He Who Plays The King

by MARY HOCKING

‘But that, in fact, is what you will do?’

  ‘At a certain point we shall wander off our route and with any luck we shall cross into Anjou before the alarm is raised. In the meantime . . .’

  ‘In the meantime, I shall have made my own arrangements and I shall be in Anjou a few days later.’ Henry made it clear that discussion was at an end; he wished each man well and said how he longed to be reunited with him. In spite of the warmth of his words, there was no doubt that he was eager for their departure. ‘A hard king he’ll make,’ one of them said with dour respect as they left.

  Henry could not so summarily dismiss his uncle. ‘Have no fear for me,’ he said. ‘If there is one part in which I have some experience, it is that of the fox, and by now I play it very well.’ He looked suddenly tired and sighed dejectedly, ‘All my poor fools will have to be left behind; I shall be sad if I do not see them again.’

  ‘Never mind about your fools,’ Jasper said sharply. ‘But be sure that whichever servants you take with you, Robin Prithie is not among them.’

  Two days later when Henry set out to make a local visit he took only five servants with him and Robin Prithie was one of them. Henry hoped that the inclusion in the party of the man whose job it was to betray him might confuse his enemies and win him a little travelling time. Before he left, he rehearsed details of the journey with one of the servants, Duncan, a Scotsman.

  When they set out two servants rode in front of Henry and two behind and Robin rode beside him. Robin felt uneasy and this feeling by no means diminished as they rode from under the walls of the old town. They would be in sight of the walls for a long time and must proceed without any show of haste. Henry rode with his hands slack on the reins, looking about him and commenting on the birds and other features of the countryside in which, to Robin’s knowledge, he had shown little interest before. The country was flat and provided little shelter for man or beast; Robin felt that not only the people of Vannes, but every peasant in the fields, must know that on this morning Robin Prithie had set out in Henry Tudor’s company. Among those people must be some who would ask why he had given no warning of Henry’s departure. ‘In an emergency, I was instructed to kill,’ Robin thought, ‘but how am I to know whether this is an emergency?’ The men who rode in front were strangers to him, but he knew the two Scotsmen who rode behind and he was no match for them. Henry had chosen his companions well.

  Henry was praising a magpie for its flight and asking if there were magpies in England. He looked into the sky, narrowing his eyes as two of the birds flashed overhead. ‘I am told they are very brave, but cruel.’

  ‘Why has he taken me with him?’ Robin wondered. ‘He thinks I am not to be trusted, so why has he chosen me?’

  They rode through a village where a pack of mangy dogs rushed out barking and snapping at the horses’ ankles and making sufficient commotion to alert the whole countryside of the presence of strangers. A stream ran through the village but there was only a thin trickle of water now and children played among the smooth white boulders. As the party rode by the children pelted them with pebbles to the toothless amusement of two ancients sitting on a bench.

  ‘Let me go back and punish them!’ Robin said.

  ‘Save your courage,’ Henry answered.

  It was hot. This was a damnable country in summer. Dust rose from the baked mud track and in the distance trees furred and wavered until Robin could not tell whether they were in fact trees or marching men. His throat was so parched he had difficulty in swallowing. He would have sold his soul for a drink of water had he still a soul to sell. He squinted up at the sky, deep blue and cloudless.

  Henry was talking about the Romans now; did he think those were Roman legions there in the distance, shimmering and bobbing about? Robin croaked, ‘Those are trees, Sire.’

  ‘What are trees?’ Henry frowned.

  ‘I am sorry, Sire,’ Robin began to babble. ‘I fear for you and so my imagination plays tricks on me.’

  ‘But what do you fear?’

  ‘That we might be pursued. It is because . . . because of that other time when I rode with you across that desolate place. I feared for you then. Sire, and stayed close by you.’ Surely Henry would remember and be touched as Robin himself was now so touched that tears smarted in his eyes.

  Henry said tersely, ‘But that was a long time ago and you have ridden with me often since then without being afraid of trees.’

  ‘I am afraid that you may be harmed. Do you recall how I nursed you that time in Brittany? You had a high fever and we all feared for you.’

