Kingdom Come

by Toby Clements

He’d shaken his head.

  ‘Stay with me a moment, Mistress Everingham,’ he’d said. ‘Just a moment.’

  She had paused and nodded, and settled next to him, having taken a look around the makeshift hospital, for she had other men yet to deal with, other men who needed her help. There were those with wounds in their bellies, such as Wilkes’s, who were beyond her assistance; and there were those with wounds in their chests who made that strange sucking sound, and they too would all die before sundown, and for these men she had mixed a very powerful dwale and had given it to a priest, a Burton Lazar, who had come up from the village at which they stopped the night before, to administer alongside the viaticum. But there were others whom she could help – men with arrow wounds or blade wounds to other parts of their bodies, men whom she could save if she could clean, wash and stitch their wounds before the air got at them and turned them black.

  She had worked at this all morning, burying herself in tasks so as not to fret over Thomas, never attempting anything that took too long, but staunching blood and cleaning wounds where she could, stitching what needed to be stitched and plugging wounds with honey-soaked, barley-filled linen wads, and all morning she had been assailed by savoury wisps of burned meat from the cautery so that at times she had felt like a pieman.

  Yet kneeling in the dirt next to Wilkes, she’d begun to fear that Wilkes was trying to tell her something about Thomas in words he was weighing out for posterity. But then she had slowly come to see that she was wrong, or half-wrong: he was trying to tell her something about himself.

  ‘Tell your husband,’ he’d said. ‘Tell your husband, when you see him, that I was not so bad a man as he thinks. I tried my best to avert bloodshed. I did my part to restrict the – the supply of widows and orphans.’

  He had smiled at his joke and tried to lick his dried lips with a bloodstained tongue. He had been silent for a moment, gathering his strength, his eyes half-closed, his dark eyes somehow glistening. That was where the last of his power lay, she’d thought, but then he had twisted with pain and she’d wondered about more dwale to soothe these last moments.

  ‘Tell him …’ Wilkes had managed. ‘Tell him – that I forgive him. In so far – as I am able. If he will forgive me.’

  ‘I will fetch a priest,’ she’d said.

  ‘No!’ he’d said, catching at the hem of her skirts. Then he’d grabbed her hand, and his back had arched in spasm, and he’d half growled, half roared: ‘Tell him – tell him you have – tell him you have – tell him you have the – You’re not to – He will understand. But tell him—’

  His eyeballs were red. He was drenched in sweat. It was as if he was vomiting up his soul.

  ‘Father!’ she’d shouted to the Lazar priest. ‘Father!’

  The priest had come scurrying, but she’d felt the life go out of Wilkes, and by the time she looked back at him, he was dead. She’d held his hand for a bit longer, before standing up; she and the priest had stayed there, looking down at him.

  ‘A merciful release,’ the priest had said.

  ‘He was trying to tell me something.’

  ‘You will have to wait now, until you join him in heaven.’

  Yes, she’d supposed, though there was something about Wilkes that made her think he would be made to endure many a long year in Purgatory. Then the priest had bent to close Wilkes’s eyes and begin the prayers, and Katherine had crossed herself.

  Now she has taken off her blood-soaked apron and left it on the wagon, and she walks towards the abbey, across the pasture towards the battlefield, leaving behind the business of the camp followers. She goes in search of solace in silence, and space, if only for a moment. She knows nothing good is likely to come of such a thing, but she is filled with memories of the past, of when she did just this, and most especially of that time after the battle of Towton, when she waited in vain for Thomas’s return.

  Men – and women, and children – are already out in the long grass, braving its dangers, looking for what they can find among the dead and dying, but up ahead, by the abbey, even on its steps, the fighting continues still. She can see many men in their colours still running to and fro, and the sounds of outrage are faint but somehow all the crueller, for the battle is over, and surely now it is the time for mercy.

  Some of the monks from the abbey have come out and are pleading with the looters to leave their victims be. And there is so much opportunity to be had that sometimes the looters do move on in search of other prey, leaving the monks to save those whom they think they can, and pray over those whom they know they cannot.

