Under the Hog: A Novel of Richard III

by Patrick Carleton

  “Put his feet in the brazier.”

  *

  The hand-organs blared up, heaving full, quivering notes toward the roof, and the choir broke into singing again. The royal procession swung in a huddle of colours out of St. Stephen’s Chapel and down the main aisle of the Abbey. The King and Queen went first: Edward, heavy and enormous in the new-fashioned clothes he had devised, very tight hose clean up to the groin and a voluminous gown, hiding the shape of his belly, with amply pendant sleeves like a monk’s frock; Elizabeth in a gown of green cloth-of-gold sewn with pearls and moonstones, the train furred with ermine and carried by four pages. The bride and bridegroom walked behind them. They were six and four years old: the little daughter of the great Duke of Norfolk, newly dead, and the young Duke of York, whom his royal father had just now created, in virtue of his bethrothal, Duke of Norfolk and Earl of Warenne, hereditary Earl-Marshal of England, settling on him (it was presumed to have been the Queen’s idea) half the estates that the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk might reasonably have hoped to enjoy in peace until her death. It was the second time the Wydvylles had carried out a raid on the Mowbray lands. Sir John Wydvylle, at twenty, had been married to the old Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, aged eighty, to the scandal of England, but had not profited much by it. Kingmaker had had his head off. Now it looked as though the job were really done. Lord Rivers, in cloth-of-silver spangled with rubies, walked on one side of the wedded pair like a farmer bringing a sound cow home from market. Young John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, supported them on the other side. He was King Edward’s nephew, a fresh-faced boy who looked as though he thought poorly of his present occupation. Duchess Anne of Gloucester walked behind them at her husband’s right hand. Duke Richard’s lined little face, between its glossy falls of brown hair, told no more than it ever did: but he had said to her plainly enough in private that he feared this wedding of babies was meant to be of advantage to the bridegroom’s mother and married aunts more than to him or to the crown, and that he was sorry with all his heart for the stripped Dowager Duchess.

  Behind them trod the nobility of England, new and old together: Suffolk and Buckingham, the Marquis Dorset, Northumberland and Westmorland, Essex, Huntingdon, Arundel and Kent, the Viscount Lovel, the Lords Hastings, Stanley, Howard and Scrope, and a whole rabble of smaller Barons and Knights, jetting it superbly in their best clothes and accompanied by their ladies. Only two of the great ones of England were not there. The venerable Dowager Duchess of York, mother of the three Plantagenet brothers, was in her mansion of Baynard’s Castle, praying most probably at this moment for the freedom of her son George of Clarence: and George, Duke of Clarence, was in the Tower.

  It had begun in the spring of the year that was just now over: rumour of a plot of witchcraft against King Edward’s life. Duke George’s secretary, Mr. Stacy, was in it; confessed, after unspecified things had been done to him in the Curfew Tower at Windsor. Duchess Anne remembered him from the bad days after Tewkesbury: a tight-lipped, bloodless man, a jackal. She had not liked him; but it was filthy to think that they had twisted and hurt him till he accused himself. Duke Richard had often told her torture had no right to be used in the free realm of England; was a game for Scots and Frenchmen. Mr. Stacy and two others, one of them a certain Burdet, a friend and retainer of Duke George, died at Tyburne in the manner reserved for traitors. Their heads were on the Bridge now. Then it appeared as though Duke George of Clarence had gone mad. He burst into the Council Chamber at Westminster, red and yelling, bringing with him learned Dr. John Goddard of the Friars Minor. Dr. John Goddard was a man noted for his skill in temporal and Canon Law: but he was also noted for having been far too much involved, eight years ago, in the old sins of Kingmaker and Duke George; had no more place in Edward’s Council Chamber than the devil in a holy-water pot. Duke George insisted in a loud voice that he read to the Council a declaration setting forth that Stacy and Burdet had been maliciously accused, falsely condemned and tyrannously put to death. King Edward was at Windsor. When he heard the interesting news that his brother had been telling his own Council that he was a tyrant and a law-twister, he flogged his horses, he who so seldom rode now, up to London and, in the presence of the Lord Mayor and Aldermen, ordered Duke George into the Tower.