  ‘I remember the fever. But that pretence will not serve now, Rob.’ Henry spoke gently and Robin was pleased. He resolved not to kill Henry. He would spare his life and Henry would take him to France and he would be his very good servant.

  ‘If I have ever failed you. Sire, I ask your forgiveness. It was but weakness; no one could desire your well-being more . . .’

  ‘What nonsense is this?’ Henry’s voice was as sharp as if he had bitten on a nerve. ‘This is no time for melancholy.’ He rode for several paces with his lips tightly compressed; his horse tossed its head and began to prance fretfully, the muscles in its flanks quivering. Henry ran a hand down the side of the taut neck murmuring, ‘Easy, easy.’ As if to soothe the animal he began to talk about some ancient stones which had been placed in a mysterious configuration by people who were in this land long before the Romans came; some of the stones were very large and no one knew how they had come there or to what use they had been put. ‘Some say they were part of a temple to heathen gods.’ His voice droned on; Robin had never known him talk so much to so little purpose. Henry said he had seen the stones once but could not remember where they were situated; he looked around him as though searching for them and the horse strained its neck uneasily. Then, from the direction of the village through which they had passed, there came the frantic barking of the dogs. Henry said, ‘The trees!’ but he scarce had need of the words for they were all of one mind and rode hard for the shelter of the trees.

  A change had come over the party now. They followed first one track and then another through the wood; yet although they proceeded as if negotiating a maze, there was nothing aimless about the manoeuvre. Robin felt he was taking part in an intricate ritual each movement of which had a precise meaning known to all save him. They turned off the path, dismounted, and led their horses between the trees, treading down the dappled light, boring their way into a deep green tunnel. They moved quietly for this was a pine wood and the ground was soft. There seemed to be no bird or animal life and Robin thought it an unnatural place. Eventually they came to a small clearing where one of the great trees had fallen. Henry handed the reins of his horse to one of the men; then he took off his cloak and tossed it on the ground in front of Robin. He said:

  ‘You are much thinner now, Rob. I think your clothes would fit me and you have often thought you would do very well in mine.’

  Duncan and his companion stepped up to Robin and began to hustle him out of his clothes. ‘But why . . .’ he blustered. ‘I don’t understand . . .’

  ‘Never mind about understanding, just be quick!’ Duncan said roughly.

  Henry, being more eager and more agile, was more quickly changed and had time to move around as though easing himself into Robin’s skin. Had I not to be a king, I’d as like be a fool, he thought; or perhaps I’d be a strolling player, or a rogue like this fellow here. How will he enjoy playing my part? He looked wryly at Robin, who was squirming and struggling as they tried to drag the doublet over his head; when his head emerged there was some trouble trying to get his left arm into the sleeve. ‘What kind of a claw is this?’ Duncan said as the crooked wrist emerged. They were all too busy to notice Henry, which was just as well. The sight of that broken wrist caught him like a blow in the stomach; he turned away and was sick. The sickness was followed by intense anger with himself. Were any soldier of my company to betray such weakness I could afford to show him no mercy, he t
hought.

  ‘What will happen to me?’ Robin whined.

  Henry turned. His face was pale, the narrow eyes like glass. ‘You will ride out and take the direct route to Anjou. Piers and Martin will accompany you. Ride hard.’

  ‘But if I am taken?’

  ‘No matter, provided you give them a good day’s hunting.’

  ‘But, Sire, they will kill me.’

  But Henry had turned away and was leading his horse between the trees. The others followed him and when they came to the edge of the wood their ways divided. Henry and his two companions remained in the shelter of the trees and watched the other three ride into the open country. Duncan, watching Robin, laughed and said, ‘King Hob o’ the muirs!’

  ‘We’ll have time to laugh when we are in Anjou,’ Henry said. For the present, he scarce gave them time to draw breath. If they thought that they must restrict their pace to his, they now had good cause to revise their assessment of his abilities as a horseman and his endurance as a man. ‘The Devil was in him,’ Duncan would say afterwards on the numerous occasions when he recounted the story of their flight. In fact, their exploits became so magical that his hearers would sometimes ask, ‘Are you sure it was Henry Tudor and not Robin Goodfellow that rode with you, Duncan?’

