The Lady of the Rivers

by Gregory, Philippa

  Richard scowls. ‘You’d better tell Scales,’ is all he says.

  Lord Scales is in a state of ill-concealed terror. He is using the Constable of the Tower’s house and he has double guards on the front and back doors and at the windows. Clearly, he fears that his king has abandoned him and the City together to the men from Kent. His men may be of the royal guard and have taken the king’s shilling but what is to say that they are not Kentishmen, or that they do not have a family making a poor living at Dover? Half of them have come from Normandy and feel betrayed; why should they defend us now, who let them be driven from their own homes? When I tell him that Cade was welcomed as a hero he tells me that I must have been mistaken. ‘He is a scoundrel and a villain,’ he rules.

  ‘There were many in his train who were gentlemen,’ I say. ‘I could see they had good horses and good saddles. Cade himself rode like a man accustomed to command. And there was only one alderman in the whole of the City who did not welcome him.’

  ‘He’s a villain,’ he says rudely.

  I raise an eyebrow at Richard. He shgs as if to say that I have done my best to give this most nervous commander an idea of the enemy, and if he is too afraid to listen then I need do no more. ‘I’ll take my wife to my rooms and get her something to eat,’ he says to Lord Scales. ‘Then shall I come back and we can plan an attack? Perhaps tonight when they have wined and dined? While they are celebrating? Or as they march back to Southwark? We could catch them in the narrow streets before the bridge and push them over?’

  ‘Not tonight! Not tonight!’ Scales says quickly. ‘Besides, I am expecting reinforcements from the king. He will send us men from the Midlands.’

  ‘They can’t come for days, if they come at all,’ my husband says. ‘Surely we should attack them now, before they expect it, while they are drinking.’

  ‘Not tonight,’ Scales repeats. ‘These are not Frenchmen, Rivers. Our experience is no use here. These are treasonous peasants, they fight around back streets and in hiding. We should wait till we have a great force to overwhelm them. I will send another message to the king and ask for his command.’

  I see my husband hesitate, and then he decides not to argue. He throws his cape around my shoulders and takes me to his lodgings. We have our usual rooms near the royal apartments in the Tower, but it feels strange, with the king and queen so far away, and the drawbridge up and the portcullis down and us besieged among the people who are our countrymen.

  ‘It’s damnable,’ my husband says shortly, snapping his fingers for the serving man to leave the tray of food. ‘Damnable. And the very men who should be putting down this unrest are either too half-hearted or too afraid to act. Get you to bed, sweetheart, and I will join you after I have posted a watch. That we should be all but besieged in the Tower of London? At war in England with Englishmen? It beggars belief.’

  We live under siege in the Tower, at war in our own country, besieged in our own capital city. Every day my husband sends out men and even the kitchen girls to get news in the market place and at the City gates. They come back saying that Cade’s army is camped south of the river with more joining them every day. Richard’s great fear is that the uprising will spread and the men of Hampshire and Sussex will join the men of Kent. ‘What about our home?’ I ask him, thinking of the children in their nursery. ‘Should I go back to them?’

  ‘The roads aren’t safe,’ he says, scowling with worry. ‘I’ll send you with a guard as soon as I know what is happening. But I don’t even know if the king is safely at Kenilworth. We have sent messages but heard nothing back yet. If he’s besieged . . . ’ He breaks off.

  It feels like the end of the world. If the common people rise against the king, if they are armed with weapons they have won from us, if they are commanded by a man who has been trained by us and embittered by losses in France, then there is no hope that the world we know can continue. Only a heroic king who could capture the love of the people could save us – and we have only King Henry, hiding at Kenilworth, his beautiful armour laid aside after its one and only outing.

  A message comes from the rebel army. They want Lord Say, the man who was Lord of Kent, sent out for trial. ‘We cannot release him to them,’ my husband sys to the commander, Lord Scales. ‘They will kill him.’

  ‘We are holding him here under arrest for treason,’ the lord says reasonably enough. ‘He could well have been tried and found guilty and then he would have been executed anyway.’

