An Unknown Welshman

by Jean Stubbs

  ‘Why, sir, what would you have me say?’ he parried, and warmed the evasion with a smile.

  ‘You are a saucy rogue, Harry. As one honest gentleman to another I bid you tell me what would please you best. So fear not and speak out.’

  The boy’s eyes strayed to the night outside.

  ‘Why, sir, I wish for nothing but a horse, two hounds and a goshawk.’

  ‘A goshawk, sirrah! You speak like a yeoman. The adage says an eagle for a king, a falcon for an earl, a goshawk for a yeoman!’

  The boy eyed him but said gently, ‘I think I cannot claim a falcon, my lord, since I am not an earl.’

  ‘Do you bandy words with me, Harry?’

  ‘I spoke but as you bade me, my lord. I have no title that warrants a falcon. A goshawk will suit me very well.’

  He had hoped that his first reply, aimed at the masculine heart of Lord Herbert, would have pleased his guardian. He was dismayed to find himself drawn into political argument. Lord Herbert made a judicious move and noted the boy’s flushed face.

  ‘You shall have your falcon, Harry, in a few more years. Tell me, lad, do you like a hound or a falcon better?’

  This was becoming more difficult than the chess, but the boy endeavoured to marshal his arguments as Master Scotus had taught him.

  ‘My lord, I have no favourite, for the hound loves his master and obeys his commands from the heart. The falcon is moulded to his master’s will and so cannot love him — and yet the one will love the other.’ He drew a deep breath and tried to remember how he had intended to trap Lord Herbert’s queen. ‘So, my lord, the beast appeals to the heart and the bird to the head. Your move, my lord.’

  ‘Why, Harry, you speak like a lawyer. Shall we send you to Oxford or to Cambridge? Nay, to Cambridge, for Oxford is a nest of heretics.’

  ‘An’ it please your lordship.’

  He watched his little scheme thrown over, and sighed, but his losses put Lord Herbert in a good humour.

  ‘Master Scotus tells me you have a clever head for figures, Harry.’

  ‘Figures are orderly, my lord,’ said the boy automatically, ‘and that I like very well. And they remain the same, and that I like also.’

  Lord Herbert was astounded that life should seem so small and mean.

  ‘But what of chance, Harry? What of the eternal wheel of fortune that now dips down low and now swings up high again? Greatness and good position come not from keeping your head in a book of sums. They must be sought out like a woman, and subdued like a woman. A pox on order!’

  ‘Perchance I am not meant for greatness, sir, and had best hold to my learning.’

  ‘So war and glory on the field are not to your liking, Harry?’

  ‘Not in themselves, my lord, and yet I love tales of chivalry and the noble wars of old.’

  ‘Aye? Aye?’ said Lord Herbert good-naturedly, demolishing Henry’s little battle-line and setting his king finally at hazard. ‘What tales?’

  ‘About the host in Rhosfair, my lord, of which the bards sing. And the Lord Llewelyn and his warriors in white and green. Now could I die with them, for Wales my lord, and never count the cost.’

  His evening and his game were over. He could no longer recollect the poignancy of the words, only that they had once moved him deeply. So he waited to be released and hoped he might dream of the Lord Llewelyn — and his dreams be undisturbed by memories of Knappan.

  There was a silence between them and then Lord Herbert said, ‘I judged you harshly, Harry, and too soon. There are two kinds of warriors. The one man fights because he can think of no finer work, the other for something greater than himself. Should it please God to give you a noble cause, Harry, you will fight as valiantly as any. Overturn your ivory king, lad, for he is lost tonight. But he shall fight another day. Summon Guto’r Glyn for me and get you to bed. God bless you, Harry.’

  He saw defeat in the obedient shoulders and his conscience smote him. The Lady Ann would have looked on him with gentle rebuke, for he had pitted his wits against those of a boy who could not answer him.

  ‘Harry!’ he shouted, as the small figure reached the chamber door, ‘Master Jones, the forester is training a falcon for the Lady Ann. Two days and two nights has he stayed sleepless, for the bird must close its eyes before he shuts his own. Tomorrow you may go to him from me, and ask him courteously is the bird’s will subdued.’

