Some Touch of Pity

by Rhoda Edwards

  On the ninth day of April, our sovereign lord King Edward IV died.

  Before the day was out a horseman galloped from Westminster Palace, taking the road west. I had no doubt that he carried a frantic letter to Ludlow. I wondered if Lord Rivers had returned there yet from his Norfolk estates. No one reported a similar man riding north, though the Duke of Gloucester was known to be at one of his Yorkshire castles. I noticed many confused comings and goings in the next few days. Westminster was suddenly swarming with men in Dorset’s livery of murrey and white, and an equal number bearing Lord Hastings’s badge of a black bull’s head. Men were going about wearing brigandines — even when covered with fine cloth, a metal sewn jacket is bulkier than ordinary — or carrying swords.

  Exhausted though I was by my constant attendance upon the King, there remained a number of tasks for me to do, none of them pleasant. King or not, the anointed flesh of a royal corpse is still a human carcase, and is dealt with as other men’s. After death King Edward was laid out upon a board in a room in the palace, naked except for a cloth covering him from the navel to the knees. All the lords spiritual and temporal filed past him as he lay; the Mayor of London, the Aldermen and Citizens came. Many wept to see him dead, especially the women; they waited hours to get a glimpse of him. He was buried ten days later in his chapel of St George at Windsor.

  A day or two before the feast of St George, a council of lords met. Not being present at such events, I could only draw my conclusions from the gossip that came out afterwards. A clerk of my acquaintance, who had been on duty in the Star Chamber, told me that the Marquess had asked for a fleet to put to sea under the command of his uncle, Sir Edward Woodville, against the French pirates. Lord Hastings had been furious, for he was Captain of Calais, and he feared that this Woodville fleet would attack him if he put to sea himself, and cut him off from his garrison. The lord Marquess wanted a date agreed upon for the young King’s coronation — May the fourth, he suggested. This threw the meeting into uproar. Lord Howard asked grimly why this should be decided before the Lord Protector arrived in London — surely it was a decision that should not be made in his absence? To this, the Marquess replied coolly that Protector or not, Gloucester was only one voice among many; the many were present, and the one not. Then Lord Hastings had dropped his hot brick into the proceedings, by announcing that he had been in communication with the Protector ever since the King’s death, and that plans were already made for the Duke to ride south to take up his office, and that he hoped to meet my Lord Rivers on the way. At this, the Marquess got very red in the face, and said that Lord Rivers, as his letters patent allowed, was already raising men in the Marches of Wales; he would be sure to come to London with a strong force. If Rivers came with an army, Lord Hastings then shouted, he would leave at once for Calais, washing his hands of English affairs, and only a siege would dig him out. This threat had such a sobering effect, dismaying the lords who looked to him for leadership, that Dorset had to agree to Rivers’s escort being limited to two thousand.

  Lord Hastings, whose nerve I had to admire, then played his trump card. He had Hastings pursuivant declaim at Paul’s Cross a letter that had been sent to the council of lords by the Duke of Gloucester. The tenor of this was heartening. He had been loyal to his brother, King Edward, Gloucester said, at home and abroad, in peace and in war. He would be equally loyal to his brother’s heir, and all his issue. He wished that the new government of the kingdom should be established according to law and justice. By his brother’s testament, he had been made Protector. If the council were debating the disposition of authority, he asked them to consider the position rightfully due to him according to the law of the land and his brother’s ordinance. Nothing which was contrary to law and King Edward’s will, could be decreed without harm. The people were impressed. The Duke, though mostly known in the south by reputation alone, was popular, his name a byword for justice and straight dealing. Men began to speak openly against the Queen, and to suspect that she meant to keep the Protector from his rightful place. The atmosphere at Westminster had become as dangerous as a strike-a-light near a powder barrel. A few frivolous-minded souls made bets on whether Gloucester or Lord Rivers would reach London first.

  I’m not one to waste good money on making wagers, but Gloucester would be the man for me in a tight situation, not Rivers. King Edward used to say that his brother throve upon danger and difficulty. His task of defending England against the Scots certainly provided both. I had served under him on his last campaign at Berwick and Edinburgh, sent with a team of nine surgeons to minister to the English army. There had been no pitched battle. We had made the usual sort of war upon the Scots, clearing towns and villages of inhabitants, then letting in the soldiers, burning the places flat to the ground, and rounding up the livestock to feed our own army. It’s quick work, and brutal; the homeless often die of hunger, or exposure to the foul Scottish weather.