  The news had come North when Duchess Anne and her husband were at supper in the Privy Chamber at Pontefract, a castle that Anne had never liked as much as Middleham. Duke Richard read the letter with a word of apology to her; bit his lip; clicked his dagger several times in its sheath and then told her what it was about, frowning and looking straight in front of him. She saw he was worried, but not desperately so. “The fool,” was his last word on the subject, “the pitiful fool: he has insulted Edward beyond bearing. We couldn’t have a day’s peace in the realm if anyone — anyone at all — were able to behave as he has. I hope Edward keeps him in the Tower for a year and stints his wine-ration.” He had been silent, playing with his ring, for a long while after; and finally they had got up from the table and gone to see the baby in his gilt cradle, who woke and smiled at them. Duke Richard smiled back then, putting his worry behind him. He gave his son a finger to hold and talked nonsense to him. For all that, Duchess Anne could see that something was on her husband’s shoulders from the night the letter came. He was one of the two things on earth she studied so that she knew them as closely as a priest knows his books. From the day she had leant against the wall in the Widow Wrangwysh’s foul-smelling bedchamber, seeing the door open and seeing the one face she had not dared to hope for, her life had been building itself up again slowly, almost painfully, as a honeycomb is constructed cell by cell, on the sure ground that he had given her. She was whole now again, but through him and for him. Nothing of him escaped her. She had seen the silences and long terms of unawareness, as though his very sight were withdrawn and turned inward onto his thoughts, come on him after the French journey. She had known then he was ashamed. Now the same ill-ease was on him a second time, because his brother George had fooled himself into prison. God damn them both, thought the Duchess Anne with a sudden little explosion of fury, as the procession filed out of the West doors of the Abbey into the February fog. Edward and George, Edward with his money-bags and George with his winepots, God damn them both. Why can’t they let him have some ease? First one shaming him and then the other, hurting him, cutting his pride and his heart that’s so much softer than any of them know: he’s worth the pair of them; is the only one of them who’s lived honestly and without a spot on him since the day he was knighted. Why can’t they let him rest?

  The marriage-feast at Westminster Palace was a great bore: infinitely too much to eat and drink, altogether too loud and insistent music, incalculably too many people with too-voluminous clothes and too-strong perfumes. King Edward and his Queen seemed to be tossing money out of the windows with both hands nowadays. Next to the baby bride and bridegroom — and the Duchess was shocked to her marrow to see those children being given strong malmsey to drink instead of claret or small ale — the guest of honour was the Prince of Byzantium, the Lord Andreas Palaiologos, a person with painted cheeks and extraordinary trailing garments, who had come to ask King Edward’s help to drive the Turks out of the city in which he should by rights be Emperor. Naturally, the King was doing nothing about it, but the Duchess Anne heard that he was allowing this epicene piece of royalty, who had nothing masculine about him but his long beard, a pension of two hundred-and-forty pounds a year. Possibly the Queen saw a chance to make one of her daughters Empress of the Greeks.

  The royal children were everywhere at that banquet. Anne had the eldest of them, Princess Elizabeth, more generally called the Lady Bessy, sitting opposite to her. At the age of twelve, the Lady Bessy was a precocious child. She could write and speak French, as she was not tired of telling people. Her official title was Mademoiselle la Dauphine, she being affianced to the Christian King’s son Charles. Her mother’s eyes used to brighten like a bird’s when she heard her called by it
. Her seven-year-old sister, Cecily, was a quieter girl, but so stuck about with jewelled pins, ouches, pendants, collars and rings that she looked like a miracle-working Virgin on a feast-day. As for Edward of Westminster, Prince of Wales, Anne hoped to all the saints that his little namesake and cousin, Edward of Middleham, would grow up very different from him. He was a lovely-looking child, certainly, tall for his eight years and with his father’s long, beautiful hands and his mother’s hair: but he had his mother’s eyes, too, silly-cunning, greenish and oblique, and her small, petulant lips. His manners were abominable and his voice a high, continual whine. Lord Rivers was his principal governor.

  These were all of the royal children present at the marriage feast, but there was another Princess in her cradle and two in their coffins, and the Queen was big again.