  ‘Why, thank you, my lord. Oh thank you, sir.’

  Lingering on the stairs, smiling at the thought of the falcon, Henry heard the bard’s voice uplifted from Lord Herbert’s chamber. Clear and sweet and unearthly came the song he had fumbled to explain.

  There is a host in Rhosfair, there is drinking, there are golden bells,

  There is my Lord Llewelyn, and tall warriors follow him;

  A thousand, a host in green and white...

  Andreas Scotus, approaching from the gallery to see him safely to bed, stopped at the sight of the boy’s face. He did not know what images surged in that yellow head, what visions rose before those grey eyes, but he had enough perception not to disturb the boy with his presence.

  Henry Tudor, twice-great grandson of Gaunt and grandson of a queen, was experiencing something he had not known. He heard the rumble of carts and wagons, laden with arms and provisions, the heavy hooves of war-horses carrying Welsh knights into battle on Saxon soil. He felt the heat and smelled the dust of a long yellow summer. And at the head of this phantom army, so far away that he could not see his face, rode the king who would release Wales from an old bondage. As the bard’s song died away so did the images, until only one banner could be seen in the distance: its white and green bearing the red dragon of Cadwaladr.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  What better fort against siege,

  Now Pembroke’s wall is broken?

  You hurled, shook till it tumbled,

  Carreg Gennen to the glen.

  The trenches above Harlech Held no better than a pen.

  No house stays you, no tower,

  No white fort, no conqueror.

  Wiliam Herbart, by Guto’r Glyn, fifteenth century, translated by Joseph P. Clancy

  Though well known in France and Brittany, Jasper Tudor was an exile and a fugitive. He owned no possessions richer than his horse and armour, and he rode and battled tirelessly: a grey-headed warrior in his middle thirties, half-brother to a dethroned king. He nourished no deep personal affection but for the nephew, Henry, that was lost to him, and the image of the boy stayed fresh in his memory though it was seven years since he had seen him. Occasional reports filtered through to him: Henry was still delicate, and moved from place to Yorkist place in Wales to benefit by the change of air and surroundings. Jasper noted these regular movements with a thought of future meeting. He heard that the young Lancastrian was intelligent and showed promise with bow and sword, that he had been well-cared for, but seemed thoughtful and grave beyond his years. And he knew that his nephew was most vigilantly held in the charge of a man whose power expanded as he climbed the ladder of Yorkist honours, and would not easily be recaptured.

  To Lord Herbert’s peerage had been added the office of Chief Justice and Chamberlain of South Wales, and a host of minor offices and lordships. He had been made a Knight of the Garter, and in 1467 Chief Justice of North Wales. His son William was married, at the age of eleven, to a sister of King Edward’s queen. He had subdued the south of Wales, and now promised to bring his considerable military prowess to bear on those little Lancastrian pockets of the north. His followers and friends were many, his lands and connections vast.

  On a spring afternoon in 1468, a combination of fine planning and considerable daring came to fruition. Henry’s retainer drew aside from the hunting party in a forest glade and begged to look to his horse.

  ‘She seems well enough to me, Master Powys,’ said Henry, puzzled.

  ‘Nay, my lord, she has a stone in her hoof that I shall fetch out presently. Leave us, and we shall meet again. Else will the mare
be lamed,’ he added, turning to his companions.

  ‘The Lord Herbert commanded that we stay with Lord Henry always.’

  Powys reddened and bent over the horse’s hoof, and Henry smelled fear on the man and saw the sweat rise.

  ‘What harm can come to him in the Lord Herbert’s territory?’ Powys grumbled, very busy with the hoof.

  ‘You know well enough, Powys, that men may be bought — aye, and sold — in any part of Wales. So hasten, and we shall wait together. Be speedy, man, else shall the forester beat out the game and we not there to see it.’

  Powys lifted his shaggy head and looked meaningfully at Henry, and all the colour fled the boy’s face. He stared from retainer to retainer, perplexed, his hand straying to his dagger. Suspicion had been his shadow since Pembroke fell, though he could find no reason why a man should kill him. He looked closely at the mare’s hoof and saw that Powys merely played with his knife and no stone was visible. Suspicion grew, and even as he struggled against it his judgement clouded.

