by Robert Irwin
Edward will probably be taken and killed, together with Richard of Gloucester, Anthony and other leading figures. Warwick’s army will join up with Margaret’s when finally it arrives in England. London will have to open its gates to the coalition of Lancastrian forces. The Yorkist cause will be lost beyond any redemption. The warlike, but vicious Edward of Lancaster will eventually succeed the sainted idiot that is his father. On the other hand, if King Edward wins at Barnet, he still has Margaret’s army and other Lancastrian forces to deal with.
Now, as Anthony restlessly paces about, he bumps into Lord Hastings. Hastings is very cheerful. He has just been with the King and Ripley. Ripley has predicted that as soon as day breaks they will find that there is a thick mist. When Anthony objects that this might favour the Lancastrians as much as the Yorkists, Hastings replies that the Yorkists are certain to win this battle, for Ripley had consulted the Talking Head about it a year ago and got the good news then. It had not occurred to Anthony that, when he and Tiptoft ceased their questioning of the Talking Head, Ripley would have the temerity to continue investigations on his own. Anthony thanks Hastings for this information and goes in search of Ripley. The alchemist is not easy to find in the murk, but when Anthony finds him, he grabs him.
‘Tell me, Ripley, what is my fate in this battle? Shall I fight well? Shall I be wounded? Shall I die?’
But Ripley, without replying, slithers out of Anthony’s grasp and vanishes into the darkness.
Sometime before dawn breaks, trumpets blast out and at last Edward commands his artillery and archers to return fire, before ordering a general advance. He means to close with the Lancastrian line before its gunners can see what they should be firing at. As Edward’s men advance, so does the mist. It rises from the ground and billows around the plodding knights and sergeants. It is most strange. By the time they reach the enemy’s position they can hardly see more than a couple of feet in front of them. Thereafter it is all shouting and confusion. Anthony, who has no idea at all what is happening elsewhere on the field, uses the spike of his poleaxe to stab at men-at-arms who wear the badge of Warwick’s brother, Lord Montagu. There is a fearful press of men around him. From far away to the left come shouts of ‘Treason!’Then quite suddenly Anthony finds that he is no longer on his feet. He struggles to get up, but cannot, for it is as if one of his legs is no longer there. The frontline of battle seems to have moved on in front of him. He can hear the shouting, but the fighting is out of sight. He stretches his hand down to his left leg and, to his relief, finds that it is still there, but when he brings his hand back up to look at it, it is red with blood. Then he decides that he might as well sleep.
When he awakes, he is in a pavilion and his wound is being tightly bandaged by the King’s surgeon. He has lost a lot of blood, but the wound seems to be a clean one. The surgeon had wanted him to be carried back to London on a litter, but Anthony gets men to help him mount Black Saladin and he rides back to London with the King. It is only as he rides that he learns what happened in the battle that he was in. The main thing is that the two armies were misaligned, with the result that the Lancastrian right wing under the Earl of Oxford was much stronger than the Yorkist left wing and swiftly routed them. The routed troops fled through Barnet and onwards spreading alarm and despondency as far as London. Oxford was successful in rallying his men outside Barnet and bringing them back to the battlefield. Oxford’s banners displayed the heraldic emblem of a star with golden rays. It looked rather like King Edward’s emblem of a sun with golden rays. And so, as Oxford’s men advanced through the mist, Montagu’s men mistook them for Yorkists and fired upon them. Then there were shouts of ‘Treason!’ and the Lancastrians started to flee in all directions. Warwick and Montagu, who had left their mounts in the horse park, were surrounded and cut down. Edward is bringing their naked corpses back to London to have them displayed in St Paul’s. Oxford, Exeter and Beaumont are also dead. Ripley does not travel back with the King. He is on the battlefield with the other scavengers and he is happily putting eyeballs into flasks filled with alcohol.
Just short of London Edward is intercepted by a messenger. Margaret and her forces have landed at Weymouth. Edward’s soldiers are allowed only a few days’ rest in London before he has them marching west. Since Anthony is not judged fit to go into battle again, he is made Constable of the Tower of London for the duration of the crisis. This time Edward will not take Henry of Lancaster with him on campaign and Anthony’s chief task is to secure Henry from any Lancastrian attempt to free him and to that end Anthony has been given an extra force of a hundred men-at-arms. Otherwise every able-bodied knight and man-at-arms is to accompany Edward as he heads west in an attempt to stop Margaret and Edward of Lancaster joining forces with Jasper Tudor.
