I, Richard Plantagenet: Book One: Tante le Desiree

by J. P. Reedman

  I, RICHARD PLANTAGENET

  BY

  J.P. REEDMAN

  Part One: TANT LE DESIREE

  Copyright 2015 by J.P. Reedman

  Published by Herne’s Cave Publishing

  Cover art by FRANCES QUINN

  I, RICHARD PLANTAGENET:

  BOOK ONE: TANT LE DESIREE

  Author’s Preface

  It took me a long while to decide to do a ‘straight’ historical novel about Richard III. I had some success with my mythological novella, SACRED KING, and my short story collection WHITE ROSES, GOLDEN SUNNES but wanted to do more with this intriguing medieval king. But what? He is a popular subject to write about, especially since the discovery of his remains in 2012, and there have already been several highly successful novels that will probably always remain the definitive books in their genre. I didn’t want to just be yet another wan imitation.

  So what was missing in recent books on Richard? Soon I hit upon it—humour. Another thing—Richard’s POV. So there I had it…the idea of a lighter, funnier retelling of the story, told by Richard himself in first person using a more modern idiom that is usual (ie there are some very modern-sounding swear words that occasionally appear—but they were in fact coming into usage in the 15th C.). Do not mistake me, ‘I, RICHARD PLANTAGENET’ is emphatically NOT a comedy, it has all the tragedy and drama of history, but it also has bawdiness and medieval humour (think of Chaucer, Richard’s relative by marriage!); I did not want a perennially sad, sombre ‘Puritan’ (as Kendall once described Richard) any more than I wanted Shakespeare’s monster. Additionally, I also wanted to delve more into the events of Richard’s life before he becomes King—his illegitimate children, everyday life with Anne at Middleham, his relationship to York, his appointment as Chief Mourner at his father’s reburial, and the Scottish campaigns, all of which tend to get skimmed over in many Ricardian novels.

  Wherever possible I have tried to keep to the known timeline; occasionally this has been difficult to do and often requires guesswork or even pure imagination. For instance, although most stories have Richard at Francis Lovell together at Middleham, Richard may have in fact already left when Francis arrived. I have stuck with the usual telling for my purposes. All verses are authentic medieval ones, and many of Richard’s letters in the story are his actual words, though modernised and pared down.

  Throughout the book I have shown Edward IV’s decline in health and growing weight; I have given him the symptoms of diabetes which is one possibility for his rather premature demise. (Pneumonia, typhoid and even poison have been mooted over the years but it seemed he was not terribly well at least a year before his death.)

  Much study was needed for this book, more than any other I have written thus far, and I would recommend ‘The Road to Bosworth’ and ‘Barnet and Tewkesbury’ by P.W. Hammond and Anne F. Sutton, Caroline Halsted’s bio of Richard (old but interesting tidbits!), ‘The Maligned King’ by Annette Carson. John Ashdown Hill’s books, and good old Paul Murray Kendall, who, though a bit dated in some respects, probably still has the best completist work on Richard’s life (and has superb notes!)

  Thanks to Frances Quinn for yet another fabulous cover, and to the support from all the girls, and to folk on the facebook groups, and to my long-suffering other-half who spends his days off driving me around Ricardian sites!

  Part two of ‘I, RICHARD PLANTAGENET: LOYALTE ME LIE’ will be out around March 2016.

  J.P. REEDMAN, November 18 2015

  CHAPTER ONE: BARNET

  Rank fog hung over the field of battle, making ghosts of living men and hiding the dead within its folds. It embraced my men, a cold winding sheet stinking of fear, of cold iron and blood. Screams and unearthly wails rose amidst the clash of arms, demonic sounds half muffled by the fog. Brave men became as children, crying for their mothers, while their guts spilled onto the ground and they vainly tried to thrust them back into jagged wounds from sword and halberd…

  Blood slicked the grass, making it slippery, beslimed, dangerous to walk upon. Go down and you might never rise, no matter how good your training. We floundered in the darkness and the fog, seeking purchase on that bloodied soil, all too aware it was nigh on impossible to make out friend from foe.

