‘The King is hideously vulnerable, through his being unknown to the London crowd, and also because of his own nature. He lacks the craft in dealing with women of his brother, who learned it through long and intensive experience! King Edward was a clever man — he perfected his paths of escape. King Richard is not, so they have him enmeshed — not caught yet, though — I’ve a feeling that horse will kick when they show it the bridle. My worry is the Woodville woman — Lady Grey. She knows where he is most vulnerable, and she is as old in guile as the serpent — forty-eight now, though it’s hard to believe. I don’t need to tell you, Hobbes, you’re a physician, her age explains much.
‘Between you and me, Richard married Anne Neville when he was twenty, and I’m as certain as one can be with any man, that he’s been faithful to her ever since. That is probably beyond Lady Grey’s comprehension. It is indisputable, I fear, that her daughter is infatuated with the King, and will move Heaven and earth to snare him. One of my manifold duties is to see that she does not. It’s a mistake, in my opinion, to leave girls unmarried to their twentieth year, they begin to cry for the moon.’
‘Poor child,’ I said, ‘whom may she turn to for comfort and advice? It’s not such an unnatural thing; I remember her as a fat, toddling child of two, running after her uncle as if he were some idolized elder brother. Sir John, this situation that has arisen is horrible.’
‘You’re right, Hobbes. If she’d been married off, and her future not in jeopardy, it would never have entered her head. But the worst is to come. The King must be told. The council are only waiting for an opportunity. In his defence we have the opinions of many learned churchmen, to show that the rumoured marriage is uncanonical and beyond contemplation. I’ll be honest with you, William, I look at his face sometimes and, experienced old spokesman of diplomacy that I am, I wonder just what and how we are going to tell him.’
A few days later, in council, they told the King. It was a mournful Monday morning at Shrovetide, by some irony also St Valentine’s Day. I was, of course, not present when they broke the news, but Norfolk told me afterwards that for a full five minutes they had sat speechless, while the King, who is not given to bad language, swore an incredible string of oaths, worthy of the captain of an Iceland herring boat. Once provoked, he has a temper to match his brother’s, especially, I think, when he is wounded in his emotions. But the outburst had died away into an obstinate refusal to countenance the rumour at all. No action was to be taken; the story was to be ignored, with the contempt it deserved. On this he was adamant, though clearly the others were convinced he was wrong, and would have to alter his mind.
On that same morning, the bells were tolled. As often happens when a King or Queen is reputedly dying, news of their demise trips over itself in its hurry to be abroad. In my opinion, bearers of false news should have their wagging tongues slit. As I say, the bells were tolled, and the poor Queen, hearing them and being told the reason, was distracted with fear. She had been sitting in her chair by the fire, during the short spell that she now left her bed, but started up and almost ran from the room. Alarmed, I followed her, for any exertion greater than a slow walk could reduce her to such a state of panting, palpitating exhaustion that she might be prostrate for days, or worse, haemorrhage again.
The whole episode was a nightmare I should not wish to experience again. She went along the palace corridors so fast I could barely keep pace, and broke in on the council meeting. Having got so far, she could go no further, but stood swaying on the threshold, holding on to the door jamb, panting and clutching her side. Between gasps, she managed to wail: ‘They say I am dead…the bells toll for me… My lords, do you wish me dead?’
Before anyone could stop him, the King ran across the room and flung himself on her. She fell into his arms, breaking into unrestrained tears, shaken by paroxysms of coughing. Worst of all, he began kissing her anywhere, clumsily on neck and shoulders, because she turned her mouth away, and he murmured all the while: ‘Hush…hush…oh, my love, my love, my love, hush now…’ The words were stifled and broken as he caressed her with mouth, hands and voice, trying to tell her that nothing was changed. ‘No one,’ he said, ‘no one — not in all the world — would wish you harm. Hush, darling…please…quiet, now, quiet…’ But she could not quiet herself; after all those months of choked-back tears, her pride had been vanquished by fools hanging on bell ropes. The King held her, trying to soothe her. She pressed herself quiveringly against him, responding to his kisses as one long starved. My eyes turned from them, stinging.
