Under the Hog: A Novel of Richard III

by Patrick Carleton

  Lord Wenlock smilingly chattered on. It was extremely hard to believe that only six months had gone since he was firing cannon at his beloved Earl and refusing shelter to his daughter in her difficult hour.

  “Now we can hope there’ll be some honesty in England again. Really, you wouldn’t believe the state the country was in under the usurper. You wouldn’t believe it. If he’d only married a lady of royal birth, there might’ve been some hope for him; but that woman Elizabeth: well, I won’t offend your ears, eh? She and her brother, Lord Rivers, and Butcher Tiptoft and Sir John Fogg, they ruined him between them, treating the old nobility like dirt and pilling and polling the poor commons to get money for their luxuries and pageants: not good enough, by the Mass, not half good enough. I mean to say, there’s measure in everything, eh? You can’t do that sort of thing in England.”

  His close-set eyes flicked round the table, as though he wanted someone to agree with him. Several people had stopped eating to listen. Now, one after another, like hounds answering each other on a hot scent, they began to talk. Their faces reddened and their chins stuck out. From all parts of the table, injuries began to heap themselves upon King Edward and his wife’s relations. One fat little man in a fox-furred gown, whom de Commynes recognised as a London wool merchant, accused them of having ruined the Calais trade, and talked of a certain sum of 32,821 pounds which he seemed to think the King should have paid out of his own pocket. Several people mentioned the beheading of Welles and Dymmoke, and the man on his left had much to tell of the cruelties of Butcher Tiptoft as Earl-Marshal of England. It seemed that his habit of impaling upon pointed stakes the bodies of those whom he had hanged was disapproved of. The charges became wilder. Queen Elizabeth and her mother, the Dowager Duchess of Bedford, were called whores and witches. Why, said one man, rudely leaning forward with his knife upright in his hand, it had been proved by witnesses that the Duchess used little puppets of lead to beglamour the King into marrying her ditch-begotten daughter; and the Queen herself had a dubious sort of priest, one Friar Bungay, always with her, a necromancer and poisoner if ever there was one. Farther down the table someone laughed and said:

  “What of it? Edward could tell you more of necromancy himself than most wizards. Alchemy was all the rage when I was at Court last: everybody chattering about Azoth and red lions and lapis philosophorum. Pity he didn’t turn dross into coin instead of coin into dross when he issued the new money.”

  The first speaker grinned; showed ugly teeth. “Turning honest women into whores is more his mystery. Remember Elizabeth Lucy.”

  “Aye, you’ve hit it there, Ralph: except when he turned a whore into an honest woman. Remember Elizabeth Grey.”

  A great bark of laughter went up from the table. De Commynes looked down the line of talking faces, flushed, sweaty, vehement, and blinked his eyes. He was not easily startled by hypocrisy, which was his trade, but this loud sudden snarling at the heels of York went past his understanding. It was the ones who he had thought were most for Edward who now most abused him. Some of those there, no doubt, were genuine Lancastrians. More, and perhaps Wenlock at heart was among these, would shout for any King made by the Kingmaker. But the rest, surely, could only be trimming their sails to the day’s wind. Set Edward up again, Kingmaker or no Kingmaker, and they would shout for him. It seemed, too, that the chief hate of all of them was against the Queen. No words were hard enough for her and her family: arid yet, he thought, if it comes to that, no one ever has pretended that Queen Marguerite is a saint of God. One has heard tales about that lady. As for King Henry, everybody knows he is a very foolish man and nearly insane. Yet to listen to these English now, one would suppose it was Christ and the Virgin Mary that they had got to rule over them again. I never saw such changes in the world before.

  He asked Lord Wenlock:

  “No doubt all the nobility of England have joined my Lord of Warwick by now and declared for King Henry?”

  Wenlock wiped his mouth with a piece of bread.

  “All that matter, anyway: Thomas Stanley, one of the chief lords of the North, has joined him, and the Percys are quiet in Northumberland. Shrewsbury’s with him, too; and then there’re the nobles who’ve always been on the Lancastrian party: Pembroke, Oxford, the Courtneys; and his brother Montacute, of course.”

