Under the Hog: A Novel of Richard III

by Patrick Carleton

  “Does any of you deny bearing arms against our Lord King in the field here on Saturday: No? Then we need not call witnesses. Does any of you make exception to the tenor of this indictment?”

  Edmund Beaufort recognised the voice of young James Gower, the Prince of Wales’ swordbearer.

  “I plead the King’s pardon.”

  The Duke of Gloucester, without moving his chin from his chest, lifted his eyes. In doing so, he immediately altered the whole character of the scene; made it alive. His eyes, narrow and set far apart, were a pale, blazing grey, and seemed to take the light like the diamond in his cap. A deep, straight wrinkle, underlining each of them, aged his face as much as the stiff muscles round his mouth.

  “What’s that?” said the Earl Marshal. “Pardon? This is the first I’ve heard of it. Mr. Gatesby, have you any writing of pardon from the King’s Grace to these accused?”

  The little clerk shuffled his papers with quick hands; looked up.

  “I have letters of pardon under Privy Seal for Sir John Fortescu and others whom we dealt with earlier, my lord.”

  “Yes, yes, we know all about that: but these prisoners, man.”

  “I have no writing concerning them but the indictment and your Grace’s commission to put them on their assize.”

  “Just what I thought: we’ve seen all the pardons there are. You, fellow, can you produce exemplification under seal of this pardon?”

  James Gower’s voice quickened. He began to stammer.

  “The pardon and assurance of safety he swore to the priest that turned out at his Mass, and the sacrament in his hands, when King Edward came with his sword into the church; required him by the virtue of the sacrament to kill none of us that were there: we stayed still in the church on trust of that pardon when we might have gone and saved our lives.”

  The Earl Marshal pulled his lip. Then he turned and bowed very respectfully to the Duke of Gloucester.

  “I don’t see how we can take this into account, your Grace.”

  The Duke stopped playing with his ring, and without moving his curious eyes from the prisoners, began to speak. His voice was as unexpected as his look. It was low-pitched, gentle, extraordinarily winning, and at the same time distant, like a clerk’s voice reading the Gospel. If there was an emotion in it, it was a kind of frigid tenderness.

  “I fear you have cheated yourselves into a cruel hope. My royal brother’s oath, which he respects, was no more than to refrain from bloodshed in the church precincts. His Grace is not a tyrant who takes pleasure in homicide, and all those who by possibility could be admitted to mercy and been so admitted. But there was no talk of general pardon. How could there be?”

  Suddenly and disconcertingly, James Gower began to yell:

  “Devils, devils and pledge-breakers, you’re going to murder us, and your lying King’s lying word’s worth nothing. He swore it on the sacrament, I tell you. He swore it on the body of Jesus Christ. He’ll be damned for this. You’ll all be damned. Why isn’t he here now? He’s afraid to face us: liar and coward and murderer. You, Richard of Gloucester, he’s sent you to judge us to death because he’s afraid to look at us himself. Are you going to take your brother’s sins on you? Take care of your precious soul, Dickon of Gloucester, or you’ll serve your brother over the edge of hell.”

  The Duke did not open his mouth or move his eyes; but the Earl Marshal, as though he had forgotten his office and remembered that he was a Mowbray speaking to a Lancastrian, shouted:

  “Shut your goddamned mouth, you traitor.”

  The Duke lifted his hand at that, frowning a little. Then he said more gently than ever:

  “Sir, will you not be brave? Bravery is better for you than hope now. You spoke of murder; but in neither God’s law nor man’s is the execution of a rebel against the King’s crown called murder. My brother is King of England; and consider what in the last twenty years has been the portion of England: wars and commotions and feigned rumours, division of county against county and hundred against hundred, continual effusion of blood. That is what comes when the crown of a kingdom is in dispute. That is what my brother’s Grace is utterly determined to end: and it shall end. If you talk of murder, think of the poor commons who lived easily and were agreed until you called them from the sheepwalk and the plough-tail and sent them to their deaths in your quarrel with us. They were murdered; and you know in your souls that if we spared you now you would only wait your day to begin this madness of civil war again. Your Prince is dead. The house of Lancaster is broken down, and whoever raises it again must do so on a great heap of poor men’s bodies. You shall not do it. We must have peace; and that there can never be in England in your lifetimes.”