  She realises that the long grass brushing against the hem of her skirts is hazing its wool with blood and she stops and stands alone, watching, waiting, in a small clearing between the dead and the dying and the looting and the looted, and above the fresh smell of new spring growth she smells blood, and shit, and gunpowder smoke, and imagines that perhaps this is the devil’s smell, and she vows that whatever else happens in her life, she will never smell this again.

  Across the blood-soaked field the abbey bells have begun to ring, sharp and dissonant, and she becomes gripped by a fearful sorrow and feels the tentacles of that same terrible desolation curl up to grip her as they did when Alice died, but it is then, at that precise, darkest moment, that from the far side of the pasture she sees Thomas come walking unsteadily towards her, blood-glazed and almost demented with panic, and as he approaches she watches him wrenching off his gloves and his helmet and tossing them aside, and then his blood-soaked livery coat, and so on, piece by piece, discarded, so that by the time he reaches her in the middle of the field he wears only his hose and his arming jacket and he carries only the bloodstained pollaxe.

  ‘We must go,’ he says. ‘We must get Rufus and be away.’

  And she says nothing but turns to walk with him, and he puts his heavy arm across her shoulder, and he tells her about Wilkes.

  ‘Hastings will know by this evening,’ he says. ‘And we are undone.’

  She says nothing, but takes him first to see the man’s dead body and then, while he stands there, she goes to the wagon to fetch the papers.

  ‘He made me swear to God that I would pass them on,’ she says.

  ‘We must destroy them,’ Thomas tells her. ‘We must destroy them.’

  ‘We could read them first?’

  After a moment he agrees.

  He opens the seal and covers the papers in a great deal of blood, but his hands are trembling too much and he complains of too great a headache, so after a moment he passes them over to her to read, and she stands a little way from Wilkes’s blood-spattered corpse and looks through the papers and finds nothing about Thomas or herself until the bottom of the very last sheet of the letter that Wilkes has addressed to William, Lord Hastings. When she finishes, she too can hardly read, for her heart blocks her throat and tears her eyes.

  ‘Say that again,’ Thomas asks, for she has murmured while she read.

  ‘He – he tells William Hastings that in the event of his death, he should rely more heavily on you,’ she says, ‘and on me, for doing what needs be done, but should we prove unwilling, under those circumstances it might be right Christian to let us reside in peace, unmolested and restored to our home in Lincolnshire.’

  There are then tears in the eyes of both.

  ‘He never wanted to condemn you, you see?’ she tells him. ‘If he lived, he would have had to tell Hastings, but if he was dead, then he wanted to spare you, in so far as he was able, in so far as it was in his power, if you might forgive him.’

  ‘Let me see,’ Thomas says, as if he does not believe her, and he tries to read through the words too, but after a moment he drops the letters and papers and falls to his knees, and it is only then she sees the wound in the back of his head.

  Epilogue

  Marton Hall, Marton,

  County of Lincoln,

  After the Assumption, 1471

  Sir Thomas Everingham sits in the late-afternoon sun
, playing chess with his son. He usually lets Rufus beat him, but the boy is getting too good for that, so today he does not do so. Instead Thomas watches him as his smudged little eyes take in the wreckage of his pieces on the board, and it is as if he is retracing his moves to see where he went wrong, and then when he recognises it, you can see him remembering not to make that mistake again.

  John Stumps sits watching. He is the best of them all at the game.

  ‘Got fuck all else to do, has he?’ Foulmouth John always says, and the skinny boy, who is forgiven and welcomed back, and who it turns out is called John, sometimes laughs.

  ‘But you are getting to be a very fine player, Rufus,’ John Stumps says.

  ‘Must have got it from his mother,’ Jack Bradford says. He has a baby asleep on his lap and his other daughter, Kate, the girl who once breathed through her neck, sits not too far off playing with two corn dolls, cooing over them like a collared dove. Jack’s wife sits nearby with her drop wheel, spinning wool into yarn. It’s a comforting sound, once you get used to it.