  “That will be very pleasant hearing for my Lords of Somerset and Exeter, who are the guests of my master the Duke just now. They’re true Lancastrians. The Duke sheltered them gladly in their time of adversity. Now I suppose they’ll be leaving us to take up their estates again. Well, it’s a pleasure to think we were able to do something for them.”

  Lord Wenlock looked queerly at him.

  “God’s bones, is that how his Grace the Duke looks at the matter?”

  De Commynes shrugged and helped himself to salted almonds.

  “But naturally: whomever you repute to be your King, we shall; and remember, the Duke himself is related to your noble King Henry, being, in effect, the great-grandson of John of Ghent, the founder of the house of Lancaster. I assure you he is very much pleased at the turn things have taken. Admittedly, he is married to the late King Edward’s sister: but, then, we must all serve the turn of the times, must we not? At the date of that marriage there seemed no hope of a Lancastrian revolution. But now it has pleased God to bring this about, we are very content with it.”

  “But here, just a moment, my dear sir; aren’t you forgetting that his Grace of Warwick has concluded an alliance with France? I mean to say...”

  “Not at all: it’s unfortunate that we are at war with King Louis ourselves just at present: but if it comes to treaties of alliance, isn’t there one between us and yourselves?”

  “But that was made in Edward’s time.”

  “What of it? I won’t rehearse the text to you. That would indeed be talking Latin to monks. But you’ll remember that, in consideration of past changes, we introduced the words with the King and the Kingdom. The treaty stands, my lord, York or Lancaster.”

  He took a long drink of the Moselle wine that was in front of him. I may snatch the chestnuts out of the fire yet, he thought. If only Edward were not with us it would be almost simple.

  “That’s very ingenious, Monsieur de Commynes. You have God by the toe and the devil by the nose, eh? But what about Edward? We all know he’s in Burgundian territory; sailed for the Low Countries as soon as Montacute declared for King Harry. You can’t expect us to be very interested in this talk about treaties whilst your Duke’s aiding and comforting our great enemy. We’re not fools, you know.”

  De Commynes set down his tankard, chose a piece of green ginger from a silver dish and chewed it slowly. He felt suddenly calm and at his ease, seeing as though by the white instant blink of lightning how all this jar and grind of opposites, Charles and Louis, York and Lancaster, the tangle of turncoat nobles and arrogant Queens, matchmaking, treaty-breaking, intrigue, annexation and war, could be for the moment be stilled and ordered by one lie from him. He looked coldly into Lord Wenlock’s unsure eyes and said:

  “Edward of York, my lord, will not be aided by my master or by any prince of Christendom. Edward of York is dead.”

  *

  On an afternoon in January of the year 1471, the month in which the great comet appeared, low and menacing like a blazing whip on the horizon, the Duchess of Burgundy sat down to write a confidential letter to her brother, the Duke of Clarence. The letter was discreet, saying only that her two other brothers, Edward King of England and Richard Duke of Gloucester, were in health and wished, despite the differences that had arisen between them, to be remembered fraternally to Duke George. For other news she besought him to give credence to the bearer, a trustworthy man, and she remained, ever praying that God would have him in keeping, his sister and hearty lover.