  My heart beat fast, a drum against my ribs, as I anticipated the next adversary to burst through the accursed fog and come at me, my death in his eyes…

  I had taken a wound… hot blood coursed down my left arm, my side, within the protection of my armour. I felt no pain, though my head had grown a little light, giddy. A scratch would not overwhelm me; musing on the blood loss was futile, dangerous.

  I was eighteen years old, and this was my first major battle. Skirmishes in Wales that I dealt with last year on my brother’s orders seemed like infant’s play compared to this carnage—a muster of half-frighted rabble, poorly armed and trained, who fled into their wild hills and forests after the initial engagement. These men were different; fighting for the best, for princes of high renown. I must put aside youthful eagerness and fight like a true man this day…

  I led the van by my brother’s command, an honour for one so young. I swore to make him proud of me this day, or die. He trusted me as no other. We would prevail, with God and Michael and Gabriel and St George smiling upon us, and he would be undisputed King of England, with none daring to stand against him ever again. More than life, we wanted this—our House restored to the throne …the throne my father should have sat upon, the great prize for which he lost his life.

  My father…a grim memory gripped me of another battle long years ago. Messengers with bloodied tunics, half-dead. My mother, silent tears upon her face; she who was hard and proud, a woman stern as a blade. A Christmas of death and terror for two young boys thrust on a ship that sped through a storm toward a place of refuge in the Lowlands. Locked below decks, vomiting with fear and seasickness. Fatherless boys of royal blood that many desired to spill.

  I had been but eight summers, George a few years older, when that terrible news had arrived from Sandal Castle in Yorkshire. My father, Richard Duke of York, rightful King of England, had left the safety of the fortress to forage for food for his men. Hiding in the woods were treacherous Lancastrians who had earlier agreed to a Christmas truce—waiting to break it.

  They took him alive and humiliated him before his captors; making him stand upon an anthill while they jeered and mocked his pretensions to the crown. Then he was forced upon his knees, and his blood stained the trampled snow as the enemy knights assailed him in a frenzy of revenge; and when he was dead, an axe swung down to cleave off his head…

  My elder brother, poor, hapless Edmund, had managed to reach the bridge into Wakefield before enemy soldiers surrounded him and dragged him from his steed. A priest who had accompanied Edmund’s flight fell to his knees and begged, “Please do not harm this young prince! He and his kin may be good to you one day!” but rather than helping my brother, these words drew the attentions of Sir John Clifford, whose father had died in battle at St Albans five years before.

  Clifford, later called the ‘The Butcher’ for his violent deeds, had glared at my unarmed and defenceless brother crouching upon his knees. Edmund had already surrendered; he expected his captors would ransom him to his family. But the Butcher had flown into a rage and shouted, “As my father died, so you too shall die!” and he slew Edmund with a rondel dagger in revenge for a death in which Edmund played no part. My brother died upon the bridge before the very doors of a wayside chapel, with the Virgin and the saints looking mournfully and helplessly on.

  Queen Marguerite of Anjou’s forces had taken the heads of my kinsm
en and carried them in triumph to the city of York, where they spiked them upon the towers of Micklegate. A paper crown fluttered upon my father’s head to further mock his claim to the throne. Edmund…he was only seventeen, a few months younger than I am now. How easy it is, if the Wheel of Fate should spin in a wayward direction, to die a horrible death, whether you be the son of a king or the son of the local miller…

  Shouts arose to my left, and I gripped my battle-axe more tightly in my hand. Blood made its haft slippery. My two squires hung close behind me, their armed presence at my back giving me great comfort. Thomas Huddleston and Thomas Parr were their names, big Tom and little Tom they were jokingly called, for one was tall and burly, the other short and spare. ‘Little’ I call Tom Parr, in comparison to his fellow, but in reality, I am the ‘little’ one, not Parr; he is a finger’s breadth taller than I am and heavier too, across shoulders and chest.

