Under the Hog: A Novel of Richard III

by Patrick Carleton

  “The question as I see it,” said the Sieur de Brosse as though continuing an argument, “is whether we can by any means trust the Count of St. Pol not to go over to the English. His sister’s the Queen of England’s mother, and he was always the most time-serving treacherous straw-presser, saving your reverence, Sire, that was ever weaned.”

  “We can trust St. Pol implicitly,” said the King, “to betray us to Edward at the first moment. Or I hope so, because until he does I cannot open up negotiations with him to betray Edward to us.”

  “Double-dealing blackguard.”

  “You speak strongly; but indeed I fear I may one day be forced to set aside that mercy I cherish as the very medicine of my soul and make a reckoning with St. Pol. He has done infinite harm to France.”

  “And to the honour of your Majesty.”

  “That I can forgive. But France is France. When I received the crown at Rheims I swore by the Holy Ampulla to restore her divided fragments, bind up her wounds. I will make it hard for those who hinder me in that work, and not trouble my conscience over them. My victorious father found his kingdom full of brigands and thieves and poverty and sorrow, stamped flat by the English, a footcloth for looters, simply because Henry of England had won the victory of Azincourt. Now they offer me a fresh Azincourt. But it shall be prevented.”

  He spoke with quick, sibilant vehemence, his long hands opening and shutting on his knees. The Sieur de Brosse looked sideways at him.

  “The situation …” he began tentatively.

  “Will resolve itself according to God’s will. De Concressault, you have seen my cousin of England very often. Would you say he was as heavy a drinker as his brother, that empty Duke of Clarence who married the good Warwick’s daughter?”

  “Very nearly, Sire, but he has by a great deal the better head for it.”

  “So, so, and a very affable and beautiful prince, I hear, and as great a lover of hunting as myself: does it not seem sad that he and I must meet as enemies in the field and not as friends over a choice bottle of wine and some good little dishes? Very sad, very foolish: war is a needful but most miserable invention, a cause of uncharity. Bona bucella sicca et tranquillitas in ea, prae dorno plena victimis iurgii. This is such a cheap year for wine, too.”

  A curious feeling of assurance and rest had come on de Commynes in the poky little bedroom with the spaniel and the parrot, as though he were a wounded man under the cool fingers of a surgeon. The trouble which threatened them was that very ill which for years had kept King Louis’ father a scarecrow and a shadow-king hanging in poverty onto a few provinces below the Loire: a return of the old awful days of burned villages and wildwood creeping like a sea over the tilth, of wolves bolder than men and men crueller than wolves, plundered churches and ruined castles, desolation with corpses rotting everywhere by the roadside save on the gibbets of the King’s justice. They were coming close again, those days of anarchy, like beasts ranging in for a fresh spring. King Louis sat in his window overlooking the stables and gossiped of the price of wine and the folly of war. De Commynes watched him, trustful and perfectly content.

  *

  “Well, for my part,” said Mrs. Shore, “I rather like Lord Hastings. He’s very amiable.”

  “He may be,” said the Queen, “but my brother Anthony doesn’t trust him, and I don’t either.”

  The two ladies were in affable converse together in one of the broad windows of the Palace of Westminster. The Queen, in a magnificent summer gown of silver tissue sewn with small rubies, sat on the cushioned ledge, whilst Mrs. Shore stood beside her, resting one plump little jewelled paw on the wall. The Queen’s women were withdrawn to the far end of the room, where they were amusing her eldest daughter — a fair-haired, sharp-faced little girl of nine, named after her mother, Elizabeth — with a set of ivory skittles. It was sunny and calm outside, light enriching the metallic green of many trees.

  “It’s true he’s a bad liver,” agreed Mrs. Shore. She knew; was the King’s concubine, but could have been William Hastings’ paramour as well if she chose any evening to say yes to him.

  “He’s a proud, ambitious man; envies my brother,” the Queen corrected her, “and I know he grudged villainously when the match was made between my son Thomas and his step-daughter.”