  She remained, in fact, with strung nerves, her temper worn: sister of one of the two most headstrong princes in Christendom and married to the other one. It was a marriage, of course, of pol
icy: no love in it. Charles the Hardy disliked the house of York; had asked for her hand only to prevent Edward, in the days when he was planted safely on his throne, from making alliance with King Louis. He would not have got her, for the matter of that, if any of the counter-suitors whom Louis, on his part, suggested had been worth Edward’s while. They were not, so two and a half years ago she had gone to Charles and Burgundy, instead of to Milan and Galeazzo Sforza or Piedmont and Prince Philbert or Savoy and Duke Amadis, as the Christian King had hoped she might. She had no objections; grew even fond of her ferocious, ugly husband as she might have been of some rather dangerous and imposing wild beast that one kept about the house to impress visitors. She taught him English, to which he took very kindly because of the new fields of blasphemy and obscenity that it opened to him; made him eat a conserve of roses with his breakfast every morning to keep his blood cool; listened to his one repeated doctrine that the great lords of the French provinces ought to be kings, not simply vassals of the crown of France; spent much of the money which he, as generous as he was brutal, poured into her lap, on books, tapestries and musicians. She knew him placidly for what he was: a man whose virtues had swollen to the proportion of vices, with whom courage was a disease, pride a madness and activity demented, a monstrous man-animal like a centaur. She was not in the least in love with him. The only persons she loved in the world were her three brothers. Neither, certainly, did she hate him. She hated only her namesake, the French princess who had been the scourge of England, Marguerite of Anjou. George and Richard had been children on the day of Wakefield. But she, like Edward, had been old enough to understand the story the survivors told: the brave soldier, her father, smashed down to death by the very weight of the armoured men who crowded round him, her delicate brother Edmund disarmed and on his knees before Black Clifford, having his throat cut like a calf, and their two heads, her father’s with a paper garland round it, rotting and stinking in rain and sun above a gate in York, lips shrivelling back to show the teeth, eye-sockets hollowed by crows’ greedy beaks, the skin turning from green to black. Her care was to see the house that were to thank for that stamped in the mud and her three brothers riding over them. She had seen it: and now, because Edward had married like a fool for love and made an enemy of the man who crowned him, it was all to do again. The following of the white rose had narrowed to a few dozen knights and noblemen hiding for their lives in English sanctuaries and the remnant of a court, without money, without dignity, living somehow on credit and faint hope, vivant de coeur, she said to herself in the language that was as usual now to her as her own, in the town of St. Pol in Artois: a court of exiles. Her brother was there, the Rose himself, Edward, with that huge and perfect body that moved with the sureness of a royal stag, the large, dark-blue eyes and the good, smiling mouth. He still smiled, although what he had lost was a kingdom; pretended that the greatest of his troubles was the coarse food he had to eat now after the meats cooked with twenty spices, the pike stewed in wine, the demaine bread and the foreign novelties, caviare and roast porcupine farced with truffles, that had been served every day of the week in his Palace at Westminster. He loved food and drink, hunting, fighting, clothes, books, music, and women above all things. There was little hunting and no fighting in Artois, and his clothes wore out. The idea of him, of all men, as a shabby dependant on a foreign government nagged his sister like an aching tooth. If ever a man had been designed by God to be a King it was the Rose of Rouen, the tallest and handsomest lad in his own kingdom, with charm in his voice and smile that delighted his worst enemies. He had killed the most deer, won the most fields and spoiled the most virginities of any man in a court of hunters, soldiers and wenchers; and now he was a conquered King. She thought of the people who were with him, loyal still: Lord Say, melancholy and preoccupied, Lord Hastings, gloomily distracting himself with the Artois peasant-girls. William Hastings was half French, one of Edward’s best friends, a dark-eyed, slim man with an affectionate manner, shrewder than one would think. If ever the world changed again, he would have more share in changing it than Lord Say; had still a following in England.

  Lord Rivers, Anthony Wydvylle, Queen Elizabeth’s brother, was the next of them. The Duchess frowned a little when she thought of him: his good clothes, neat little golden beard, manners that were almost too elegant, too easy. He was more than a fop, she thought: was one of the most learned nobles in Christendom. A philosopher, student of the classics, he accepted misfortune gently, with a smooth face. When Edward regretted the almond pastries and roast herons of Westminster, he answered that his own chief sorrow was for the beheading of the Earl of Worcester, who had been the best-read peer in England. The saints knew what had been done with his library. It seemed neither of them spoke of what must really smart in their minds: that Queen Elizabeth, alone in sanctuary whilst her enemies tramped the streets and manned the Tower, had given birth at long last to a son who might never see his father and never be called Prince of Wales or King of England. The Abbot and Prior of Westminster had stood godfathers, as they were accustomed in charity to do for poor and nameless children born in that place. Well, be it so, the Duchess thought. Neither the Queen nor any other Wydvylle had much room to grumble at a revolution their own too much pride had brought about. Let Queen Elizabeth, suckling her boy in the stinks and shadows of Broad Sanctuary, and Anthony Rivers reading his book in a tilt-roofed attic in St. Pol, be grateful for the fat past years they had enjoyed. Much more than enough that a Plantagenet had ever mated with them: the badge of the old Duke of York had been a falcon, a bird that does not foul its own nest.