Though Anthony’s duties do not seem to be onerous, he takes them seriously.
The first thing he does is have those who are suspected of having Lancastrian sympathies rounded up and brought to the Tower to be incarcerated there. One of these is Sir Thomas Malory. He is brought under escort to Anthony. He hobbles on two sticks and he seems to have difficulty raising his head.
‘You see me here, a broken old man,’ he says. ‘What possible danger can I be to you or your party?’ Then, ‘If I told you how the story of the lady and the bratchet ends, then would you set me free?’
Anthony does not reply. But perhaps Malory speaks the truth. And he would like to hear the rest of that story.
Then Malory says, ‘Last night I dreamt that this would happen. I should have made my escape when I could.’
‘Do you believe that dreams can foretell the future?’
Malory replies, ‘Dreams are subtle spirits and I believe that sometimes they may shape the future. I am reminded of something that happened only a few years ago. A pedlar called John Chapman of Swaffham in Norfolk dreamt that, if he went to London Bridge, he would find a man who would tell him how he might become rich. So he travelled down to London and stood on the bridge for hours, but nothing happened and nobody spoke to him and he was feeling quite a fool. Finally he went into one of the shops on the bridge to buy a pie, I think, and he told the shopkeeper about his dream and how foolish it was and the shopkeeper agreed with him that dreams were indeed foolish things. For his part, he had dreamt only last night that he saw treasure being buried in the garden of a certain John Chapman in Norfolk, but the shopkeeper was not going all the way to Norfolk on a fool’s errand and he said to Chapman, ‘Go home and mind your business’. Then Chapman went home and started digging in his garden, and sure enough, he found two pots of gold buried beneath the roots of the tree. I have been to Swaffham and seen the house he built with this money. Also he paid for the north aisle and tower of Swaffham church.’
‘It is a curious dream.’ Anthony sits pondering a while before he speaks again.
‘Why did the dream wish to make Chapman rich? And why did it work so crookedly? What did it need the pie merchant for? What has made the pie merchant a slave of destiny? It makes me dizzy to think about it all. I feel like a man on the edge of an abyss. Why do dreams always speak in riddles?’
‘It is my opinion that it was not that the dream was so keen to make Chapman rich, but rather that it wished to make itself famous,’ replies Malory. ‘In any case, it is no stranger than the dream I had a week ago. Then I dreamt that I met a man who told me that if ever I was in a room full of skulls, I should find a fortune there. But where shall I ever find a catacomb in England? I know of none such. Should I travel perhaps to Rome at the behest of a dream?’
‘Follow me,’ says Anthony. ‘Now we two shall put dreams to the test.’
Though Anthony is limping, Malory still has difficulty in keeping up with him as they make their way to the Museum of Skulls and once in there he is of little assistance, as Anthony searches behind the shelves and raps on walls in search of the treasure that Tiptoft must have hidden. Malory just gazes vacantly around him. Lit from below by a lantern, hundreds of eyes are fixed u
pon them, hungry for life. It is as if Anthony and Malory have interrupted a solemn conclave of the dead. Suddenly, Malory points to one of the heads and says, ‘I know that man. Or rather I knew him.’
He is pointing to the Talking Head.
Anthony swivels round and grabs Malory by the jerkin.
‘Who is he? Who was he? What was his name? What did you have to do with him? Speak man, or, by God, I will have you put to the rack.’
Malory’s response is calm, ‘We were together in Ludgate Gaol. His name was Jack Coterel. Like me he was often in and out of prison. He did terrible things, for he regularly hired himself out as an assassin, but though he was often indicted, he always escaped hanging since he had an influential friend at court.’
‘What friend was this?’
‘Jack was close with the royal jester. I think that the jester’s name was Scoggin.’
Hearing these words, Anthony unbuckles his purse and gives it to Malory. Then, without saying a word, he leads him to an office at the foot of the Byward Tower where he sits down to write a letter. This he passes to Malory. Malory is to present this letter to the steward of the Woodville townhouse, whereupon he will be given a small chest full of gold. Anthony escorts him out of the Tower before returning to the office to write another letter. This one is to go to Westminster and it requests the arrest of Scoggin and his deliverance in shackles to the Tower.