  Henry crossed into Anjou the next day, but Robin remained in Brittany. The men who captured him spared the two servants but Robin was hacked near to death and left in fields some twenty miles from the pine wood. He had given his pursuers a good day’s hunting. Now it was dark and looking up at the night sky he whispered, ‘I’m not . . .’ but he could not think who it was that he was not, or who he was, and he was still puzzling about it when the stars blinked and went out.

  Chapter Eighteen

  *

  The clouds moved slowly across the sky. One was shaped like a crouching boar with a savage tufted tusk and it grew and grew until it dominated the sky; but the wind chased and worried it as relentlessly as hounds tearing at its extremities until it broke apart. Then the wind built up turrets and temples and gorgeous palaces, all for the pleasure of pulling them down. In the fields the wind combed the grass this way and that so that it was never the same from one second to another; and over the moors sun and cloud made an endless shadow play. And all the time the adversaries rolled across the sky, billowing up threateningly or feigning innocence as when a tiny scrap of white on the horizon scudded in and turned the whole sky black. The formations of the sky had no permanence, they loomed up, dark and ominous, moved on, dissolved. Only change was constant.

  On earth, things were to be better ordered. King Richard was at work bringing stability to his realm. In the first instance, he looked to that most stormy part of his kingdom, the north. He had won support from the north, but this was a personal achievement rather than a mark of attachment to the crown or a desire for the establishment of law and order throughout the realm. Now, he planned to control this most turbulent but well-loved part of his kingdom. He, too, would create his ramparts and turrets, his splendid towering achievements. He set up a Council of the North with jurisdiction over Yorkshire, Cumberland and Westmorland, and he made his nephew and successor, the Earl of Lincoln, who had no lands beyond the Trent, President of the Council. This Council was to be no airy, insubstantial creation, but something firm and solid that would endure as long as England should endure which, as Richard saw it, was to the end of time. Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, feared that at least it might endure during his lifetime which, however it might affect England, would go ill for the future of the Percys.

  Richard rode about his northern territory, across land where the wind blew the soil away and nothing would grow save heather and stunted thorn trees all bowed the one way so that the tormentor seemed almost visible. The air was clear and one could see for miles ahead. There had been trouble with the Scots for some time but during this summer Richard’s men had struck hard and now the Scots were ready to sue for peace. Richard felt himself in command, no longer Edward’s able lieutenant but King of England by right of his own strength and power. Even that small scrap on the horizon which could scarce justify the name of ‘cloud’ kept a respectful distance, for Henry Tudor was involved in a shadow play of his own.

  Henry’s followers had been allowed to join him in France and now he must concentrate on winning the favour of the French king, Charles the Eighth, with whom he could claim kinship. Henry found little cause for rejoicing in his descent from Henry the Fifth’s Queen Katherine, daughter of the mad king of France. Nevertheless, it was useful now to be of the line of the Valois and Henry’s frugal nature did not allow him to neglect anything that could be of use to him. But it was wearisome, this need to be endlessly charming, to be modest about one’s accomplishments while making sure that no one doubted them, to maintain a balance between natural aspiration and overweening ambition, to contrive to be a suppliant without becoming too obviously a beggar. And all the time to smile, smile, smile. ‘When I become king I hope never to smile again,’ he said sourly to his uncle. ‘Indeed, when I look at the state of my kingdom, I doubt I shall ever have cause to smile.’ He saw England as so disunited as barely to justify the word ‘kingdom’ and he had no quarrel with Richard’s view that the need to unify was of paramount importance; nor did he have much fault to find with the measures which Richard had so far taken. The difference between them was in the gifts they brought to bear on what was a common task.