  Of the other English at St. Pol, two likely-looking East-Anglian knights, Sir Robert Chamberlaine and Sir Gilbert Debenham, attended chiefly on the Duchess’ youngest brother, Duke Richard of Gloucester. Richard had changed more than Edward, she thought, in the last three years. He had ridden beside her to Margate, a pale-faced, chétif little boy of fifteen, thin as a lizard and not five feet high, to see her aboard the New Ellen when she sailed for Burgundy. He was still pale and had grown hardly at all; looked a shade ridiculous beside Edward; but he had seen his first field last year against the Lincolnshire rebels, and blooded himself. Edward had made him Warden of the West Marches against Scotland afterward. That post was no one’s plaything. He had pleasant manners, more reserved than Edward’s; was quiet; sat patiently and attentively in the background whilst the others talked, keeping his grey eyes on their faces. He had retained though, the Duchess noted, a boy’s nervous habit of sliding his dagger up and down in its sheath, or twiddling a ring on his finger: shy, probably. He told nothing of what his thoughts were in this new world: but she was sure he had thoughts. At least he was a better brother than George; devoted, she guessed to Edward; might come in useful one day.

  Absently, she scribbled at the top of her letter to Duke George the one word Jesus, half as a symbol of good faith, half as a talisman. The time had come for them to risk something. Even her husband was beginning to see that. He had only had one interview with Edward at St. Pol. Their servants quarrelled: scufflings in passages, groups standing apart in antechambers, muttering and looking at each other under their eyebrows. Edward used all his charm: his laugh that could make any girl forget what her mother told her; boyish, slightly uncertain gestures of hands which he kept so clean that it was impossible to believe he had killed dozens of men with them; lively humorous talk; caressing looks. Duke Charles, with pimples all over his face and half his front teeth missing, looked scarcely human in his company; told her afterwards that he was a fool.

  “They’ve kicked him out. Why the devil should I sweat my skin to put him back again, that playboy, that long-legged fop? He should have held on tight to his crown while he had it. I tell you frankly, if I can come to an understanding with the Lancastrians, I’ll see him to twenty thousand basketsful of black devils before I’ll help him. Virtue of God, I’m a Lancastrian myself if it comes to that. It’s only that damned fellow Warwick I don’t trust.”


  It looked at first as though the understanding with the Lancastrians might come about, too: days when the Duchess felt numb and out of hope; knelt in her oratory, praying in anger and not devotion, whilst the Duke held conference with his Lancastrian guests, the Dukes of Exeter and Somerset, who were getting ready to leave for England. They, it seemed, trusted Kingmaker about as well as Duke Charles did. Edmund Beaufort of Somerset had lost his father in the first battle at St. Albans, and his elder brother had been beheaded by the brother of Kingmaker, the Marquis Montacute. “These things,” he said drily to Duke Charles, “stick in a man’s memory”; and he had not forgotten, either, who it was that had led King Henry bound through Cheapside, shouting down from his saddle to the peering people in the shop-doors: “Here’s the traitor.” Henry Holland of Exeter said that, for his part, he had no desire for a French alliance. He and his cousin of Somerset, when they were home again, would use their influence against Kingmaker. The devil, having got into heaven, was being cold-shouldered by the saints.

  Unfortunately, they were a little late in starting. Kingmaker, doubtless mindful of the parable which promises to those who have worked but one hour in the vineyard the same reward as to them who have borne the heat and burden of the day, waited neither for them nor for Queen Marguerite before calling a Parliament. His brother, the Archbishop of York, opened the deliberations with an eloquent sermon on a text of Jeremiah: Revertimini ad me filii revertentes, ego enim vir vester. Edward of York was declared, obviously enough, a rebel and traitor to his sovereign lord, King Henry VI, now restored by God’s especial providence to his rights and dignities. His acts were annulled and damned and his Dukedom of York presented to his brother Duke George. A ten years’ treaty was ratified with King Louis. King Henry himself did not take any very active part in these proceedings, though some of the sounds which escaped his small, protruding lips were understood to express his gratitude to God and the Earl of Warwick. The Earl talked to the French ambassadors about sending over two or three thousand men to Calais as an advance-guard. He, himself, would follow with ten thousand good archers and as many levies as could be raised, and France and England would take order with the Duke of Burgundy. His share of the proceeds, it was understood, was to be the counties of Zeeland and Holland.