  ‘The king sent him here for his safety, not to charge him with treason, as we both know, my lord. The king would have released him. You know the king would have forgiven him anything he has done.’

  ‘I shall release him to them, and if he is innocent of all they say, then he can tell them so,’ Lord Scales says.

  My husband swears under his breath and then speaks clearly. ‘My lord, if we send Lord Say out to them, guilty or innocent, they will kill him. This is not a release, it is to push him out of safety to his death. If this doesn’t matter to you now, then I ask you what you will do if the rebels ask for me to be sent out to them. What would you like us to do when they ask for you?’

  His lordship glowers. ‘I wasn’t the man who said I would make a deer park out of Kent. I didn’t say they were too good for hanging and should be pushed into the sea.’

  ‘You are advisor to the king, as are we all. They could name any one of us and ask for us to be sent out. Are we going to obey the servants? Are they our new masters?’

  Lord Scales rises from his seat behind the great dark wooden table and goes to the arrowslit window that looks towards the City. ‘Woodville, my old friend, I know you are right; but if they attack us with the numbers they have now, they are likely to take the Tower, and then we will all be at their mercy, your wife as well as us.’

  ‘We can hold out,’ my husband says.

  ‘They have a full-size army at Southwark, and every day more men come from Essex and camp out there. There are hundreds now. Who knows how strong they may become? If they come from Essex, what’s to stop them coming from Hertfordshire? From Nottinghamshire? What if they can raise the whole country against us?’

  ‘Better strike now then, before they grow any stronger.’

  ‘What if they have the king, and we don’t yet know it?’

  ‘Then we will have to fight them.’

  ‘But if we negotiate with them, promise them a pardon, say that their grievances will be resolved, promise them an inquiry, they will go back to their little farms and get the hay in.’

  ‘If we pardon them, we will have taught them that they can take up arms against the King of England,’ my husband objects. ‘And that is a lesson we may regret one day.’

  ‘I cannot risk the safety of the Tower,’ Lord Scales says firmly. ‘We cannot attack, we must prepare to defend. At the worst, Lord Say buys us time.’

  There is a silence as my husband absorbs the fact that they are going to send one of the peers of England out to face a mob that wants him dead. ‘You are the commander,’ he says stiffly. ‘I am here under your command. But my advice is that we defy them.’

  That afternoon they send Lord Say out to Guildhall where those aldermen who arhe stomach for it, and the rebels who are eager for it, create a little court for the day. They persuade his lordship to confess, find him a priest and take him to Cheapside for execution. His son-in-law, the Sheriff of Kent, William Crowmer, thinks himself lucky to be released from the Fleet prison, and steps out of the stone doorway cheerfully, thinking a rescue party has come for him, only to find a scaffold waiting for him outside the gates. They don’t even bother to try him, but string him up without ceremony.

  ‘God forgive them,’ my husband says as we stand on the walls of the Tower, hidden by the parapet, looking down into the streets below. A dancing, singing, chanting mob is weaving its unsteady way through the narrow lanes towards the Tower. My husband interposes his broad shoulder before me, but I peep around his arm and see what is leading the processi
on. They have the head of Lord Say on a pike, bobbing along at the front of the crowd. Behind on another pike is the stabbed head of William Crowmer, the sheriff who promised to lay waste to his county of Kent. As they come within range of the Tower gates they pause and bawl defiance, and then dance the two heads together. The dead faces bump, the pike-bearers jiggle the pikes so the mouths knock one against another. ‘They’re kissing! They’re kissing!’ they howl and roar with laughter at the spectacle. ‘Send us out Lord Scales!’ they bellow. ‘He can have a kiss too!’

  Richard draws me back into the shadow of the wall. ‘My God,’ I say quietly. ‘This is the end, isn’t it? This is the end of the England we have known. This is the end of everything.’

