by Livi Michael
The king prevented himself from blessing the wine. He kept his hood up and did not speak. He chewed his food as well as he could, because lately his teeth had been hurting, listened to the singing and gave thanks silently.
This fugitive existence was no life for a king, yet he felt he had learned from it; that he had been shown, if nothing else, the fundamental goodness of human nature. So many people had fed and clothed him and given him shelter despite the risk, and cost, requiring nothing in return other than his blessing.
The meal was drawing to a close when something happened, small and insignificant in itself. He forgot to take hold of his goblet as a young lad poured wine into it because a king would not take hold of his goblet as wine was poured. He thought for a moment that he could feel the ferocious intensity of the Black Monk’s gaze, but Richard Tunstall took the goblet instead with a laugh, and the Black Monk lowered his eyes.
That was all, but the king had lost his appetite. They were able to retire early, however, since no one expected them to stay, and so the king followed Richard Tunstall from the room, back up the narrow stair. Richard Tunstall shut the door between their rooms but would not lock it, in case he was needed. The king said he did not require any help getting ready for bed and knelt down by it to say his prayers. The four saints stood like sentinels around him as he prayed.
They told him nothing this time, and he was glad of that. He was not up to deciphering any more messages. He said his prayers without interruption then pulled back the sheets, curling up in the bed and closing his eyes to shut them out. Still no one disturbed him, not even John the Baptist with his apocalyptic messages.
At one point he could feel St Dunstan moving forward to sit on his bed, but the saint said nothing and the king did not ask.
It was only later that he remembered the connection between St Dunstan and the Benedictine monks.
When he woke, in the darkness before dawn, they had all disappeared.
He lay for a while as the room lightened slowly, then rose and said his prayers again, aware of an uneven pressure, a bruised feeling in his knees and a stiffness in his neck.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee …
Nothing; except as always during prayer he felt a strong pull away from the world, as if the saints were tugging him out of it. And yet he had to live in it; he was still king. Awkwardly, he rose and went to the window.
Colour was returning to the world by imperceptible degrees, leaving blocks and corners of shade. Two horses on the far side of the courtyard became steadily more distinct; their necks bent forward, one brown and the other a dappled grey. Behind them the stone wall took on muted hues; behind that the field was stippled by pale dots of sheep.
Night changed so subtly into day that however long he gazed into the sky he could not discern the moment when the darkness left.
He thought, as he had thought before, how strange it was that light, which had no colour itself, should bring colour to the world.
As he watched, a stable boy crossed the yard towards the horses. The king wondered what it must be like to lead an ordinary life like that of a stable boy, who could walk across a yard towards two horses, apparently unaware of anything else. It seemed to the king that of all the mysteries in the world the strangest was that he should be here, in this moment, in this place. He and the stable boy both imprisoned in a small space of time yet somehow linked to all things before or since. The king thought he could have been happy as a stable boy, without the burdens and terrors of kingship, the freight of history. He would live and love, labour and die, have children and love them perhaps, and love his wife, and have many experiences, many encounters that were, in the end, like particles of dust that blew together and away.
And he too would be like a particle of dust, a form tumbling slowly through darkness.
He knew nothing about the stable boy’s life, its complications and desires, but he longed so keenly to be him that his mouth was dry. He would be anyone, he thought, anyone else at all; his heart was beating more rapidly with this yearning. He pressed his fingers to the pane and prayed to God, who had ordered all the particles of dust in the universe and who could surely perform the simple exchange. Almost he felt as though the solid substance of the window was becoming insubstantial beneath his fingertips, but it did not disappear or yield.
When he turned finally away from the window he was unsurprised to find the Virgin sitting beneath the crucifix on the wall.
She was like an icon of herself; robes of vivid blue on gold, Jesus like a tiny man on her knee, holding her hands.
It will not be long now, she said, but he didn’t know what she meant, and in any case he knew that time did not operate in her world as it did in his.
Behind her he could see a river with stones in it. Great wet black stones such as were used for crossing. And on the other side of it he could see the Black Monk, who had sat at his table last night.
So he knew then, of course, that something was wrong, and later when it all became plain to him he wondered what, if anything, he could have done about it. He could perhaps have summoned Richard Tunstall and said that they must leave early, leave now. Yet he was hampered by a sense of not knowing whether these glimpses into the future were real, and by not knowing how to explain them to anyone else. Richard Tunstall was already troubled by the things he said.
He was like an actor, allowed to read the script before performing the play that had to be performed. He put on his monkish robes and went to join his men.
And breakfast passed without incident. But afterwards they went back to their rooms and the drama began to unfold.
There was a disturbance outside; voices speaking rapidly, then angrily, then rapidly again. Sir John’s wife came to their door and spoke to Richard Tunstall, telling him he was not to worry, it was only Sir John’s brother, and his son-in-law Thomas Talbot. They lived nearby and frequently visited.
The king looked down at the plate of bread she’d brought with her. It seemed to him it was full of locusts.
