John Benet’s Chronicle
14
The Duke of Suffolk Suffers a Premonition
She bent over him with her blackened, smoking eyes, saying, ‘Do you think you are Duke of France?’
Or was it Normandy?
Small flames flickered from her lips and helmet as she raised her fiery sword then brought it down.
And he woke, sweating. It was not the first time he had dreamed of the Maid of Orléans, whose execution he had, in fact, witnessed. What disturbed him was the vivid quality of his dreams. There was nothing to occupy him in his cell, relatively little light and air, and his dreams had begun to seem more real to him than his waking moments. Indeed there were times when both his present condition and much of his previous life seemed like a dream.
It was as though the substance of time itself had become distorted, so drawn out that it almost stood still, then gushing faster than a flooding stream as memories and images of his past life returned to him. He remembered playing with his sister, who had died, the tutor who had mocked him in private, the first prostitute he ever slept with.
Then he was walking with his wife in her herb garden, or holding his son.
Very often the smiling face of Adam Moleyns came back to him. They were discussing policy together in the duke’s house at St Giles. Then the bishop’s head, still smiling, addressed him from a pole. ‘Soon it will be your turn,’ he said.
Thoughts and images and memories swirled into whirlpools or drove him through mazes, and he lost all ability to concentrate. He tried, for example, to remember lines of poetry – his own, that he had composed for the queen – but could remember only fragments:
My heart is set and all mine whole intent
To serve this flower in my most humble wise …
The queen had been so pleased by his verses, she had received them with a childlike pleasure; but now he could not remember them.
Both the king and queen had written to him several times, assuring him of their love, and that he would be released. By contrast, his wife had written only once, to tell him that she was going ahead with the arrangements for the marriage of their son. The little Margaret Beaufort was staying with her all the time now, so that the wedding could be arranged quickly before any objections might arise.
Alone in his cell, the duke could imagine her making those arrangements, with the same efficiency and assurance that had first drawn him to her.
There were moments when he could not remember her face.
What he could remember were the faces of those in parliament who had stood against him. All the commons, of course, and several lords. He had tried to speak in his own defence:
In the matter of ceding Maine, he had said, other lords were as privy thereto as he.
It would have been impossible, he told them, for him to have done such great things without the cooperation of other men.
And they had shouted him down.
With terrifying lucidity he recalled their distorted faces, pulled and contorted by the sheer weight of their malice. He had not known before that men’s faces would change as he fell from grace, becoming animal, unclean.
For this reason the horror of this imprisonment exceeded that of his imprisonment in France. Then, he had been a prisoner of war, fighting for his country; now, his country had turned on him. And there was no place for him, none, despite his many manors, apart from this narrow cell and the hostile territory of his mind. He slept and woke, slept and woke, always with the horror of his situation covering him like a pall, a sheen of sweat. He lay stinking in its fetor, amid all the phantasms of his brain.
Accordingly, when the king finally sent for him to say that he was taking him into his own custody in Westminster Palace, he had to read the message several times over, then he pressed it to his face to smell it. Later, he sat in the boat sent for him, blinking in gratitude at the night sky, which was stippled with stars. Never had he seen anything more miraculous or wonderful. The air he breathed, though it reeked of the city, had never seemed sweeter.
As they approached the king’s chambers, the king himself came out to greet him. The duke fell clumsily to his knees, acutely conscious of his clothes, which he had been unable to change, of his straggling beard and weeping eye. But the king, who was himself dressed like a monk, had no interest in appearances. He raised him up at once and embraced him.
‘My dearest friend,’ he said, ‘how you have suffered.’
And at once the duke began to feel restored to himself, for how could he be traitor if he was the king’s dearest friend? He had never acted against his king.
‘It is nothing,’ he managed to say, ‘now that I am here – with you.’
And the king embraced him again. Then he led him into his privy chamber, and from there into his private chapel, a small, bare room containing only a wooden bench and crucifix and a tapestry of St Sebastian. The king sat with him on the bench and looked earnestly at him. His own face was drawn in lines of tragedy and suffering, but he said, ‘My friend, you are not well.’
The duke thought of saying that he had not been visiting a spa, but it did not seem the right time for irony.
‘A little fever, perhaps, your grace.’
His left eye was evidently infected; it would not stop weeping.
‘I will send for my own physician – you must rest and recuperate.’
The duke thought of saying that he had rested enough, but again he suppressed the thought. The king stood suddenly and gazed out of the chapel window. ‘But you cannot stay in London – the city is not safe. The people … rise against me.’
The duke thought he had heard the sounds of rioting from his cell.
‘A man has been sentenced to death for speaking against me.’ The king turned his bewildered face towards the duke. ‘I did not require it – my council required it: not I.’
The duke bowed his head, wondering who had taken his place on the king’s council.
‘I have been praying for days,’ said the king.
Ah, thought the duke.
‘Only to know what I have done wrong – if I have done wrong. But there is no answer.’
No, thought the duke.
‘I have loved my people, but they do not love me.’
