“And if we fail?”
The Duke looked at her frankly and opened his hand like a man dropping something.
“Destruction: they will not show a tittle of mercy. If we fail now, we fail for good. Louis of France will do nothing more for us now your father’s gone. Burgundy’s handfast to York after all his shuffling. His clever envoy, de Commynes, saved Edward’s skin when he told Wenlock that lie that he was dead. Brittany will go where the cat jumps. The Scots are useless. One more defeat, and the red rose is bled white forever. I shall die in harness or on the scaffold; and I don’t mind that. It’s the way my father and my brother went to God, and I’ve been an exile long enough to like an English grave better than a Flemish bed. All I care for is to persuade our Queen that we’ve still hope. But you, Lady — it is different for you, harder: but I think if the worst came about — which God defend — you could find some means of grace with Edward, could you not? The world’s mad, as you say, and all changes are possible. Duke George is your brother-in-law. He and his wife would stand between you and the extreme of malice.”
She shook her head.
“The world’s mad, my Lord, and there’s an end of it. York or Lancaster, I feel there is nothing left now to call real.”
He did not answer, except to shake his head. They sat on in dark and firelight of the guest-hall, as though under the shadow of dark wings.
*
On Tuesday April the sixteenth of the year 1471, the Lancastrian army marched out of Cerne Abbas toward Exeter. Its leader was the Prince of Wales, Queen Marguerite’s son, but since he was without experience of warfare, the guidance of the campaign fell upon Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, John Courtney, Earl of Devon, their brothers Lord John Beaufort and Sir Hugh Courtney, Lord Wenlock, and Sir John Langstrother, Prior of the Knights of St. John, who were all soldiers. With them went Queen Marguerite and the young Princess of Wales, daughter of the Earl of Warwick now deceased. It had been a hard business to persuade Queen Marguerite to this step. She and Lord Wenlock, of whom the news of his great master’s death had made a frightened man, were for retreat to France: but Somerset and Devon had had their bellyful of exile. They argued till midnight round the large fire, swearing and pounding the chair-arms with their fists, until the thin-faced Queen agreed to draw Edward of York into the West so that the Calais fleet might make its raid on London. “I pray God speed us well,” she said in the end, with a dead look.
From Exeter they moved to Taunton first and gathered strength. Then their road swung North-east, and their troubles began. The mercenaries who had fought under Queen Marguerite ten years ago, the Scots and Bretons and Normans, got out of hand. At Wells they sacked the Bishop’s Palace and sang the old plunder-song of the Lancastrian army before Tow ton:
“Hop! Hop! Willikin, hop!
England is mine and thine”:
words that had caused the name of Lancaster to stink from Trent to Severn; and at Bath they had news that Edward was at Cirencester, camping three miles South of the town on the Bath road. Somerset blessed God then and would have made a stand, and the Prince spoke hopefully of meeting Edward himself in the battle, or at least his perjured brother-in-law George of Clarence: but the others were for retreat until Jaspar Tydder of Pembroke should have brought up his Welch to their support. They made for Bristol, and the news met them almost at the city gate that Edward had come down to Malmesbury; was shouldering them inch by inch over the Cotswolds and into the water of Severn. That was on Wednesday. On Thursday their outriders met and skirmished in the streets of Sodbury. “We must make for Gloucester,” Lord Wenlock urged, “and hold it till Pembroke can come up.” So they marched all that night. But in the morning the town gates were shut and the walls manned, and when they demanded entrance in the name of Queen Marguerite and her son, they were told that Gloucester was firm and fast to Duke Richard.
This was the ugliest setback they had had. Edward and his two brothers were very near them now, and it seemed their best hope to slip over Severn by the ford at Tewkesbury, some five hours away. They were very roadworn, and the foul weather, which had darkened the sky as though the devil did not mean that God should watch the fall of Kingmaker, had given place now to an unnatural early heat. Nevertheless, they reached the abbey town that afternoon and, sending the Queen and Princess to take shelter in a house of religion on the Worcester road, pitched camp and got some rest.
