Henry the Sixth. They told Henry that he was to ride in triumphal procession through the streets.

  ‘Again?’ he said.

  They sat him on a horse and the people cheered and threw caps in the air.

  ‘How long?’ he asked when they returned from the procession. No one answered him. He looked out of the window. The day was creeping slowly away, the long shadow of its skirts lingered on the grass. ‘How long, this time?’ They thought him a fool, but he was wiser than they.

  Queen Margaret came to terms with Warwick. No other course was open to her. She even assented to the marriage of her son, Prince Edward, to Warwick’s young daughter, Anne. But she placed no trust in Warwick and delayed her return to England.

  In London, Elizabeth Woodville waited. She had given birth to a son and looked forward to presenting the young Edward to his father.

  The months went by, January dwindled into February, and still Margaret delayed. March came in without its usual bluster, quietly, almost stealthily. At last the Queen began to make her preparations, but she had delayed too long. On March 14th Edward and Richard landed on the Yorkshire coast. George, Duke of Clarence marched north, ostensibly to give battle; but George, unnerved by Queen Margaret’s delay, had begun to think more fondly of his brothers. A meeting was arranged at which he allowed Richard to persuade him to become reconciled with Edward. There was a rumour that Warwick would be offered a pardon if he submitted to Edward.

  Warwick preferred to fight. The Earl of Oxford, one of Warwick’s most trusted commanders, was not impressed by this decision. To him, Warwick now seemed no longer a heroic figure, but an old war horse, slow on the turn, unable any longer to manoeuvre with skill.

  ‘Queen Margaret is on her way at last; and Jasper Tudor is marching from Wales,’ Oxford said. ‘We should wait until our forces are joined with theirs.’

  ‘We have waited too long as it is,’ Warwick answered.

  It was spring and there was work to be done on the land; men were drifting off, making their way home. His commanders were at odds with one another; Oxford made it apparent that he did not trust Montagu and the situation between them daily grew worse. Warwick lacked the subtlety necessary to bind together these fraying threads. He did the thing he best understood. He moved south. On Easter Eve, while Queen Margaret was within a day’s sailing of Weymouth, his army was camped near the town of Barnet.

  It was a move which delighted King Edward. He had marched from London in the hope of forcing a battle before the arrival of Queen Margaret, and here was Warwick obligingly come to meet him! It was evening when he received news of the disposition of Warwick’s forces. He decided that he would take up a position as close as possible to Warwick’s army ‘so that by morning, at first light, we can attack, and, by the grace of God, the business between us will be settled by noon.’ He would take command of the centre and Hastings the left wing; to his brother, Richard, he entrusted the command of the right wing.

  The air was damp and cobwebs of mist hung about as Edward’s forces began to move towards the St Albans road, on either side of which Warwick’s army was encamped. There was some activity from Warwick’s artillery; but as the cannon fire was sporadic and overshot Edward’s men it seemed likely that Warwick’s commanders had little idea that the enemy was moving in so close. Richard had ordered his troops to move quietly so as not to give away their position. They dared not show any lights and the mist blurred their vision. It was a chancy business. From time to time a man stumbled and there was a clash of iron on stone. Any noise seemed to reverberate so loud it must be heard in heaven.

  When as a child Richard had imagined himself in command, he had always visualized the opposing armies already assembled, neatly in place, like the figures in a puppet show when the curtains are pulled back. What commander would have chosen tonight’s conditions to take up his position! Behind him, there was yet another clatter of steel and a great thrashing about as a horse stumbled into a ditch. Richard moved forward slowly, unable to see where he was going; he was shivering in the chill air and did not feel at all the decisive figure he had imagined would emerge on the great occasion of his first battle. Immediately ahead, lights danced momentarily as a rabbit scurried across the path. Then suddenly the mist parted and he had a clear view for some one hundred yards ahead. He saw that to his right, the trees seemed gradually to dwindle into nothingness. He hoped the nothingness would turn out to be a heath since it was on the heath that he was to camp. In Edward’s tent there had been a map of the area drawn by a man who knew the lie of the land. It had seemed, looking at the clear lines on the map, that it must be a matter of minutes to reach the heath. But darkness and mist distorted the landscape and the road twisted and turned, quite unlike the straight line on the map. Richard could not even be sure that he was proceeding in the right direction. He fought back the horrid fear that he might lose his way and the battle as well. The mist had come down again; around him men grunted and swore and scrambled and the horses blew noisily, their harness jingling. They continued so for ten minutes which seemed an hour. Then the mist parted again and Richard saw the heath stretching away to his right. Impulsively, he bent down, felt the ground and tugged hard; as he stood up, rubbing the tuft between his fingers, he could not have believed a sprig of heather could have made him so happy. When all his men were assembled on the heath, one of his captains asked him, ‘What do we do now, Dickon?’

  ‘We wait.’

  He spoke with calm assurance, but he was revising some of his notions about battles. The mist had damped down his excitement and blunted the fine edge of resolution; the blood itself seemed to have thinned. During the next few hours, he revised one or two ideas about himself. He learnt, for one thing, that he was not good at waiting. Years ago, when he was a child, he had heard a voice in the night saying that a man must know the moment to strike. He had always remembered this; it suited his temperament well. But now it seemed that there were times when it was not advisable to be so hot for action. When Edward assigned the right wing to him, he had brought himself to a pitch almost of ecstasy and must now sit out the night while ecstasy evaporated.

  Dawn came at last, a poor thing, a mere paring away of the darkness leaving in its place an atmosphere as dense but of a lighter hue. Into this indifferent blanket, Edward’s trumpeters hurled their urgent summons and in the distance Warwick’s trumpets sounded. The cannon fire intensified. Richard commended his enterprise to God and ordered his men to advance. Advance they did, but met no resistance, although the ground showed a tendency to give way. Soon they were moving rapidly downhill while the clash of steel told them that men were engaged to their right. Richard realized that in the mist he had outflanked the enemy. To hurtle full tilt at the enemy had been his ambition, but now he must come upon him stealthily since his men
had first to grope their way uphill, no easy matter to those in heavy armour. It seemed a bad mistake and Richard resolved to die honourably on the field of battle. When the lines were reformed, he again ordered the advance and, gripping his axe, charged recklessly forward. But the mistake had enabled him to take the left wing of Warwick’s army by surprise and soon he found himself concerned with tactics rather than an honourable death.

  Qualities were needed which he had not foreseen: however eagerly the spirit drove him forward, however the blood sang, a certain coolness must be retained, as though a chip of ice were lodged somewhere in his brain. Messengers came with news of how the battle went on other wings. He must listen and make decisions. But the messengers did not give the clear information he had expected to receive, they were confused and more often than not contradicted one another; it was impossible to form a picture of what was happening. He was blinkered by fog; the only reality was an area smaller than the tilting yard on which he had served his apprenticeship. For him, this must be the whole battlefield and he must fight as though victory depended on his defence of this small patch of ground. His troops were hard-pressed. But he decided to accept the blackest estimate of fortunes elsewhere— Hastings’ wing was said to be broken—and resolved not to call on his brother to throw in reserves to aid him. It was a reckless decision, but he felt the better for it and fought with great heart thereafter.

  The fog favoured no one and the messages which Warwick received were no less confused. A handful of panic-stricken men running from the field can give an impression that the whole wing of an army has been broken, just as the onslaught of a few rash spirits can appear to signal a formidable attack. Hastings’ men misread the confused signs available to them and, not realizing the seriousness of their plight, fought on. The Duke of Exeter’s men thought their plight was worse than it was and Warwick threw in his reserves to support the Duke.