Under the Hog: A Novel of Richard III

by Patrick Carleton

  “I do believe he is, your Grace.”

  “I have more reason to speak well of him than of many others, my own relations not excepted. He was always a friend to my crown; and he hates Burgundy.”

  The King’s chin had sunk down onto his chest. He twisted his long fingers together for a little. Then he threw his head up and his laughter, like something being torn apart, screeched round the room.

  “Charles the Hardy, Charles the foolhardy, Charles the ass’s head! De Concressault, listen now! It’s a comedy. In God’s name it is. Charles means to hammer his coronet into a crown, does he, and with my France for his anvil? Yes, and Charles perfectly loves the house of Lancaster: but when Edward of York climbed up to be the King of England, Charles saw an ally and put his love of Lancaster in his pocket. Didn’t he marry Edward’s sister? Didn’t he invest Edward with the Golden Fleece and let Edward invest him with the Garter? Qui fodit foveam incidet in earn. That’s Holy Writ, de Concressault. The man who digs a ditch falls into it. At the moment when he says: ‘Now I have England at my elbow,’ I put my hand out, I give a push, and down goes the house of York he hates and flatters, and up goes the house of Lancaster he loved and betrayed. And now who’s Lancaster’s ally but I who put them on their throne again? And when Charles and I reckon up our accounts at last, whose elbow does England stand at? not Burgundy’s.”

  He was leaning forward in his settle now and his hands were wagging. A glint of saliva appeared at the corner of his mouth.

  “It’ll be my England, de Concressault, an England that I call the tune in: not a strong kingdom any more. They need not help me. What must be certain is that they cannot help Charles; and with a madman, a child, a Frenchwoman and my loyal friend ruling in it, Lord God, I shall see England weak again.”

  He thrust to his feet. There was a slither and slur in the rushes and then he was kneeling at the prie-dieu, his eyes fixed on Christ and a babble of prayers starting from his lips.

  *

  Isobel, Duchess of Clarence, was embroidering with threads of several colours her father’s arms, Kingmaker’s. She had finished already the fesse and crosslets of Beauchamp and the Clare chevrons; was at work now on the three lozenges gules of Montacute. Anne, her young sister, was using only blue and gold threads for the leopards and lilies of England that would be quartered with the Neville blazons when she married the Prince, Queen Marguerite’s son. The tapestry was to be part of her trousseau. They sat in their room at Angers, side by side, with the heavy cloth across their knees, and stitched. A French maid watched them from a window-seat; bored, fiddled with the ribbons on her lute. It was July and hot, bees fooling about the room noisily and butting against the flowers on the high oak table. The Duchess felt heavy and wretched again that morning, four months after she had had the birth-pangs in a little stinking ship rolling first one rail under and then the other outside Calais harbour. Everything had begun with messengers from her father coming to her husband’s castles before sunrise, having travelled by night, and her husband writing with his secretary, Mr. Stacy, the Oxford bachelor, and drinking more than ever, clashing the lid of his pot down and asking her how she would like to be Queen of England. Treason was what that was, and she knew it. George was her father’s choice of a husband, and not hers, but she was fond of him. He and his young brother Richard and she and Anne had been children together. It gave her a little cold, like a knife’s slippery cold, inside herself when she thought of what was done to traitors. They were not hanged till they were dead, but cut down alive, unmanned, gutted; and what had been inside them was burnt on the scaffold. A hangman who knew his job could get the tripes into the fire before his man had died. She did not want that to happen to George; only a silly boy. It was so stupid, anyway, that he should want to go rampaging about, trying to be a King and making war on his big brother, the Rose of Rouen, Edward. Edward was a giant and had fought seven pitched battles without losing one of them; and even her father said George might be able to handle a sword, but he was no soldier; and neither did his hopes last long. She could remember, in March, him and her father in the castle at Leicester, looking up every time they heard hooves, and the wind blowing to deafen them, and a man coming at last, riding with his left foot out of the stirrup, hose of his left leg black, blood-stiffened, holding on by his horse’s mane in the courtyard, shouting between grunts up to the window they stood in: “ … all over … the big guns … not a hope … Sir Robert, he’s taken … and her father looking at George with a stretched smile lifting his lips at their ends. “Unless Stanley helps us now it must be Calais. I am at least sure of Wenlock.” They had gone South and West and there had been torment at sea, and Lord Wenlock not letting her land, sending out to their ship only wine and a midwife and word to her father that he was holding Calais for King Edward against rebels and traitors. People said the Duke of Burgundy had bribed him to do that. At Amboise she suckled her boy whilst George and her father talked to the King of France, and one night George had come back in a rage and got drunk, making a noise as he stumbled about the room. He spilled wine and said: “But I’ll never give up my right. I’ll renounce God first,” cursing King Louis and Queen Marguerite. It had astonished her, too: her father talking about Holy Harry as though he were the true King after all: but she understood that it was the only thing left for him. Edward in England was putting people to the brake, hanging them up by the hands and forcing their teeth out, to discover all her father’s secrets. They would never be friends again: and now Anne would be Queen of England one day. When they had come to Angers and met Queen Marguerite there, her father had gone down on his knees to her, kneeling for a quarter of an hour, with King Louis’ courtiers and the Lancastrian nobles he had chased away from England looking on. The Queen had forgiven him and he had done formal homage to her; sworn to be a good faithful subject until death to her, whom he had fought against, and to Holy Harry, whom he had arrested as a traitor, and to the Prince, whom he had called a bastard. It seemed like magic to Isobel. The magician was the shuffling little French King in scrubby clothes with the holy medals in his hat. He had worked it.