  Next night, at dinner, I see Richard put his head down over his plate and eat steadily, hardly pausing for breath, but drinking no wine at all. Throughout the meal his servants come and whisper brief messages in his ear. After dinner there is never dancing or singing, not even playing at cards, but tonight it is even more hushed and nervous. The remnants of this beleaguered court stand around in groups and exchange fearful whispers. Then Richard stands up on the steps of the dais and raises his voice. ‘My lords, gentlemen: a number of the gentlemen and merchants of London tell me that they are weary of Cade and his men running riot through the City. Also, matters are getting worse and no man can be sure that his home and his goods are safe. Cade has lost control of his men and they are looting the City. The London men tell me that they are determined to push the soldiers out of the City, back to their camp at Southwark tonight, and I have agreed that we will join with them to drive the rebels back, raise the drawbridge and close the gate. They are not going to enter London again.’

  He raises his hand at the buzz of noise. ‘Lord Scales will command,’ he says. ‘We will muster in the courtyard at nine of the clock, weapons will be distributed now. I expect all able-bodied men to arm and come with me.’

  He steps down, and men crowd around him at once. I hear him explaining the plan, and sending men to get their weapons. I stand a little closer and wait for him to turn to me.

  ‘I’ll leave a guard on the Tower,’ he says. ‘Enough to hold it. The king is sending reinforcements from the Midlands, they will be here tomorrow, or the next day. You’ll be safe here until I come back.’

  He sees the unspoken question in my face. ‘If I don’t come back, you should put on your plainest clothes and make your way onfoot, out of the City,’ he says. ‘Cutler will go with you or any of our men. Once you are out of the City you can buy or borrow horses to get home. I can’t tell what will happen then. But if you can get home to the children, you can live off our lands, and you should be safe there until it all comes right again. Our tenants would stand by you. Jacquetta, I am sorry. I never thought it would come to this. I didn’t mean to bring you out of France to danger in England.’

  ‘Because if the rebels take London, then nowhere is safe?’ I ask him. ‘If you cannot drive them out of the City then they will take England in time?’

  ‘I don’t know how this will end,’ he says. ‘A king who leaves London to the peasants and a half-pay captain? A penniless crowd who say that they own the City? I don’t know what might happen next.’

  ‘Come back,’ is all I can manage.

  ‘It is my intention,’ he says tightly. ‘You are the love of my life. I will come back to you if I possibly can. I have sworn it. I am going to be there at the baptism of our new baby, my love. And God willing, make another.’

  A vision of the dancing head of Lord Say comes to my mind and I blink to try to rid myself of it. ‘Richard, God send you back safely to me,’ I whisper.

  I watch them muster in the great central yard of the Tower and then leave quietly by the sally-port, into the silent streets. I climb to the walkway at the top of the walls that run around the Tower and stand by a soldier on guard to watch them make their way quietly to the City. Richard has them in squares, four men by four men, all of them with pikes, many with swords, most of them with muffled feet. I see all this, but I am trying to see more. I am trying to see if there is a shadow over them, if they are marching out to their death. Especially, I am looking for the tall figure of my husband, at the head of his division, his sword drawn, his hooded head looking this way and the other, every sense alert, vibrantly alive, angry to have been brought to this.

  I glimpse him only briefly before they slip between the crowded buildings but I have no sense of premonition. Richard seems, as he always has been, so passionately alive, so vital, that there could never be a shadow over him. For a moment I think that perhaps this proves that he will come home in the morning in triumph, and then I think that if he were going out to certain death he would still go out to it with his head up, his shoulders squared, and his footstep light.