  Grudged villainously: Mrs. Shore remembered the words he, habitually careless, trusting, in his talk with her, used on the matter: “I’d thought I was too good a friend of Edward’s to be plundered for the Wydvylles’ sake, at least; but I was wrong.” His stepdaughter, the little Cecily, had been married at thirteen to Thomas Gray, the Queen’s son — newly ennobled to be Marquis Dorset — who was in his later twenties and famous for his woman-hunting. A special grace of Parliament had privileged her, as soon as she should reach her fourteenth birthday, to confer all her fortune on him.

  “Oh, your Grace,” she said, “I’m sure he never grudged. It was an honour for him.”

  “So it was,” snapped the Queen — “more honour than he deserved. He grudged, for all that.” She twitched her head back so that her strangely shallow, greenish eyes, eyes bright and unspeculative like the eyes of a hen, caught Mrs. Shore’s. “I know how much grumbling and banning there goes up in England whenever my Lord honours me or my kin as we deserve. I know it very well, Jane, and so do you.”

  “Only a few fools,” Jane Shore tempered the truth.

  “Too many: my Lord Edward is too easy with them. He should rule, I say; teach them their manners.”

  “It’s below your Grace’s station to take notice of what common folk say.”

  “You need not teach me my station, Mrs. Shore. As to those common folk, isn’t it from them we royal persons get money to live according to our dignity? They’re monstrously tight-fisted.”

  “They’ve given largely for the French war, at least, your Grace, what from taxes and benevolences …”

  The Queen jerked her head again so that the many chains round her neck tinkled. Her voice took on a note as though she were shouting down some kind of opposition. Mrs. Shore, who saw a great deal of her when King Edward’s back was turned, knew the trick well. It was as though Elizabeth Wydvylle, alias Elizabeth Grey, alias Elizabeth of England and France, were still unsure, ten years after her secret marriage with King Edward, that people round her understood she was a Queen.

  “The war, the war, the war, I’m sick to my very bowels of the war. Waste of good riches is what I call it for my Lord and his brothers to go tramping lanes in France when we’ve so many needs at home. Six children I’ve borne my husband’s Grace, and four of them alive still, saints be thanked, and I’m big with a seventh: and must the bread be taken out of their mouths now to feed common archers in Picardy? Tens of thousands of pounds to fight the French, that I’m sure never did us any harm that I can see, and I have all the labour in this world to get a little pension from those Jews in Parliament for my poor midwife, Mrs. Cobb, though what I’d do without her I daren’t even think. I mean that solemnly: I dare not even think what I should do without Mrs. Cobb. Much those pick-penny lawyers and little country knights understand a woman’s needs: and my wardrobe, Jane, would make me ashamed to my soul to show you, now my Lord’s gone campaigning.”

  “I never saw anything so lovely,” said Mrs. Shore, “as that Venice brocade your Grace condescended to show me yesterday.”

  “Yes, to be sure, but can I pay for it, d’you suppose? Caniziani’s bill must wait till my Lord’s done his silly soldiering.”

  Quite a number of bills would be presented then, thought Mrs. Shore. She herself did not ask the King for dresses or jewellery very often; preferred cold coin. When Edward of England rode in triumph back to London, she would be ready for another dole; and, there was her husband to be remembered. A few crumbs dropped, now and again, from the King’s board kept his horns from irking him.

  “It’s a blessing to talk to you, Jane,” went on the Queen, less urgently. “You make no pretence you’re better than you are, and
you know your place. No one dare say I’m proud — though I know well they’d like to — seeing how I treat you. I’ve heard of Queens in chronicles would have had you poisoned or bewitched to death: but though you’re my Lord’s harlot, I treat you like a friend, and a better friend than some of these high-nosed Lords and Ladies about the Court.”

  Jane Shore took her cue and went down plumply onto her two knees.

  “Oh, your Grace, I know I am not worthy to breathe the same air with you, but if I could ever find oratory enough to say what it has meant to me that you should forgive me and …”

  “There, there, Jane, you may stand. You’re a good creature and I’ve always said it. There are matters I’d sooner talk of to you than anybody, that’s as true as the Mass. You know, Jane, I have my troubles just as though I were a common woman.”

  “If I could give my blood for your Grace I’d do it.”

  “That’s a proper thing to say, Jane. I’m pleased. Oh, Jane, if you did but know what a labour it is to have a family to care for.”

  “But such sweet young Princes, and the little Princesses as lovely as their mother …”

  “Ah, no, I meant my brothers and my two sons by my first husband, God rest his soul. Thomas is a Marquis and married well now, malgré my Lord Hastings and all his grumbles, but there’s still my boy Richard; such a lovely lad! I must do something for him when the time’s ripe, and my brother Ned, too. I wish my brother Anthony were here to advise me, instead of fighting in France: he has such wits: and then there’s more to trouble me. You know all I’ve done for young Henry Stafford, the Duke of Buckingham, making a marriage for him with my sister Catherine when he was in the nursery still and begging my Lord to make those brute beasts in Parliament account him to be of age this year instead of waiting till he’s twenty-one and confirm an old grant of money on him so that he can maintain my sister as she deserves: but d’you suppose the haughty little whelp is grateful to me? By God’s will, no! My sister Catherine says he treats her most unkindly, no better than a filthy Turk would.”

  “Lord amend his bad ways,” said Mrs. Shore, who did not care the price of a rush about him or his wife Catherine.

  “Lord amend him or else punish him for his heartlessness, the evil little wretch. Would you imagine it, Jane, but he’s told my own dear sister he wishes to God she’d keep out of his bed and out of his sight too? I thought my heart would burst when I heard it. What if she is older than he is a little. She’s borne him a son, poor saint, and now he treats her in this vile way. How I wish I’d my Lord home again to deal with him.”

  “When he does come home,” said Mrs. Shore, who understood that she was being invited to help, “I’m sure the King’s Grace will see that he repents. I’m sure he will.”

  “You’re a comfort to me, Jane, whatever else you are. I am not ashamed to say it. You’re a comfort to me, especially in this sad time when I see all the treasure that I need at home poured out into this cruel war and my Lord and my dear brother and my precious Thomas risking their blood against the French: though, God be loved, they’re at least certain of a great victory since my uncle, the Count of St. Pol, Constable of France no less, is going to aid them, by my own entreaties to him; for I’ve worked as hard for England as any of them. They could do nothing if it were not for my uncle: but oh Christ, Jane, I can’t pretend I like the business; and I believe in his heart my Lord Edward would have been very content to stay at home and be merry with me. But that Duke Charles and a certain other person gave him no rest, poor soul, until he put on his armour.”

  “A certain other person?” asked Jane Shore.

  The Queen jerked her head again.

  “His Grace of Gloucester, who talks like a monk and never thinks of anything but bloodshed; I’m sure he has a proud and cruel mind, however sweetly he speaks. Look how he always bites his underlip, and the dagger he carries, he’s always chopping it in and out. You can see his cruel nature chafing in his wretched body.”

  Mrs. Shore was interested to find the Queen taking her place upon an already considerable list of persons: those who, without any cause that they could put a name to, instinctively mistrusted and misliked the Duke of Gloucester. She was not sure that she herself should not be in this list too. She had met the Duke once only, and for a second, but the memory fretted her a little. It had been at one of the informal Court functions which, nowadays, she attended openly. There had been dancing, and in one figure she found herself opposite a youth smaller than herself, with brown hair and a face the colour of milk-of-almonds. He had given her one glance, from eyes so narrowed that it was not possible to identify their expression, bowed very gracefully and handed her down the line as the positions’ were shifted. The touch of his hand, which was thin and cool, had a very odd effect on her. It was like touching something unexpectedly in the dark. She looked sharply back at him over her shoulder, almost with a gasp, but he was already bowing to her sister, the Countess of Lincoln, and she did not see his face again.

  It was curious to know the Queen had the same sentiments; but at the moment Mrs. Shore was interested in other things. The Duke of Gloucester lived and ruled in the remote North and served his brother. The Duke of Clarence was more the object of Jane Shore’s curiosity. He lived in the South and, for some time past, had been doing and saying things that seemed obscurely significant, but of which she had not so far found an explanation.

  “His Grace of Gloucester,” she said tentatively, “has a deeper nature, I suppose, than his brother of Clarence?” The Queen snapped the bait up without looking twice at it.

  “George of Clarence’s nature is plain enough and unchristian enough,” she began, the words breaking from her in a flow dammed now and then by little gasps, as always when she was talking indiscreetly: “a boorish, drunken, envious man with no kindness in him. He’s wounded me to the very quick of my heart by the language he’s used about me: and I know why. I can speak with you, Jane. I’d not dare tell Edward, but that turncoat brother of his has never forgotten that he once had wicked hopes of being the King. He’s never forgotten them and he envies my Lord cruelly. I know it in my bones.”