  She looked at Anne sewing a royal golden leopard on its azure field: small face rather pale except over the cheekbones, lips very red. Not really beautiful, she thought. She had their father’s forward chin, though her nose was short. Her hair was fair-brown, hidden now under a square coiffe, white gauze edged with silver. She sat and frowned a little with her plucked eyebrows over the stitching. Her hand quickly went up and down.

  How will she like being married, Isobel wondered — and to Marguerite’s boy? It seems only the other day that she and little Richard and George and I were all playing ball together at Warwick. She was always so fond of poor little Richard. Now I’ve married George and she’s going to marry the Prince of Wales (it does seem odd to have to call him that again), and our husbands are going to make war on Edward and Richard and probably kill them. It is all tangled, like threads a cat has played with. The cat is King Louis. We are both fond of Edward and Richard ourselves. When Holy Harry dies — and I mustn’t call him that any more either — she will be Queen. It is agreed, too, that if she and the Prince die before us without any children, George is their heir: so I may be Queen, too, in the end. I don’t think that I want to be.

  “Isobel.”

  “Yes, Anne dear.”

  “Do you think we shall have to see the Queen again to-day?”

  “I don’t know. I expect not. She’ll be in council all day with father and the others, most likely.”

  “Thank God.”

  Anne went on with her sewing. She had not looked up to speak. Isobel chose a green thread with which to begin the eagle displayed of Monthermer, and thought of Queen Marguerite. She was thin; had black eyes and grey hair; looked at one as though she meant to bite. Her voice was harsh, as though she had been screaming and shouting all her life. When anything was wrong she stamped her foot hard. She had her pages whipped very often and looked on whilst it was
done. They said she had been beautiful when King Henry married her. Her son was good-looking after a fashion certainly, but very sulky, and with her temper. It would have done no harm if she had whipped him sometimes and let the pages be. He had never fought an action in his life, but talked about nothing but war and chopping heads off, as though everything were in his hands and he were the god of battles, or safely on his throne, at least.

  Anne asked:

  “Did George tell you anything last night of when they mean to sail to England?”

  “No; only something about going over with father first, and you and mother staying behind with the Queen.”

  Anne left her needle in the tapestry and looked up. “Staying behind?”

  “Only until the fighting’s over: that’s what he said. I don’t know if he knows anything about it really.”

  “He must know that much.”

  “Father tells him very little now. He complains of it.”

  “Well, it was different when we thought he was going to be King. You can’t think father would want to tell him things, and now there’s no cause why he should. I must ask father. There’s no other way then.”

  “I shouldn’t, dear.”

  “Mother Mary, it’s only in nature that I should want to know what will become of me, left alone with that Queen.”

  “You’ll have our mother: and you’ll be married by that time. Father will never invade England till that’s done.”

  “Yes, he means to be a King’s father-in-law, fall back, fall edge. Oh, God, if Edward had married one of us we should never have been in this case. He might have done, for the matter of that.”

  “We were never good enough for him, I suppose, my dear. He was fierce with anger when I married George.”

  “As though that were monstrous: I can’t see.”

  “We did always say when we were playing that George was my bridegroom, and …”

  “And Richard was mine: well away, he won’t be, it seems. The world’s changed again.”

  Anne got up; looked tall for fourteen in her blue narrow mantle with silver edgings. She put her end of the tapestry onto her chair and walked to a window; propped her right fist on the edge of the embrasure, level with her head.

  “I’m tired of sewing. I wish we had a fool here or a juggler. Do you remember how Edward always loved our fool at home? That was something about Edward. He was always merry.”

