Some Touch of Pity

by Rhoda Edwards

  Incidents like that broke the tedium of the journey. We went from Poole to Dorchester, to Bridport and to Exeter, where we stayed put for five days and there were half a dozen more beheadings. Then on to Bridgewater, on the northern coast, a long, hard slog through deepest Devon and Somerset. This was a depressed and depressing little town, which had once had a flourishing cloth trade, but now seemed full of out-of-work weavers, tumbledown houses and a silting-up harbour. The bridge over the muddy river seemed to be tottering on its arches for lack of repair. From there we crossed the Somerset fenlands by causeway, near to Glastonbury, heading for Salisbury again. That ride was frightening, like crossing the sea by a plank bridge. The land was still flooded after the great storms of a month ago, and, the locals said, would stay that way until the end of winter. It’s a watery, desolate place at best, but when I saw it, one could hardly imagine human beings had existed there. Bridgewater to Salisbury took only two days. The grooms were having great trouble now with saddle sores and lameness, and the horses looked rough and thin; some of the busiest men among us were the farriers. By the time we moved from Salisbury to Winchester and Farnham, and home to London, men and beasts were all jaded and ill-tempered.

  The Mayor and five hundred citizens met us at Kennington and escorted us towards London. As I rode up the filthy highway of the Borough of Southwark, I felt almost an affection for its familiar squalor. Crowds lined the street in front of the big inns, but it was a subdued welcome for the King returning from a bloodless victory over his rebels. At the south end of London Bridge, those rebels’ heads had been set up on poles, the kites soaring over them.

  At the house called the King’s Wardrobe, near St Paul’s, the Queen met her husband. She had come south a week ago, as London was safe again. When our party rode in through the gates, she darted across the courtyard like a swallow, leaving her ladies behind. When the King had dismounted, she went straight into his arms. At first they did not kiss, only held each other very tightly. Now we were back in London, our journey done, the King’s face was the colour of candle wax, and if I knew anything about it, he was tired enough to drop where he stood. I wasn’t sure if I could stand myself without my knees wobbling. At a rough estimate, we had ridden close on five hundred miles in five weeks. I watched the Queen’s face, pressed briefly against his shoulder, a little, fine-boned face, the eyes big and bright as mirrors. After their first embrace, they kissed and parted, as if a little shy of all the spectators, and walked into the house. I thought: he’s a luckier man than I supposed. I wouldn’t get a welcome like that.

  Back at Westminster, I began to catch up with five months’ news. The first piece of gossip concerned the Solicitor General. This lawyer, Thomas Lynom, was King Richard’s man, having worked for him in the north when he was Duke. Lynom, the fool, had fallen arse over head in love with Shore’s wife, who was imprisoned in Ludgate for her part in the treason against the King in June. He had even gone so far as to apply for a marriage licence! The King, when he heard of this, had not been pleased, for a woman who was so blatantly his enemy, and a notorious whore, was hardly a suitable wife for a dignified officer of the law. He had written to the Lord Chancellor, asking him to try to persuade Lynom out of this folly. But, and this caused us some amazement, he had not expressly forbidden it. When it appeared that Lynom was determined to marry Elizabeth Shore, the King allowed it, letting the woman come out of prison into the care of her father. Now we were all back in London, Lynom took the wife he desired, apparently without any loss of favour with the King.

  Soon after this, while I was still bewildered by the King’s leniency to his Solicitor General, he did me a kindness. He sent a direction to Dr Gunthorpe, requesting him to dismiss Bele! He had remembered what I had told him, that day we had gone to see the Giant’s Dance, and removed those who had obtained posts in the Privy Seal Office by bribery. I was to have Bele’s place! Pleased as I was to get my promotion at last, I was surprised that the King felt it necessary to cleanse the crown offices of corruption. If he continued in this way, he’d make enemies, for sure; most men prefer those who turn a blind eye.

