The Man On a Donkey

by H. F. M. Prescott

  ‘But that,’ he told them, when he had done, ‘is no more but as I would say unto you, “The King’s Grace, will give you a pardon,” and bade you go to the Chancery to fetch it. Also herein you are called rebels, by the which ye shall acknowledge yourselves to have done against the King, which is contrary to your Oath.’

  They all began to cry out then, one saying, ‘The King hath sent us the fawcet but keepeth the spigot. Which is to say we shall none of us taste of the ale.’ And another shouted that as for the pardon it makes no matter whether we have any or not, for we never offended the King nor his laws.’ ‘Nay,’ said another, ‘therefore we need no pardon.’

  ‘Well then,’ Sir Francis stopped there, and again they looked, all of them, to him. ‘Hear you further. A Parliament is appointed, as they say, but neither the place nor the time is appointed. And also here,’ – and he tapped on the pardon with his fingers – ‘here is written that the King should have care both of your body and soul, which is plain false, for it is against the Gospel of Christ, and that I will justify, even to my death.’

  He looked about at them with his eyes burning in his head, and then cast up his right hand clenched.

  ‘And therefore,’ he cried, ‘if ye will take my part in this and defend it, I will not fail you so long as I live, to the uttermost of my power; and who will do so, assure me by your hands and hold them up.’

  Upon which up went all their hands, and they shouted so that a ploughman tramping down the furrow a mile away heard the cry and stopped the horses to listen and wonder what might be afoot.

  Then Sir Francis told them what must be done – he to go to Hull, which by now Hallom should have command of, others to make sure of Scarborough, and a letter to be sent to bring out Sir Thomas Percy on their side – and so he and his horsemen rode away down the hill. The others watched them go; the morning was cheerful, and their spirits warmed by enthusiasm and indignation at once.

  ‘Blessed is the day,’ one told another, ‘that Sir Francis Bigod and Jack Hallom met together; for an if they had not set their heads together, this matter had not been bolted out.’

  Then, after a little talk and some argument, they broke up, to fetch their horses, and meet again at the White Cross, and so march against Scarborough.

  January 19

  Julian Aske came, abruptly as usual, into the winter parlour, having just put Dickon to bed. Her father and mother sat side by side, yet apart, on the settle; Tony and Chris were on the bench under the window, making an appearance of learning their Latin; a little apart her mother’s waiting gentlewoman was busy cutting down one of Tony’s old coats for Dickon.

  When Julian opened the door they were all, except the gentlewoman, talking at once. But when she shut it after her they were silent. Then her mother cried, as if for the last of many times—

  ‘Then you will do nothing! Nothing!’

  ‘I can’t,’ said her father, ‘turn away mine own brother from this house.’

  Julian went over to the fire. She set her foot on the raised brick hearth and rested one hand on the chimney. She did not think that just so her uncle would stand, nor how like him she was now, with her eyes bright and her mouth set hard.

  ‘Then,’ her mother said, in the same sharp voice, ‘then must we flee away from it ourselves, all of us, as we did in the first insurrection.’

  Jack fidgeted with the pages of a book he had open on his knee.

  He said that this time it was different. No man could have done more than Robin to stay the people.

  ‘Why!’ Nell laughed. ‘So he does, with the one hand, and with the other he is trying to shield these traitors. You heard him say how he and Constable wrote that Frank Bigod’s messengers should be set free, because, forsooth, “It’s none honest,” says he, “to keep messengers.”’

  ‘They’re poor ignorant fellows—’ Jack put in, but half-heartedly.

  ‘Oh! He’s taught you. But I’m not so tender of poor ignorant fellows. Let him be tender of his brother and of his father’s house. We shall suffer for his tenderness.’

  Tony said, in his new man’s voice, and with the air of importance he had grown into since Hob left home – ‘I think my mother is right. Why should he not go to my Uncle Will Monkton’s. Or to one of these great men with whom he sorted in the insurrection. Let them have him. We do not hold with him in his treasons.’

  ‘Speak for your own self!’ July said so suddenly and so fiercely that they all started and stared. ‘I do. I hold with him. But it’s no treason, but lawful petition of grievances made by all the commonalty and gentry of the North.’