In a short while, the bells ceased tolling. In dread, I asked Lady Joyce, Sir Robert Percy’s wife, if she knew of the rumours concerning the Lady Elizabeth, and whether the Queen had any inkling of them. She said that indeed she had known, since before Epiphany, not from anything overt, but from Lady Elizabeth’s face — it could be read like a book. Others must have noticed it, but she had seen that no word reached the Queen. For this I was thankful; Lady Percy is a rare woman, sensible and discreet.
God is sometimes without mercy. Death did not come to the Queen for another four weeks, until the Wednesday before Passion Sunday. She did not get up from her bed again. I forbade the King to see her for more than a few minutes each day. She was in a great deal of pain, and he saw enough without witnessing that too. At the end, she in fact bled to death, being too weak to withstand another haemorrhage. On that day, the sixteenth of March, an eclipse of the sun threw a sad, ghostly shadow across London. Some swore it was the shadow of the wings of Lucifer as he passed through the sky. All the self-appointed prophets within the palace of Westminster foretold a year of pestilence and war, of ruin for the King, a punishment for his own wickedness.
A fresh crop of rumours sprang up after the Queen’s burial in Westminster Abbey. This time they had become too malicious to ignore. Suspicions of poison invariably attend the deathbeds of royal persons who do not die of that rare complaint, old age. But London seized upon the titillating conclusion that the King had poisoned his wife in order that he might be free to marry the Lady Elizabeth. The tales now implied deliberate cruelty; the bells had been tolled before the Queen was dead by the King’s order, so that she might be frightened into taking leave of this world. An indiscretion over a gown was magnified out of all proportion. At the Epiphany feast, the Lady Elizabeth had appeared wearing the same cloth as the Queen, cloth of gold of a quality allowable by sumptuary law for a King’s daughter, but definitely not for his discredited bastard. The simple explanation was that the gown had been the Queen’s gift, made from left-over cloth. No one chose to remark that King Richard’s own bastard daughter was dressed to equal rank, or that the laws of dress are less strictly adhered to these days. Inevitably, it was said that the King had wished the beauty of the Lady Elizabeth to overshadow the fading looks of the Queen, to her great hurt.
I do not know how many details the King had been told, but the sight of him in the past week had been enough to move stones to pity. He went about his work much as usual, granted audiences as frequently as he always had, but what he said to them, or what conclusion these people reached about him, I felt unable to imagine. He appeared to have bound and gagged his face into something approaching expressionless composure, but his eyes pleaded for respite. Pressure was put upon him to take some action, though I felt that whatever was done would be inadequate; the filth had seeped into too many minds. In the end he was goaded into an extraordinary course of action — extraordinary because, instead of condemning the London rumour-mongers in proclamations read out by deputies, he met them face to face, in public, denying the slanders by words from his own mouth. It was at once the best and the worst that could be done. It is difficult to know how he brought himself to do it.
Two weeks to the day after the Queen’s death, a huge concourse of London citizens was assembled in the great hall of the Priory of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem, in Clerkenwell, this being the only available hall in London big enough to cram them in. On the Wednesday in
Holy Week, the last day but one of March, we rode down to Clerkenwell with the entire royal household, through Bloomsbury Fields and Holborn. As we crossed the Fleet river at Holborn Bridge, I thought of how, fourteen years ago, the King had found his wife hidden in a cook-shop near Aldersgate, in the middle of a street full of houses of ill fame — it seemed to me scarcely more than yesterday. To him? Well, I think he moved now as if all his life had been but a dream, that Destiny, treacherous as a Jack o’ Lantern, had led him into barren and desolate places.
Most of us in that great train rode in silence, mum as mice, as if the hand of the Almighty was raised over us in anger. So it proved to be, for when we reached the Bishop of Ely’s house in Holborn — ‘to let’, you might say, in the absence in France of Dr Morton — the sky opened and a torrent of rain fell out. It gushed down in an opaque sheet, as if someone had turned a heavenly spigot, and like good ale it frothed merrily, bringing up a scum on the puddles. There was hail in it, jumping about like beans, pitting the wet slush of the road with worm holes. When the first spate of it slackened, I peered through icy rods of rain at horses whose bay coats were dark with water, manes slick on necks, tails bedraggled, velvet-covered harness dripping. The riders had the look of a gaggle of disgruntled ravens on Tower Green in a thunderstorm, all in mourning black, with ruined plumes and rat-like fur.
