Under the Hog: A Novel of Richard III

by Patrick Carleton

  “It does not matter,” he told them. “The foxes are killing a hawk for raiding the poultry-yard.”

  The Friar took him by the hand now.

  “Kneel down, my son. Pray. Ask all these others to pray with you.”

  “I’ll pray alone,” said Henry Stafford.

  He did not kneel; put his hands together and looked down. The others on the scaffold pulled off their bonnets. Some in the front of the crowd crossed themselves. Presently he lifted his head again.

  “Now I am ready.”

  A dry, precise voice surprised Richard Ratcliffe. It came from Sir William Catesby, who was peering forward a little like a lawyer making a point.

  “Will you not ask the King’s forgiveness for having contrived against him?”

  Henry Stafford’s eyes were like those of a wild horse again. He spoke so loudly that Sir Richard was afraid the crowd might hear.

  “If the King I made had given me an audience I would have stabbed him to the heart. I am Buckingham. My house does nothing by short measure. England is the kingdom of traitors, and I would have been the greatest traitor of all. There is nothing for forgiveness in that.”

  One of the masked men laid hands on him; began to pull open the collar of his doublet. He took no notice; went on, still loudly:

  “Look at your conscience, William Gatesby, and tell me if it is not true. You are only another Englishman. You betrayed Hastings to Richard When Hastings betrayed Richard to Elizabeth. There is no honesty anywhere. Honesty bled to death in the wars before I was grown. Tell your King Richard that I made him King of a nation of perjurers and he must not blame me if I was no better than my fellow-subjects. Tell him it is a rotten carcase he has to rule. The soul went out of it when we were young. Now leave me in peace.”

  He turned to the block as the headsman took his hands off him. It was a high piece of wood, black-painted, with a hollow for the chin. Without crossing himself, he knelt down and caught hold of it by the two sides.

  The Friar slipped round in front of him, holding up a crucifix. From somewhere, the other masked man had produced his three-foot axe. The huge triangular blade glimmered like lead. Henry Stafford was smiling drunkenly.

  “This England is too much for any man’s conscience,” he said, and crouched over the block.

  “Proficiscere, anima Christiana …”

  Gripped by two hands, the axe heaved slowly up against a background of roofs and clouds. It rose higher than the uplifted crucifix; quivered for half of a breath; swooped down. A loud crash shook the silence round the Poultry Cross. Henry Stafford’s hands dropped from the sides of the block and at the same instant the Friar flinched backward with a yelp. A great crimson spurt had stained the front of his habit.

  The headsman stooped, groping for something on the far side of the block. His hand came up with fingers in the hair of the head, whose lips and eyelids shivered and from which blood pattered like thaw-water from the eaves.

  “This is the head of a traitor.”

  He spoke the formula in turn from each quarter of the scaffold. Sir William Gatesby stared at the tall block that rose, like a black promontory in a sea at sunset, out of a widening puddle of red. Presently he said in his dry lawyer’s voice:

  “He was mad, of course.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Sir Richard Ratcliffe, “he was quite mad.”

  *

  Dr. John Warkworth, Master of St. Peter’s College in the University of Cambridge, drew his hands from his sleeves to make a negative gesture.

  “No, no, my days of writing chronicles are over and done.”

  His host, Dr. Robert Wodelarke, Provost of King Henry of Windsor’s College of the Blessed Virgin and St. Michael, smiled.

  “Does a man leave the inclination of a lifetime as easily as that, Domine? You have been a spectator of the great affairs of the world as long as I’ve known you. Are you going to content yourself suddenly with Aristotle and Alexander: no more annals, no more strangeness?”

  “None whatever, Domine: as much of my little chronicle as I thought it wise to preserve was written out and given to the library of our poor house, not to be removed on pain of anathema, a year ago. I do not meddle with news now.”

  “But you must still hear stories.”

  “The world was full of gossip as soon as God took Adam’s rib out of him. I don’t run after it any more.”

  “I could wish almost that you did.”

  “I know, Domine, and I know why. But if you wish these things recorded you must find someone else for the task, a young man who will write a fine book for Mr. Caxton in London to imprint. You and I are too old for vanities.”

