Within the Hollow Crown: A Valiant King's Struggle to Save His Country, His Dynasty, and His Love

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  Even now he could scarcely believe that they had behaved so cravenly, and was prey to a tantalizing conviction that if only they might go again they would do better. What had happened to all the inherent dominance of the ruling classes—to all their warlike training and lessons in high chivalry? What must these serfs and labourers, whom they had ordered about all their lives, have thought of them? And—above all—how could they themselves go on respecting each other? Once back in the Tower they had avoided each other's eyes. But the fact remained that not even the bravest of them, tried on many a battlefield, had had any idea that a mob, once free from their crushing heel and aware of its own power, could look—and sound—so alarming.

  Richard's waking senses became aware of sounds unusual to the hour. Surely the same sounds as at Rotherhithe—that murmuring of innumerable voices and shuffling of innumerable ill-shod feet? But that was impossible, with the width of the Thames between. It must be some horrid trick of memory born of a sleepless night. He knew that he would be late for Mass, yet burrowed a rumpled bronze head deeper into the softness of the pillows. But it was all of no avail. The mob really was howling beneath his windows. He sat up starkly and called for Standish to pull back the tapestry curtains.

  "What is it, Ralph?" he asked, and knew the answer before his squire spoke.

  Standish was white beneath his healthy summer tan, but he began laying out his master's shirt and hose with steady, accustomed hands. "The rebels have been pouring into the City all night," he said.

  Richard's blue eyes were points of demanding intelligence in the disordered wideness of the bed. "You mean they rushed the Bridge?"

  "It is thought to have been treachery, sir." Standish guessed that the King had slept but little and tried to curb his own rising panic. "One of those accursed aldermen went across to talk with them and told them the bridge was held by friends. And all the unruly prentices and some malcontents already planted in the City made sure that it was so. They either persuaded or overcame Sybyle's guards."

  "But I sent a messenger to say that the charters I promised at Rotherhithe would be ready for them this morning—so that they can go away. As you know, I took a clerk with me in the barge specially to write down their main grievances, and after supper we all composed a sort of free pardon embodying most of the things they asked. Some fool started writing it out in Latin, but I turned it into plain English for them myself and told those idle clerks of Sudbury's to sit up all night making copies of it."

  The King slid his legs over the side of the bed and hastily pulled on his hose. "It appears, sir," said Standish, stooping to smooth out the slightest suggestion of a wrinkle from ankle to thigh, "that this treacherous Alderman Horn borrowed a City banner from the Town Clerk to give him the semblance of authority and forestalled your messenger."

  "God damn his insolence! I'll see that Walworth has him hanged for it!" Richard sprang up and ran shoeless to the window. All he could see was his privy garden spread out like a neatly patterned coloured kerchief. The dew on the grass was not yet dry and cobwebs glistened like glass lace across the rose bushes. But with such tumult going on outside the walls it seemed incongruous that roses should bloom at all.

  "Some of us have been to the top of the Keep. You can see everything from there," Standish was saying excitedly. "As soon as the drawbridge was down on the Southwark side the devils began coming across in little companies and you could see their friends on this side giving them food. But now hundreds of them are ransacking the Vintry and private houses in Thames Street. And whole gangs of them were rushing shouting along the Strand."

  "But that howling noise is coming from the opposite direction."

  "St. Catherine's hill. If you come to this side of the window, sir, you can see a bit of it behind the wharf. Tyler's got his main forces assembled there. And they're yelling for blood!"

  Richard leaned out and listened, trying to recognize the words they were shouting. It was the most terrifying sound he had ever heard. The pleasant open space, so often thronged with Londoners taking their evening stroll, was now packed with an angry, surging mass of labourers shaking fists and home-made weapons at the fortress wall which baulked them of their prey; for now it was not charters they were asking for, but lives. When Richard drew his head back into the room he, too, was white. "They sound like wild beasts!" he said.

  Standish returned his horrified gaze. For the moment they were no longer King and squire, but a very young man and a boy facing up to a common danger. "It's the poor Archbishop they want. And Prior Hales, of course. And Legge."

  "I know. They sent a deputation about them almost as soon as I got here, and my uncle would have turned them out to their fate." Richard began pacing restlessly back and forth. "I don't mind what happens to that rat Legge. By all accounts he started most of the trouble. It wasn't only the accursed tax. It was the way it was collected. You saw what happened in that forge." Fetching up before the empty hearth, he sighed and stretched, graceful as a girl in his silken underwear. "Lord, how long ago that seems!"

  "It's a mercy the Duke's in Scotland," said Standish, clapping for the pages and making an effort to resume his normal duties.

  Richard knew, of course, that when anyone said just "the Duke" like that, that they were referring to his eldest uncle. Back at the window, again, with all his attention centred on a fresh cloud of smoke, he caught at his squire's arm as he brought him his fashionably pointed shoes. "Look, Ralph! You said they rushed shouting down the Strand. Surely that's the Savoy palace burning now?"