What shall he do while he is waiting for Scoggin to be brought to him? Then he remembers that there is the matter of Tiptoft’s legacy. Tiptoft has bequeathed almost all his considerable collection of books to be added to the library of Humphrey Bodley in Oxford. But in a codicil he has stipulated that Earl Rivers should be entitled to pick out ten or so books for himself. So now Anthony makes his way to the late Earl of Worcester’s townhouse and after some negotiation with the porter and the steward, he is introduced to the Tiptoft’s librarian who conducts him to the books. Anthony has never been in a room that is completely full of books before and he gazes round in wonder. The air is thick with the smell of leather, vellum and parchment. Who could have believed that there were so many books in the world?
Then he starts to look at the books in more detail. They are quite strange. There is a shelf full of manuscripts devoted to men who built themselves wings and attempted to fly and another shelf devoted to earth-eaters and the types of soil and clay that are deemed to be particularly edible. There is a manuscript on how to simulate the appearance of leprosy. Anthony studies a fat volume full of diagrams illustrating ways of manufacturing mechanical horses and chess players. There is an Etruscan grammar. And a manual on how to construct a revolving door. Another one on how to construct a wife from flowers. Another on cooking with testicles. Also one on sticks that feature in the Bible and in the lives of saints. There is an armorial roll displaying the heraldry of the ancient Egyptians.
Anthony is shocked that Tiptoft possesses a copy of The Three Imposters. This book Anthony has at least heard of, for he knows that it is a sinister book which sets out to demonstrate that Moses, Mohammed and Jesus were all charlatans. Anthony cannot bring himself even to touch it. There is a case full of treatises dealing with torture and executions. How Boys Bathe in Finland contains some rather odd illustrations. So does another manuscript which has no title and which is in a script unknown to Anthony. In the margins there are drawings of plants that are also unknown to him and constellations of stars that have never been seen in our sky. Also there are many images of naked women frolicking and bathing and they alternate with unfamiliar abstract structures. Anthony gazes at drawings of things which might be buildings, though they also seem to be plants. It is beyond all understanding. The Earl’s own translation of a treatise on baldness, gold-tooled and bound in black leather, has its own lectern.
As Anthony gazes on all these books, he becomes increasingly uneasy. There is something that is wrong here, though he cannot put his finger on it. Then he begins to consider the way books are ordered. They are indeed ordered, but the connections between neighbouring books on a shelf are rarely the sort that any normal human being would make and he sees that Tiptoft had arranged his books in such a manner as to take the curious browser down some very strange paths of thought – his own paths of thought and he was mad and now Anthony realises that the mad Earl still lived in some manner through the ordered chaos of his library.
He shudders and hastily chooses out the most ordinary books he can find. These are Chaucer’s Book of the Lion, Bede’s Song of Judith, Richard Rolle’s Tower of All Towers, William of Malmesbury’s De Antiquitate Glastoniensis Ecclesiae, The Saga of Earl Godwin, Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, The History of the Two Guineveres, The Matter of Troy and a pretty little book in Spanish entitled Cardenio which Anthony picks for its miniature illustrations. Then, having arranged for a servant to come and collect these books, he hurries out.
As he walks back to the Tower, he thinks that he will saddle up Black Saladin and go riding out on a quest for what he thinks of as the enchanted garden. This is not to be, for when he returns to the Tower there are three messengers waiting for him. The first messenger claims he carries important news. On breaking the seals of this document, Anthony finds that it is a short treatise by the Abbot of Crowland on why there are no volcanoes in England and this he tosses aside. Next he turns impatiently to a letter in the Queen’s hand. After affectionate greetings, Elizabeth reports that she has had enquiries made and it appears that Scoggin left royal service over a year ago and no one knows what has become of him. The third letter contains worse news. It is from the Bishop of Rochester and he reports that a kinsman of the late Earl of Warwick, Thomas Neville, better known as the Bastard of Fauconberg, has landed in Kent. He has brought with him hundreds of men from the Calais garrison and he has been joined by thousands of Kentish rebels. They are now marching on London, and when they have occupied the city, their intention is to place Henry on the throne once more. They also plan to join forces with the Earl of Warwick whom Fauconberg claims is not really dead.
Now Anthony has to bustle. Edward and the Yorkist army are at Coventry. There is no hope of any help from that quarter. Anthony commands the regular garrison of the Tower, a little over two hundred men and these are supplemented by the extra hundred that Edward gave him. There will be a few Yorkist knights who arrived in London after Edward’s departure. There may be other Yorkists who will flee from Kent in advance of the rebels. There is a garrison of forty at Baynard’s Castle. It is nowhere near enough to defend the city. Should Anthony make for Coventry, taking the captive Henry with him?