  The two dons were taking their ease in the solar of the Provost’s lodgings. It was a cold March afternoon over the Fenlands, wet and unsure. Cambridge, snuggled in a blanket of mist, was recovering from its greatest season of excitement since Archbishop Rotherham presented the new Schools. The King had come that way. They had not heard much of him since he began to rule last year; knew that he had come to the throne in a strange manner and had taken several unexpected heads off. He was said to be a pale little man with uneven shoulders and narrow eyes: a great change from the Rose of Rouen certainly. Then one morning he had come riding in, nobles and men-at-arms in front of him, a surprising number of clergy in his attendance; and the University had turned out to do him honour: the Vice-Chancellor, the Provost of King’s and President of Queens’ the Masters of St. Peter’s, and St. Bene’t’s, Clare and Pembroke, Trinity Hall and Gonville Hall, Michaelhouse, King’s Hall, and Provost Wodelarke’s own foundation of St. Catherine’s, the Proctors and Esquires Bedell, the Doctors, Masters and Bachelors of all the faculties and sciences. They had not had much time for preparation. House-fronts in Trumpington Street were hung with what arras could be found, the stinking quagmire of a lane between Trinity Hall and Gonville Hall was sweetened after a fashion, Latin orations were scrambled together and lads in statu pupillari forbidden, on pain of stocks and birching, to make themselves conspicuous. Everything was fluttering and uncertain: and into the turmoil there rode a tiny little white-faced man who smiled at everybody and looked as though he were ready to tumble out of his saddle with weariness: a ghost of a man. They conducted him to the new great Church of St. Mary on Market Hill, where Mass was sung and long speeches made and some degrees conferred. They took him to the hall of King Henry’s College to sup and hear Latin disputations. They sang another Mass for him in the vast, unfinished Chapel of the College; and they left him for the night. He was not so formidable, after all. To-morrow he would ride off and forget them again. He did not. They had misread him there. He spent tomorrow talking to people and asking questions. When he left the day after, they realised very completely that they had a new make of King in England.

  Provost Wodelarke leaned forward and touched his friend’s knee.

  “You’ve understood me too well. I confess I would dearly like to see a fit record of what has been done for us here written by one of us. We have the future to consider, Domine. Those who come to find learning here after we’re gone ought not to suppose we were ungrateful.”

  Dr. Warkworth allowed himself a thin laugh.

  “I used to think, Provost, that you were Lancastrian.”

  “I was,” said Provost Wodelarke innocently, “until I met the King.”

  “Your founder would not thank you to hear that.”

  “My founder would thank him. You and I know, my friend, that Henry of Windsor was a man of God if ever one trod this villainous earth. Look out there.”

  He pointed to the towering greyness of the College Chapel, just visible through the window like a solidification of the general mist.

  “That lovely house of God was his best work. It was to be his monument: a place such as no University in France or Italy possessed, a Chapel like a Cathedral that would remind all us learned men what the beginning of wisdom is.”

  “You’re an orator, Domine.”

  “Do you deny th
e postulate?”

  “No, no.”

  “No learned place in Christendom would praise God with more seemly magnificence than Holy King Henry’s College if that Chapel were finished. But he died before it was finished, unkinged and a martyr.”

  “Between four walls, Domine, there are plenty would say the King we have now martyred him.”

  “Do you believe it yourself?”

  “I am not sure: and if I were sure I should not tell my hood, leave alone my friends.”

  “I do not. I am ignorant of politics beside you, but I disbelieve that tale. Thanks to King Richard, the work begins on King Henry’s Chapel again to-morrow. He has promised me the money on his own word. We may live to see it finished.”

  “That is certainly something.”

  “Something? Then what do you say to his other charity to the memory of Lancaster: five hundred marks to Queen Marguerite’s College?”

  “I say it is a great sum of money.”

  The Provost was warming. He kicked the skirts of his gown impatiently and stood up.