  Ralph looked, and an awed silence fell upon them. "The Londoners almost burned it before—when the Duke tried to take the City government from the Mayor and Corporation. At the time of Wycliffe's trial. Do you remember?" Ralph whispered, above the scurrying of the frightened pages.

  Richard nodded. "The beloved Bishop of London intervened. But what's to prevent them from destroying Uncle John's palace now?" he asked bitterly.

  Yesterday he had watched several houses burn, but somehow it was different when it was a home belonging to a member of one's own family. A place where one had gone in and out familiarly, eaten meals, had favourite rooms, and petted dogs. Perhaps he should have been glad—all cock-a-hoop because the people hated his haughty uncle, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. One of the uncles who had kept him in leading strings. But the times were too critical for that; and Richard was not naturally revengeful. Besides, oddly enough, of all three uncles he disliked least the one whom rumour persistently represented as his rival.

  Apparently other occupants of the Tower had been astir early at their windows, for Richard was still in shirt and hose when his halfbrothers and a posse of excited hangers-on invaded his bedroom. They seemed on the verge of panic. "The fiends really have fired the Savoy!" shouted the younger Holland.

  "And Hales' Priory at Clerkenwell," added the elder. "So it's no longer a question of the rebels being starved out. It's we who are being besieged." He stopped gloomily before the open psalter on his brother's prie-dieu. "And it's Friday the thirteenth," he added, with all the pessimism of a man sickening for something.

  Pages coming from the kitchen with hot water were too scared to hold their ewers steadily. They slopped it over people's feet and were cuffed by their overwrought betters; but Richard thought they were scarcely to be blamed, considering the poor example they had been set. He coaxed and rated them into dressing him somehow and was thankful to hurry down to the courtyard and betake himself to the bare old chapel in the Keep. Glad, too, to find Archbishop Sudbury waiting to celebrate. Here, at least, where his ancestors had worshipped, there was peace. The thickness of the Conqueror's walls shut out the murderous howling of a crazy new world, and between massive pillars of Caen stone it was easy to slip back into a familiar age when feudalism was unquestioned and secure. Watching the Archbishop move serenely before the altar, it seemed absurd to think that the old man's life was in danger. All the crescendo of ugly scenes which had filled the last few days were muted
to a dream so that Richard, on rising from his knees, could almost imagine it was any ordinary day and that he was free to go hunting at Sheen or Windsor.

  But realization came sharply. He separated himself from the rest of the congregation and followed Sudbury into the sacristy. It was true he had been shriven, but he was missing de Vere and felt need of more informal confession. So he stood around watching a clerk divest the primate of his chasuble until Sudbury, sensing his desire for privacy, sent the young monk away. Even then Richard lingered over the vestments spilling their gorgeousness from a great carved chest, so that his bright hair and the richly embroidered materials made a pool of colour in the dim, pillared gloom. Suddenly aware that he was being observed, he lifted his head and spoke impulsively, rutting out all preamble. "I was afraid yesterday in the barge—horribly afraid," he said.

  The clear-cut words seemed to echo almost startlingly against the stonework of his hardier ancestors. Sudbury laid down the jewelled mitre in his hands and smiled at him. "Who am I to judge you, my son?" he asked gently. "I, who was asked to stay in hiding."

  Richard waved his diffidence aside. "But you can tell me—not as a priest but as friend—was it ignoble of me to let them row back before my conference with these insurgents was completed?"

  The Archbishop found such grave, youthful conscientiousness very touching. It seemed so unfair, too, that this boy whose burgeoning ideas about statecraft had been so consistently ignored should now, for the first time, be left by his managing relatives to conduct his own conferences. "You had a woman with you," Sudbury reminded him, seeking to restore his self-respect.

  Richard let the cope he had been examining fall back across the coffer lid. "My mother would come," he said. "For love of me, probably. Or out of fear for John, because he is of the Lancastrian household. As you know, milord, she is much more courageous than most women. But when she saw the numbers of insurgents she nearly fainted. It is the numbers that are so terrifying, of course." He paused for a moment or two as if reliving his own sensations at sight of them. "Naturally, I was anxious about her. But I wanted to get back to save my own skin as well," he added, with meticulous candour.

  Sudbury had gone down to the Tower steps to meet them on their return. "Judging by their complexions there were older men in the barge who were not exactly loath to do so either," he pointed out dryly. "Although I noticed afterwards that most of them, at one time or another, made your lady mother their excuse."

  Richard knew this to be true, and when the Princess had retired to her own room and they had been discussing the expedition at supper he had hated them for it. "If they hadn't kept urging me I might have stayed to hear more," he admitted. "I wanted to. Actually, it was extraordinarily interesting hearing about life from a viewpoint so absolutely opposed to our own."

  "A rare experience for a king," smiled Sudbury.