The noise intensified and Lady Alice’s look altered and she said she would just go to see, and hurried from their room. There was the sound of footsteps pounding up the main stairs. Richard Tunstall grabbed his sword. ‘We must leave,’ he said.
Then all was pandemonium.
They could hear the sound of fighting and shouting on the stairs. Richard Tunstall’s men were already engaged in combat, trying to force Thomas Talbot’s men back down. Richard Tunstall grabbed him by the hand and dragged him from the room, down the narrow stairs that seemed too steep and winding for speed. At the bottom he had to slash his way through two men who tried to block their path. They ran across the courtyard to the horses, then rode out across the field to the wood and to the river that ran through the wood. They rode up and down the river, looking for a place to cross. The king was bewildered, not knowing which world he was in, for the four saints had reappeared. St Anselm was holding his fingers to his lips, St John the Baptist had a great jagged line round his neck, while the Virgin with a tear on her cheek pointed towards the stepping stones, big and black and wet, leading across the river. On the other side stood St Dunstan with the Black Monk. And it was there that Sir Thomas Talbot’s men caught up with them at last.
[In 1465] King Harry was taken … in Lancashire, by means of a black monk of Abingdon, in a wood called Clitherwood, near Bungerly Hipping stones, by Thomas Talbot, son and heir to Sir Edmund Talbot of Bashall, and John Talbot his cousin of Colebury … and was carried to London on horseback, with his legs bound to the stirrups, and so brought through London to the Tower, where he was kept a long time by two squires and two yeomen of the crown and their men; and every man was suffered to come and speak with him, by licence of the keepers …
Warkworth’s Chronicle
20
July 1465
The Duke of Bourbon … persuaded the Duke of Burgundy to consent to raise an army in his land … to remonstrate with the King of F
rance over his disorderly and unjust government. The Count of Charolais [son of the Duke of Burgundy] immediately put his troops into the field and the Count of Saint-Pol accompanied him … Then the Count of Charolais camped at Monthléry. The king held council with [the Count of] Maine, Pierre de Brézé, Grand Seneschal of Normandy, the Admiral of France and others … He was suspicious of the Grand Seneschal of Normandy and demanded that he should tell him if he had given his seal to the princes who were opposed to him. To this the Grand Seneschal replied jokingly in his customary manner, ‘Yes, but if his seal belonged to them his body belonged to the king.’ The king was satisfied by this and put him in charge of the vanguard and the scouts … The Grand Seneschal, wanting his own way, said then to some of his confidants, ‘I’ll bring the armies so close to one another today that it will be an able man who can separate them.’ And so he did; the first man to die was himself and his men with him.
Philippe de Commines
The last time the queen had seen Pierre de Brézé was shortly before he had left to fight for King Louis. The night had been so warm that she was unable to sleep. Finally she got up, left her chamber and walked towards the lake in the grip of feverish and restless thoughts. And there she had seen him, standing on the shore.
Despite herself, despite everything, her heart had lifted to see him there.
He did not turn, even when she stood behind him; he remained gazing out over the water. He appeared to be in a kind of reflective absorption. After a while she said, ‘What are you looking for, Chevalier?’
And still without turning, he replied, ‘Where does the starlight go when it touches the water? I have wondered that all my life.’
She looked at the sky. There were the stars in their formal arrangements, but there was no reflection of them in the water, just a smooth sheen which further out became the suggestion of a glimmer.
‘Sometimes I think that the stars are dreaming us,’ he said, but the queen was in no mood for poetry. She wanted to say to him that he should not go, but it seemed impossible to ask him to disobey the summons of his king here, when everything was so quiescent and still.
‘They should dream differently,’ she said, and he made a small sound that might have been a laugh, but she went on, ‘What will I do without you, Chevalier?’
‘Ah, my lady,’ he said, turning to her at last.
‘Louis does not need you. I need you.’
‘People are coming here all the time, to join you.’
But they are not you, she did not say, and she realized that she had come to him as she had always come, for reassurance.
‘I suppose the war will be over eventually,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and then there will be another war.’
She didn’t like the sound of that. ‘But you will come back,’ she said. ‘You must come back, to fight for me.’
He had turned away again. When he didn’t answer, she said, ‘Or perhaps you are tired. Tired of fighting for me and my hopeless cause.’
‘You don’t think that,’ he said, looking out over the water.
She said, ‘If it was clear to me that it was all hopeless I could give up now. Go and live a quiet life in my father’s house.’
‘You would not do that,’ he said.
No, she would not do that. Not while her husband was forced to live as a fugitive, and she and her son were in exile. Her war could not be over. But she was a little disturbed by his pronouncements. He sounded as if he knew something she did not know, as if the dark surface of the lake had revealed something about her or her destiny.
‘What do the stars say about me, eh?’ she said.
‘They say that they have given you their fire, so that you can make it burn more brightly here on earth.’
She would not be cajoled. ‘I am tired,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I think I would like to walk away from all of this – and from myself. Forget that I was ever queen of England, or even Margaret of Anjou.’