  Gloucester gave the towns fair warning, for the people to get clear away. He refused to allow looting, murder or rape. He gave his men the orders in a characteristic way, by riding out in front of them and telling them straight, that anyone caught disobeying him would be punished. Now, he had an army of twenty odd thousand, which is a big army by any standards, and discipline of this sort is hard to enforce among so many. But after the first offender had been strung up in full view of all the rest, with his spoils hung round his neck, and left there to rot, or one who’d molested a Scots woman equally publicly flogged, these orders were obeyed. Yet no one was afraid to bring their injustices and injuries to the Duke. He went so openly among his men that they only needed to walk up to him to gain a hearing. He would talk with them in their own northern speech, of which I could understand very little, but I saw that, in his way, he had as much of the common touch as his brother King Edward. The Queen’s family would have been wiser not to make an enemy of the Duke of Gloucester.

  On the evening of May Day, I was returning to my lodgings at Westminster, when I came upon the lords Hastings and Howard, standing by an upper window that looked out over the Sanctuary, apparently fascinated by what they saw, and letting out great guffaws of laughter. As the past weeks hadn’t afforded much mirth, I was curious, and pleased when they turned round and greeted me in a friendly fashion.

  ‘Take a look out of here, Dr Hobbes,’ Hastings said, grinning, and making room for me at the window. I looked out. It was almost dark and the yard below was ablaze with cressets and torches; I had a feeling Hell would look like that when you looked down into it. In the spring dusk, above it all, a blackbird was singing from a roof pinnacle, when he could make himself heard over the din of human voices. I looked again into that Hades lake of light, and saw that it was in fact men moving furniture, rolled-up arras, big coffers and bulky bundles, through a hole in the Sanctuary wall. Judging by the tumble of bricks and mortar they kept stumbling over, they’d had to take pickaxes to the wall in order to get the goods through. A huge painted cupboard was stuck halfway, like a ship aground.

  ‘What goes on?’ I said, stupefied.

  ‘Her Grace the Queen,’ Lord Howard said, ‘is moving her household, her younger son and five daughters into the Sanctuary. No one may touch her there; the Church protects her from the Law.’

  I gawped at him. ‘Holy Jesu, why does she need protection?’

  Hastings, triumphant, burst in with the news. ‘Gloucester has the King. Rivers is arrested. The Queen is in flight!’

  May–June 1483

  3

  Lord Protector

  Told by Francis, Viscount Lovell, the Duke of Gloucester’s friend

  The power and auctoritie of my lord Protector is so behoffulle and of reason to be assented and establisshed by the auctoritie of thys hyghe courte, that amonges alle the causes of the assemblynge of the parliamente yn thys tyme of the yere, thys is the grettest and the most necessarye furst to be affermed. God graunte that thys mater and syche othir as of necessite owithe to be furst moved for the wele of th
e Kynge and the defense of thys londe, maye have such goode and breff expedition yn thys hyghe courte of parliamente as the ease of the peuple and the condicion of the tyme requireth.

  Speech drafted by the Bishop of Lincoln for the intended Parliament of Edward V on 23 June 1483, proposing a continuation of the Protectorate

  ‘Protector’s an ill-omened title,’ Richard had said. ‘It brought my father to ruin, and Duke Humphrey of Gloucester before him.’

  I could appreciate his gloom. As we rode into Northampton an air of unease infected our party. The day before, scouts sent out to spy upon the road between Warwick and Daventry had reported that Lord Rivers brought the young King from Ludlow with an escort of two thousand, and that they carried arms: cartloads of armour, sheaves of arrows, bundles of crossbows and spears had been noticed. They should reach Northampton on the last day of April. I looked round at my companions. We numbered a little above five hundred. Richard had brought no more than a usual riding household of knights, squires, servants and priests, which, together with the attendants of the other northern lords who rode with us, made up the number. If Rivers planned an attack, we were more than likely to end up dead, captive, or running for our lives. I had been in favour of our setting out better prepared, but Richard had shut his lips tight in that stubborn way he has, and said, ‘No. It usually takes two bellicose parties to make a fight. Rivers has more sense than his sister the Queen. I do not wish to be accused of storming down from the north with an army to seize the King, even though I am lawful Protector. Better to let Rivers show his hand first. The Woodvilles are not popular. I’ve a feeling they’ll be their own undoing.’