  The Duchess Anne had been placed, for no reason that was apparent to her, between Lord Rivers and the Duke of Buckingham. I ought not to grudge, she told herself. It might have been the Prince of Byzantium. The Duke of Buckingham had only recently begun to come to Court. He was a pleasant-looking youth, handsome, one would even say, but there was something peculiar in the set of his eyes, which were too wide apart and showed the whites all round the irises. He had good manners and a studied, oratorical way of speaking. Lord Rivers was in excellent humour. He began by talking playfully, with a man’s condescension, to Anne; but after one snub altered his drift and discussed foreign politics with a pretty air of deference to her opinion. Things in Burgundy were quieter now. The Lady Marie, Charles the Hardy’s daughter, had married the young Maximilian of Austria and they had the Low Countries, whilst King Louis held the western lands of Burgundy as appanages of the Crown of France. His tone was a shade less enthusiastic than his words. Duchess Anne remembered gossip that he had aspired to plan a supreme and final Wydvylle wedding: that of the Lady Marie to himself. Presumably even King Edward had felt that too much.

  As soon as Lord Rivers had finished with her, the Duke of Buckingham began. How did her gracious husband find the Scots situation? Was there a chance of war? She thought there might be. Her husband would of course be in command, suggested the Duke of Buckingham, and went on straightway to present her with what sounded like a rehearsed panegyric of Duke Richard and his abilities: his marvellous administrative work in the North, his skill as a soldier, his unselfish devotion to the good of England. It was all pleasant hearing, if a little too like a formal speech before the Privy Council. The feast limped somehow to its end. There was a sung grace. Anne had a headache from too many kinds of sweet wine and a feeling of breathlessness from too much food: but she knew she would have to dance presently. They filed out, trumpets going before them; broke up into knots and groups in the long gallery. King Edward and Duke Richard were talking together, Edward, in purple and silver, still looked magnificent from behind: immense breadth of shoulders, a straight back. But as she watched he turned round, still talking, and she was shocked again by the heaviness and redness of his face, his hanging chops. He looked dull and bearish, too, stupid with food. His appetite, she had noticed, was past all bounds now. In one service of fowl during the banquet he had eaten a whole cygnet boiled in wine and stuffed with Portugal oranges, and the best part of a roast flamingo. His long hands, between courses, had been continually reaching after the comfits and almonds and sugared fruits; and he must have drunk a gallon of mixed wines, chiefly sweet resinous stuff from the Morea, strong enough to stun a Norwegian. He was scowling now. Duke Richard was saying something emphatically to him. He pulled his lip a second; shrugged and made an annoyed consenting gesture with one arm; stamped off down the gallery. Duke Richard looked after him for a second, his hand at his dagger; then came to Anne. He bowed.

  “Can you divert yourself without me for an hour, bird? I have a conference with Edward.”

  “I saw. He doesn’t seem to relish it.”

  “He has drunk too much,” Richard’s voice was carefully lowered: “this accursed banquet. But I must speak to him.”

  “George?”

  He nodded, chewing his lip, eyes narrow.

  “God speed you, then.”

  “Can I find anyone to entertain you?”

  “Yes, for God’s sake send Frank Lovel or Jockey Howard.”

  “What, not my Lord Rivers?”

  His face was entirely serious, blank.

  “Dickon, Dickon, are you ambitious to wear horns, thrusting my dearest of men into my arms?”

  Anne was one of the very few people in England who knew her husband had a sense of humour. She got what she wanted: a tiny twinkle of eyes in his pale, thinking face. “So I know who it is at last. Shall I challenge him?”

  “I wish you would.”

  The twinkle went out like a blown candle-flame.

  “I wish I might. I’ll send Frank to you.”

  He bowed again and went away from her. Before Lord Lovel had come, Lord Hastings was at her elbow. He looked older, too, but was not fat yet. His hair was grey at the temples and his eyes were tired. He gave her his best smile; asked how she had liked the feast.

  “Too much to eat, Lord William, and outrageously too much to drink.”