  Richard drew near. He had been wanting to tell someone about it. Somebody who would understand like Burley. "Their spokesmen were quite intelligent and I feel we might have come to some real agreement. But it was difficult, shouting from a swaying boat and trying to understand their rough country speech. And unfortunately I missed a lot because people in the barge kept talking across me. Saying they could see dangerous-looking trained bands on the bank—crack shots as likely as not who had been at Poitiers—and what was the good of coming by water, anyway, if the men ashore had bows and arrows? Even my bargemaster whispered to me that he thought we ought to be going. Then one of my mother's ladies, who is very young but would come with us, screamed out that there was a man hidden behind one of those drooping willows taking aim at me." Richard stammered a little at remembrance of her embarrassing concern for him. "Though I think it was really Henry he was aiming at," he explained confusedly, "because some peasants were shouting 'Down with Lancaster!' and when I moved in front of him the man lowered his bow."

  Sudbury studied the fair, sensitive face which showed no trace of the Black Prince's hardihood. "You did that, Richard?" he said. "And you come and ask me if it was ignoble to be afraid!"

  Richard reddened uncomfortably. It sounded as if he had been bragging. "Oh, well, that was different. Things one does on the spur of the moment like that—"

  "Are usually the outcome of habit and therefore a true indication of character. But I always thought that you and he—"

  "There's no love lost between us, if that's what you mean. But we're all in this together and he's been more helpful than some of those wordy old Councillors. After all, he stands in as much danger as yourself; but he didn't get sent for by anxious relatives or—or find more pressing business elsewhere."

  If the Archbishop recognized a tinge of bitterness in the King's words and guessed at the cause, he was too wise a man to remark on it. And, as their import reminded him, he had enough urgent trouble of his own. "I am an old man now and prepared to die," he said, as they came out on to steps of the Keep and heard again that unappeased howl for blood. "But I too have been horribly afraid. Afraid of being torn limb from limb by those ravening wolves."

  Richard offered him his arm with charming courtesy. "I could have bought our immunity that way two days ago," he said. "But you are my guest, milord, and surely these walls are thick enough to reassure you."

  The people's hatred had come as a great shock to a man who had been wont to pray for them. "Then they asked for—my body?" he quavered, as they descended the steps.

  Richard nodded gravely. "Yours and Hales' and Lancaster's— which last is not in my hands, thank God!"

  Half-way across the courtyard Sudbury paused a little breathlessly, and in his preoccupation rested a hand on the King's shoulder almost as if the lad were his own son. "Richard, I have been thinking—"

  "Well?"

  "If Hales and I could get away, too, it would make it easier for you all, wouldn't it? When I was down on the watersteps yesterday one of the fathers from Crutched Friars was getting into a little boat. Taking Extreme Unction to some poor passing soul aboard one of those galleys bound for Venice, no doubt. And I wondered if I, too, could—"

  Richard was quick to take in his thought. "It is worth trying," he agreed.

  "Except that today the insurgents are all along this bank, watching," sighed Sudbury as they came through the privy garden to the royal apartments. "So that unless something should divert their attention—"

  "Don't worry, Sudbury. I will see that there is a diversion quite soon," promised Richard, unconsciously adumbrating his father's brisk decisiveness. "Before dinner, if I can get my own way, for once!"

  He looked back from the doorway so that the last the Archbishop saw of him was his bright, boyish smile, unclouded as yet by cynicism or distrust. "God keep him like that always," prayed the old man, "with his goodness shining out of him!"

  Chapter Nine

  Richard found most of his friends and relatives gathered in the Lantern Tower. From thence they could look down on a part of London. They seemed stunned by this invasion of the City and were herded together in anxious groups in one half of the bare, circular room. As if by common consent they had left the westward window to Henry Bolingbroke, who stood with his back to them staring at the dying flames which were all that was left of the Savoy.

  In spite of this fresh tragedy, Joan of Kent was seated at a little table breaking her fast. "You see how right I was about getting John away," she said as soon as Richard appeared at the top of the winding stair. He noticed that although Lizbeth de Wardeaux was spreading her a fresh slice of bread and honey the dear, inimitable woman spoke in a hushed whisper as if she were still in church—out of deference to her detested nephew, he supposed. He smiled and bent to kiss her, then went straight to Henry. Seeing that desolate gap in the fine river frontage for the first time was like having a bit of one's everyday life suddenly shore away. "I'm terribly sorry, Henry," he said. "It was one of the loveliest buildings in London!"

  Henry himself cared considerably less about its architectural beauty, but it had been hi
s home; and a reflection of the conflagration shining in his dark eyes revealed his burning rage.

  "You're sure the Duchess got away safely?" asked Joan, rather ashamed of her preoccupation with her own loved ones. She never had liked the Lancasters, but at a time like this one couldn't help being sorry for them.

  "I hear she reached our castle at Kenilworth, madam," answered Henry. "But even up there feeling runs so high against us that I doubt if the Constable would dare to let her in." His words sounded wooden and callous; but the present duchess was only his stepmother—and part of a political bargain at that. For, as everyone knew, John of Gaunt had married her solely to substantiate his pretensions to the Castilian throne. She couldn't even speak English, and the upbringing of his first wife's daughters had been left to Katherine Swinford, the family governess.

  The name of Swinford must have reminded Joan of someone in the household for whom she did care. "How awful of us to forget about Chaucer's wife!" she exclaimed; and when the Port Controller came hurrying into the room she half rose in consternation as if this beloved servant were one of themselves.