  Upon the journey south, he had been uncommunicative. I had often travelled in his company, and he is a man easy to talk to, especially among his friends. I had known him as a boy, when I had gone at the age of eight, just before my father’s death, to be educated in the Earl of Warwick’s household at Middleham. Richard, who is a little more than three years older than I, had been sent away soon after to Westminster, because of his brother’s quarrel with Warwick. Our friendship was formed later, after he had returned to the north, and I, at seventeen, had escaped the tutelage of the Duke of Suffolk whose ward I was, and looked for the favour of a lord of high rank who was to my liking. Richard, at twenty-one, appealed to me, because he stood in such favour with the King, and because of his youth, fame in war and reputation for honesty. I wanted his good lordship, but soon found we fell easily into friendship.

  Now, he was wrapped round in his own thoughts. He had the stark, stricken look of the recently bereaved. The news of King Edward’s death had arrived at Middleham just after I had departed from a visit that began with the meeting of Richard’s ducal council at Lady Day and lasted over the feast of Easter. I heard when staying at my brother-in-law Lord Fitzhugh’s castle of Ravensworth, so did not see Richard in the first shock of it. King Edward had been the lodestar of his life. He hadn’t much time for an outward display of mourning, but I thought the loss would afflict him for a long time to come. Richard has never been one to take life lightly, and he has had more than his just share of trouble and sorrow. Now we were in for troubled times again.

  So, riding down the main street of Northampton, we looked over our shoulders and fingered our daggers, as if Queen’s men lurked behind every ale-bush. We had only just dismounted at the inn where we were to lodge for the night, when Lord Rivers himself rode up. He was not accompanied by the young King.

  Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers, had arrayed himself in ostentatious mourning. His long gown of cut Genoa velvet was patterned with water-flowers, his sister the Queen’s device, and sumptuously lined with fox skins dyed black. Round his shoulders gleamed a gold collar of linked suns and roses, with a pendant white lion of March: the collar all King Edward’s followers had worn, but studded with enough diamonds and pearls for the necklace of a Westminster whore. I wondered if, as rumour had it, he wore a hair shirt under the rich garments, as though by his perpetual mortification of the flesh, he might do penance for his outward display. He dismounted, servants holding aside his magnificent fur gown, in case it caught up in his very large gilt spurs — he even had diamonds in his spurs. He strode across the yard — nothing womanish here: he combined muscular activity with his extreme elegance. His fair-skinned face was illumined by a smile of great charm and friendliness; he courteously doffed his hat, and stretched out his hand in greeting. Richard made no move towards him. Rivers’s sudden arrival had produced an entire lack of expression in his face, as if one had turned the page of a book and been confronted with a blank sheet. Rivers bent his knee, lower than he need have, to Richard, and kissed his hand. ‘Your Grace of Gloucester keeps prompt time on the road. May I offer my condolences to your Grace upon the sudden death of our late sovereign lord King Edward, your brother. Believe me, I most sincerely share your sorrow. Remember, all three of us endured many vicissitudes — why, we have even shared a crust of bread, as fellow exiles!’

  ‘Yes,’ Richard said, almost inaudibly. Then, ‘My Lord Rivers, I had hoped to offer my own condolences to the King my nephew, and to promise him the faithful service I always gave his father. It seems that I must wait to do so.’

  ‘My nephew the King will receive your Grace soon, of course. The reason for his absence is, I am afraid, a mundane one. Your Grace’s person and these northern gentlemen will no doubt occupy all the inns in Northampton. In order that the King shall not cause them inconvenience he decided it better if his own household were lodged at Stony Stratford. If your Grace will do me the favour of accompanying me there in the morning, we may greet our nephew together.’