  He raised his eyebrows, nodding. “Yes, dear God, I sometimes feel I’m too old for these pleasures nowadays: and we’ve had no time to recruit ourselves from Christmas yet. You kept the feast at Middleham, no doubt?”

  “We did, very simply.”

  “So didn’t we. And how is the heir of Gloucester?”

  “My Edward? Oh, but he can talk now, quite plainly. Truly he can, and walk a little. He’s a forward boy.”

  “God bless him; that’s excellent news, excellent news. Let me tell you a secret.”

  “Yes?”

  “You’ll have a new name to call him soon. The King spoke of it to me.”

  “A new name?”

  “Aye, an Earldom: Salisbury was mentioned.”

  “That’s kind of Edward. Oh, that’s kind. Salisbury was my grandfather’s title.”

  She stopped then; remembered that her father’s title of Warwick had gone to Duke George’s son; and Duke George was in the Tower now. It was unpleasant always to be remembering that. I bear him no grudge, she thought, for that piece of silly wickedness seven years ago. I wish him out of his troubles; would do even if I hated him, just for Dickon’s sake.

  Viscount Lovel was coming up to her now, all impish grins and pretty gestures. He amused Anne because he always talked to her about clothes, as though he were a fellow-woman. He kissed her — they were cousins by marriage — and at once demanded that she feel his apple-green-velvet sleeve and guess how little the stuff cost. It’s odd, she thought, how his mincingness is always pleasant; has no harm in it. If it were the Marquis Dorset trying to talk women’s matters to me now, I’d want to scratch his eyes out. The music started in the next hall, and Lord Lovel asked her if she would dance.

  “God’s mother, Frank, I wonder whether I can. You’ll find me as heavy as if I were in harness.”

  “I know, I know,” said Lord Lovel, “and I was as slim as a page myself once.”

  “You are now and know it, you parcel of vanity sewn up in green velvet. Come, then. I’ll try one turn with you.” They danced, and were bumped heavily by Lord Stanley. Lord Lovel whispered to her:

  “Why was that fat oaf ever allowed on the floor? A gryfon’s foot his badge is. It ought to be a bull’s foot. If he’s split my hose I’ll murder him.”

  “Charity, Francis, charity.”

  “And for God’s love look at the Prince of Byzantium. He’ll trip over his petticoats in a minute.”

  “Or his beard.”

  “Lord, there’s some strange things about this Court now.”

  “Who’s the little man with the hard mouth who looks like a lawyer?”

  “Sir William Catesby, friend of Hastings, cleverest little devil between this and the end of a stick: some great ones we won’t mention hate him as a cat hates water.”

  She could feel i
t suddenly: the prickly hates and mistrusts that were all round the Court. The grand people danced in their grand clothes; smiled like images. That meant nothing. Under velvet and behind smiles there was a life of the mind that was a continual march and counter-march of grudges. England was once York and Lancaster. Now it is York, Lancaster, Wydvylle, Hastings, Clarence. Every one of them in London doubts the other. All doubt my Richard. We, who are England, are only a bunch of faggots bound together with one rope. Edward’s the rope, and he is rotting. When he parts we all tumble asunder, and the first-comer can pick us up and break us one at a time over his knee.

  She felt again like the little girl who had sat seven years ago by a fire in the Benedictine house at Cerne Abbas. The world was loose and quaking under her feet again, a moving world. Hora novissima, she could remember that much of Church Latin, tempora pessima sunt, vigilemus. Ecce minaciter, imminet Arbiter … But what judge was coming? Who will bind the faggot firm again, she thought, when the rope parts? Where is there a man of goodwill, someone with power and single purpose, who will be what we once thought Edward was? The music stopped and started again. She danced now with the Duke of Buckingham, and scarcely heard what he was saying. When that dance was over, a voice spoke to her:

  “Anne.”

  It was Richard.

  “Dickon?”

  “We are going home now.”

  She knew better than to ask why. Something was very wrong to-night in the Palace of Westminster. She felt her heart shaking. Torches and weapons accompanied them to their barge. When the curtains were drawn round them, Richard found her hand under the thick bearskin wraps. He did not speak for a long while, only held her fingers. She heard the sad splash of the oars and the town-noises from the banks. Then he said: