So much, such single-hearted labour instantly wasted: Fate was too clever; only gave to take away. The fool lifted up his voice and wearied God with his indignation when he found worms in the fruit he had climbed high to pick. The wise man recognised destiny and covered his mouth. But it was sad that a whole life with which he could have done so much should have been poured, down to the last drops of cunning and courage, into the sieve of the Danaïds: all given, all offered from a free heart, all wasted. A man could not be blamed for regretting that a little. Lines of poetry came into his mind: a ballad he had begun composing on the cold ride, leg-bound, from Sheriffhutton, unfinished yet. The cadence pleased him; seemed to chime with the cawing of the rooks whose last stragglers were passing now over his head.
Somewhat musing
And more mourning
In remembering
Th’ unsteadfastness,
This world being
Of such wheeling,
Me contrarying,
What may I guess?
Guess nothing more now. The world wheels too quickly for us, and it is by the world and not our own feebleness that we are vanquished. It turns and slides us off, tilting us out of the light into confusion, and nothing that we do can steady it in the end. Guess nothing more. The time for guessing is over. Time is. Time was. You guessed cleverly then. But time shall be no more. That is not your fault.
Lo, in this trance,
Now in substance,
Such is my dance:
Willing to die …
And this is true: as well now as twenty years from now, so that we die by fortune, with which no man can quarrel, not by our own fault. The axe is nothing. The mercy of God is very great. It is no shame to die of a blow in the dark: and the mere act and mechanism is easy: the gabbling chaplain, pikemen staring with their mouths open, the rough fellow in the black frieze jerkin dropping down on one knee to ask pardon for what he is to do. There is nothing to be afraid of there.
Willing to die,
Methinks, truly,
Bounden am I,
And that greatly,
To be content,
Seeing plainly …
How did it go now, the reason, the resolution of the discord: the why and wherefore of dying without anger or resentment or the knowledge of failure? Why was defeat not defeat?
Seeing plainly
Fortune doth wry
All contrary
From mine intent.
The edge of cloud was half-way up the sun now. Behind him the stone room began to swim with shadows. Content, content, content: his mind said the word almost aloud. To be content, having lost the game only by fortune, by no folly or feebleness on one’s own part: it had been played hard and well. Richard was not the winner, but destiny, the mistress of booby-traps, the eternal inventress of odd surprises. He might lose to her himself one day; and if he did not lose, if he lived forty years as King of England, it would not matter. What mattered was that Anthony, Earl Rivers, was not the villain of his own tragedy; died having climbed high enough to make fortune jealous. It was no hardship to see one’s work smashed in a storm and to be killed in the ruins. Only to know it had fallen through one’s own heedlessness, for want of care one could have given it, was the pain of loss. He escaped that.
Suddenly, with a single decisive movement like that of a raindrop falling from a leaf, a quatrain added itself to the poem in his mind.
My life was lent
Me to one intent.
It is nigh spent —
Welcome, Fortune.
He had not failed that intent whilst he was alive; had earned his epitaph. He repeated it, leaning his cheek against the stone and watching the steady and continual accession of the night.
*
“My Lords, temporal and spiritual, and you, the commons of my realm, and you especially, my Lord Chief Justice and all the Justices, Barons and Serjeants of the law; you have now heard me, in this place which is called Court of King’s Bench, take the oath administered by old custom to the Kings of England when they begin to rule, that I will be a good and gracious Lord to my realm of England: and it may be that you have wondered why I should choose to make an oration to you here and not to go at once to St. Edward’s Shrine, as the usage is.
“I shall make this plain to you.
“My Lords and commons, and you my Lord Chief Justice and your brother-judges, you know what is my title to the crown. That has been rehearsed to you, and because you found it good you came to me yesterday at my mother’s Palace of Baynard’s Castle and by the mouth of my cousin of Buckingham you petitioned me to be King. I need not recall to you the tenor of your own words. My brother’s children are adjudged bastards by sentence of Holy Church. We leave them there. But before you spoke of any such matter, you alleged another on which I must dwell with you for a moment. You spoke of a time when the Kings, my progenitors, feared God and were zealous for the indifferent administration of justice. Then, you said, the land was at peace, the malice of enemies was resisted, the intercourse of merchants was largely used and poor people labouring for their living were spared any miserable or intolerable poverty. You told me next of a later time when insolent, vicious and avaricious persons turned your felicity into misery and confounded the order of policy and the laws of God and man, so that no man could be sure of his life, and or livelihood, or of his wife or daughter. All these things you urged to me as reasons why I should be your King.
“My Lords, commons and Justices, as touching kingship, I have stood near to a throne all my life. I am not one of those of whom it is said in Holy Writ that they come out of prison to be crowned.
“To men who are subjects, there appears nothing happier than to be a King. My Lords and Commons, I wish to make no longer oration to you: but be sure of this: that if I had much regard for my own happiness I should not sit in this seat.