  He was most convincingly conciliatory; one could almost believe that he meant to accord Richard his rightful place as Lord Protector. We could not know what he intended — a brawl now, the unfortunate death of Gloucester? Or soft words, to lull suspicion until some other trap was set? The fact that Stony Stratford is fourteen miles nearer to London was not lost upon us. Whoever held the King’s person held the realm. The sooner Richard made sure it was himself, the better.

  Beside the elegant figure of Lord Rivers, who is a middling to tall man, Richard was at a disadvantage. He was bareheaded, out of courtesy when speaking to Rivers, and the wind ruffled up his hair. A servant stood holding his mourning robe, and he wore the plainest black worsted, decorated only with a row of black silk buttons. This midnight garb made him look sickly pale, and very tired; he could have been about the same age as Rivers, who is fully a dozen years older. There’s no denying, the Queen’s family are beautiful people — a pity their minds do not match their bodies. Though Anthony Woodville does not have the startling silver fairness of his sister the Queen, he is smoothly blond, with an extraordinarily unlined skin, fitting firmly over his regular features. I suspect that he puts creams and pastes on it, like a woman. Not that he is a self-indulgent man: he avoids excess. At past forty, he still prides himself on the fitness of his body, and on his prowess in the tourney, at tennis, wrestling and all the manly sports; one cannot deny that he is expert in all of them. Strange that with his repute in handling weapons in the mock, but dangerous, battles of the lists, he has never won any distinction in real battles.

  The next thing I knew was that Rivers had invited himself to supper — at least I think he had, Richard didn’t seem to be saying anything, either yea or nay. It was a good supper. These big inns that serve travellers on the north road are used to receiving guests of the highest rank. We ate in a room the size of a hall in a castle, warmed by giant fires in two hearths. The tables were spread with white damask, the candles set in silver holders, and the best serving dishes were silver gilt. We washed our hands in basins filled with hot water in which camomile flowers had been steeped, and dried them on the finest linen towels.

  After Grace was said, we scarcely had time to sample the first dish, of brawn with mustard, when a tremendous clatter of hooves was heard in the yard, and a voice at the door announced: ‘His Grace the Duke of
Buckingham!’ Buckingham walked straight in, still in his boots and cloak, ignored Rivers, marched up to Richard, and knelt to him as if he were the King himself. Richard got up, took his cousin’s hands, raised him up and kissed his cheek. ‘Harry,’ he said, smiling for the first time that evening, ‘you’re more than welcome. You’ll dine with Lord Rivers and myself?’

  ‘Very willingly — I’m late; the roads from the Severn eastwards have not yet recovered from the winter. I hope you’ll excuse the intrusion, cousin, in the middle of supper.’

  It was an intrusion we all welcomed. Buckingham and his two hundred Welsh Marcher followers had been expected. He had sent word to the Lord Protector soon after he’d heard of King Edward’s death, offering his entire support, and suggesting that it would be wise to join forces here.

  When the flutter caused by his arrival had died down, and he was seated on Richard’s right hand, and Rivers on the left, I watched the three men talk. Harry Buckingham was about my own age, of middle height, with bright chestnut hair and odd-shaped black eyebrows that didn’t seem to match it. His nose was largish and longish, his mouth wide, with a quirky smile. It was a face remarkable chiefly for its mobility: those eyebrows moved up and down often, the mouth smiled or grimaced emphasizing his words. Soon the warmth, wine and food put a high colour in his cheeks. I noticed that as Buckingham talked to him, gesticulating and shrugging now and then, Richard smiled often; once even he laughed. I was surprised, then pleased that his cousin had such a cheering effect on him. I’d not had much success in cheering him in the last weeks. I caught parts of their conversation. Richard enquired after the enterprises of Master Caxton the printer, whose workshop at the sign of the Red Pale near Westminster Abbey we had visited once again while attending the last Parliament. It is his generous patronage of such arts, and his scholar’s love of learning and literature, that set Rivers apart from the rest of his family. Later, I think he began telling a tale of his pilgrimage to the shrine of St James of Compostella in Spain. I remembered how he had announced his intention to go on this pilgrimage not long after the battle of Tewkesbury, and King Edward had been annoyed, saying that Rivers had a habit of absenting himself when there was most work to do — in fact calling him work-shy and a coward.