King Edward and his brothers had halted at the village of Cheltenham. They arrived before Tewkesbury on Saturday the fourth of May and deployed their forces in the order they had kept at Barnet; the Lancastrians were entrenched very securely upon the edge of a rise, having a broad trough of lower ground before them, and behind them the small River Tirle. Devon commanded their right, which lay nearest the ford and town of Tewkesbury, and the left was in the charge of Somerset, Lord Wenlock had the middleward. With him were the Prior of St. John’s and the young Prince of Wales.
King Edward had brought his great artillery: the guns Meg, Messenger, Dijon, Fowler of the Tower and Fowler of Chester, the bombardels, Edward and Richard and the iron guns Newcastle and London. He emplaced these opposite Somerset’s division, under the command of his young brother, Richard of Gloucester; and presently the Duke, annoyed by the sharp shower of balls and arrows that Duke Richard gave him, sent word to Lord Wenlock to advance in his support and charged the middleward of the enemy.
Lord Wenlock, sitting his horse upon the ridge with the pleasant scent of apple-orchards in his nostrils, could see the attack, in an oblique hurrying line of gleams and colours, streaming past below him. He could see also the ambush of spears which had been set by Edward in a little copse, emerge and take Somerset in his right flank and the Duke of Gloucester swing his line through a half-circle on his left to crush him. He remarked to the Prior of St. John’s that the time had come for disobeying orders: and after a while, Edmund of Somerset, having lost above two-thirds of his man, and his own brother among them, seemed to realise that he was at hopeless work, for he turned and hacked his way out of the press and rode, with tears streaming down his face, for his own centre. Finding Lord Wenlock there, with his reins still slack upon his horse’s neck, the smell of apples blowing coolly round him from the cider-orchards by the river, he swung his axe for the last time that day and struck the brains out of his skull.
King Edward and Duke Richard now advanced to fold up the Lancastrian force from right to left. The ford of Tewkesbury being a little one, only a few of those who ran got over it. Many were drowned by the mill, but most were herded along the bank, first of the Tirle and then of the Avon, until they came to a sunken meadow with a line of willows down its middle, which was called after that Saturday, the Bloody Meadow, and there killed miserably. King Edward, when he came to regain England, had told his followers to give no quarter, so the carnage in this place was absolute, and the Prince of Wales, who was the last of his house and fourth in descent from John of Ghent, was cut down with the rest, although he cried for succour to his brother-in-law, the Duke of Clarence.
Of those who got their bodies and lives over the Tewkesbury ford, most ran at once through the town and toward Wales. But the Duke of Somerset, the Prior of the Order of St. John and Sir John Fortescu, with twenty-three other knights and squires and some common people, threw themselves into the Benedictine Abbey which lay to the right of their road and dropped like hares in a forme among the Glare and Despencer tombs there. A priest, disturbed at his Mass, turned round with the ciborium in his hands to find that the house of God was full of bleeding men. He was an old, short-sighted priest, not much in touch with politics, and this invasion so startled him that he almost forgot what he was at. He came from his altar and stood in the pillared nave, wholly bemused, whilst his acolyte, who was only a boy and inquisitive, ranged about like a dog in a barn, peering at the grand gentlemen. Then a sudden and abominable tumult began outside. Men shouted brutally, there was a screech as though a spirit had been sent to its account from the Abb
ey’s very threshold, and the door was hurled open by an enormous figure, all blazing and splendid, that swung a yard and a half of steel in its hand and shouted: “Lancaster thieves; no quarter, men, kill the lot!” Its voice fetched echoes from the painted roof where angels played their drums and cornets to the honour of God. The men sprawling on the pavement, with blood oozing through their broken armour so that they looked like lizards that a cat had mauled, appeared to dwindle at the sound of it. The priest, who was learned, remembered a very terrible story in the Gesta Regum: how a woman of wicked life was buried in a certain church, in a stone coffin with chains round it, and fifty clerks sang Dirige and fifty priests said Masses for three nights for her; but on the third night a tall demon smashed the doors of the church to fragments with impetuous violence and, going arrogantly up to the coffin, plucked the poor woman out of it and carried her whither she would not. This thing, he thought, was happening again to-day. He knew that he was only a foolish old man, but, remembering what he had in the ciborium, he did not feel afraid. He walked up to the shining monster in the doorway and said boldly:
“My son, you will kill no one in this place.”
