The Last English King

by Julian Rathbone

  ‘Your here and now,’ she remonstrated, ‘seem to carry a smack of the essential about them do they not? Are they not essences - ’

  ‘Abstractions merely. Not the same.’

  Like a distressed cat, Walt, following Quint, growled.

  ‘Men died down there,’ he muttered to Taillefer. ‘Limbs hewn from torsos, the arrow in the stomach, the black blood in the mouth and what do they know of it all? They’re high on what they saw, but what do they know . . .?’

  ‘More than you, young man,’ Taillefer said. He reined back and fell in beside him. ‘That battle was a civilised one. Oh, a few men got hurt, deaths even, but once the Infidels had paraded their might and let the Christians see their numbers and their strength the Christians evinced a clear desire to be off and the Infidels let them. Quite a different sort of business from the bloody shambles you got caught up in.’

  Clip-clop, clip-clop.

  ‘Well, you were there. You should know,’ Walt muttered after a time. ‘But there was glory there, honour and everlasting fame. The shield-wall and the faith a thegn owes his ring-giving lord.’

  He and Taillefer looked inward and back to the shattered men, a handful only at the end, beneath the grey sky deepening to night, the wheeling crows, back to the blood-bespattered shields that swung and wavered where for hours they had remained firm, the rain that fell like arrows on them, the arrows that fell like rain, and the swirling horsemen, circling beyond the reach of axe-blow and sword-slash, waiting like the crows for the last shield to fall, the last man to die.

  Taillefer sighed and pushed his horse on, rejoined the theologians who were still discussing Islam.

  ‘They have their problems,’ he called out.

  ‘They have?’

  ‘Like the Christians they have their sects, their divisions, their heresies. A house divided and all that. It’ll be their undoing.’

  ‘Ah, but one day they’ll get it right,’ Quint exclaimed. ‘Once they’ve fixed on the true fundamentals of their religion, there will be no stopping them.’

  Clip-clop, clip-clop.

  ‘You’ll turn Moslem, then?’

  ‘Why not? It’s a more rational religion than the one we’ve got. How about you?’

  ‘Perhaps. Certainly there is one sect amongst them has a special appeal.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The Ismaelis. They have a new leader, a young man, who has provided in one sentence all one needs to know.’

  ‘Which is?’

  “‘Nothing is forbidden. All things are possible.’”

  ‘I make that two sentences.’

  ‘Pedant!’ And he dropped back again.

  ‘But that was the end,’ he said to Walt. ‘The outcome - that dreadful obscenity of a battle. There was trouble, before that, was there not, when Harold returned from Bayeux? Bad news waiting for him. Is that not where it began?’

  ‘The worst news. At the time none knew how bad it was.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Taillefer pleaded. Walt looked at him. The dark face was now pained and pleading, the grooves in his cheeks deeper than before. Walt glanced at his still bandaged hands. Russet stains on the back of them, pain in the palms when he gripped the reins. It was as if he needed to know that he was not solely responsible for the fate that had befallen the English king. Taking pity, if not actually forgiving, Walt took up the next part of his tale.

  PART V: The Last English King

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The boat slipped into the lower reaches of Chichester harbour towards midday. The fat, grey, mottled seals still basked on the sand-banks; the terns, sea-swallows some called them, still hovered and struck, coming up with small-fry. The sea was calm, velvety, purple, with only the slightest of swells, the sky clear apart from a haze over the lowlands in front of the downs. The golds of late October had begun to stretch along the shore-line amongst the tired greens of summer -- the old white gold of oak and elm, the red gold of beech, the new minted yellow of coins spinning against the silver and pewter of birch and poplar boughs.

  The tide was out but flowing. Men with buckets and mud-shoes, small discs of black wood, swung their awkward gait shorewards from the oyster and mussel beds or laid nets against the incoming flood. Wood- smoke drifted up through the still air from the settlements of the shore-folk and as the boat left the swell of the sea and the banks came closer, Harold and his men caught on the air the sweet-sour fresh fragrance of apples crushed in a cider-press.