  The King did not intend to give us clerks much respite that winter. We managed to stay put at Westminster for the whole of December. After the Christmas season, we would be busy, for Parliament was to meet on the twenty-third of January, until the twentieth of February. This we’d expected, for the session had been postponed from November last, because of Buckingham’s rebellion. What we had not expected was that the King would go on a progress into Kent in the two weeks between Epiphany and the meeting of Parliament. As if we had not had enough journeying about. Kent in January was a dismal prospect — the miriest ways in the kingdom. Kendal announced this, and asked me if I would go — it was not necessary for us all to go — and that we would be travelling fast and light, to Maidstone, Canterbury and Sandwich. ‘The King wishes to take oaths of allegiance,’ he said, ‘from those who have dabbled in treason. He intends to issue a proclamation, urging all men who have grievances at law, to prepare petitions, which he will hear and determine. The King’s justice must be brought to Kent.’

  So, I thought, the King will go into Kent, the worst centre of the rebellion against him, to bring the Kentish men his justice. To my way of thinking, his care for the common weal will bring him trouble from some of his lords. Their idea of the King’s justice is more likely the axe and the gallows, not the recourse of poor men to the law. Is this King, the law giver, also King Herod, who, men say, has put his brother’s sons to eternal silence?

  January–May 1484

  7

  The Innocents

  Told by Lady Elizabeth, eldest daughter of King Edward IV

  Why soo unkende, alas?

  Why soo unkende to me?

  Soo to be kende to me.

  Syne the tyme I knew yow fyrst

  You were my joye and my trust.

  Erly and late I am ryght fayne

  Youre love and favour to attayne.

  Ys ther no grace ne remedy,

  But ever to morne eternally?

  15th–16th century

  On the feast of the Holy Innocents, the day when King Herod slew all the boy babies in Israel, my mother refused to get up. She lay in bed and wept all morning, until her face was red and puffy. It was an unlucky day — a Sunday — so we’d have to beware of Sundays for all next year. The year my father had been crowned was the same, but he believed too much in his own luck to worry, and went to the Abbey on Sunday, defying the omens. In spite of all the weeping and wailing and mourning for my poor little brothers, Ned and Richard, I don’t think my mother had given up the hope that they are still alive. I can’t bear to imagine them dead and I can’t believe that my uncle Richard would murder anybody, let alone two children, his own kin. My mother refused to have him called King in this house. She called him names I’d blush to repeat, but mostly the Hog. In the same way, she was always known as the Queen, though elsewhere in the world she was known as Lady Grey, as if she were never married to my father. What could it matter how titles were used, in a cramped house in Westminster Sanctuary?

  The day after she took to her bed, my mother got up, and looked at her face in a mirror. She made Cecily dab it with a lotion called lac virginis, which is made of lead and something else, ground up and put in rose-water. It’s supposed to make ladies’ skin white. My mother’s skin is as white as her water flower device, the wrinkles in it no more than the veining in a petal. Her eyelashes are the only fault — too light — she dyes them from time to time. I had to braid her hair and pin it up. It made a thick, silvery rope, below her waist; there are white streaks in it now, but they don’t show much in hair so pale. I coiled it up, and stuck in the long ivory pins. She has a set of these, each with a tiny diamond rose in the head. I put on her black velvet hood of the latest fashion, which looked as almost everything does, elegant on her — more flattering, I thought, than the high butterfly head-dresses.

  I felt like a servant. My moth
er thought she should keep us occupied with trivial tasks, to stop us fretting. It had the opposite effect on me; I’d rather read a book for the fiftieth time, or merely stare out of the window, than fiddle endlessly with needles, face lotions and wailing children. A strand of my own hair had fallen against my mother’s. It looked a dark, bright colour beside hers, crudely yellow as oat straw, with a tinge of red in it where the firelight catches. I’m not much like my mother. Cecily is the only one of us to resemble her closely, and pretty though my sister is, she can’t compare with the crystal clear beauty of our mother when she was younger. She’s not young now, though her figure is good still, if a little thick in the waist, but after bearing twelve children, the miracle is that she isn’t shaped like a meal sack. I’m taller than my mother, or Cecily; in fact I seem to be the tallest girl anywhere. Standing back to back with my half-brother Dorset, who is six feet, I was only a hand’s breadth shorter. He used to say I was too big, and not going to be beautiful, but later on, he stopped saying that. Everyone says I’m like my father, which always pleases me.

