Under the Hog: A Novel of Richard III

by Patrick Carleton

  “News of what?” asked Alderman Wrangwysh.

  “Eh, you, Mr. Wrangwysh: ask your pardon. God give you good day. I was not expecting … Sit you down.”

  Mr. Kendal’s face was not its usual colour.

  “God give you good-day, Mr. Kendal. I hope I’ve not come at a wrong time. What’s amiss?”

  “Nothing, I pray God,” said Mr. Kendal. “What was your errand. Can I be of use?”

  “We’re in ugly trouble at York, Mr. Kendal, and need his Grace the Duke’s noble guidance that he’s always favoured us with. It’s a damnable garboyle. Our clerk, Mr. Yotton — you know him yourself — I’d ’ve thought him as honest a fellow as ever spat: and now he tells us on his own confession he’s been embezzling the city’s money for years. A strong thief, that’s what he is, and nothing better. Now we must petition the King’s Grace for leave to appoint another man in his room. The Council made bold to send me to beg his good Grace’s kindness in the business.”

  Mr. Secretary Kendal picked up a quill from his penner; tried to balance it over his finger; dropped it. He was frowning.

  “Mr. Wrangwysh,” he said slowly, “if you ask me to take you to the Duke it’s as much as my office is worth to refuse you. But if you have any kindness for him, don’t derange him now.”

  “That I won’t, then. But for God’s sake, Mr. Kendal, tell me what’s happening in this Castle.”

  “It’s the Duchess,” said Mr. Kendal shortly.

  “God keep her.” Mr. Wrangwysh crossed himself. “Is she ill?”

  “Childbed: you surely knew she was big?”

  “Nay, not for certain I didn’t: God and the Virgin be good to her. Has she got her pains now? Our little Duchess, as good and kind as an angel: may all the saints give her an easy time of it.”

  “The saints have not done so. The pains began before dawn and there’s still no word from her women. The physicians are with her now. She’s so very small, Mr. Wrangwysh, so tender; was never strong. But oh God, Mr. Wrangwysh” — he got up and kicked his stool from him — “it’s the Duke’s Grace I’m thinking of. He was the gladdest man in Christendom when we knew for certain she was carrying. None of us ever guessed how much he wanted an heir: but now he is like a damned soul. I’ve no other language for it: like a damned soul.”

  “Christ have mercy.”

  “Amen: he’s not a man you can read, not open. There’s no weeping or crying out now. I was with him more than an hour, and he transacted just the common business of the day as he always does; signed letters; settled a quarrel between two footmen: nothing out of the rule. But his face: God, it was like watching a ghost you cannot speak to and cannot speak to you. His soul’s screaming for mercy inside him. I tell you I was almost crying aloud myself before he dismissed me. He did it with a smile, too. By God’s body, Mr. Wrangwysh, there are liars in this world who dare say that he conjoined with my Lady for the sake of the Warwick lands. I wish them a tithe of what’s in his face now to teach them to know true love next time they see it.”

  “There’ll be hope yet, surely? My own good woman was most miserably handled with her first, but she’s as hale as I am now and nursing her seventh, God be loved.”

  “God send there is hope. Meanwhile the best master and mistress a man ever had are each in a separate cell in Purgatory and there’s not a possible thing that we can do for them.”

  “Saving your presence,” said Alderman Wrangwysh shortly, “but if you’ll take me to the Chapel I know what I’ll do.”

  Mr. Kendal looked at him with a kind of sour liking. “You’re an honest fellow, Mr. Wrangwysh, and you remind me of my flat duty. We’ll both go.”

  Doves were purring as always on the roof of the Keep, but except for them a discomfortable silence shut the Castle off from the live world beyond its moat. The grooms and men-at-arms going about the Inner Ward walked quietly and did not speak to one another. The usual scurry and clatter from the great kitchen were tuned down to a mere clinking of pots. The two men climbed the stone stairway, as sullen as the way to a gaol, and pulled back the heavy leather curtain of the Chapel door. The tiny two-hundred-year-old place, with its high traceried windows and its vaulted roof, appeared to be the nexus, the focal point, of the whole silence. Nothing stirred in it. A red lamp burning over the altar warned them that God was bodily present.