  ‘Hold your tongue!’ her mother cried; and Tony, ‘Parrot! Parrot! Who taught you words to speak so pat?’ ‘Quiet! Quiet!’ Jack bade all of them.

  When he had got silence he began to explain to July, with far more patience than any of the others liked, just why all that her uncle had done before the pardon was treason and needed pardon.

  ‘He says,’ Julian muttered obstinately, ‘that he could not in his conscience have let such things happen, as the destruction of the Abbeys, and preaching of heretics.’

  ‘Well then,’ said her father, still reasonable and patient, ‘what will be the end, if every man, because his conscience grudges at what the King does, shall count himself free to move war. Will it not be as in the days of the two Roses? Will it not be so? Come. Answer me.’

  Julian’s face was burning, and she hung her head.

  ‘I can’t answer. But he could.’

  ‘Ho!’ cried Tony, and he and Chris laughed loudly and insultingly at her.

  Julian lifted her head, and looked at her mother. ‘But,’ she said, ‘if he goes from this house, I go too.’

  ‘God’s Passion!’ Nell sprang up. ‘Nay, but you shall go. I’ll send you waiting woman to my sister, till you be married to a man that shall teach you reverence and quietness, and that soon.’

  When Julian had said that she would go from the house she had meant it, but as soon as it was said she thought, with a great jolt, ‘Where shall I go?’ Something came into her mind, giving her answer. She lifted her chin, and scowled back at her mother over her shoulder as she went to the door. She had her finger on the latch, then turned.

  ‘You shall send me where you will. But you shall not marry me. For I will be a nun.’

  In the darkness outside, when she had shut herself out from them, she was conscious at first only of the impressiveness of the moment she had created, at random as it were, almost, it seemed now, out of nothing. But once more she realized the practical difficulty with which she was faced. What should she do now? It would be altogether tame if she returned to the parlour. It was too early to go to bed. The Hall would be cluttered with servants getting ready for supper. She could not well lurk on the stairway till it was bedtime. Then she knew where she could go, and her heart lifted again to the height of her defiance, yet this time not angrily but in solemnity. She could go to church.

  Outside was a night of full moon, heavily clouded: it was too dark to see, but she could hear a great noise of wind in the orchard trees and in the elms of the churchyard, where the branches strained and ground together, as the gale poured itself through them from the flat countryside. She reached the church porch and only then remembered she had not brought the key, which hung always at the end of the passage by the screens. But just as she realized this, her fingers, groping over the door, touched the cold iron of the key standing in the lock. ‘Huh!’ she thought, as she pushed the door open, ‘the old man’s forgotten again,’ for the priest from Ellerton, who came here to sing Vespers, was a careless, forgetful old thing.

  She shut herself into the church, and into a different world. Here it was black dark, wholly quiet, except for a thin, wailing noise the wind made in the tower; and that seemed to come from a long way off. The air here, though it was still, and smelt of damp, stale rushes, of incense and candle reek, was colder than the living air outside.

  She stood for a moment, because i
t was so dark, and suddenly so quiet, then moved forward. She could see nothing, but knew that the way was clear, if she avoided the bench which stood against the wall just beyond the door.

  Then she tripped over something, cried ‘Oh!’, almost fell, and saved herself by clutching the man’s arm who sat there with his feet sprawling out in front of him.

  ‘Who? It’s you, Julian!’

  The voice was sufficiently like her uncle’s voice for her to know him by it. It was so very unlike as to give her a new fright.

  ‘Oh!’ she cried again, ‘what is it? What are you doing here?’ and her hands began to feel over him, but he put them away, and said:

  ‘Doing? Nothing.’

  She had forgotten herself and the reason that brought her here. She sat down by him and laid her hands on his arm.

  ‘Uncle Robin, what is wrong?’

  He took a long time to answer and then spoke with a sort of harsh lightness.

  ‘God’s Passion! I think everything is wrong.’

  ‘Tell me. You must tell me, Sir.’