  My mother was sitting in front of the meagre fire, her skirt folded back over her knees, to show her petticoats, and her white stockinged feet in velvet slippers, fashionable, round-toed slippers — she manages to get some new things brought in from the outside world. Only since we’d been in this ordinary house, like a shopkeeper’s, had she taken to this habit of warming her legs. It reminded me of my old nurse, whose legs had been all lumpy with veins. I wondered if my mother had behaved like that — like an ordinary woman — when she was young, and lived in country manors. At court no one had ever seen the Queen’s ankles, not even her daughters.

  ‘Bess,’ she said, running a finger along the hem of her gown, ‘this velvet needs turning. The pile’s moulting. You and Cecily can sew it together. I’ll speak French for an hour with Anne, and you must hear Bridget say her alphabet.’ My heart sank. Another day spent busily at nothing.

  ‘Is that man of the Hog’s outside today?’ She asked this question every day, without fail. As usual, I went to the window and looked out. The twenty-ninth day of December, as dreary and dark as could be. The guard was there. He was wearing the royal livery of murrey and blue, my father’s livery, ours. We’d been in Sanctuary for eight months. The summer had been worst. In winter, the rooms in the house were dark, poky and cold; in the summer they were nearly as dark, and stifling hot. There was a tiny garden, but we never used it, because the windows of other houses overlooked it. The palace of Westminster was cleaned in August, when the court had gone on a progress. We had to shut all the windows, because the stink of this operation was so appalling. Now, facing the darkest winter days, we were running short of good, clean wax candles, and were having to use smelly tallow dips.

  As I left my mother’s room, I almost fell over my smallest sister, and stubbed my toe on one of the annoying little steps in the wooden floor that these houses seem full of. Bridget, who is just three, was sitting on the floor outside the door, pulling apart a wooden doll, whose arms and legs were fixed on by leather thongs. When I ran into her, she howled instantly. I picked her up, but she went on crying. Her podgy little face was scarlet; her flax-white hair stuck out in unkempt spikes all round it. She didn’t smell very sweet, and her skirts were damp. She’s growing too lazy to ask for the pot, I thought, or her nurse is too bored to care. I heard Katherine set up a yelling somewhere else in the house. Very nearly five now, she was resentful of having to do her lessons, for she had no one of her own age to learn with. Anne, at eight, was in the same predicament. In that hateful hen-coop, it always seemed to be me who had to comfort the little ones. No wonder my mother had made only brief visits to her nursery, sweeping in and out, never letting us forget she was the Queen. We used to kneel to her, all in a row, like a set of mourners, in assorted sizes, each of us with long fair hair down our backs; butter wouldn’t melt in our mouths. My mother now coped with the indignity and inconvenience of living so close to her children, by shutting her ears to the howls, and leaving the harassed nurses and few elderly servants — and me — to deal with the troubles.

  We’d had a miserable Christmas. We tried to be brave, and decked the house with holly and ivy, bays and rosemary, but it all fell flat and sour. Cecily said, what was the use of having mistletoe, when there was no man in the house between fourteen and sixty, and nobody wanted to kiss the chaplain or the page? On Twelfth Day we drank each other’s healths in ‘lamb’s wool’, a lovely drink made of ale, with spices and sugar, and all fluffy from the roasted, bursting apples floating in it. The Abbey bells rang loudly that day; the King would make the Epiphany offering of gold, frankincense and myrrh at the High Altar, in memory of the three Kings of Cologne. He’d go in procession to the Abbey, wearing his crown, and in the evening there’d be feasting in the White Hall. Even in our house, the sounds of merry-making around Westminster could be heard.