  It was good to be back. As he usually did, Helgrim the Golden had a song for it, something about seafarers home from the sea. In the waist of the ship Walt and Daflydd taught Wulfnoth and Hakon, the young lads they had brought back from Le Bec, how to play dice, while Harold stood in the prow with the look-out, hoping news of their approach might have reached Bosham ahead of them and that Edith Swan-neck would be standing on the quay to welcome them. Already the oath wrung from him weighed on his chest like a huge dead, white bird. It was something he wanted to talk about, quietly, with someone he trusted.

  But as they rounded a headland and came in view of the steeple, Canute’s thrones and the landing-stage, he could see a group of armed and mounted men clustered around one taller and fairer than the rest. With his long hair, coarser now, with some white in it and pulled back so the dome of his head was bald, fastened in a pony tail which hung down the back of his leather-studded jerkin, he was, even at a distance, unmistakeably Tostig.

  The boat nudged the huge and heavy timbers, covered with barnacles and limpets, the sail rattled down with shouts of warning from the crew lest the yard should crack some ignorant land-lubber’s skull, the ship’s boy leapt up onto the quay with a tarred hauser. One of Tostig’s men gave him a hand and together they hauled it in and looped it over a bollard. Behind them Harold was already breaking out of Tostig’s embrace

  ‘What brings you here then? Not just a brotherly desire to welcome me back.’

  Tostig, the third-born of close siblings, had always been demanding, attention-seeking, unreliable, always ready to take what he wanted as his birthright, regardless of convention or law. It was his belief that Harold existed merely to ensure that Tostig got what he wanted - especially now that Edward had clearly booked an early passage across the bourn from which no traveller returns. With middle-age approaching, he had grown even more proud and petulant, ready to see slights where none were intended, not willing to see reason, impatient. What charms, both of physique and personality, he had had in late adolescence had long gone. He remained cunning, cruel and ambitious.

  He exploded . . .

  ‘Fucking bastards have chucked me out,’ he cried.

  Harold stood back.

  ‘You’d better tell me about it.’

  ‘Of course I’ll fucking tell you about it. That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘Calmly. In the hall. Is Edith still here?’

  ‘Your fancy piece? Yes, she’s still hanging around. But what I’ve got to tell you --’ He saw how the dark blood rose in Harold’s face and his voice faded.

  ‘What you have to tell me can wait until I and my men have eaten, and drunk, and I have spent some time with Edith. I’ll see you in the hall. At dusk.’

  Through the meal Tostig chafed and fretted, spilled his mead, hit an over-friendly mastiff hard on the nose with a sheep’s femur, ignored Edith when she offered him more mead and then called her back with a barely suppressed curse on his lips when she had moved on. Not wishing to put up with this more than he had to, Harold signalled to the women and servants and his bodyguard that they should withdraw. Wulfric, as the eldest and senior of his men, led them down to the far end of the hall where they played dice amicably enough against Tostig’s bodyguard, polished their weapons, drank some more and listened to Helgrim’s strumming.

  ‘So,’ Harold began, once he and his brother were on their own. ‘They turned you out. Who? Why? How?’

  He had already heard from Edith some of the answers to these and other questions but wanted to
assess Tostig’s version.

  ‘First. The Northumbrian thegns. They used the shire moot as a cover, slipped into York, killed most of the men I’d left there --’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘On the Brifford estate, near Salisbury. They also seized my armoury and my treasury . . .’

  ‘Why? What brought this on?’

  ‘I taxed them. Extra taxes. For your sake, Harold. The King’s dying. He hasn’t collected heregild for ten years. When he goes we’ll need all the men and arms we can get hold of. . .’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Us. You. The Godwinsons. If I’d been there and armed, if l’d had my sword, I’d have . . .’

  And eyes burning he smashed his right fist into his left palm, then pushed his hair back from his temples. In the torchlight the sweat glistened on his jowels and his full lips pulled back in a snarl. ‘You know I would.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Harold murmured. And thought to himself and you would have been butchered like a bull and I should have had no option but war. Wessex against Northumbria. Saxons against Danes. Like the good old days.