  ‘Why? You know it,’ he cried, as if he could not endure her importunity. Then he muttered, ‘They took Hallom of the Wold in an attempt on Hull. They’ve taken Bigod now.’

  She felt his arm harden under her hands and knew that he clenched his fist.

  ‘And that Bigod’s taken, I thank God. For it was he that set Hallom on after I had stayed him and the rest from rising at Beverley. Let Bigod suffer!’ Close to her ear in the darkness she heard his teeth grind together, and the sound appalled her by its force and fury. Yet when he spoke it was not anger that altered his voice.

  ‘Hallom’s this manner man, July. They say that when none would rise in Hull to take his part, he came safe out of the gate, and as far as the windmill, whence he might without pain have come clear away. But one cried out on him, “Fie! Will ye go your ways and leave your men behind you?” So he turned back and came to the gate. And so they took him.’

  ‘And so,’ he said after there had been a long silence, ‘I sit here doing – nothing. I can do nothing. But that I can I will. I have written that they should not try Hallom yet, saying that the North’s all dry tinder that a spark will set afire – and that’s the truth. And I’ve sent your Uncle Monkton to bid them – Whom? Oh! Rafe Ellerker and the rest – to bid them a’ God’s name let go on bail all those poor souls taken with Hallom and with Bigod, except only the leaders. So, by the Duke comes, they may be forgotten and escape judgement. But I think,’ he ended bitterly, ‘I think Rafe Ellerker, like many another, remembers too near how he was with us to dare show mercy.’

  She hunted in her mind for comfort, but there seemed none to give him. Then she thought of one who could help. ‘The King,’ she began uncertainly—

  ‘I have written to the King,’ he took her up. ‘Constable said I wrote too plain, and that he may be displeased. Yet how can I write but the truth? And truth is plain.’

  ‘He has promised—’ Julian began. This time he had not spoken, but something rigid in his silence stopped her short.

  He said, speaking in a hurry after a long time, ‘He has promised – I told them so at Beverley. I told them he was gracious lord to us all. So he is. There must be hangings after this late rising, for it’s treason, though the people were misled. But he’ll keep his promise that he made. I don’t doubt it.’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘No. With his own mouth he—’

  He started up, and went a few steps away from her.

  ‘I say – “no”,’ he said out of the darkness. ‘But now they may say that we have broken the appointment, so the King need not keep his promise to us.’

  She knew then what had brought him to lurk here in the church, and for a moment it struck her dumb.

  Then she remembered, and was startled to think that she had forgotten, why she herself had come there. So she told him.

  He did not for a moment take it in. ‘A nun?’ he repeated – ‘You, a nun? Why, niece?’

  ‘Because I will undertake Christ’s cause, and in that stand beside you as I may. And – and – He will prevail.’ She had begun grandly, but the grandeur tailed off as she thought, ‘It doesn’t sound like the truth. Yet it is the truth.’

  He knew it for that, but he made no answer, except to say under his breath, ‘Jesu! Saviour!’ and then after a long pause – ‘There was a poor wench at Marrick, a servant. They said she had seen Him go over Grinton Bridge riding on a pedlar’s donkey. She would have it He was here, in the realm, now.’

  Julian could not understand why he told her this, unless it were because she had said, ‘Christ will prevail,’ and this was a sign to confirm that saying. Yet it seemed to her that he spoke not at all in triumph, but as if he was reluctant to recall what the woman had seen.

  So they sat together, following their own thoughts. She saw herself declared, committed, sealed to the cause of Christ which he had chosen. Once more his mind looked, shrinking, down a road the end of which he dreaded to see. To-night, as if distress had cleared his sight, he saw further along it than ever before. Were Christ, he asked himself, were Christ in the realm now, and came to London, a poor man, speaking humbleness, poverty, truth, and the compassion of God, should He prevail, or should He be judged as a malefactor, and so, again, die?