  ‘Stay with me, I pray you,’ he implored the retainers, fearing treachery, and suddenly Powys leaped to his feet and ran.

  The man who brought him down, with an arrow between his shoulders, flung out his own arms, and toppled from his horse. And suddenly the glade was full of armed men. Backing against a tree, shaking, Henry drew out his dagger and held it before him. So Jasper saw him, after all the years: a long slim lad with fear in his face and a blade in his hand.

  ‘Do you not know me, Harry?’ he asked. ‘Come, mount your horse and quickly, lad. We must be gone.’

  His soldiers were cutting down the servants, as he spoke.

  Horrified, Henry saw men fall whom he had known as friendly jailors. Jehu and Hughes and Gittings, all with wives and children, spitting their blood on the trampled grass. He felt himself swung into Jasper’s saddle, and twisted to see the hard face above him. It held no answer to the slaughter. The smiles and joy could come later when they were safe in the Nant-Gonway. And Henry knew before even he asked that Jasper would tell him this was the price of his freedom, and those who were not for him were against him. But he regretted the bloodshed, and Powys lying in the forest with a Herbert arrow in his back and Tudor money in his pouch.

  Harlech reared four strong and shapely towers from a precipitous cliff, above the marshes that stretched out to the sea. Edward I had built it, but upon the site of an older stronghold. Men said it could not be conquered by force, protected as it was by the rock itself, then by a middle ward below the walls — from which assailants would suffer rivers of boiling pitch and molten lead, and a hailstorm of arrows. Snugly within its stout defences, Harlech armed and fed the bodies and souls of its garrison, from granary and bakehouse and kitchen and chapel and the great hall where they gathered together. To this echoing fortress, this last Lancastrian foothold in North Wales, Jasper brought Henry Tudor.

  The boy’s wardship had been close, but his temporary freedom was closer, for once inside those grey walls he stayed there. A little world lay all about him, but it was a man’s world of war and the bard’s songs were bitter.

  In Lord William Herbert’s care Henry had lived like a gentleman, now he lived like a soldier. Though the military world was not greatly to his liking he adapted himself yet again to new demands and old loyalties, and re-discovered his uncle. He had forgotten how he loved the man, even at those points where they most differed. Intuitively, he sensed that Jasper was more familiar with weapons than books, so he kept his learning to himself and strove to master the arts of war. His Latin was slipping away but his French improved, since Jasper could speak it as fluently as English and Welsh. Nephew and uncle enjoyed each other’s company for only a short space of time, since Jasper must again be about King Henry’s business. So the boy remained at Harlech and watched him ride away again, to take assizes in the name of Lancaster and to elude Lancaster’s enemies. And spring became summer, and still the castle loomed above a Yorkist Wales and seemed to have a power of its own, for none came near it.

  They had been twice as watchful since Lord Herbert was promoted to Chief Justice of North Wales the year before, for they knew that neither his pride nor his prowess would let them be. And now this last rock of Lancaster must beckon him twice as persuasively, since it contained his ward. They had held their breaths when Jasper Tudor rode in with the boy, and crossed themselves in thanksgiving that Lord Herbert did not come upon them straightway, for they needed the fruits of a good harvest to hold them through the coming winter. The last apples, wrinkled and sweet, had been eaten. The granary was low, and fuel too green to gather and stack. Still, there was fish and meat salted, and flitches of bacon smoked and hung, and they could at least replenish the ammunition. If he would but give them a respite until autumn they could face him.

  So men-at-arms strode the battlements with pride, looking across Tremadoc Bay to the ranges of Caernarvonshire on the west and north, and the Cambrian mountains on the east, and down to the south where Cader Idris flung a long dark arm of defence. And each week that passed brought the harvest nearer.

  He came when fruit was green and small on the trees, and the grain green-gold in the fields, but he approached them as a nobleman should, with courtesy and a triple summons from his herald — who rode ahead of the long columns and demanded a peaceful surrender. And most courteously did the governor of Harlech decline his invitation.