“This seat, the King’s Bench, has been from of old a seat of judgment; and the kings of England are accustomed to begin their rule here because a King is also a judge. Learned grammarians say that in Latin a King takes his name from regere, signifying rule, so that he has the name but not the substance of kingship who is crowned but does not rule indifferently according to the law. My Lords and commons, and you most particularly, my Lord Chief Justice and your brethren, it is for this reason that I have chosen to speak to you sitting in this marble throne of the King’s Bench. Indeed, it is for this reason that I am willing to speak to you in any place as your King.
“This is the place of law; and the law is above all of us, for it is the whole marrow of the old liberties of this land to say: The King is not above the law, but the law above the King. Therefore, for all these distresses of which you have complained to me, there is a remedy in the law administered without fear or prejudice or affection and now I speak to you, my Lord Chief Justice Hussey, to you Judges of the King’s Bench and the Common Pleas, Barons and Judges of the Exchequer, Mr. Attorney-General Kidwelly, and all you men of law, straitly willing and commanding you justly and duly to administer my law without delay or favour. My law, the old law of England, is for all men. It is the refuge of the broken and the strong castle that the righteous run to and are safe. See you to it that that castle is guarded and not betrayed. As to you, my Lords temporal, see the countries where you dwell well guided, and that no extortions are done upon my subjects down to the very least of them. Do this, my Lords and Judges, and fear nothing, for the whole might of England is on the side of justice now. Rather than that you should see a leper or an Irishman oppressed in my realm, and want power to help him, I will send you a thousand men-at-arms to protect you in doing justice.
“Have a particular care that no money be wrung from my subjects by unlawful means, even though it were in my own name. I remember how the commons of this realm have been put to great exactions by a new imposition called a benevolence, which forced them against their freedom to pay large sums of money to their almost utter destruction. It is my wish that at the next P
arliament this device of a benevolence shall be damned and annulled forever.
“Yeomen, call for silence at the end of the hall there. I will have no cheering.
“You judges and Lords, your business, I tell you again and with all the oratory at my command, is to do justice to all men. Let me not hear that officers of the courts have seized on the goods of accused men before they have been found guilty by law, as has been done lately to my knowledge. Let the Justices of my Peace not be too hardly induced to grant bail or mainprise to such as are accused, for by our law no one is criminous until twelve men of his own shire have found him so: and now I come to speak of these twelve men. See you to it that they, whose oaths can free a wrongdoer or bring an innocent Christian to the ladder, are always men of good name and fame, not things of straw to be bought by some Lord to protect a scoundrel or hurt an honest man. That is another charge I lay on you.
“Now I am coming to the end of what I am to say. I am not eloquent and would have been glad to say less than I have done. My Lords, commons and Judges, you know that since the death of my dear brother, to whom Almighty God grant peace and perpetual light, amen, I have put five noble persons of this realm to death; and of this I shall not attempt to make any concealment. Lord Rivers, Sir Richard Grey, Sir Richard Hawte and Sir Thomas Vaughan died by the consent and agreement of the whole Council because they had attempted my destruction and to seize the person of my nephew who was then called King. As to Lord Hastings, I can only say this to you, that he intended my death, and that I wish I might have died before I found him, whom I always loved, a traitor. May God have mercy on his soul. These men died because they broke the law. Pray for their souls as I do: but remember that their sin was rebellion, which Holy Writ tells us is like the sin of necromancy. I have told you I will not suffer extortion. Neither will I suffer that devilish wickedness of civil war which has filled England with widows. I will stamp it out utterly. There is no nobleman in the realm who would not be better to starve than to arm Englishmen against Englishmen whilst I am King. If he were the dearest friend I have, I would not dine until I saw his head off.
“Silence at the end of the hall there: I am grateful for your cheers, but keep them till I have spoken. I have almost done.
“But if I condemn civil bloodshed, I must give you your example. It shall never be said of me that I taught others to exercise justice and good which I would not do myself.
“Those who were prime enemies of their own country I have punished already. Presently I shall call before you a man whom I have no reason to love, but whom I think powerless to hurt the state now, one Sir John Fogg. Those of you who best know him best know what he deserves: but I shall take him by the hand and pardon him in the sight of you all, as a sign that King Richard of England has forgotten the enemies of Duke Richard of Gloucester.
“When I have done that, we are to worship at the shrine of our great Saint and King, St. Edward the Confessor. Let us pray that by his intercession God may be pleased to grant each of us the virtues most requisite to his station: to you, my Lords temporal, courage and loyalty to put down forever this curse of armed faction, this sin of rebellion; to you, my Lords spiritual, zeal to see virtue and cleanness of living advanced and vices repressed; to you, Judges, conscience to administer my laws indifferently to all men, without delay; and to me, your King, grace by God’s infinite mercy to rule well in England.”
*
The reindeer stared at de Commynes, and de Commynes, not particularly impressed, stared back at the reindeer. It was really very much like any other kind of deer, he thought, except that it was longer and lower in the body and had finer antlers. He had just counted fifty-four points on the head in front of him, and that was certainly impressive. Whether it justified the Christian King in paying forty-five hundred German florins for a herd of six of the creatures was a question: but doubtless it was better for him to amuse his dying fantasy with jackels from Tunis and elks from Denmark and dogs from every inhabited quarter of the world than with his other pastime of making and breaking men simply to prove that he could still do it.