  “If you had heard him talk to me,” he said, “as simply as I talk to you, about his other charities and foundations: a college of a hundred priests — no less than that — at York, the College of All Hallows in London, his works in Westminster. He is finishing the great Chapel of St. George King Edward began there. He talked to me so openly about all these things, and about Prince Edward, his son, and how he will educate him. It was in this room. He sent for me. There were a dozen great men with him: my Lord Treasurer Audley, the Viscount Lovel, the Earl of Lincoln, Sir William Catesby; and he treated me as though I were one of them. Mr. Kendal the Secretary came in whilst we were talking with a letter to King Charles of France for him to sign, and he asked my pardon to break off and attend to it.”

  “The house of York were always affable,” observed Dr. Warkworth.

  “Maybe. But I tell you I no longer believe the tales about him. He is a kind Christian Prince: and he is not crouch-backed either. I say now that if he headed Lord Hastings it was because he deserved it; and the Duke of Buckingham was a foul common traitor to rise against him last year, Lancaster or no Lancaster.”

  “Yes, you’re a proper Yorkist now, my friend. That is as great a prodigy as any I have recorded in my chronicle.”

  “Habeo! The charge lies. I confess to it. He has made a Yorkist of me. My old friend, I wish you would open that chronicle of yours again. I know why you closed it: because you would not record all the sorrows of this unfortunate realm after Edward came back again.”

  “And that’s true. I would not risk my neck with telling the truth or cumber my soul with writing lies.”

  “But now there’s a new kind of truth to tell. Consider this year’s Parliament. They say on all hands it’s the best and most just that’s sat since Edward the Great’s day. I believe as much as you do that our hold King Henry and his son after him were the only heirs of the crown of England. As to this Welchman, the Lady Margaret’s son, I do not know what to say. But I will say this. I think that King Richard is a wise King and a kind King who has shown a most blessed disposition in all things. He has comforted the poor; worked to undo his brother’s tyrannies; showed more mercy to his opponents than could be imagined. I have heard stories of the care he took last year, after the Duke revolted, to see that no innocents should suffer. I wish these things could be recorded; and I think you are the man to record them.”

  “Not I.”

  “You saw him too. You spoke to him. Did you see a tyrant?”

  “I will say this, Domine. All I saw in the King’s face was kindness: that, and more care and weariness than I supposed there was in the world.”

  “Then set down what he has done. A University being a place of learning, it is fitting and reasonable that useful truth should be stored up in it for the future. You should be our Livy, and set down these things you have witnessed. It is laudable, and you once took pleasure in it.”

  It was Dr. Warkworth’s turn to get up now. He took his friend by the arm and spoke quietly.

  “I should be glad to do it, if it were not for one thing.

  I have told you I will not endanger myself by writing dangerous truths, and I will not flatter. I would rather choose honesty and silence. Tell me where are the two sons of Edward IV?”

  Dr. Wodelarke turned very white; looked at the door. His voice jerked.

  “You should not ask such things; even here. It is dangerous. No one knows …”

  Dr. Warkworth smiled at him with one side of his mouth.

  “You see now. It is, as you say, dangerous. Even to talk: leave writing aside. All last autumn, until after the Duke’s rebellion, they were seen playing and shooting at times in the royal gardens at the Tower. Now they are not seen any more. The story is that they tried to escape and fell from the bridge into the moat and were drowned. The Thames carried their innocent little bodies away so that there was not even anything to bury. Ascertain me for certain, Domine, that that is the true story, and I will take my pen again and write you the history of King Richard.”