  “And he did look a King in the beautiful clothes he wore: not like …”

  Isobel remembered the French maid, whom she suspected of knowing more English than she owned to; did not go on. Anne twisted her short, bright lips down oddly at the corners.

  “He’d have made you a better husband than George, Isobel; and if he’d married you, our father would still be in favour.”

  “My dear Anne, he never thought of me: but why he need have married that harlot …”

  “Go on. There’s one blessing in having turned Lancastrian. We can say what we like about Elizabeth Wydvylle.”

  “Yes, she’s the root of our ills.”

  “I tell you again, Isobel: you should have married Edward.”

  “Oh, I’ve no quarrel with George.”

  “There are folk in plenty who’d call George a traitor.”

  “And our father.”

  “That’s another tale. George is Edward’s brother.”

  “God have mercy on all sinners.”

  “Amen.”

  Isobel stopped sewing too, and thought of George and Edward and Cain and Abel. But if it came to that, she thought, her Uncle Montacute was against her father. Everyone was against everyone in England. Edward himself was known for breaking his word. He had headed Dymmoke and old Welles after swearing their safety; and his father, the old Duke, had broken his oath to King Henry. There was nothing sure in England; and after all the battles and turning of colours everyone had a grudge against everyone else now. There were revenges. Edmund, Earl of Rutland, George’s and Edward’s brother, had begged for his life, they said, at the battle of Wakefield. He was only seventeen. But Black Clifford, who had him down, said: “By God’s blood, your father killed mine and so will I you.” They were all bitter now, and perjured too, most of them. No one cared more for his side than himself in England. God have mercy on all sinners, then.

  Anne touched the French girl on the shoulder. She said:

  “Chante donc, Yvonne. Nous nous ennuyons tant.”

  Yvonne came to life: flash of her teeth in her white, quickly-smiling face; took her lute up. She fretted with the strings a little, nodding and working her eyebrows. Then her face stilled and she began to sing in a good treble:

  “De triste coeur chanter joyeusement

  Et rire en deuil e’est chose fort à faire,

  De son penser montrer tout le contraire,

  N’issir doux ris de doulent sentiment.

  “Ainsi me faut faire communement,

  Et me convient, pour celer mon affaire,

  De triste coeur chanter joyeusement.”

  Anne interrupted her.

  “Qu’est-ce que c’est cette chanson?”

  Yvonne turned her head sharply; looked put-out.

  “C’est un vieux rondeau de la noble dame Christine, dite de Pisan, Mademoiselle. J’espère bien qu’il vous plaît.”

  “I never heard of her before,” said Anne.

  “She was a learned lady, very skilful in rhetoric and suchlike,” Isobel told her.

  “And very unhappy as well, I think.”

  *

  Mist, Calais, October, thin drizzle dropping down into stinking, narrow streets and the wind cold: a fair-haired young man in good clothes was peering at the door of his inn, remembering words shouted as he and his people came into the town: “Burgundian whorsons.” The inn-door looked odd; was scribbled over with crosses and words in two languages. The young man spoke French, as well as Flemish, from birth and

  Chaqu’un Bourguignon est marry

  De la bonne alliance

  Accordée au bon roy Harry

  De par le roy de Fraunce.

  helped him to guess at:

  Therle of Warrewyke in a happy tyde

  wth the ffrensshe kynge is wel allyed.

  The crosses, he supposed, were for the Neville blazon of gules a saltire argent. Slantingly, in a corner, to leave no doubt, someone had scrawled:

  godde bles Kynge herry,

  God curse King Harry,

  was what the young man thought; and shrugged his fur cloak more warmly about his shoulders. His names were Philippes de Commynes and Philippus van den Clyte. At twenty-four he was Charles of Burgundy’s most trusted ambassador already; wished at the moment heavily that he were not: looking up trouble on his Duke’s behalf for King Louis was one pair of shoes; but coming to Calais in the foam of an English revolution when Burgundy had backed the wrong side was another, and pinched. He had come on official business often before, and this was the first time he had found it necessary to ask for a passport. He had it with him, and Duke Charles’ ring too, that he was to show if the English put him in prison. The Duke had almost begged him, using filthier language even than usual, but keeping his temper, to undertake this mission, saying he had need to be served in the matter: which was all very fine and large; but where, de Commynes wondered, would he be, ring and passport or no ring and passport, if a couple of drunken English soldiers met him in a dark alley and decided that there was no need of Burgundians about the place, seeing the house of Lancaster was up again and Charles the Hardy was allied with the house of York? He would be in a hole and, the next thing, a hole would be in him. Four years ago he had taken part in the battle against King Louis at Montlhéry; could still remember the look of pikes, their steel heads showing up on the wooden dark shafts, levelled at one; how a man kicked when an axe had gone into his brain; and the noise a sword-stroke made: short, heavy hiss in the air like a cat spitting. That was a startling sound. Remembering it, he overcomingly felt the sensation of a dagger lift
ed up, now, for a blow, behind his shoulder-blades; looked round with a twitch. There were only his own people at his back. They stood in the drizzle and pulled their furs high under their noses. The house opposite was blind, dull, with heavily overleaning gables, a pair of gilt shears swinging from them for a sign. A lean pig grouted in the rubbish of the kennel. Farther up the street a hawker was shouting flatly: “Que voulez-vous, que voulez-vous. Whaddyou lack, say, whaddyou lack?” His voice was dreamlike and profoundly desolate. De Commynes told one of his men to knock on the door.