The immense figure — to the gold crest on its basnet, it was more than seven feet high — lifted a steel fist to knock its vizor up. The old priest saw that its azure surcoat was quartered in gold with leopards passant and fleurs-de-lys. Then he found himself looking up into a flushed face, straight-nosed, as smooth as a boy’s, in which the eyes blazed like the blued steel studs on the head of a mace. The loud voice said:
“Stand aside, father. You see who commands you now.”
“You see who commands you, my son,” answered the priest, feeling no fear. He lifted the ciborium and held it before King Edward’s eyes. “Are you not ashamed to be waving that sword in the presence of your Redeemer?”
The King stepped backward, and the panting and blood-splashed men in steel who had been crowding up behind him stopped their rush.
“Go out,” said the priest firmly, “and think how narrowly you have been spared from a terrible sin.”
King Edward crossed himself and mumbled. He looked sheepish.
“You have menaced Christ himself with that sword of yours. Now you shall kill no one who is here. I forbid it.”
“Aye,” muttered King Edward, like a man who does not understand clearly what is happening, “aye, anything.” He swung round and shouted angrily at the men behind him:
“Go on, the lot of you. Get out of here.”
The priest watched them go to the road again, shapes of flaring steel in sunlight, badges of the rose and sun, the silver boar, the black bull, the manche, the talbot. Monks peered from doorways and narrow windows at their retreat before issuing into the green-turfed garth to help one or two who had not retreated, but lay moving or quiet, where they had been overtaken. From the road, the din of pursuit and slaughter still went on, and there were sounds as though the doors of houses were being battered in.
The priest went back into the cool of the Abbey. He replaced upon the altar the body of God in its gold lodging.
Then he told the men who crouched, more of them than stood, among the tombs and pillars that King Edward had promised their lives to Christ, and they had nothing to fear.
The monks brought them food and drink, urging them timidly to lay off their hacked armour and let the infirmarian ransack their wounds. Two lay-brothers began to swab up the puddles of blood that had formed on the flagstones. The excited acolyte was cuffed over the ears and sent about his business. The broken men began to breathe as though life were flowing back into them after drowning. They ate and spoke to each other. But when they peered out of the door of the Abbey, they saw pikemen and archers posted on guard, wearing the Yorkist livery.
*
The hall where the Court sat was low and stuffy and hung with a rather bad threadbare arras of the Seven Worthies of Christendom. Sun came through the windows and painted stripes of dust along the air, and when a cart passed outside the noise was painful. Bored men-at-arms in scarlet, badged with the silver boar of Gloucester, were lined down the two walls. The chairs placed for the Earl Marshal and the Lord High Constable of England were behind a long table of pale oak at whose end a busy little fellow in a clerk’s gown was scribbling, taking no notice of anything, apparently.
Edmund Beaufort of Somerset, standing bareheaded among his fellow-prisoners, found his mind drifting. He knew remotely, a little incredulously, that he was probably within a few hours of his death. It did not move him; had been coming anyway, for so many years. The Beaufort destiny was to hold by Queen Marguerite and the red rose, and die. His brother had discharged the duty two days earlier, toppling sideways off his horse with a Yorkist spear-point under his arm. Now, he and his sisters and his cousin, the Lady Margaret, were the last Beauforts left alive. Distantly, the thought satisfied him: that his name would go out on the same breeze as blew out for good the cause and quarrel of the House of Lancaster.
Tired with standing, he shifted his feet. Pictures were forming in his mind: Wenlock’s face of sudden terror as he swung his axe at him, the ripple of light on lance-heads when the Yorkist ambush broke out of the wood to turn his flank, the smashed body of the Prince of Wales carried up into the Abbey from the Bloody Meadow after his first and last battle. He remembered a firelit room and a girl in a white coiffe, sitting very still in a big chair and whispering without tears; “Holy Mary, have pity on me.” That poor, brave, lovely child, he thought, what will become of her now, orphaned, widowed and outlawed at fifteen? I hope she need not be broken in our fall, the daughter of my old enemy, who forgave me so simply for the rough things I said to her. I hope her sister and her brother-in-law of Clarence will take care of her.