It is better to be feared rather than loved, thought the duke, but he could not remember where the quote came from.
‘I have been a merciful king. I have sought to rule by Christ’s law.’
They both knew that if he had been a tyrant, the people would have loved him more. But the king was looking at the wooden cross in some perplexity. ‘I have begged for the answer in prayer – how is it that I, who seek only to live in charity with all men, have brought about such evil?’
He turned to the duke with troubled eyes, but the duke, for once, was at a loss for words.
‘The only answer I receive is this,’ he continued. ‘I am doing penance for the nation – for the land. Like a blood offering.’
‘Your majesty –’
‘If the people require my blood, they may have it. But they will not have yours.’
His eyes were fervent, like the eyes of a martyr. He had the courage of a martyr, not a warrior. But the people required a warrior.
‘I will not let them execute you, my friend.’
The king’s words began to echo strangely in the duke’s head. He looked at the king with that fractured vision that had come to him in his cell. He could see that if he, the Duke of Suffolk, were to advise his king truly, he would have himself executed; if he had been king, he would have signed the death warrant by now. But he did not say this, of course. Despite the circumstances, he could feel in himself a surprisingly strong desire to live.
‘I will stand between you and your enemies,’ said the king.
He sat down beside the duke again and took his hands in a characteristically inappropriate gesture. The duke could not look at the simple belief in his face. He stared instead at his own hands in the king’s. He could
feel, almost like a physical force, or a current at sea, the compelling power of the king’s goodness. But the king was speaking again.
‘As soon as you have recovered you must leave London secretly – you must decide where to go.’
The duke thought. He would not return to his wife (who had written to him only once) because to return to her would be to endanger her and his son. He could go, perhaps, to one of his lesser manors.
‘I would keep you with me,’ the king said, ‘but I would rather keep you safe.’
The duke smiled. ‘I have too many enemies for that.’
‘But I am their king!’
He spoke as if kings could not be deposed; as if his own grandfather had not deposed a king. But the duke felt suddenly too weary to argue. He swayed in his seat, and the king caught and held him with surprising strength.
‘You must rest,’ he said. ‘But first we must pray together – pray for the fortunes of this land, that we may bring good to it and lay all the evil to rest.’
The duke was a little wary of prayer. He thought of all those prayers, throughout time, that had risen like flies from the lips of the dying and the desperate, apparently unheard. But the king was pressing him forward, into a kneeling position, and began to pray for mercy and wisdom and the power of goodness. The duke knelt beside him, with the king’s arm still supporting his shoulders, and knew suddenly, with a penetrating clarity, that the king’s goodness would be the nation’s doom.
And after St Hilary’s Day the parliament was removed to Leicester … and the king brought with him to that parliament the Duke of Suffolk, and when the commons understood that he was out of the Tower and brought thither they desired to have execution upon him for the deliverance of Normandy and also for the death of that noble prince the Duke of Gloucester. And to appease the commons the Duke of Suffolk was exiled out of England.
Gregory’s Chronicle
15
The Duke of Suffolk Writes a Letter
Something had happened to him while he prayed with the king, something extraordinary, but he could not say what it was. It was almost as though a skin had been lifted from him. And although it had been painless, this spiritual flaying, it had left him feeling raw. Ever since, he had been affected by a profound melancholy.
Of course, the circumstances were not good. He had been lucky to escape from his house in London when a mob had attacked it. And now here he was in his manor of Easthorpe, making arrangements to leave the country. But he was not under sentence of death; the king, as promised, had ‘stood between him and his enemies’.
It was a beautiful day, but even the clear light – watery, pristine – could not lift his melancholy; he could feel no renaissance in his flesh. Birds were calling, hares darting about the field, but they merely increased his sense of hopeless sorrow. He turned away from the window and made an attempt to gather his failing resources. He had decided, that day, that he would write a letter to his son, John. Paper and quills were set out for him on the table, but he did not know what to say.
He sat down, in any case, because his legs were trembling. He looked down at his hands, resting on the polished wood; how they had aged. They were elegant hands, with tapering fingers: a poet’s hands, or an artist’s – not a general’s. That was what his wife had said to him once, in the early days of their courtship. His wife, who had not written to him here, who had gone ahead with the marriage of his son.
An image of his little boy came vividly to his mind. The small, pointed features which had lengthened until they resembled his wife’s features. He had not expected to have a son after so many years of marriage. Yet he remembered, as though it were happening now, the sensation of holding the small, crumpled body for the first time, that trembling rush of love. He hadn’t expected that either. He was not aware that his own father had felt anything at his birth other than a certain grim pleasure at having another son.
The duke was fifty-three years old, and had already lived longer than many men, but his son, John, was only seven. He could remember himself at that age; how vividly things had affected him. His mood could be entirely transported by shifts in the weather or the light. He had begun each day with a sense of excitement and possibility, because it was new, and anything might happen. He remembered the first time someone had lifted him on to a horse, the dizzying sensation of terror. The horse had seemed huge and the ground so far away.