  He stood up abruptly and uncovered his head. The Earl Marshal rose beside him, over-topping him. The loud breathing of the prisoners could be heard.

  “You and each one of you are guilty of rebellion and high treason against our Sovereign Lord, King Edward, and the sentence of the court is:

  “that after time given for the shrift of your souls, upon this present day, you be had severally to a scaffold in the market-place of this town and your heads there smitten from your bodies, and all your lands, titles and estates be escheat and forfeit into the hands of the King’s Grace: but though it is in the authority of this court to see your bodies dismembered and your quarters hung upon the highway to the admonition of ill-disposed persons, nevertheless, the King’s Grace, of his mere mercy, is pleased to grant that after execution you shall be buried according to the usage of Holy Church, without any quartering or division of your limbs.”

  And so, thought Edmund Beaufort, we come to the end.

  *

  “What I can’t for the life of me see is why that little fox John Morton, that little Rector of St. Dunstan’s or what he calls himself, has to be left alive. Make a clean sweep, I would. Everybody knows he was the whole wits of the Lancastrians, he and Fortescu.”

  “Wits without hands aren’t dangerous. I’d never head Fortescu, anyway: such a distinguished old fellow, great scholar. As to Morton, if he can see flies in milk he’ll forget the red rose and make himself useful now. He’s a learned man, too.”

  “Scholars and priests: I never did like scholars.”

  “We know that, Thomas. We know that.”

  “Well, I was never one for learning: waste of dear time. What’s a man want with books when he can get a lance in his hand?”

  “You mustn’t talk like that, Thomas, or you’ll offend Anthony. Our Anthony’s a great man in a tournament as well as a scholar, remember. Will, wake up and give me a drink. No, not the claret, man: can’t you see I’m drinking hippocras? You know, you fellows, what I really want is a woman. God’s blessed Lady, it’s good to see London girls again after those ugly bitches in Artois: faces like mules, and stinking of sweat and garlic to knock you down. I swear I’d ’ve taken a vow of chastity if we’d stopped there much longer.”

  “Talking of women …”

  “Yes, let’s talk of women. I summon Will here to tell us about his first woman. Search your mind, Will. Cast your memory back and count on your fingers. Well, no, not your fingers, perhaps: try the hairs of your head. How old were you?”

  “These are the secrets of the confessional.”

  “Don’t talk about confessionals. It upsets Thomas. How old were you, Will?”

  “I was fourteen, and she said she’d tell her mother.”

  “And did she?”

  “No, I found out afterwards she was an orphan. That taught me never to take women at their word.”

  “Oh, Solomon!”

  “Have you ever done penance for adultery, William?”

  “Yes, whenever my wife got to hear of it.”

  “Talking of adultery, I wonder if that story’s really true. I’d like to know that.”

  “What story? If it’s one of Will’s, it isn’t.”

  “About Marguerite’s son being a bastard.”

  “Why, holy God, surel
y there’s no doubt about it.”

  “I never heard it questioned before now.”

  “Not a doubt, man.”

  “Well, since you ask, Anthony, I tell you plainly that for my part I’m not sure. Warwick began the tale, and he swore to me that he had proof of it. But didn’t Warwick marry his own daughter to that same bastard when he thought it paid him? He was a deep one, Warwick. If he ever had those proofs he told me of, we can be sure that he destroyed them then. Marguerite had carnal doings with Suffolk, and Wiltshire too. I’m sure of that: a French whore. They say when Harry of Windsor heard she was with child he counted on his fingers and said it must be by the Holy Ghost: but Harry of Windsor’s mad. We’ll never know the truth; and the brat’s dead and gone now.”

  “Aye, killed flying: and that’s not like a grandson of Harry of Monmouth.”

  “It saved the headsman a job, at least. There’s the end of Lancaster.”

  “Amen.”