  Then we wait. We can hear some shouting from the street and we have the cannon trained on the raggle-taggle army camped in the marshes below the Tower, and pointed north to the streets, but no-one comes within range. The fighting is going on hand-to-hand, in one street after another as the rebels surge forwards and the apprentices and merchants, well armed and defending their homes, push them back. My husband commanding one wing of our forces and Lord Scales commanding another fight their way through the treacherous streets, always heading for the river. The rebels make a stand before Bridgegate where the lanes grow close and narrow, but the soldiers from the Tower push forwards and push on and gradually they yield, falling back over the bridge, a yard at a time. This time the doors of the houses on the bridge are barred and the shutters are over the windows, the tradesmen and merchants on the bridge are battened inside their homes, sick of the disordher asd fearing worse as the slow battle grinds across the river, a yard at a time. The grinning heads of Lord Say and William Crowmer look down from the spikes of the bridge as their murderers are pressed back, one slow pace after another, and the royal army doggedly pushes on.

  Forewarned by me, my husband has thick coils of rope and craftsmen in the vanguard of the men, and as soon as they force their way past the anchor points, he has the workmen ringed with a guard as they feverishly replace the ropes that I saw Jack Cade slash with his stolen sword. Desperately the men work, fearing arrows and missiles from the rebel army, as my husband, at the head of his men, fights with his sword in one hand and an axe in another, going forwards and forwards until Cade’s army is thrust to the far side of the bridge, then at a shouted command from my husband and a blast of trumpets, loud above the noise, the royal army breaks off, runs back to its own side, and with a rumble and a roar the drawbridge is raised and my husband leans on his bloody sword, grins at Lord Scales and then looks back along the long twenty-span bridge at the English dead who are being rolled carelessly into the river, and the wounded who are groaning and calling for help.

  That night he sits in a deep hot bath in our rooms and I soap the nape of his neck and his strong muscled back as if we were a peasant and his doxy taking their annual bath on Shrove Tuesday. ‘Good,’ he says. ‘Pray God the worst of this is over.’

  ‘Will they beg for forgiveness?’

  ‘The king has sent pardons already,’ he says, his eyes closed as I pour a jug of hot water over his head. ‘Hundreds of them, blank forms of pardons. Hundreds of them, without a thought. And a bishop to fill in the names. They are all to be forgiven and told to go home.’

  ‘Just like that?’ I ask.

  ‘Just like that,’ he says.

  ‘Do you think they will each take a pardon and go home and forget all about it?’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘But the king hopes that they were misled and mistaken and that they have learned their lesson and will accept his rule. He wants to think that it is all the fault of a bad leader and the rest of them were just mistaken.’

  ‘Queen Margaret won’t think that,’ I predict, knowing the power of her temper and that she learned how to rule over a peasantry who were held down by force and deference.

  ‘No she won’t. But the king
has decided on pardons, whatever she thinks.’

  Jack Cade’s army, which was so brave and so filled with hope for a better world, lines up to take the pardons, and seems to be glad to do so. Each man says his name and Bishop William Waynflete’s clerk, in the rebel camp with a little writing desk, writes each name down and tells each man to go home, that the king has forgiven his offence. The bishop blesses them, signing the cross over each bowed head, and tells them to go in peace. Jack Cade himself lines up for his piece of paper and is publicly forgiven for leading an army against the king, killing a noble lord and invading London. Some men see this as the king’s weakness, but the greatest number of them think themselves lucky to get off scot-free, and they go back to their poor homes where they cannot pay their taxes, where they cannot get justice, where the great lords ride roughshod over them – and hope for better times. They are just as they were before; but more bitter – and still the good times have not come.

  But not Cade. I find my husband in the stables, his face dark with temper, ordering our horses in a bellowing voice. It seems that we are going back to Grafton, we are going back to Grafton ‘at once!’, the roads are safe enough if we take a good guard.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I ask. ‘Why are we going now? Isn’t the king coming? Should we not stay in London?’

  ‘I can’t stand to see him, nor her,’ he says flatly. ‘I want to go home for a while. We’ll come back, of course we will, we will come back the moment they send for us; but before God, Jacquetta, I cannot stomach the court a moment longer.’

  ‘Why? What has happened?’

  He is tying his travelling cape on the back of his saddle and his back is to me. I go behind him and put my hand on his shoulder. Slowly he turns to face me. ‘I see you’re angry,’ I say. ‘But speak to me: tell me what has happened.’