  I am a small man, the smallest of the family in both height and girth, taking after my dead father in that regard. Insignificant I seem beside my great, shining brother Edward, who stands more than a head above most other men. Men say he is the most handsome prince in all of Europe, but today, of all days, his comely face and amiable nature must be forgotten. He must cease to be the handsome lord with a love of women and wine; he must again become a destroyer of his enemies, a conqueror as cruel and hard as the devil himself, meting out no mercy.

  As I must.

  More screams sounded to my right, out amidst the coiling tendrils of fog; arms clashed, metallic, grating—a sound like the teeth of the devils in hell grinding together. I see a body drop, roll through the fogbanks fountaining blood from a stump of neck, and Little Tom flinches at my side.

  “Jesu!” he breathed shakily, behind his visor. He crossed himself.

  “Peace, Tom,” I whispered. “Hold fast for me…I know you can.”

  I did not blame him for his revulsion, his fear; he was as young as I, and this was also his first battle, and already Christopher Worsley, John Harper and other men of my household had been slain. None of us wanted to die; we were all youths barely into manhood with songs to sing and women to bed and our whole lives stretching ahead. We hoped.

  The wind began to skirl, shredding the fog and picking up the folds of my banner with it snarling white boar, and shook them out. My standard-bearer held the banner up higher, a rallying point for those following. It reminded me of who I am, who my ancestors were, and what I must do this day. Pride swelled in my heart amid the swirling blend of fog, shadow and sudden bloody death.

  I called out to my men, “For the King! For the King. For York, for England and for St George!” Clarions blared, and my soldiers surged forward, blinded though they were by the mist, harrying the enemy’s flank remorselessly. No quarter for the enemy, no mercy given to our foe.

  I was eighteen years old, and I was wounded…. (No, I must not think on the blood, the pain! A scratch, JUST a scratch!) and it was Easter Sunday and a holy time, yet a morning of blood and vengeance, of death but no resurrection…unless that resurrection was to be the new emergence of our House. We would pray afterwards…if any of us survived. If not, it was God himself we must ask for mercy.

  Panting heavily, I ran up a low hill past stands of trees that loomed through the haze like twisted skeletons and clawed at my soldiers and me as we raced after our quarry.

  I am Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the King of England’s brother, and today I will help him to ultimate victory or die upon the field in his service.

  Sometimes fate plays a hard hand against us, sometimes God smiles on our moves and guides us through the darkness. When we first reached Barnet and marched towards Monken Hadley, all those loyal to Edward my brother surely felt a sinking feeling in their hearts as dusk fell and the fog rolled in. Great white clouds of it tumbled over twilit ditches like winding sheets, and the spire of Hadley church sank into gloom. Thick hedges became monstrous barricades, a living shield-wall hiding our enemies from us and us from them.

  My Lord of Warwick, Richard Neville, who led the enemy forces along with Exeter, the formidable Oxford, and Warwick’s brother John Montagu, began at once to try to frighten us by beginning a barrage of arrows and gunfire. Terrifying it truly was, when arrows whined out of the night and cannons roared like wrathful angels, shivering the very earth with their blasts.

  “Christ’s teeth,” Edward said, watching from amidst his personal guards. “What a waste of artillery and arrows. We are not hapless women to be affrighted by such displays. Are we, Richard, my brother?” His helmeted head swung in my direction.

  I nodded in agreement. The sounds of guns and hissing, shrilling arrows did not raise fear in my heart, but the thought of maybe facing Warwick on the field did, though I would never have admitted it to Ned. Warwick, once my mentor, my teacher in the battle-arts I would apply this fateful day…

  Our forces held steady. Edward, myself, and our other brother George, recently returned to the fold of York after defecting to the enemy, strode in among the troops to rally them, to impress upon them how Warwick’s posturing would not make us retreat one inch.

  As the first glimmer of light struck the eastern sky, a crimson strip that turned the mist bloody, the King’s army at least moved forward to engage, my brother towing mad old Henry, our prisoner, the unlawful king, behind him like some whipped dog on a lead.