  “Not quite the end, your Grace: Have you not heard who the rebels say is heir to the crown now?”

  “Good God, I’m no chronicler. The Staffords trace their descent from Edward III, I believe.”

  “It is not Henry Stafford, though.”

  “Well, who, then?”

  “Jaspar of Pembroke’s nephew, Henry Tydder, son of the old Earl of Richmond and Lady Margaret Beaufort.”

  There was a bellow of laughter. Edward IV of England leaned his huge body back in his chair and beat his hands against his silk-sheathed knees. He jerked his head, and the sun from the window sent snakes of light twisting among his copper-coloured hair and made the jewels on his chest and neck flash. His laughter was delightful, as true as a child’s, compelling to anyone who heard it. The richly-dressed noblemen of the Cabinet Council — the unconstitutional small body that, much more than the official Privy Council, ruled England — clapped their hands and held their sides. Even the young Duke of Gloucester, that precociously straight-faced boy, chuckled with the rest. Lord William Hastings, the Court Chamberlain, who had told the news, made a brief effort not to applaud his own joke and then succumbed.

  “A Welchman,” gasped Edward presently, “a Welchman to rule England: by God’s blessed Lady that’s rich. Oh, that’s wonderful. I suppose the eldest sons of his royal house’ll be styled Prince of England. Where’s the capital of the realm to be: Conway or Caernarvon? Oh Jesus, Will, you mustn’t say these things. I shall hurt myself. A Welchman: and what after him: a Scot perhaps?”

  Duke Richard of Gloucester, with a suggestion of colour in his usually bloodless face, asked:

  “You’re not serious, surely, Hastings?”

  “As the Gospel of the Mass, your Grace.”

  “But for God’s love, Will,” said the King, “they can’t think they’ve any law or reason behind this moonshine concoction.”

  “I understand, your Grace,” said Hastings in the hushed voice of a man about to giggle, “that the main point is that this Henry Tydder — who is a child about ten years old, by the way — is descended on his father’s side from Harry of Monmouth’s widow, Queen Katherine, and that his mother’s a Beaufort, and so descended from John of Ghent.”

  “But all that amounts to,” said the King with a kind of strained reasonableness, “is that he’s descended from two several sets of bastards. His grandfather, that old fellow I had the head off after Mortimer’s Cross, was never married to Queen Katherine. Their children were got in open adultery: and as for the Beauforts, the whole world knows they’re bastards. Good God, the thing’s unheard of. The claim of Lancaster to the crown is false enough, but if it were as strong as mine and my father’s it would do this Welch brat no good. He’s no more Harry of Windsor’s heir than I’m the Duke of Muscovy’s.”

  “I only tell the tale I heard.”

  “Well, I’ll renounce Mahomet,” said the King euphemistically. “Can the Tydders themselves believe such a cock-and-pie story, d’you suppose? It passes my simple understanding altogether.”

  Hastings shrugged.

  “Don’t ask me, your Grace. They’re Welchmen: and of course they’re descended from ten thousand generations of most royal and puissant no-one-Ap-nobodies who were all Kings before Noah.”

  “Did you ever meet a jenkin who wasn’t? All the same, I wish we might have laid hands on Jaspar of Pembroke. His head would look well on a pike over the Bridge. That fellow Vaughan we sent after him into Wales is a damned bungler. I ought to ’ve sent you, Dickon, when you asked me.”

  Duke Richard of Gloucester, sitting a trifle apart from the others, had been abstractedly sliding his extremely beautiful Italian dagger up and down in its gold sheath. He looked up with his quick, serious smile when his brother spoke to him.

  “I should have been very glad to serve your Grace in the matter,” he said formally; then added, with the manner of making fun of his own gravity:

  “A little work comes as a change after last winter.”

  Edward smiled over his shoulder at him.

  “Oh yes,” he said, “it’s time we gave you something to do. You’ve been idle these last months, haven’t you? Only led a wing in two battles, headed fifteen rebels, and then nearly cried with rage because the Bastard of Fauconberg wasn’t here to meet us. Can you never be still?”