  When it grew dark, which was by mid-afternoon, my mother got out her cards. She always made a great fuss about these, and wouldn’t let any of us use them. She kept them wrapped in silk, in a painted wooden box that smelt of incense. The cards themselves were battered and grubby because they were so old, and had belonged to my grandmother Bedford. The pictures’ names were written under them in French — strange pictures, fool and Pope, justice, the world, the Devil, the hanged man. It was a long time since my mother had been obliged to make her own amusements, and she seemed less remote because of it. Her chaplain was too good humoured to forbid the game. Some priests think casting fortunes is as bad as conjuring up the Devil. For my mother, it was half game, half believable magic. My fortune read too favourably to imagine it ever happening; the cards predicted that I should be a Queen! A year ago I might have believed it, but not now. I knew that my mother had been cheating, and arranged some of the cards as she had wanted them. So like her, to half believe, and then turn the belief into a lie by her own hand.

  I would never be a Queen now, nor my little brother Edward a King. I was just as much King Richard’s prisoner as he, but I was alive. No one seemed able to tell us for certain whether my brothers were alive or dead. Early last September, Bishop Morton of Ely’s agents had got into the Tower, to begin a scheme to free them. To everyone’s dismay, the boys could not be found there. This was a disaster, because there couldn’t be a plot to free them without them being present for freeing. My mother was convinced immediately that they were dead, and that my uncle Richard had murdered them. She was so frantic, we were all afraid that she would go mad. I kept saying that they must have been moved from the Tower, but she would not listen.

  Then a visitor came to us in Sanctuary. He was a little black-beetle of a man called Dr Lewis Caerleon, a Welshman who had sometimes acted as my mother’s physician. He was also employed by Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond, Lord Stanley’s wife. We knew her well, a tiny woman with bright brown eyes, a rather ferrety nose, pursed-up mouth, and black eyebrows so highly arched they gave her a look of perpetual pained surprise. She is a very learned lady, and has a way of always appearing independent of men. Dr Lewis brought a message from her to my mother — an offer.

  Since King Edward V and his brother the Duke of York were missing from the Tower and presumed dead — he had to wait for my mother’s fit of weeping to spend itself — what better plan than that Lady Margaret’s son, Henry Tudor, should come back from exile to avenge them by killing the usurper Richard and making himself King of England? The Bishop of Ely had persuaded the great Duke of Buckingham to help us. Lady Margaret’s man Sir Reginald Bray had gone to Buckingham’s castle of Brecon and found the plot going well. The fact of my brothers’ disappearance — murder, certainly — could be put to good use, to turn the people from King Richard, and show Henry Tudor as their saviour from the usurper and shedder of infants’ blood. The condition Lady Margaret had to offer my mother came last. It appalled me. Tudor would marry me, and restore my father’s blood to the throne in our heirs! I gasped; I could not help it.
My mother said something very sharp to me. She was willing to grab at any offer. ‘But we don’t know they’re dead,’ I blurted out. My mother almost slapped my face. Me — to marry the Lancastrian pretender, whom my father had sworn to give a traitor’s death if he got the chance. In our topsy-turvy world, my father wouldn’t have known us for his wife and daughters. For that matter, he wouldn’t have known my uncle Richard for his brother.

  But the plot failed, and the October gales blew Henry Tudor back to Brittany. I’m still offered to him, if he cares to try again. On Christmas Day, he had proclaimed himself King Henry VII, at Rennes Cathedral in Brittany, and sworn that if he should win his crown, he would make me his wife. Of course, this was why my mother had foretold I should be a Queen. They showed me a picture of Tudor, belatedly, after the plot. He’s got a thinnish face, the eyebrows as arched as his mother’s, and eyes with drooping lids, like some birds have. His hair looked sandy in colour. He’s twenty-seven. But I’m sure he’ll never get near England again, to claim me. I sometimes pray to Our Lady that he may not, and that my uncle the King will rid us of him once and for ever. Dr Lewis Caerleon will carry no more messages from Brittany; he was caught and imprisoned in the Tower.

  *

  Parliament met at the end of January. News of it came trickling in to us. Lady Margaret had been attainted for her part in the rebellion, her title of Countess of Richmond taken away, and a lot of her lands. Everyone was surprised that she didn’t get imprisoned in the Tower, but she was sent off to the country, where her husband Lord Stanley was told to keep her in order. I think it’s she who tells Lord Stanley what to do. So does my mother, for she sneered, and said my uncle was a bigger fool than she thought. He’s not that much of a fool though, because he attainted a hundred and four of the other rebels.