  In my opinion, Mad Henry should have been left safely with the baggage train, but Edward trusted no one to guard him and refused to let him out of his sight. Clad in a shabby blue robe stained by food, looking more beggar than noble, Henry was bound to a saddle atop a stolid swaybacked mare. Child-like or saint-like, the old king smiled at nothing, or perhaps at imaginary angels, while he clapped veined hands and sang in a reedy voice,

  “The fowls in the wood,

  the fishes in the flood

  and I must go mad,

  much sorrow I walk with

  for best of bone and blood….”

  I tried to tune out his irritating, toneless warbles; they set my teeth on edge. Leaving Edward and George, I gathered my captains and concentrated on the plans for that morning. I was to face my Lord of Exeter, Henry Holland, a staunch Lancastrian and the hated husband of my own older sister, Anne of York. He was experienced in the field, having been at Wakefield, St Albans, and Towton. A man both cruel and stupid, he would be a ruthless enemy.

  I could not think of Holland’s cruelties or his far greater experience in warfare. I would think instead of killing him for our cause and setting my sister free from her loathed marriage. Signalling for the banners to advance, I led the vanguard stalwartly towards what I believed to be Holland’s line, concealed in the folds of the accursed fog.

  However, after a while of seeing and hearing nothing ahead I began to feel uneasy. Despite the coolness of the dawn, beads of sweat broke out on my forehead, trickled down the back of my neck.

  Something was amiss.

  My gut lurched and knotted as in horror I realised the terrible truth… we were marching on a downward slope, heading toward some hidden valley bottom! I was not where I should be. Edward and George were above me on the plateau, ready to join in the central battle, while I, lost in the fog, was leading the van away from the desired position to engage.

  Angry at the bloody weather, raging at myself for my miscalculation and for not noticing the error sooner, I let out a dreadful oath that could have half-damned me to Hell. Fortunately, the fog muffled it; with any luck, God was not listening too closely on this morning of blood and death.

  I had to think swiftly before my men went any farther on this disastrous path. What could I do to rectify my mistake before the enemy realised I had overshot the field and took advantage?

  “Halt! Halt!” I gestured to my bannermen, to all those nearest me. Marching feet clattered to silence; an eerie silence aided by the grey sheets winding around us. A few arrows whirred by, bolts of death in the murk while not so far away, the cannon bellowed and rumbled lik
e thunder. All eyes were on me, expectant, an air of vague unease clung to the troops; they knew I was young, and untried. They were afraid an over-confident boy would lead them to their deaths.

  I smiled grimly within the safety of my helmet and glanced around as best I could with my restricted vision. Retreating up the accursed, mist-shrouded slope to reach my desired position was not an option; I had no time for such a chancy and long-winded manoeuvre. Too long in the attempt, and a clumsy move that would leave the vanguard open to attack from behind.

  No, it was better to deal with what fate had cast at me this Easter day…the endless fog. I would attempt to use it to my advantage rather than regard it as a hindrance. Hidden by its folds as if by a great cloak, I would round on Exeter’s forces and mount a flank attack beneath the cover of the fog. With any luck, he would not expect such a bold move from the King’s inexperienced younger brother.

  Again, I raised my gauntleted hand, giving the signal to advance, but also directing my men to turn sharply to the left instead of proceeding straight ahead. A shining wall of death, my soldiers stalwartly and swiftly marched in the required direction and suddenly out of the greyness loomed the banners of the Duke of Exeter and the massed ranks of his company.

  My axe held at the ready, I began to run. A strange sensation of lightness overwhelmed me, as if my feet did not truly touch the ground but had grown strange, invisible wings. It felt as if the angels themselves lifted me, bearing me forward toward destiny or death. Time seemed to stretch into infinity, the seconds of my headlong rush becoming long as hours.

  The enemy loomed closer and closer; I could see Exeter’s banner with the lions of England, denoting his ancestry from John of Gaunt, surrounded by a French bordure….Its colours became fiercer, brighter as the mist gave way, and then with sickening, awful finality …there was impact.