We entered the gate of St John’s soaked to the skin. Within the great hall, the stink of wet wool on the backs of nearly two thousand people was enough to choke a healthy man. Whether they had donned opulent fur and best Kendal cloth, or common frieze, it all smelt alike, of piss, with overtones of herbs used to guard against moths. They were packed tight enough in the hall to make the wall buttresses bulge outwards, each man jammed with elbows in his neighbour’s paunch. Each dripped into his own pool of water, which soon trickled across the flagstones to join one with another.
I felt I should stay as near the King as possible, not liking the look of him at all. In spite of the solicitude of the brothers of St John upon our arrival, in proffering wine and hot towels, rain still ran out of his hair. It may have been because the water made it appear darker, that his face by contrast had a pallor like the dead. You might almost see through him.
As he walked out in front of the waiting multitude, he looked small, and thin, as if the wet clothes had shrunk on him. In all that huge hall the only sound was the little clink of his spurs, and to me it seemed to echo round the roof timbers. There was no need for a silence to be called; I could hear my own heartbeat, the gurgling in the gutters outside. Water rolled off my bald pate and down my nose, and my back ached from standing woodenly in a confined space.
The King slowly mounted the steps of the dais at the hall’s end. He stood there in isolation, staring blankly over the mass of uncovered heads. He played with the dagger at his belt, then stopped, as if uncertain what to do with his hands. St Edmund, King of the East Saxons, was bound naked to a stake, to be shot full of as many arrows as a porcupine has quills. I surveyed the pink ocean of faces, bearing various expressions: shocked, disapproving, grave, sly, smug, anticipatory, or downright salacious. A few, I was sure, indulged in the lechery of imagining what it might be like, pleasuring the Lady Elizabeth. These looks, then, were their arrows.
When he began to speak, his voice was muffled and stumbling. I thought: the ones beyond the front rows won’t hear a word. But he gathered strength after a sentence or two. Soon no one but the deafest, most decrepit Alderman with ears sunk in fat could have missed a syllable. Most of the time he sounded coldly angry, but once or twice, when he spoke of the Queen, his voice became harsh with emotion. But they listened — almost held their breath. In the silences, one might have heard falling hair. When he said that it had never, ever, entered his head that he might marry the Lady Elizabeth, his brother’s daughter, that he had not wished for the death of his wife the Queen, neither was he glad of it, but as sorry and deep in distress as any man could be, I began to sweat for him. It seemed to me grotesque that any King of England should have to stand up in front of his subjects and utter such a denial. No, more, shameful; those who had accused him should hang their heads, like the elders who condemned Susanna of adultery.
Anyone, the King said, caught spreading defamation against him, was to be immediately imprisoned, and not released until the source of the rumour had been traced. Masters of the City Companies were to be summoned before the Mayor and ordered to exert their authority over members and their apprentices, to suppress rumours.
He came down from the dais even more slowly than he had gone up, like a man sentenced to the block. The spell broken, men began to shuffle their feet, but no one liked to be the first to start talking. Even Sir Thomas Hill, the Mayor, resplendent in soggy scarlet and miniver, looked chastened.
Shocked by what had been said, Prior Weston and the brothers of the order of St John hovered around when we left the hall, but the King refused the wine they offered, and, as soon as his horse was brought up, rode out of the gate at the head of his train, leaving an embarrassed silence behind him.
The King’s horse played up like a fiend all the way home, an unusual thing, as most of his mounts have perfect manners, and he is a capable horseman. It threw up its head, jerking and champing until the bit jingled a carillon and foam flew in thick white blobs. It refused to walk or trot, but jogged along erratically, swishing its white tail like an angry cat. A horse in that mood perversely sets out to put its rider through Hell, to rattle his teeth in his head, jerk his backbone to and fro in a constant, whip-lash motion, and make his arms feel like unravelled string. I suppose the animal felt the tension that gripped its rider, and became as nervous as he. All the King could do was hold it in tight, which only made matters worse. It shied at every bush and lurking gardener’s boy or wheelbarrow in Holborn, its trampling hooves slithering about in the churned mud of the road.