He summons the Mayor Stockton and his aldermen to a meeting. Though they are terrified by the approach of the Kentish army, Anthony eventually understands that this is a good thing, for what the Mayor and his friends have realised is that men of Kent have not risen because they are devoted to the memory of the Earl of Warwick, or because they need to see mad Henry on the throne once more. No, the men of Kent have joined Fauconberg because they are devoted to the prospect of sacking London. It would be as it was when London was looted and burnt during the Peasants’ Revolt and then again by Jack Cade’s men a little over twenty years ago. Consequently the citizens of London will defend it to the last. Also Thomas Bourchier, the Earl of Essex, arrives while the meeting is still going on and he agrees to serve as Anthony’s deputy. Then the Queen arrives from Westminster with a handful of courtier knights and a troop of royal archers. London will be defended.
‘But we have no experience of fighting,’ says Stockton.
Nevertheless Anthony gives orders that the armoury of the Tower be opened and its store of weapons be distributed among the town bands. These weapons soon run out. Then Anthony remembers the tiltyard and leads a body of aldermen and their followers to it. Raker is first grumpily pleased to see Anthony, then furious that his stock of antique arms and armour is to be commandeered in the service of the defence of London, and finally delighted to learn that he will be paid for the weapons and for his servi
ce as a captain in charge of a town band. It is a long time since he has seen real fighting, and Kent being halfway to France, Kentish men are evil creatures. His leathery face breaks into a rare grin. It is like watching an ice floe breaking up, or so Anthony supposes, for he has never seen an ice floe. Raker immediately commences the drilling of shopkeepers, porters and apprentices in the management of war hammers and pikestaffs.
Fauconberg and his forces arrive and camp just outside Southwark from where he sends to the Mayor, aldermen and commonalty demanding to be admitted to the city. He promises that there will be no looting and that all victuals will be paid for. The Mayor sends back the message first that he was charged by King Edward to keep the city safe, secondly that he does not believe Fauconberg’s promise and thirdly he adds that, contrary to Fauconberg’s claims, the Earl of Warwick really is dead, for his corpse has been displayed at the church of St Paul’s.
Meanwhile barrels full of sand are being placed all the way along the north shore of the Thames from Baynard’s Castle to the Tower of London and artillery is moved into position.
Back at the Tower of London all is noise and confusion. Anthony ascends to the battlements of the White Tower where there is peace. He looks over the river to Fauconberg’s encampment on St George’s Field, where there is also confusion, and to houses on the edge of Southwark that are on fire. Then beyond the encampment there are fields and hedges, as well as trees that are late in coming into leaf. It is May and he can see some farmers, neglectful of the closeness of war, weeding what will probably turn out to be cornfields. He feels a shadow pass over him and he looks up to see a kestrel circling in widening gyres in its quest for prey. England is a ship sailing into the future and he is in its crow’s nest. Then he descends.
Anthony remembers his service with Fauconberg at Alnwick. Though he thought of him as a cautious and uninspiring commander, he may have bolder officers under him. Fauconberg waits till Sunday before launching an attack on London Bridge. Though he manages to destroy the gate and some of the houses on the south end of the bridge, he is outgunned on the bridge. After this defeat he marches his men towards Kingston, where perhaps he planned to cross the Thames. Then he changes his mind and returns to St George’s Field from where he organises a crossing of the river in small boats. By now his cause is desperate, for news has arrived in London that King Edward has won a great victory at Tewkesbury. Edward of Lancaster is dead and the King is bringing Margaret back to London in a cage. So he essays one last throw and the rabble that is his army attempts simultaneous assaults on London Bridge, Aldgate and Bishopsgate. Bourchier leads a sally out of Bishopsgate, while Anthony, mounted on Black Saladin, leads an army of four hundred knights and foot out through a postern gate of the Tower to make a flank attack on the rebels outside Aldgate. Many of Anthony’s men are guildsmen and apprentices, but then many of those they fight are peasants and they rout those peasants. Anthony orders casks of wine to be rolled out to reward his following. The wound he gained at Barnet has reopened, but he is otherwise uninjured. He is talking with Raker about the day’s events. Raker is unwounded, but nevertheless he grumbles about the aches and pains that the day’s fighting has brought upon him.