The men-at-arms grounded their demi-lances with a series of thuds and stood to attention, and the little scribbling clerk rose from his stool. The judges had entered, and now took their places. John Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, was Earl Marshal: a middle-aged man with a smooth shaven, square face that looked somehow as though it were made of iron and growing rusty. His expression was that of someone attending the funeral of a distant relative. Next to him, seeming tiny in the wide chair with carved arms, sat Richard Plantagenet, Duke of Gloucester, Earl of Carlisle, Lord High Admiral of England, Warden of the West Marches against Scotland, Chief Justice and Chamberlain of North and South Wales, Lord High Constable of England. He was very quietly dressed in black velvet slashed and reversed with violet silk and a black velvet beret with a jewel in it: but about his shoulders, like a bright noose, there flamed the Yorkist livery-collar of gemmed and enamelled gold. Edmund Beaufort’s eyes, once on him, did not move again. He was thinking: I can see the face of our destruction now. This is the little boy in his ’teens who persuaded Clarence to betray us, who broke Kingmaker’s ranks at Barnet and mine here on Saturday, to please his big brother. He has been Edward’s angel all these months past. It is fitting he should be the one to pronounce our death-sentence and put a keystone to his work.
The Earl Marshal began to read from a list of names the clerk had pushed across to him. He read badly, in a rough, loud voice that stumbled sometimes:
“Humphrey Audley, Edmund Beaufort calling himself Duke of Somerset, William Carey …”
Edmund Beaufort did not listen. Between his black headdress and the violet turnup of his doublet, the face of Duke Richard was astonishingly pale: not sick or haggard, but bloodlessly clear and white like limestone. His straight hair, combed until it gleamed, was a brown frame round it. He sat back in his chair with his chin dropped and his hands, as white too as a girl’s, lifted in front of him. The finger and thumb of the left hand drew ceaselessly up and down a large ring on the little finger of the right one. His eyelids were lowered over this play, and all that was visible of his face was a pair of delicate eyebrows, slanting a little upward toward the forehead, and with a scholar’s frown between them, and a tight, lipless mouth, muscled at the corners like a grown man’s. He is
not nineteen years old yet, thought Edmund Beaufort, our destroyer. Boys of his age are being birched to teach them Latin in the colleges and the novices’ schools. Yet he has known exile and intrigue and won battles, and he is sitting here to order my death.
“You and each one of you,” rasped the Earl Marshal, “are indicted and accused of the crime of high treason against our Sovereign Lord, Edward, by the Grace of God King of England and France and Lord of Ireland; forasmuch as you have wickedly, seditiously and maliciously levied war against our said Sovereign Lord in his dominions, entering the same in arms and with banners displayed; moving and seducing his lawful subjects to great riots, tumults and insurrections in divers places, to the jeopardy of their lives and against the peace of our said Sovereign Lord, whereby the prosperity of this realm was like to have been utterly destroyed; and treasonably, sinisterly and maliciously resisting in arms the loyal part-takers of our said Sovereign Lord, to the effusion of Christian blood and the great annoyance of the commonwealth; imagining and intending by this the destruction of our said Sovereign Lord’s most royal person and the subversion of this his realm. All of which you have done in the name and by the stirring of Henry of Lancaster, late calling himself King of England, and of Marguerite his wife, and with the aid and by the stirring of the ancient adversary of this realm, the King of France; contrary to the faith and allegiance which you and each one of you owe and should bear to our said most Sovereign Lord, King Edward.
“What have you to answer touching these charges?”
No one spoke. The trampling and gossiping of common people in the street came through the windows with the sunshine. Edmund Beaufort still watched Duke Richard. He had not moved whilst the indictment was being read; had continued, with a grave air and bowed head, to draw the shining ring up to the top joint of his little finger and shoot it down again. Once or twice, when the Earl Marshal stumbled in his reading, he wrinkled his forehead and sighed gently. A curious thought crossed Edmund of Somerset’s mind, drowsy with the foreknowledge of death: If we were not all certainly condemned already, if there were a loophole for us, I should be glad we had this boy for our judge. The Earl Marshal laid down his paper and coughed.
Under the Hog: A Novel of Richard III Page 12