  February 3

  Very early this morning, when the town of Pomfret was just beginning to stir, and the castle gate had not long been opened, Lord Darcy’s litter, with a pretty good number of gentlemen and men-at-arms riding behind it, came to the gate of the Barbican. My Lord’s litter came through into the ward beyond the gate, but then the guard, who were George Darcy’s men, stopped the rest before they could pass in. So Lord Darcy pulled open the leather curtains of the litter, and asked, ‘Why do you stop here?’ and cried, ‘Get on! Get on!’ to the boy riding the leading horse, and then, looking round, seemed for the first time to see the guard there at the gate, with their halberds set against his men outside, and a gentleman of Sir George’s who now came out towards the litter.

  ‘Oh!’ said he. ‘It’s you, Baynton, is it?’

  Master Baynton pulled off his cap. But he said that Sir George had straightly commanded him to admit no one.

  ‘Did he say you should keep out the Constable of the Honour and Castle of Pomfret?’

  ‘No.’ Master Baynton looked down at his feet, and felt an inclination to shuffle them. ‘No.’ But he understood well enough what Sir George’s intention had been. The order had been the same for the last three days, but till to-day the guard had been much stronger, for Sir George had expected the old Lord to have been here before this.

  ‘Well,’ said Darcy pleasantly, but with that in his eyes that Baynton found hard to meet, ‘it’s I now, the Constable, that command you let in my people,’ and leaning out of the litter he said not very loud, but curt and sharp, ‘Stand back, fellows!’

  The men stood back, and Master Baynton had to skip out of the way pretty quick, for the old Lord’s gentlemen knew what they must do, and they and the men-at-arms came on smartly, packed close in line, knee to knee.

  So they were all in the first ward, and my Lord’s litter going on to the second gate when Sir George came out of that, with his hair and beard not so trim as usual, clutching up his hosen, and with most of the points dangling from under his doublet, for he had just tumbled out of bed, hearing that his father was at the gate.

  Lord Darcy beckoned to one of his own gentlemen, and with his help got down from the litter, and stood, taller yet than his son by half a head, all in crimson cloth lined with furs, and an old-fashioned by-cocket hat with a brim of fur pulled on over his hood.

  ‘Son George,’ said he, leaning on his stick, ‘who in your fantasy is keeper of this castle? Is it thou, or I?’

  George Darcy did not like straight questions; he was a man that found crooked answers easiest. So he said—

  ‘Sir, I have letters from the King.’

  ‘And I, His Grace’s Co
mmission.’ Lord Darcy began to go under the gate.

  ‘What preparations have you for the Duke’s refreshment?’ he asked over his shoulder. ‘For I hear he comes from Doncaster this day.’

  The Duke of Norfolk arrived about dinner-time, so after he had dined he and my Lord and Sir George went into the Privy Chamber, and there sat down by the fire with wine, wafers, and a dish of late apples. The Duke was just now thawed after a cold ride; he drank, and sighed, and stretched out his feet to the warmth. But though he might have been glad to take his ease he did not forget his duty as the King’s Lieutenant, and began to ask shrewd questions as to the state of the North, and how many prisoners had been apprehended in the last troubles, who kept them, and had any yet been judged?

  The other two, sitting one on each side of him, answered what he asked; sometimes one held the word, sometimes the other was too quick for him, tripped him up and came in first. Sir George leaned forward to it, very earnest, very eager to have the Duke’s favour, for that, he thought, might mean advancement in times to come. Lord Darcy seemed to play it as a game, with dancing sparks, almost of laughter, in his eyes, although he conceived that to have the Duke’s good word might, in times to come, mean the difference that lay between life and death.

  After they had talked for some time the Duke asked my Lord to give him leave to speak alone with Sir George.

  Darcy got up. ‘Gladly,’ he said, flipped George’s shoulder as he passed him as though they were the best of friends, and bade the Duke refresh himself well after his journey.

  But in the little room over the gate, with Thomas Grice his steward, he frowned over the account books which they spread out before them on the desk.

  ‘I have offered,’ said he, ‘to keep Pomfret at my own charges, and that, if the Duke consents, will tear the bottom out of my purse. Yet it is most necessary I should keep Pomfret in these days. It’d look ill to hand it over as if I knew myself guilty. And—’ he laughed out loud now, ‘you should ha’ seen Sir George’s face!’