Those who did not know him thought he was mad now, crouching behind the spiked grilles and drawbridges of Plessis-les-Tours like an hysterical cat in a tree-top. He was not mad, de Commynes knew, only beyond words afraid: of his nobles who might restrain him and take the guidance of affairs in their own hands; of his subjects who might break down the iron gates of his hermitage and murder him; of his neighbours and enemies who might drag France into the dirt again during his son’s minority; above and beyond all, of an old servant of his who suddenly threatened to become his master, of death whose very name he had forbidden to be spoken in his hearing. Tormented with haemorrhoids, drained white with dysentery, his body numbed and ruined by frequent strokes, King Louis of France was trying to buy life for himself as he bought peace for his kingdom: ten thousand écus a month to his physician, foul-mouthed Dr. Jacques Coictier, who bullied him like a schoolmaster, offerings to the value of above seven hundred thousand francs to all the saints in Christendom from St. John Lateran to the Three Kings of Cologne; even acts of mercy, for he had released Cardinal Balue, the traitor, from the iron cage in which he had been kept for fourteen years. All the world watched his long campaign against dying. Frederic of Aragon sent him, at his entreaty, a holy man from Calabria who had lived in a cave since he was twelve years old and ate neither flesh, fish nor butter. The Pope lent him relics of great sanctity. His fear still stalked through Plessis-les-Tours like a visible tiling, breathing coldly on the necks of those who lived there. The place was like a frontier-fortress. From where he stood, de Commynes could see one of the guard-turrets of solid iron from which the Scots archers had orders to shoot without challenging whoever came within sight of the walls at night. The King received no one. The veritable Grand Turk, Sultan Bajazet himself, had sent an embassy offering a fortune in coin and all the relics in Byzantium if the Christian King would oblige him in a little matter. It was refused an audience. The King had seen his own son once in the past four years.
A heavy, impatient tread broke de Commynes’ reflections. He looked round. Dr. Coictier, the most powerful man in the little iron-barred world of Plessis-les-Tours, was stumping toward him, head down, gown floating behind him, the very image of a surly tup looking to see who intruded on his pasture. He had the tup’s yellow eye, too, perspicacious, quick, intolerant. He grunted a species of good-day and stood, his thumbs in Ins girdle, glaring at the reindeer. De Commynes almost expected him to tuck in his chin and charge it, head-to-head.
“How is he this morning?”
“How’s who?”
“His Majesty.”
“Him: he’s well enough, well as he’ll ever be. He won’t last long. All the holy relics in Christendom can’t cure a man in his case. I’ve told him so but he won’t listen.”
“I don’t doubt you have.”
“Obstinate man, obstinate: I’ve no patience. If he’d take more notice of me and less of that damned mountebank he fetched out of Calabria he’d do better. But what’s the use of talking? Any news from outside?”
“None that I know: I believe Monseigneur le Daim had a post this morning, but I’ve heard nothing.”
“You never will from that fellow; keeps his mouth shut: wise man.”
There was a silence. The reindeer, tired of their company, walked slowly away. Dr. Coictier, whose manners were not pretty, hawked and spat; then wiped his lips on his physician’s gown. De Commynes said:
“I thought he seemed somewhat easier the last day or two.”
The yellow eyes turned their glare on him.
“You did, did you? Well, my dear and learned fellow-physician, you’ll be interested to hear that I, with my poor science, had formed the same opinion. He is easier; and if I could contrive to kill one of the reigning princes of Christendom every month or so I might keep him alive for quite a while yet.”
“You mean the news of King Edward’s death has cheered him? I
thought that too. It’s a strange grace God’s given him to outlast all his enemies and neighbours: Charles the Hardy and his daughter, Galeazzo Sforza, John of Aragon. He’s seen them all out, and I think he’s conscious that that’s a divine mercy to him.”
“You’ve a little more sense than these other numskulls about here,” Coictier told him in an almost friendly manner. “The poor devil would do better if he troubled himself less: worrying about how long he’s going to last, worrying about how much Purgatory he’s going to get when he is sent for, worrying about what’ll come to France after he’s gone. Sacrament of the altar, why doesn’t the fool take things more quietly? He’s only a man when all’s said: plenty more like him. I’ve told you that I’m sick of it but he won’t listen. I said to him to his face the other day, I said: You may be the King of France, Sire, but you’re a troublesome old fool to all those who are trying to do you good. I’ve ordered you to keep your mind easy, and if you can’t do as you’re told I wash my hands of you. That made him think.”
“By God, Coictier,” said de Commynes, “you go a great deal too far. A man wouldn’t use such outrageous language to his servant. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. There was a time when you’d sooner have bitten your tongue out than talk to the King like that. One of these days his Majesty will remember who he is and who you are, and you’ll find yourself outside the gates with nothing but the clothes you stand up in: and you’ll deserve it.”
Under the Hog: A Novel of Richard III Page 44