  Mr. Wrangwysh blessed himself, desolately knowing why the sacrament was kept ready. Then he saw that someone else had brought his trouble here: a puny, boy-sized figure in black and violet, kneeling like a figure in stone. The sight shocked and held him as though he had come suddenly on a snake. The figure, head down and hands joined, made not a quiver of movement; and an enormous feeling of helplessness and pity closed down on Mr. Wrangwysh, like the lead sheeting round a corpse. He laid his hand on Mr. Kendal’s shoulder, pushing him gently back through the Chapel doorway. They knelt outside.

  He prayed a long while, addressing himself methodically to saint after saint: St. Richard of Chichester for the Duke and St. Anne for the Duchess, for himself St. Thomas Martyr, St. Peter for York, St. Akelda of Middleham. You know, he told them, in your glory of heaven, the difficult time we have, being alive. You remember our troubles. You know that life has been very hard here in the North, what with battles and parties, until we did not know whom to look to, and dues and taxes whoever was master, and fishgarths in the rivers and thieves on the roads and justice far away in London, always very difficult to come by, and trade worse than it was. You understand these things, St. Thomas who was murdered by wicked Lords and St. Peter who was crucified head-downwards by King Nero. You know we had a hard time of it till the Duke came. He brought the King’s justice within reach of us and broke down the fishgarths and hanged the robbers. Now he is in trouble, and we who have always shown you respect and remembered your feast-days implore you to help him, by the Virtue of Christ who bought us. A very faint smell of incense, accumulated years of praying, prayers of Duke Richard and Duchess Anne, prayers of the Nevilles from Robert of Raby down to Kingmaker, reached him out of the Chapel. It soothed him, narrowing his consciousness to familiar Latin formulae, worn and rounded like brook-pebbles, which slid through the mind and helped to smother down the impotence of pity: Gratiam tuam, quaesumus, Domine, mentibus nostris infunde, ut qui, angelo nuntiante, Christi filii tui incarnationem cognovimus, per passionem eius et crucem ad resurrectionis gloriam per-ducamur, amen.

  Someone came up the stairs.

  Alderman Wrangwysh, standing, drew a very deep breath and shut his teeth on his lip. He was aware of Secretary Kendal, behind him, cursing rapidly in a whisper. It angered him. Don’t curse, you fool. You should be praying. A man in the long robe of a physician dived past them, shoving the leather curtain aside, into the Chapel. There was a terrible little silence, and then whispering. At almost the same instant, jarring the heart and brain like a stroke of a mace, the Chapel bell immediately above their heads broke into ringing. It did not toll but danced and babbled, spilling quick gushes of noise like laughter. The curtain was ripped back again, and for the second time in his life Thomas Wrangwysh saw the face of the Duke of Gloucester thawed into unmistakable expression. This time, too, the look was one of blazing and almost horrible joy.

  *

  Lord Anthony Wydvylle, K.G., Earl Rivers, Baron Scales and Nucelles, loved beautiful things. His long, capable fingers, bleached with lemon-juice, crispened in pleasure, almost tingled, as he drew them over the coolness of a little ivory diptych he had brought back with him from Italy, a work of that lamented artist, Messer Donatello. It was an adorable object. One of its two arched panels was crowded with tiny delicate figures, minute but unmistakable: weeping Apostles, the Magdalene with dishevelled hair, the Virgin herself, standing a little aside as though her agony refused companionship, and Joseph of Arimathaea lowering, with a tragic movement, the tired body into the sepulchre. In the opposite panel, the risen Christ, heroic and almost naked, with the breast and carriage of an athlete, triumphed over P
ilate’s men-at-arms who crouched terrorised in their antique harness. A lovely thing, a thing which only Italy could make: Lord Anthony’s fingers, which seemed to him to possess wits and will of their own on these occasions, became sad, stroked it regretfully. He had just decided to give it away.

  There was a whole raffle of precious objects spread out on the mosaic table-top: a golden crucifix by that other irreproachable craftsman, Messer Lorenzo Ghiberti, a casket of sumptuous Bruges enamels in gilt bronze, a set of ebony paternosters, an emerald ring, a covered cup of Egyptian porcelain patterned with fantastic designs. Lord Anthony had filled in time, whilst waiting for an expected letter, by choosing a birthday gift for the Duke of Gloucester’s infant son, who would be one year old that month. Lord Anthony had never set eyes on the young Edward of Middleham — named after his uncle and godfather, the King — and did not want to. Children meant nothing to him. But he held decidedly that a friendly gesture toward Duke Richard of Gloucester was never wasted. No one knew what that bloodless little prince was thinking behind his broad forehead and narrow eyes; but Lord Anthony felt that, should things turn out as he intended them to do in England, his goodwill — or at least the absence of his illwill — was worth even the sacrifice of a Donatello. The gift might hardly appeal to a baby of one year old, but the father was a known connoisseur and reputedly pious; was said to be planning to turn the parish church of Middleham into a College.

  Regretfully but finally, Lord Anthony set the diptych aside from the other objects and began to stroll about the room. It was, he prided himself, a unique room, his Privy Chamber at Mote Manor in Kent, being fashioned on the Italian plan. Its walls were not hung, but lined with cedar-wood and divided by half-columns of marble into large panels. A wooden frieze in alto-rilievo, Italian work, ran above the pilasters: knights, ladies, heralds, men-at-arms, all in lifelike attitudes, going in procession to a joust. Each panel was inlaid in mother-of-pearl with Lord Anthony’s cypher encircled by a Garter. The carpet was an astonishing affair from Byzantium: stiff-looking people in peculiar clothes worked with gold and silver thread on a silk ground. It was mushy to the feet, being laid over a thick bed of dried lavender and verbena, whose odour filled the place. Lord Anthony’s enormous library of French, English and Latin works was arranged in presses of the almost unobtainably rare sandalwood, protected by silver grilles. The manuscripts, superbly illuminated, were bound in Moroccan leather tooled and emblazoned in gold and with gold clasps. The printed books had a press to themselves: the Bible, Psalter and Catholicon of Guthenberg, the Sallust and Barzizi’s Epistoloe printed for the Sorbonne, and the best treasure of all, its clasps studded with rubies, Lord Anthony’s own Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, just executed by his protégé, Mr. William Caxton. In a niche at the far end of the room, like a saint in a shrine, stood another Italian trophy: a great vase of moss-agate, veritable Roman work with figures of dancing hobgoblins, tailed and goat-footed, carved round it. Caesar or Virgil might have looked at it with their living eyes, or touched it. Lord Anthony stopped to run those long, possessive fingers round its rim now, looking down the extent of his rich privacy as far as the great bay-window full of painted glass that displayed the French quarterings — the fork-tailed lions of Limburg and Luxemburg, the sixteen-rayed star and fleurs-de-lys of Baux, the bends and rose of Orsini — which he claimed in right of his mother, the Duchess of Bedford. From the coffered ceiling of gold and green hung five gold lamps ornamented with tritons and naked mermaids. At night these and ten great prickets of ebony and silver would fetch up gleams on the mosaic table, the inlaid chairs and benches, the service of gold plate on the buffet, the marble hearth guarded by crowned lions and topped by a huge glazed plaque, fabricated after a secret process by Messer della Robbia, of minstrels singing from open books.

  A good place to be home from the wars in: it was not many months since Lord Anthony, who wished to keep out of England for a while after the French treaty, had returned from service with the late Duke of Burgundy. Charles the Hardy had taken a good number of English volunteers into his pay, saying contemptuously that they would be better fighting for him than slitting each other’s throats at home. Lord Anthony, feeling that some gesture from him might soften the Duke’s anger against his uncle, the Count of St. Pol (it did not: Duke Charles stripped him of all but his life and handed him prisoner to the Christian King, who took the life as well), made one of their number. He did not especially dislike fighting; and though it was only now, looking down the length of his own Privy Chamber, that he admitted it, he had been glad to do something to suggest to Duke Richard of Gloucester that he was not one of those who had crossed the Channel simply for a French pension. There had been something indefinably frightening in that Duke’s silences since the day King Edward had agreed to discuss terms with the Christian King.

  Charles the Hardy, abandoned by his brother-in-law of England, had patched things up as well as he might with France and then flung himself straightway into a rather meaningless quarrel with the Swiss. Taking his artillery and a great part of his personal treasure with him, he marched to besiege Granson. Lord Anthony was there. He wrinkled his nose now, thinking of what had happened when the place surrendered. The hardest heart would have felt pity, seeing the wretched garrison strung up from trees in such number that they broke the branches and fell down halfdead. Then there was news that the Swiss, not in great force, were gathering for their revenge. Duke Charles, against the advice of those he consulted, moved out to meet them. Lord Anthony was not at all clear about what happened next. He saw Burgundians running past him in retreat before he even knew they were near the enemy; halted his own company and fell back a little; heard the Swiss horns blaring and was aware of a vast body of pike-men rolling down on him yelling: “Österreich und Bern!” and “Rache für Granson!” He put spurs to his horse and found himself suddenly involved in a general rout. When they had collected themselves again, they discovered that they had lost precisely seven men-at-arms, but that the whole of their artillery, their camp and a large share of the Ducal treasure were in the hands of the enemy, who, Lord Anthony supposed, were the only body of men in Christendom more surprised than they. They quartered at Lausanne then, and Lord Anthony read books and talked to such scholars as the place provided until, on a June day, he had a letter from his sister, Queen Elizabeth. It was a letter in her own bad hand, blotted and interlined, and though he read it ten times, it did not make sense. Someone whose name she would not set down was making trouble in England; was asking questions. If he were left to go on as he had been doing he would unbury a secret that would be the ruin of the Wydvylles: but she would not say what. The King knew nothing. She had not dared to speak to him. She was a friendless woman, God help her, and could trust no one. Anthony had been away a year now. He must come home.

  Lord Anthony, knowing her for a fool, was in two minds on the matter until events decided him. The Burgundian forces, twenty-three thousand strong, were marched out of Lausanne and set to besiege a wholly unimportant little town called Morat. Again, the Swiss army of relief appeared. Exactly how the Republic had contrived to raise thirty-five thousand men, and among them ten thousand hand-gunners and four thousand crack German cavalry, Lord Anthony did not bother to inquire. Half-an-hour after the battles joined he turned and led such of his English as were alive out of the field; was risking no more blood for Charles the Hardy. The Burgundian dead on that day were guessed at eighteen thousand. Lord Anthony was unsurprised when, at the turn of the year, news came to England of the end of it all. Charles the Hardy had not understood the meaning of defeat. Deserted by the soldier of fortune, Niccolò di Campobasso, having only four thousand men, of whom not more than twelve hundred were in a state to fight, he besieged in midwinter the strong town of Nancy. The Swiss marched. They had cavalry lent them in secret by King Louis. Gleaners, two days after the battle, found what the wolves had left of Charles the Hardy, Duke of Burgundy, Brabant and Luxemburg, Count of Flanders, Holland and Zeeland
, naked, hamstrung, the skull split.

  Lord Anthony stroked his little scented beard. There would be international complications, so far as he could see, for ten years or a hundred years to come on account of that unnecessary death. God had given the lands of Burgundy, after their long felicity and wealth under the three good princes, Philippe the Hardy, Jean the Fearless, Philippe the Good, a Duke who kept them in continual war. At one stroke he had tumbled down the great and sumptuous edifice, the powerful house which had flourished whilst its neighbours were in distress. God did such things before we were born, decided Lord Anthony, and He will do them again when we are dust. But the wise man takes warning by what he sees. The God who can ruin the Ducal house of Burgundy need not stretch His arm far to destroy the Wydvylles.

  He looked round his room again: mirrors in jewelled frames, swansdown cushions, his own portrait by Meister van Eyck. He had got them, and a Garter and an Earldom and the office of Chief Butler of England and title of King’s Kinsman by nothing but his own wits and his sister’s pretty face. And I wish to Christ, he thought irritably, that all the wits in the family had not been mine. I wish Elizabeth might have had some. As soon as he reached England he had gone to Court. Edward, fuller-fleshed even than before, welcomed him sumptuously: balls, hunts, banquets, chamber-music, buffoons, malmsey. He got a morning with the Queen alone, whilst the King was giving audience to the desperate ambassadors of his sister, Margaret of Burgundy, who was holding her dead husband’s territories on behalf of her stepdaughter (she herself had borne no children to Duke Charles) and whom the Christian King was pressing. He asked bluntly what had been the meaning of the letter sent him to Lausanne. It had seemed like Bedlam, he said, but there was presumably a cause for it. He got an answer to that: the Duke of Clarence. He had expected it; was merely relieved that it was not the Duke of Gloucester.

  “And what the devil has Duke George been at to throw you into this panic, my dear sister?”