  After a moment Katherine comes out of the hall and sits next to Rufus. She’s in her new green dress, and there is something about her that Thomas guesses instantly, though he’d never be able to say why, and he leans forward and pushes her untouched mug of ale towards her. She pushes it back at him, unable to stand its smell, and he knows, and he smiles and she smiles back at him, but it is one of those secret, careful, let-us-wait-and-see smiles, and for a moment she and Rufus look so similar he cannot help but smile a proper, happily carefree smile himself.

  It is the first Sunday after the Assumption, in the year 1471, the eleventh of King Edward IV’s reign, and the sun shines bright on those gathered here in the courtyard of Marton Hall in the county of Lincoln, and when it sinks, they will go into the hall, and cover the fire, and they will say their prayers and retire to bed, where they will lie watched over by the shades of men who have gone before: by John Daud, pardoner, who gave them succour; by Sir John Fakenham, knight, who knew more than ever he let on, and by his son Richard, who died blind, and of heartbreak. They will be watched over by Walter, who gave up his life for them in the Welsh mountains; by the physician Payne, who kept their secrets even to his death; and even by Lord Hastings’s deep-thinking man of business John Wilkes, who knew either he or Thomas must die. They will be watched over by the shades of women, too: by those such as Nettie Bradford, who died with a crossbow shaft in her face; and by Margaret Cornford, who died in the snow, almost by their hand. And by Alice. Always Alice, their infant, whose body lies buried in the black earth of Holland, but who watches over them still.

  And for as long as those sleeping under the roof of Marton Hall are able to keep the departed in mind, and offer up prayers for their souls, then such monsters as still exist in England will be kept constrained within the mind of man.

  A Note from the Author

  If 1469 was an odd and tumultuous year, the two that followed have to be among the most dramatic in English history: the Earl of Warwick’s second rebellion in as many years failed, and he and King Edward’s brother George were driven into exile where they had to make allies of not only England’s oldest enemy, France, but also their own most bitter foe: Margaret of Anjou, wife of the king they’d deposed and mother of any Lancastrian hopes for the future. Six months later, and seemingly against all odds, they reversed their positions, and managed a triumphant return to England. King Edward was driven out of the country, forced to steal away across the North Sea on a ship he could only pay for with his fur-lined coat.

  Old King Henry was brought out from the Tower and restored to the throne and it was as if there had never been a King Edward IV. Another six months later, though, and it was King Edward’s turn to come back, sneaking in through the back door this time, at first claiming only the dukedom of York, as Henry IV had done many years earlier, but within another he had defeated in battle and killed his oldest ally, and within another he had defeated in battle and killed his oldest enemy. He was restored to the throne, and King Henry was restored to the Tower, where he was soon to join the growing number of murdered English kings.

  These are the facts that provide the backbone of Kingdom Come, the last in the Kingmaker series, though readers familiar with the conventional narrative of the times – often based on The Chronicle of the Rebellion in Lincolnshire, 1470–will recognise I’ve chosen an unorthodox interpretation. This is not to suit any novelistic necessity, but because the various mysteries surrounding the attack on Sir Thomas Burgh’s house in Gainsborough (still there today, and terrific to visit, incidentally), and the events that followed immediately afterwards, point to – or at least allow for – a much more interesting possibility than is usually accepted.

  The basis for this hypothesis – that King Edward provoked the rebellion to force the Earl of Warwick’s hand – can be found in P. Holland’s excellent paper ‘The Lincolnshire Rebellion of March 1470’, in The English Historical Review (Vol. 103, No. 409). Much of it pivots on the timing of the issuing of Commissions of Array, the implausibility of those damning letters found after the battle of Losecoat, and the identity of a man named Walter who may or may not have been a churchman, but I recommend this as further reading to anyone who wishes to pursue the argument. The character of Wilkes is obviously – I hope – an invention, but it must have taken someone to initiate the plot, so why not him?