  ‘And who put you up to this idea of collecting heregild.’ He doubted Tostig had thought of it himself.

  ‘Our Edith,’ he said truculently, ‘the Queen.’

  ‘Why?’ Harold was incredulous. Ever since the debacle of 1052 which had put her for some months in a particularly spartan nunnery, his sister had kept out of state affairs.

  ‘Poor Eddie’s dying. You were away. We all thought the Bastard would get you off the list while he had the chance. She took other steps too to protect us.’

  He left this hanging in the air. Harold, aware of quickening heart beat and a pricking in the palms of his hands, wiped them on his jerkin and drank. Beer. He’d had enough wine in Normandy and mead was for feasts, celebrations. Nothing much to celebrate right now.

  ‘You’d better tell me.’

  Without looking at him Tostig began to poke his nails with the short seax he always carried.

  ‘She contracted two men to kill Cospatric.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He’s fucking dead, isn’t he?’

  ‘Shit.’ Then: ‘Why did she do that?’

  Tostig pulled in breath and let out a heavy sigh.

  ‘She reckoned,’ he said, ‘that with both you and Eddie gone, we,’ he meant the Godwinsons, and Harold understood as much, ‘would back the Athling. So, he’s under age, but some sort of regency could be set up -- her and Stigand, maybe . . .’

  ‘Stigand is in on all this?’

  ‘Yes. In fact it was he arranged the contract. She reckoned Aelfgar’s sons,’ Edwin and Morcar, Earl of Mercia and his younger brother, ‘would be looking for a candidate they could support. They’ve no royal blood any more than we have so she thought they’d go for Cospatric.’

  Centuries earlier Northumbria had been two kingdoms -- Bernicia and Deira. The royal line of Bernicia had survived in the person of a youth called Cospatric, whom Edward had kept at court, like the Athling, and for similar reasons -- elsewhere he was a threat.

  ‘How much of all this has come out?’

  ‘Most of it. They tried to drown the lad but he struggled and they had to hit him about the head a bit. They caught one of the murderers and under trial by ordeal he confessed our Edith paid him . . .’

  ‘Bloody, bloody hell! So what’s the situation now?’

  ‘Edwin wants Morcar Earl of Northumbria in my place. That’s what it’s all about. That old rogue Aelfgar’s fucking brood coming home to roost. And because of the taxes and then Cospatric it’s a fucking sight more than just the Northumbrian thegns. They’ve raised both kingdoms (he meant Mercia and Northumbria), not just the housecarls but the levy too, and marched south.’

  Eight years earlier, after several of his earldoms had been given to the Godwin family because of earlier treacheries, Aelfgar, Earl of Mercia and the last great lord in the land who was not a Godwinson, had plotted with both Griffith, who had become his son-in-law and the Norwegians. Only after Harold and Tostig had finally scotched Griffith in 1062 and Aelfgar had considerately died, leaving Mercia to his young son Edwin, barely a grown man, had the threat been neutralized. Apparently. Now, three years later, they were back -- the old alliance of Northumbria and Mercia, albeit with new and immature leaders, challenging the King and the rest of England.

  He thought it through, leaving his brother chafing with impatience. At last he sighed.

  ‘How is the King?’ he asked.

  ‘Bad. He’ll be gone by Christmas.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Oxford.’

  ‘And Edwin and Morcar?’

  ‘I just told you. Got an army together. Welsh bastards in it too, heading for Northampton when I left the king three days ago.’

  Harold sighed again, finished his beer. Suddenly he felt tired, almost old, and his knees ached a little as he stood.

  ‘Wulfric,’ he called. ‘Get saddled up two hours before dawn. We’re going to Oxford.’

  He pushed past Tostig and went to the lady’s bower. Four hours back in England after nearly two months away and already he was about to be off again. Edith Swan-Neck took him to her couch, and since they had already made love and she knew he was tired and distraught she put his head on her breast and tried to get him to sleep.