  *

  King Edward IV had built largely in his time at the Castle of Nottingham, the great central fort of England which faced all ways, dominating the roads from Scotland to London and from the Eastern fens to Wales. His brother, who loved stone and mortar, was continuing the work. The high, three-storied tower where, his face turned North again after the spring progress, he bent patiently and unrestingly over his morning’s business was not finished even now. Clink of trowels and rough talking came down occasionally through the wide window and into the room. It was a fine room hung with a peculiarly beautiful arras whose scenes showed the hunting of the unicorn. Here, the noble solitary beast with its one horn ventured out of a wood of formal trees, lured by a virgin, ready to lay its wild head on her lap. Now the hounds were slipped. They bounded forward in heraldic postures like lions salient on a shield. One of them seized it by the fetlock. The monster had turned, in the next scene, and scattered them; was galloping away over a meadow full of butterflies and coloured flowers. The hunt was after it: men with swords and boar-spears, servants with crossbows; small-waisted ladies in red gowns watched from a pavilion as it came to bay, levelling its horn at its pursuers. In the last picture it was ringed round with men and stabbed between the shoulders with a long sword. Beneath this part of the arras was the King’s table, heaped regularly and orderly with papers. King Richard, wearing a magnificent gown of mulberry-coloured silk reversed with otter, sat at the middle of the board with Mr. Secretary Kendal on his left and the Lord Privy Seal, Dean Gunthorpe of Wells, on his right. The Comptroller and Treasurer of the Household, Sir Robert Percy and Mr. Walter Hopton, were together at one end, busy with their own affairs, pricking items on a long parchment list with a dagger and checking them from a raffle of small papers. Mr. Robert Bolman, clerk to the Privy Seal, was writing at the other. They had been at work since seven o’clock that morning and it was now almost noon.

  Mr. Kendal looked sideways at the King: line of a wax-white cheek curving inward to the furrow round the mouth, and with the bone showing under it, the lips as tight as they had always been, but with less blood in them. God have mercy, he thought, how bad he looks! Less than a year of being a King has done it. He is, now how old, not thirty-two yet; looks forty-five. Well, and we aren’t through the morning’s work yet. The King looked up from the paper he had been reading: a sworn statement by the Mayor, bailiffs and burgesses of Cambridge concerning the impoverished condition of their town. It had been forwarded to him after he visited the University a month ago.

  “We shall have to do something for these folk,” he said. “What is the old fee-farm they pay?”

  Mr. Kendal routed among his papers. “Seventy pounds to the Exchequer, your Grace, nine pounds to the Prior of Chaldwell and a pound to the Prior of Killingworth.”

  “Make a memorial, please, to consult Sir William Catesby about how much we can spare them.”


  “Yes, your Grace.”

  What an ugly face Sir William will pull, he thought. It’s almost the only diversion we have now, to see the King cheating his own Chancellor of the Exchequer out of halfpence for charity. The same thought must have been also in King Richard’s mind. His narrowed eyelids allowed the smallest twinkle of amusement to flick through them.

  “And if he grumbles,” he said, “tell him to be a little sharper in collecting the Crown debts and then we shall not need to squint quite so long at each groat we spend. What was it you wished, Sir Robert?”

  Sir Robert Percy leaned over with two carefully engrossed documents.

  “Appointments of two yeomen-poulterers of the household, your Grace.”

  The King waved them away.

  “At your own discretion, Sir Robert, so long as you appoint no foxes. Mr. Secretary, please give me the inquisitions of the property of John Fogg.”

  His voice chilled on the name a little. Mr. Kendal, routing out the papers, thought: I wish we could have caught the bastard. Too many people had slipped overseas last year when the storm drowned Henry of Buckingham’s rebellion: the smooth Morton of Ely, the Marquis Dorset and several more. They were in France and Brittany now, though one of them, the Marquis, might soon be home again, considering the strange course King Richard had just taken.

  Before the King left London he had, with no warning, summoned the Lord Mayor and Aldermen and the Lords spiritual and temporal, as many as could be found, and before them all, coldly and unaccountably, as he did most things, promised and swore, verbo regio, that if the daughters of Elizabeth Grey, late calling herself Queen of England, would come to him out of the Sanctuary of Westminster and be guided and ruled by him, then he would see them in surety of their lives; would not suffer any manner of hurt to be done to their persons by way of ravishing or defiling contrary to their wills, nor imprison them in the Tower of London or elsewhere; but would treat them and find for them honestly and courteously as his kinswomen and marry them to gentlemen born, giving to each of them a dowry of the yearly value of two hundred marks, in land. To Dame Elizabeth Grey herself he would assure a pension of seven hundred marks a year; and he further promised that if any evil report were made of them to him he would not punish them before they had opportunity for defence.