  The long-running issue of the ledger is finally laid to rest, and some will be pleased to hear the back of it. Its inspiration comes from a record found in Rouen Cathedral that suggests King Edward’s father, Richard, Duke of York, had been in the town of Pontoise, near Paris, during the crucial months in which his son ought to have been conceived in Rouen, where his wife Cecily passed the summer of 1441. This – along with the fact that the boy was baptised in a side chapel of the cathedral, which has been taken as a sign his mother was ashamed of him – has been seen by some as proof of the boy’s bastardy, but Pontoise is in fact only ninety kilometres from Rouen, a couple of days’ ride, and Edward might have been born prematurely and had a rushed baptism to ensure his entry into the kingdom of God.

  Rumours of illegitimacy had surrounded Edward all his life, though, because he was not supposed to look like his father, who was short and not particularly striking while Edward was tall and strapping, and supposedly the most handsome prince in Europe. In fact, he looked similar to his siblings who were all – except notably Richard, Duke of Gloucester – also tall and fair. His sister Margaret was supposed to be 5 feet 11 inches. Such accusations were political, of course, but after his death they sufficed to prevent his sons reaching the throne until a more permanent way was found.

  Given that there is a record placing Richard, Duke of York, in Pontoise in the summer of 1441, I hope it is obvious there is no record that now exists placing him in Pontours – which is the best part of seven hundred kilometres away from Rouen – and that the pardoner’s double-edged bequest is pure invention on my part. Or perhaps the confusion between Pontoise and Pontours was the original clerk’s?

  The other long-running end that is tied up is that of Katherine’s identity. Katherine of Valois was married to Henry V and mother of Henry VI, who was born in 1421, but after Henry V’s death in 1422, she married (in obscure circumstances) Owen Tudor, a Welshman, who was beheaded in Hereford after the battle of Mortimer’s Cross in 1461, but not before he had sired one of the most important families in English history. Katherine of Valois died, perhaps from complications after childbirth, aged thirty-five, in 1437, but there is mention of at least one unnamed daughter born in 1435 who became a nun. That would make Katherine Everingham older by five years than Thomas, and by the end of Kingdom Come in 1471 at the very limit of childbearing age, but there we are. It is possible. And it is why, in Winter Pilgrims, Owen Tudor recognised her as she stood in the crowd watching him being beheaded: because she looked like her mother, his wife.

  The battle of Tewkesbury, which ends this book, also saw
the end of the Lancastrian line, and the end of the middle spasm of what we now call the Wars of the Roses. It remains controversial because there is strong evidence that many – some? a few? – men were killed even though they were seeking sanctuary within the abbey. Had one of them been Prince Edward of Westminster, then you can be sure Thomas Everingham would have been there, pollaxe in hand, but despite Tudor propaganda of dastardly, heretic and murderous Yorkist activities, there is evidence that the Prince was killed in the field, during the battle itself. King Edward was rumoured to have offered a hundred pounds to the man who killed him, or brought the Prince to him alive, so there is not a doubt he would have been despatched very swiftly thereafter, but as with everything in this Kingmaker series, I’ve changed its story to match the facts, not the facts to match its story.

  After the death of his son, old King Henry VI was said to have died of grief, but most likely had his brains dashed out in the Tower; and after her capture fleeing the field, Margaret of Anjou, that heroic, strong-laboured she-wolf of France, with nothing left for which to struggle, returned eventually to France to live out the rest of her life as a poor relation of King Louis XI. She died in 1482.

  One of the saddest characters in this period, to my mind, is John Neville, Lord Montagu, once Earl of Northumberland, who served Edward and England loyally, remaining steadfast while his brother, the Earl of Warwick, flip-flopped all over the place, only to be demoted. If Edward had not deprived him of the earldom of Northumberland in 1470, then I imagine he would have stayed faithful and the King would not have been driven into exile in Flanders. Had Edward not spent those months in Bruges then we might not have such a magnificent royal library, or a taste for bricks, as evinced by William Hastings’s unfinished castle at Kirby Muxloe, but more crucially, in the last ten years of Edward’s reign, as the Earl of Northumberland, John Neville would have remained the significant power in the north, not Richard of Gloucester, and the whole catastrophe – for the House of York – of Richard III’s reign might never have arisen. Well, it is a theory.