  But he had much to talk about. First, their sons, Egbert and Godfric, now eighteen and seventeen years old.

  ‘They’re all right,’ she insisted, smoothing his forehead and pulling the coverlet up over his shoulder. Conchobar will see they’re all right, don’t worry about them.’ Conchobar was old Cuthbert’s younger brother, her brother-in-law; after her husband Cuthbert had fallen into senility Conchobar and his family had looked after her children whenever she went to England, where neither she nor Harold believed they were entirely safe.

  ‘All right. But I want you to go back to Wexford too. Until everything is settled.’

  She ran her hand down his long flank, digging a little with her fingers into the hard muscle below the rib-cage.

  But still he was restless and turned away.

  ‘What else is there?’ she asked. ‘I know. You found a beautiful maiden in Normandy and you want to go back to her.’

  ‘Worse than that.’

  He told her about the oaths he had sworn to William, especially the last one.

  ‘It was forced from you by sheer trickery. By the devil’s work, for I don’t see how else that charlatan could have made you see the things you saw.’

  She sat up and leant over him, spoke with all the forcefulness she could muster.

  ‘Listen. It does not count. But already it sits in your heart like an ugly little worm eating away your resolve. Pluck it out. Stamp on it. Forget it.’

  Nevertheless, often during the few months that were left, it came back to him like bile at the back of his throat, like a heaviness that sat in his chest when he woke in the morning.

  They left when it was still dark. In the yard Edith Swan-Neck held the bridle of his horse.

  ‘Go,’ and it was almost a whisper, ‘by the Vale of the White Horse. Leave Her some flowers or, better still, a branch of oak. And may be She’ll protect you from that stupid oath.’

  He stooped down in the saddle to kiss her, and cradle her cheek with his hand.

  ‘I’ll do that,’ he said.

  Over a hundred miles though it was they were there by mid-afternoon two days later. Almost all the land they crossed was Harold’s and it had been possible to change horses whenever they needed to. And this in spite of making a small detour to take in the big Hambledon-like hill with the contoured White Horse scored in its side. There, dismounting, he took the small branch of golden-leafed oak he had plucked in the valley below and laid it above the Horse’s head. He had wanted to pray, but did not know what sort of words She would find acceptable, or even the language that would be right. She? A fine lady who wore rings on her fingers and bells on her toes and rode on a w
hite horse. You can see a small image of her to this day in the church at Banbury on the other side of the Thames valley.

  As he looked down and across the valleys to the haze of smoke above the city the weariness returned. He glanced back at Tostig, now sitting bolt upright in his saddle, his face flaming, his blue eyes narrowed, spittle driven by the cold breeze from the corners of a mouth that looked mean in spite of his thick lips. He shook his reins.

  ‘Come on our Harold,’ he shouted, ‘let’s get the bulgars sorted.’ His horse’s hooves kicked up clods of turf as he careered down the steep hill, setting it to jump a low hedge of thorn stained with the bloodlike droplets of its haws.

  Almost, thought Harold, as he and his men followed at a more careful trot, I could wish him a broken neck between here and there, between now and what’s to come.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  In 1065 Oxford was a prosperous burgh within better walls and with a more capacious castle than the small motte and bailey affairs most English towns had at the time. Built on what had been the border with the ancient kingdom of Mercia and, at the point where the Thames ceased to be navigable, even with portage where there are now locks, it was an important trading post. Hence the castle. No university yet: it would be a hundred years before the busy town unblemished by spires would be transformed into a cluster of lodging houses.

  The king, with his court -- that is clerks, officials, scribes and so on -- occupied the castle. Archbishops, bishops, abbots, ealdormen, leading thegns, called by the crisis for a Witangemot, were mostly bedded in the city which then boasted nearly three hundred town mansions. Outside and to the north of the city walls the four hundred acres of Port Meadow were dotted with the tents of Edwin and Morcar and their men, a thousand or more. It was rumoured a much larger host had occupied Northampton and was ravaging the surrounding countryside which Edwin claimed belonged by immemorial right to Mercia, though Edward had given it to Tostig.