When we reached the great gate of Westminster, I rode in under the arch with relief. I saw the King throw the foam-lathered reins of his horse over its head for the waiting groom to catch, and slide stiffly out of the saddle. He went in, ignoring friend or onlooker alike, while we flocked after him like sheep. He headed for the royal apartments by a devious route, through the river gardens. There, without warning, he ran to the stone wall where the Thames lapped at high tide, leaned over it and was very sick in the river. When I caught up with him, he was surrounded by distraught friends and servants, and still heaving like a land-mariner in a gale. He sagged against the stone wall, fingers grasping at small plants that grew along its top. He was shaking, his face greenish, sweat-drops gathering on it. I put my arm round him and felt every muscle shudder. His clothes were cold and wet. The rain was beginning again, blown by a gusty wind over the river. I said gently, ‘My lord Richard, come inside now.’ He gave a little groan and shook his head, but after a while let me lead him indoors.
That evening heralded the three days of mourning at Passiontide, by the singing of the office of Tenebrae in the royal chapel within the palace. At the best of times this is always a solemn moment for all true believing Christians. Throughout the office, fifteen candles on a great branched sconce are snuffed out one by one, until at the Miserere only one solitary light is left. When this is extinguished, the priests beat together wooden clappers and stamp on the floor, to signify that chaos and darkness have descended upon the world. So indeed it seemed at this time, that we were close to the valley of the shadow of death.
Because the King appeared so unwell, I was installed in a place of privilege, beside Lord Lovell, behind the arras that screened off the King’s chair from the rest of the chapel, where only he and his family, his confessor and intimate friends were permitted to be present.
At first in the darkness I could not see well, and was only made aware that something was wrong by a small sound. I thought a dog had got into the chapel and was whimpering at the door to leave. Then I saw that the King was lying flat on his face on the floor. The sound was the beginning of
such a storm of weeping as I hope never to hear again. One of those glazed lions might have got up from the floor tiles and leapt on his back, to maul him with claws and teeth.
‘Oh Lord Jesu,’ I said under my breath as I heaved myself upright, ‘is there no end to this?’ I knelt again, on one side of him, Father Roby his confessor on the other, Lovell at his head. We all groped rather helplessly, as one does when a man breaks down so completely. The King lay with his arms spread out like a crucified Christ and wept without any abatement. He was past knowing what he did. Having kept an iron grip on himself for too long, his breaking was all the harder for it. I’d seen a good many men weep in my time, but none quite like this. Father Roby murmured, ‘My son, my son, let God heal you. Peace…’ The King had a rosary wound round his right hand, with beads of delicate filigree ivory and gold. His fingers had clenched so hard on it, some of the beads were crushed and broken.
I took a deep breath and decided to deal as summarily with him as I would with any man in such a state. I put my hands on his shoulders, gripped hard enough for it to be painful, and bellowed in my best battlefield butcher’s roar: ‘Stop this! Stop it I say — my lord Richard, you forget yourself!’
To the amazement of all three of us, he did stop, relapsing into a series of choking heaves. He went limp too, and though still trembling, had lost that twanging tautness that so frightened me, for it can push a man into a fit. Lovell knelt at his side in a state of shock, near to tears himself. Father Roby muttered a prayer.
‘For the love of God,’ I said in Lovell’s ear, ‘leave him to mop his face and recover some dignity. We intrude upon too much grief.’
Father Roby, who is probably a better Doctor of Theology than the Archbishop of Canterbury, and a man beyond the common sort in understanding and humanity, put his hands on the King’s head, stroking him as if calming a panic-stricken horse. ‘There is a prayer in which I have great faith, for those who are threatened by enemies and in deep anguish of mind. Hear these words, my son, and be comforted.’ He knelt, and the King followed his example, kneeling with bowed head in front of his confessor. Roby began to pray: ‘O Lord, Who restored the race of man into concord with the Father, and Who bought back with Thine own precious blood that forfeited inheritance of Paradise, and Who made peace between men and angels, deign to establish and confirm concord between me and my enemies. Show to me and pour out on me the glory of Thy grace. Deign to assuage, turn aside, extinguish and bring to nothing the hatred that they bear towards me, just as You extinguished the hatred and anger that Esau bore towards his brother Jacob…’
Some Touch of Pity Page 22