Was that what he wanted to write to his son? ‘Do not be afraid when you sit on a horse’?
‘Do not be afraid,’ perhaps. And he could say that he was sorry. Sorry he had to leave, that he would not see his son grow up, that he had not been a better father. And sorry for any disgrace that would follow; any blows of fortune.
But he did not want to alarm him. And anything he wrote would be read to John by his mother; he could hear her crisp, editorial tones. He could say that he hoped, as far as hope was left in him, for John’s future. For his marriage to the little heiress, Margaret Beaufort.
Who was six years old, as John was seven.
His thoughts were too scattered, that was the trouble. Blown about as chaff in the wind. And he could not see the future, that was his wife’s gift; his own vision seemed oddly foreshortened.
But he had to start somewhere.
The Duke of Suffolk, as he remained, adjusted his spectacles and the piece of paper in front of him and lifted his quill. Then he gazed ahead of him at the map of Jerusalem on the wall. Maps, he had always loved them, and had a great collection, which would pass to John. He wondered if his son would love them also.
He should not give the impression that he would never return, though in fact his grandfather had died in exile. Perhaps that had been the beginning. His son had so few and such insecure connections that the duke had striven, at least partly for him, to secure land and titles.
He was sorry that John had no more family, no better connections. God knew that, when the world turned on you, you needed support.
I wish I could be there with you, my son.
The outlines of the map seemed to shift and blur as he looked at it and waited for a sense of focus, the words that would not come.
And last of all, as heartily and lovingly as father ever blessed his child on earth I give you the blessing of our Lord and me; which of His infinite mercy increase you in all virtue and good living. And that your blood may by His grace from kindred to kindred multiply on this earth to His service, in such wise as after the departing from this wretched world here, you and they may glorify Him eternally among His angels in heaven.
Letter from the Duke of Suffolk to his son, John de la Pole, 1450
PART II: 1450–55
16
The Wedding
When Margaret closed her eyes she could still see the colours of the stained-glass windows, scarlet, indigo and gold. It was another world, behind her eyelids, with its own patterns of light and shade, its own depths and shallows. It was where, she believed, God was hiding. God, whose presence was immanent in the world, which meant that you couldn’t see Him. But if you waited without ever giving up hope, and paid attention to the spaces between words or the pause between one breath and the next, God, like a shy deer, might emerge from the hidden, shadowy places.
God was also in Heaven, of course, which was part of the mystery. The chapel ceiling had been painted a deep blue to represent the cerulean of Paradise. This she could not see through her eyelids, but if she pressed the balls of her eyes surreptitiously, contrary to the warnings of her nurse, she could see swirling lines, blocks of colour and dots which spiralled away from each other and reformed differently. If she kept up the pressure long enough, it seemed to her that these patterns might resolve into a different world; one that was ordinarily too dazzling for human eyes.
This was what she thought about while the priest intoned the mass in Latin, and further along the pew her guardian’s son, John, fidgeted and twisted in his seat and kicked the bench in front. They had been separated because h
e kept trying to pull her hair from its cap, then tie it to the pew behind. Even now he was trying to attract her attention – she could see him from the corner of her eye. Which was another reason for keeping her eyes closed.
She had been told that she must play with him like a good little girl; he was her brother now.
Which was a little confusing because her mother had married again and had a little boy who was also her brother, and also named John.
At first there had been other children to play with in this household, and then just Margaret and John. The other children were never mentioned again; she did not know if they had died, or been sent away. But she understood that she was in some way special. ‘This is your second home,’ she had been told. And her nurse had said she was lucky – ‘a lucky little chick’ – to have such a grand home in addition to her own.
She knew she was lucky, though she sometimes wished she could play with someone else. When she glanced secretly at her foster-brother he was pulling faces at her, as if he knew, all the time, that she would look. She leaned forward in her seat and pressed her fingertips still more firmly into her eyelids, waiting for the revelation of God.
When it didn’t happen, and the service ended, they were taken to John’s rooms to play, because they played together so well.
They played together well, she had discovered, as long as she let him win. If not, she had been astonished to find that he cried louder and harder than she, and his nurse would come running to comfort him, while her nurse chided her gently: it was only natural that a boy would want to win.
‘But he always wants to win,’ she had objected on more than one occasion, and her nurse would say ‘Well!’ As if it were of so little consequence that she shouldn’t make a fuss. And then she would make one of the comments that even from a young age had outraged Margaret’s logic, such as ‘Losing is the way little ladies win’, or ‘The ball that would rise, must fall.’
‘Not if you catch it,’ Margaret would say, but her nurse would never engage in arguments of this kind. She would only press her lips together over her toothless gums and tell her that she had lost one tooth every time her little ward argued; every time she was good she stood a chance of growing one back. ‘But look,’ she said, opening her lips and exposing her shrunken gums; Little Peg had obviously not been very good yet. If she went back to play, like a good little lady, she could come back later to see whether her old Betsy had grown a tooth back.
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