  “I’m young,” said Duke Richard with perfect seriousness.

  There was an odd intimacy in this exchange between the two brothers, as though they were alone together in the room. Even Duke George, sprawling his legs in a window-seat, appeared shut out by it.

  “You’re young,” said the King, “but you’ll have your bellyful of work before you’re older. I’m like the man in the tale who raised the devil and had to keep him busy. You shall make ropes of sand.”

  Anthony Wydvylle, Earl Rivers, the King’s brother-in-law, looked and listened. A man of no family, a made Lord, despised by the old nobility and detested by the common people, it was his principal business in life to keep his fingers on the pulse of Edward’s mind. His sister Elizabeth — a woman, as he did not conceal from himself, of small imagination — had thought their troubles over when she netted the twenty-two-year-old King into a quiet little marriage at Grafton Regis on an April morning seven years ago. He had known better; though he could hardly have foreseen that Kingmaker’s angry jealousy was to mean a revolution, two deaths in the Wydvylle family and four pitched battles. His care was for his own advancement and his kinfolk’s; and since it was hard for beggars on horseback to make friends, he watched the King.

  Edward, at the moment, was a sight to see. He was dressed with the magnificence that was characteristic of him and that led him frequently into astonishing expenditure. Jewels glistened on his fingers and rippled in bands across his plum-coloured Genoese velvet doublet: pearls and sapphires to match his teeth and eyes and heighten the colour of his hair. His gown was damson-coloured cloth of gold and his hose damson silk, and though the occasion was not a ceremonious one, he wore his Garter. Eight weeks’ campaigning had sweated the fat of exile from his vast bones and fined down the lines of neck and face. He was twenty-nine and looked nineteen. Duke Richard, with his small, prim mouth and the queer horizontal wrinkles below his eyes, might have been his elder rather than his younger brother. Certainly, no one who saw him now, sprawling in one padded chair with his feet on another, would imagine that three months ago his position had been hopeless enough to inspire a Milanese diplomat to an epigram about the difficulty of climbing in through the window when one has been kicked out of the door. Still less would anyone who heard his delightful laugh suppose that he had only that morning come to London, victor of the decisive battle of his life, or that after that battle he had stood in a window looking onto Tewkesbury market-place, listening to the dull repeated crash of the axe and watching the thin spurts of blood jet onto the sawdust, as fifteen rebels and gentlemen, all of whom believed he had sworn their pardon on the sacrament, were made shorter by a head. In many ways, thought Lord Anthony, a studious reader of chro
nicles, he must be the oddest King that ever ruled in England. Some people complained, with careful euphemism, that his abundant humanity caused him to use himself more familiarly among private persons than the honour of his majesty required. Elder statesmen who remembered the godly dowdiness of Harry of Windsor’s Court and the frozen etiquette of Harry of Monmouth’s felt like travellers to a new country when they waited on the Rose of Rouen in his state apartments, that were always hung with the finest French and Flemish arras and full of pretty women and tame monkeys. It distressed them to be given drink in a trick goblet that spurted wine into their sleeves, or to hear the King seriously commend some squeaky-voiced brat on being able to spit farther than any other page in the Palace. Royal mistresses, too, had been out of fashion in the previous generations. Under the Rose of Rouen they had come in again with a vengeance. To those who ventured — very circumspectly — to deplore his taste for exotic fashions, nursery amusements and the wives and daughters of his loyal subjects, Edward might fairly have pointed out that he had never lost a battle in his life and could outface any man in his kingdom either in the hunting-field, in the tiltyard or at the butts. Instead, he generally contented himself with saying that he did not mean taking Holy Orders just at present. People who pressed the matter farther had been known to leave his presence with white faces. The Plantagenet temper, which his family got, along with their drooping eyelid, from Black Fulk of Anjou who sold his soul to the devil, was not dead in him, but simply sleeping. Lord Anthony, of all people, was careful never to disturb its slumbers. If he and his family once dropped from royal favour, it would be into everlasting destruction. His friends and colleagues of the Cabinet Council would see to that.