‘Who would you be?’ he asked, turning slightly.
‘How should I know?’ she said. ‘I would be someone else.’
He laughed.
‘Just a child, perhaps – an ordinary child. Picking flowers on a hillside.’
As she said it she felt a nostalgic hunger for the child that she had never been. She had never, as far as she could remember, picked flowers on a hillside.
But Pierre de Brézé had turned fully towards her now. ‘Flowers?’ he said. Then unexpectedly he cupped her face. ‘Ma petite Marguerite,’ he said in the old rhyme. ‘Stars are the flowers of the sky.’ He stroked her face with his thumbs, moved his fingers through her hair.
She did not reject him or move away. She closed her eyes and rested her face in his hands. In that moment she knew what she was offering him; despite the difference between them, and the lopsided ugliness of his face; despite the fact that she had decided it must not ever happen again. She would offer him everything if he would not go.
His hands paused round her face. For a moment everything seemed hung in the balance. Then the balance shifted and she knew that he would go. He was a fighting man; he had been summoned, and he would go.
‘My lady –’
‘Don’t say it.’
‘I won’t say it.’
‘Promise me that you will come back.’
‘Of course,’ he said tenderly. ‘How could I not?’
‘If you don’t come back to me, I do not know what I will do.’
‘Hush,’ he said, moving his fingers to her lips. ‘Don’t you know that I will always come back to you?’
When she received the news that he had been killed at Monthléry she had walked away from the messenger, nodding, as if to herself. She had made her way to her room, then cried like an abandoned child on her bed.
The pain was at first savage, then heavy and dull. My heart is heavy – she’d heard that phrase before, but hadn’t imagined the physical reality. Because now it seemed to her as though her heart had grown physically heavy, like a great weight in her chest, making it difficult to breathe.
Soon she heard that her husband had been taken prisoner, tied to a small horse and led through the streets of London to be mocked and reviled. His companions were scattered; some of them, it seemed, had escaped to Harlech. But the king her husband was in the Tower.
The pain was not worse, but it was different. It seemed to her that all the fire had gone out of the world, that it was impossible to get warm.
But there was nothing to be done except to pick up the burden that had been mysteriously allocated to her once again. She wrote to her supporters, to her brother, Duke John of Calabria, and to Jasper Tudor, and to any of the French nobility who would listen to plead her cause to King Louis, who was still too occupied with his own war to respond to her. She sent her agents into England and Wales and received each month a small trickle of newcomers to her court: escapees from the Yorkist regime, which, they said, had become intolerable. Edward IV had his spies everywhere, the nobles were at loggerheads with each other and many people were being arrested.
So it was not that there was no reason to hope; just that it was hard to fan the flames of hope again. Still she continued diligently writing her letters, gathering support, overseeing the education of the young prince. Because in the absence of hope there was only effort, and in the absence of effort there was only despair.
My lord, here beeth with the queen the Duke of Exeter and the [new] Duke of Somerset [Edmund Beaufort] and his brother, and also Sir John Courtenay, which beeth descended from the House of Lancaster. Also here beeth my lord Privy Seal Dr John Morton [and others] … We beeth all in great poverty, but yet the queen sustaineth us in meat and drink, so as we beeth not in extreme necessity … in all this country is no man that will or may lend you any money, have ye never so great need.
Letter from Sir John Fortescue to the Earl of Ormond, Koeur-la-Petite, France
21
A Child is Born
The proce
ssion, led by the Earl of Warwick, wound its way from Islington through Cheapside and Newgate. Behind Warwick were his guards and retainers, and behind them, led by Ralph Hastings, was the former king.
He sat on a small horse, not much bigger than a donkey. He was leaning to one side so that Queen Elizabeth wondered that he did not fall. Until she realized that he had been tied to it, his legs bound to the stirrups, and a straw hat tied to his head.
The crowds screamed and jeered.
King of fools!
King of carrots!
Where is your throne now?
Where is your wife?
Two men ran before him making obscene gestures; one of them pretending to be his wife, taking it from behind from the other, who by his paper crown represented the king of France. The crowd roared with laughter.
It was, in fact, a comical sight. The small horse, unaccustomed to such weight, made slow progress. Sometimes it shied or skittered at the noise, or because some prankster had prodded it from behind with a stick, and sometimes it wandered from side to side, eating the vegetables thrown at it, while the king sagged forward like a straw man.
The new queen could not see the face of the former king, and she was glad of that. He seemed barely conscious, and that too seemed to her to be a good thing. She could see Warwick’s face, as he led the procession with mock solemnity. It repelled her more than the savagery of the crowd.
It was necessary, of course, to humiliate the former king so that no one would ever think of him as king again. It was the obvious thing to do. It was less obvious what to do with him afterwards.
She thought about his wife, whose lady-in-waiting she had been. She was now in France, where she would receive news of her husband’s capture and imprisonment. Which would be another nail in the coffin of her hopes.