  The landlord, who was anglicised French, scrubby and talkative, showed them their rooms. Good ones: but they had the chalk scratchings round the doors again. The sight of the sprawled white X and the easy rhyme, repeated in both languages, of France and alliance began to irritate him furiously. Belly of God, he thought, there’s no need to remind me that they’re in alliance: I am in no danger of forgetting it. He pointed to the devices and asked the landlord sharply who wrote them there. The fellow showed him an arch silly smile, moving his shoulders, eyelids and eyebrows all at the same time.

  “C’est les gens de la ville, mon Seigneur.”

  “Mais pourquoi, en nom Dieu?”

  “Ah, très puissant, illustre Seigneur, ne sais rien, moi; mais c’est que les pie tons du tres illustre Comte de Varrouic sont venus ici, les pieds blancs, et maintenant on dit partout: Vive King ’Arry.”

  “Merci, va-t-en.”

  Thinking, he walked about the room. His valets knelt on the floor to unpack his boxes. Yes, they would all have to say for the moment: Vive King ’Arry. Bitterly he reviewed his dealings of the last five months with John, Lord Wenlock, Governor of Calais, Knight of the Garter, and the shiftiest time-server, he had always suspected and was now certain, between London and Byzantium. When the news came to Duke Charles that Kingmaker, running from the hornet’s nest he had stirred up in England, had been refused at Calais, he was very well pleased. Kingmaker, he had always maintained, had only two ideas in his head. One was to marry his daughters royally; and that did not matter to anybody. The other was an alliance between England and France. That mattered more than a rush to the Duke. He packed de Commynes off to Calais to kiss Wenlock ceremoniously on both cheeks, offer him a pension of a thousand crowns from the Ducal treasury and desire him to continue that affection which he had already showed to King Edward. De Commynes tapped his lip with his finger as he remembered the scene in the Hall of the Staple on a fine June day when, kneeling before him as the Duke’s proxy, Wenlock put his hands between his own and swore that he would serve Edward IV, by God’s grace King of England and France, against all opposers whatsoever and be a true friend of Edward’s noble and illustrious brother-in-law, Charles, Duke of Burgundy, Brabant and Luxemburg, Count of Flanders, Holland and Zeeland. There had been the whiff of a rat in it, even then: a score or so of Warwick’s retainers still in the town and drawing their pay from Wenlock, and Wenlock looking sideways, and hinting that if the Earl sailed back to England again, well, let him: no need for the fleet Charles was fitting out at Boulogne to engage him in the Channel. Edward could crush him as soon as he landed: oh, easily. Then the news came, and made the Duke throw the plate he was eating from out of the window, that Louis had managed, by the help of the devil presumably, to patch something up between Warwick and Marguerite. Duke Charles ranted and cursed till it seemed all the pimples on his face would jet fire like volcanoes. If the Earl of Warwick, he said, had turned Lancastrian, then he fully expected to meet the devil in heaven; and he wrote to his brother-in-law that the age of miracles had begun again and that Warwick with a French fleet would invade England as sure as the Mass, before autumn. It did not seem that Edward of York had taken much notice; but the Duke was right this time, which was more than he always was. De Commynes himself had been in Calais when the world heard how Kingmaker and his son-in-law had crossed the Channel whilst the Burgundian navy that should have stopped them was stormbound; had landed at Dartmouth along with Jaspar Tydder, Earl of Pembroke, and John Vere, Earl of Oxford, the two best soldiers among the Lancastrians; had raised all the West country; had camped within three leagues of the King. There were worse rumours than that, but wild ones. He flogged his horses from Calais to Boulogne, and a frightened man in an ante-room caught at his sleeve.