  From a watchtower, Henry saw the herald canter gently back with his message. Lord Herbert was observing all the rules of chivalry. For a second time the messenger invited the governor to surrender, and this time the request was more insistent. Threats of no quarter, of hangings, of min, hurtled across like so many arrows. Dafydd ap Einion answered in kind.

  ‘I held a tower in France until all the old women in Wales had heard of it. And now all the old women in France shall hear how I defend this castle!’

  A great cheer drowned the noise of hooves as the messenger returned again, so that Henry saw him moving, dreamlike, silently in the summer landscape.

  ‘Sir,’ Henry whispered, touching ap Einion’s arm, ‘sir, I have been besieged at Pembroke by Lord Herbert.’

  The governor did not turn his head, watching the leisurely movements of an invading force settling down for a long wait. The pavilioners were marking out their canvas town, a simple affair built on a cross-plan, while the wagons unloaded tents and guy-ropes and iron pins. They had some difficulty in finding sufficient level ground, free of trees but near enough to them to give boughs for the common soldiers’ shelter and fuel for camp fires. The day was warm and clear. Harlech itself was ready. So its inmates had nothing to do but watch their enemy’s activity.

  ‘Sir,’ Henry said, tugging ap Einion’s arm, ‘Lord Herbert besieged us by land and water. I was there, sir, with my nurse Joan Howell and Captain Roberts.’

  The tents were going up, bellied by a wind from the sea. Here a marquee for Lord Herbert and another for his brother Sir Richard Herbert, connected by a gallery of canvas. There a group of soldiers erected their own humble houses: simple huts of branches covered by sheets. More carts drew up, and their contents were unloaded: two wooden chamber-stools for the two noblemen, chests and chairs and tables; barrels of gunpowder, barrels of beer, barrels of wheat flour, of beef, of wine; hay, oats and horsebread for the animals; and as an afterthought, tin basins for the chamber-stools which had been packed elsewhere. Round tents for physicians and surgeons and their assistants, for trumpeters and harbingers and heralds, for secretaries. Square tents with pyramid-shaped roofs to form the bakehouse, pantry, scullery, buttery — and another for the laundry. And as each cart was emptied the carters drove it into place in the great ring surrounding the camp, and a sentry of the standwatch went with it.

  ‘Sir,’ said Henry desperately, ‘Lord Herbert mined Pembroke while his soldiers scaled the wall from the sea.’ Dafydd ap Einion stirred and gave him his attention. ‘He shall not threaten us from the sea this time, Lord Henry, for we have iro
n chains stretched across, and trunks of trees driven into the sea-bed which would be a hazard to his boats.’

  Teams of horses were drawing the heavy guns, which joined the carts and wagons like a shield about the camp. Numbed with terror Henry counted them: two horses to a falconet, which fired two-inch balls; ten horses for a demi-ulverin.

  ‘He had a bombard,’ Henry cried. ‘He had a bombard, sir, at Pembroke.’

  They were leading the sweating animals away to drink at the stream. And then Henry recognized the deep chests and shoulders of the Flanders mares, toiling, toiling: muscles heaving, great legs plodding, heads down as they hauled Lord Herbert’s centre-piece of artillery. Fearfully Henry counted this team, too.

  ‘Twenty-four, sir. Twenty-four Flanders mares. Sir, it is Lord Herbert’s bombard! And they call it “The Messenger”.’

  ‘I have seen a bombard,’ said ap Einion, expressionless.

  ‘Sir, the noise is like a thousand devils mocking souls in hell.’

  ‘You are descended from the royal blood of Wales, France and England,’ said the governor, but kindly enough, tempering the rebuke with passion. ‘I shall look to you to act as your uncle Pembroke would, that withstood the siege of Bamburgh and kept his wits about him, Lord Henry.’

  ‘I shall not play the coward, sir, but I mislike the noise exceedingly.’

  ‘Your ears shall not be troubled yet awhile, lad. They must construct emplacements for these great gunnys of theirs, and we shall harry them I swear on it! For every stake and every hinge and every plank a soldier shall fall. Get you below, Lord Henry, and see what the cooks prepare for us. This will be a quiet night, the last for many a day.’