  In the summer evenings Henry would sit in the courtyard where he enjoyed being entertained by his fools. The slanting rays of the sun cast patterns on the stones and sometimes ideas would spring to his mind and he would move them about, manipulating them in that chequered light while the breeze shifted the dust from the ivy leaves. He liked to test his ideas thoroughly; he was not a rash man. The summer breeze was soft; it whispered messages in a voice that was dry and sweet, and told him that soon he would be king. It spoke of no effort. Henry’s courtiers spoke softly, too, and told him how the people yearned for him to come to them. Henry was not so easily seduced. The people ‘yearned’ for a strong king so that they could get on with the business of their lives in peace, and only when he had demonstrated that he was that king would he earn their support. He would not have had it otherwise.

  There were times when the summer seemed too long. Henry’s resolution was not of the kind that dies with the heat of the day; and disappointment and delay would not wear away his courage. Inactivity, however, he found hard to combat. In his moments of enforced idleness, strange things slipped into his mind, things which had no place in the mind of a man so eminently self-disciplined and practical. Voices came out of the past—a boy saying ‘It’s only a puppy devil’ and the image of a face, dark, vivid, faun-like, a face that did not belong to the world of everyday; behind that face were other faces, not so clearly remembered, faces of men who rode a winding path which led them further and further from the everyday into a misty, mountainous land where they sat over camp fires at night, spinning stories of a golden age; men who travelled light and served no master. Why should he envy such as these? More than envy, why should he feel they had spirited away something that should have belonged to him? He could not remember what it was, but he had always had a keen sense of possession and he felt the theft deep within himself.

  These are demons that torment me, he thought; did they not tell me that demons haunt those mountains? He brought his wandering thoughts to heel and set about preparing himself for entry into his kingdom of England where dreams of a golden age had no place. He wrote to his friends in England assuring them that no Christian heart could be more full of joy and gladness at the thought of returning to his country, and asking what support they could promise him. The replies were encouraging.

  The man who comes bloodily to power may in time be forgiven almost any crime if he proves himself a good ruler. But these were early days and Richard lacked the qualities which can quickly turn enemies into friends. He was not an adjustable person; because he felt a
t home in the north and had had some success there in the past, he put the problems of the north before those of the rest of the country. Trouble simmered in the south. It was now many months since the Princes had been seen and the rumours regarding their murder were spreading. In July a notice was fastened to the door of St Paul’s ‘The Cat, the Rat, and Lovell our dog, Rule all England under an Hog’.

  But Richard was in the north where things seemed to go well for him. By September a peace treaty was being negotiated with the Scots and his Council of the North had been established. It was not until the end of October, when he was on his way to London, that a blow was struck which forced him to admit that there was another enemy with whom he must now come to a reckoning. The Earl of Oxford, who had been held prisoner since 1474 in Hammes Castle, near Calais, had escaped and had joined Henry Tudor. Oxford was the most powerful of the Lancastrian lords. Now that he was surrounding himself with men such as this, the Tudor must be taken seriously. The scrap of cloud was fast transforming itself into a dragon; a puffed-up dragon, perhaps, but one whose pretensions the boar must now prick. In December, Richard issued a proclamation against Henry Tudor who, ambitious and insatiably covetous, sought to usurp the throne ‘whereunto he hath no manner of interest, right, title or colour, as every man well knoweth, for he is descended of bastard blood, both of father’s side, and of mother’s side . . .’

  Henry was by no means displeased when he heard this account of himself: recognition is always encouraging.

  Richard spent Christmas at West Minster. The wind blew from the east. At night, Anne heard it knocking on the window pane like an importunate traveller who will not be turned away. A change had come over her and it was apparent to all those around her, save Richard, that she was no longer ill but dying.

  Richard was extravagant with gifts this Christmas. Anne received his presents with a sadness too deep for tears. The gorgeous silks and velvets hung on her shoulders heavy as the weight of his despairing love. He was generous to Princess Elizabeth and her sisters, and Anne saw how others marked this generosity. She made it her business to be gay in company and to be particularly gay when Elizabeth was present and as her spirit had always been stronger than her body she succeeded very well. The time was coming, however, when she would have nothing left to give Richard and now, when they were alone, she began to talk about her death.