  “He speaks very strangely, so I’ve heard. I believe he tells people now that he is near to knowing the truth of a great mystery.”

  “That has a sound of necromancy and conjuration,” said the Queen, blessing herself. “I’ve heard on many hands that he’s taken to secret devilish arts.”

  “I’ve heard so, too,” agreed Jane Shore, “but this matter seems to be a different one. He has been saying — or so someone told me — that the greatest mystery in England, which he has a certain assurance that he will solve, is in the life and actions of the Lady Elenor Butler, daughter to the old Earl of Shrewsbury. He says that if he knew the secrets of that Lady — she’d dead now — he would know a wonderful thing. Good God Almighty, your Grace isn’t ill?”

  The Queen’s face was painted in the most meticulous fashion, but under the paint it had gone miserably white. Her mouth hung open.

  *

  Amiens on a wet Tuesday morning in August: Lord William Hastings looked from his tent-door toward the city and wished it were in hell. A faint drizzle, like a cold steam, was crawling down out of the parti-coloured sky and dampening the endless gaudy pavilions that sheltered a hundred-and-fifty-six English knights and nobles and twenty thousand fighting-men. Pennons hung drearily from tent-poles and pitched lances, and the ground underfoot was a wet porridge. Beyond the unhappy waters of the Somme, the towers and defended gates of Amiens could be seen like dejected people standing about and waiting for a hardly probable event. Lord Hastings cursed them briefly and called for his horse. A sense of duty had got him out of bed and was sending him for a morning ride into the enemy’s ground, now open freely to him and to all Englishmen by virtue of a truce.

  William Hastings had some title to call himself a soldier, he had climbed the ridge at Towton, on that terrible Palm Sunday fourteen years ago, with the snow blinding his eyes and
the whole force of Lancaster lying somewhere ahead of him in the flurry; had seen his best men killed at his feet when Oxford charged like a mad lion out of the fog at Barnet; and had commanded his wing and done his share of butchery in the meadows beside Tewkesbury Abbey: but never since the sword had touched his shoulders had he seen a campaign at all like this that they were waging in Picardy against King Louis.

  They had sailed for Calais from Dover in May: twenty thousand men, with no encumbrance of pages or camp-women, led by King Edward and his two brothers, the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, the Earls of Essex, Northumberland, Ormond, Arundel and Rivers and the young Marquis Dorset. Five hundred flat-bottomed barges of Holland, lent by Duke Charles of Burgundy, bore them, their horses and armour, their iron and brass guns, their siege-engines, artillery-wagons, ladders and sapping-tools, together with a vast provision of stoneshot, gunpowder, saltpetre and sulphur. Their convoy were the warships George Howard, Thomas Howard, Trinity, Little Trinity, Trinité, Barbara, Martin, Mary Calday, Gabriel, Katherine, Margaret, John, Janet, Peter, Mary and Marie, and the work of transport took three weeks of smiling weather. No such army had been landed in France within the memory of Chroniclers. With a quarter of that force, Harry of Monmouth won the field at Azincourt and chased King Louis’ father South to the Loire. As it was the greatest English host that had crossed the Channel, so it was the most splendid. The King’s tent was of cloth-of-gold, divided into rooms like a little house. The small knights were ashamed if they had not two or three remounts with coloured trappings, and damascened armour to wear under silk surcoats. The great mass of archers who made the backbone of this force were every one of them mounted, and on good horses. Day after day the narrow streets of Calais were choked with mounted men, riding superbly with their heads up, laughing and calling jokes to one another in the sunshine that coloured their sallets and basnets and the embroidered work, as rich as on Church vestments, on the armorial banners of their captains. They had pay and sustenance money in their pouches, so that the inns were drained as dry as Sodom and men jostled and fought one another all night before the doors of the stews. With the wages of his army filling their town like a dyke in February, the Calais citizens forgot that they had ever loved the Rose of Rouen less than they did Kingmaker. No ruler of England, since the time of King Arthur, had led such a company to strike a blow beyond the sea.