When Henry returned to Westminster after a month of convalescence, York rode to the palace to attend a council meeting he had summoned, only to find the council chamber empty. He sat in his usual chair to wait, knowing in his gut that no one was coming, growing angrier and more morose by the minute. For a while, he juggled the notions of slinking back home or confronting Henry. It would do no good to speak to Henry, he knew that. Even if he agreed with everything said he would change his mind later when the Queen and Somerset got at him. A slender reed was Henry, swaying back and forth with every breeze. But, no, he would not go down without a fight.
Henry was giving audience that day. Sir Richard Tunstall was on the door and favoured York with a smile – a sour smile to be sure, but a smile nonetheless. Which was odd.
“I want to see the King, sir.”
“His Grace is presently occupied, my lord. I will inform him of your presence.”
York leant against a window embrasure, too agitated to sit, and listened to the talk around him. Waiting their turn were three monks from Tewkesbury who had received from Henry’s hands revenues from the fish-garths on the River Avon for the restoration and beautification of one of their chapels. Appalling! More money that would never find its way into the royal coffers. When would he learn? The grant had been only for a year, and now they were back, hoping for renewal. And they would likely get it. Henry was easily persuaded to give away lands, revenue, grants, and wardships, or to remit taxes and tithes in perpetuity. He seemed unable to say no – particularly if the petitioner wore a tonsure. He was a pauper – worse, he was carrying a load of debt – and cared not a whit. Money was of no use to him except for good works.
Two city men dressed in their Sunday clothes came out looking pleased with themselves. From the open door, Tunstall called: “Brother Paul, sacristan of Tewkesbury Abbey and two of his brothers, your Grace.”
Before York could collect himself, the monks had bustled in, the door closed. Tunstall gave him a sneering look.
“I am not accustomed to waiting on monks and tradesmen, sir.”
“You must wait your turn, my lord.”
York was seething, but he resisted the temptation to say anything further. This was not Tunstall’s doing. He was too small a fish to dare flout a bigger fish unless assured of the protection of a whale. They knew he was in the palace.
The small antechamber was quite crowded. There were two other groups of churchmen, a delegation from the Fishmongers, a powerful guild, a knight and his lady, and half a dozen individuals, including the alderman of Farringdon Without and one unsavoury character who looked and smelled as if he had just crawled through a sewer into a pile of horse manure.
York was stood by the door when the monks emerged. Tunstall called: “Sir Andrew Amery and Lady Margaret, your Grace.”
The knight shot York a furtive glance. “Stay!” the Duke roared and shoved past Tunstall and the guards who were within the doors before anyone could stop him. As he strode forward, there was a flurry of movement at the other end of the chamber. Oh, yes, they were expecting him. Margaret and her minions stood like a fortified wall around the throne. There was Somerset, Dorset, Wiltshire and Exeter – Exeter! – looking absurdly smug – gathered around Henry like a pack of snarling mastiffs. York hardly needed the presence of these enemies to tell him that his mission was in vain, for Henry’s look of obduracy spoke volumes in itself. It was too late to retreat, however. He wasn’t going to give this pack of dogs the satisfaction! He went forward with an expression on his face that clearly conveyed the disgust he felt at being in the same room as Beauforts and bowed before the King.
Before he could speak, Dorset said with deceptive gentleness, “Won’t you greet my lord father, your Grace? As you see, he is now set at liberty by the King’s good offices after a year of confinement.”
York glanced briefly at his nemesis. A few months – it wasn’t even a year – in captivity hadn’t changed him, he thought. Still tall and straight as a lance, the haughty face untroubled by lines as if he lived a life without a care. His son, however, had the blood-shot eyes and puffy flesh of a man who enjoyed too many nights of debauchery.
Ignoring them both, York tried to speak to the King. “Sire –”
“Traitor! How dare you come before the King after usurping his power and prerogatives while he was incapacitated?” Margaret said, showing her pointed canines.
They look as if they are made to rend flesh. Living flesh.
“Sire, I demand to be heard!”
Henry held up a hand to silence the others and inclined his head. He looked almost as he had before the onset of his illness, except that those little indications of weakness – the sloping, wobbling chin, the vacant eyes – were more pronounced than ever.
“Sire, it is true that I exercised power while you were unable to do so. It was necessary that someone should and I felt, as did Parliament, which appointed me protector, that I was the best man for the task, being nearest in blood and having served your Grace capably in France and again in Ireland. For eight months, I kept your kingdom safe and your government running smoothly. I even developed a program of reforms that, if initiated, would strengthen the social, political and mercantile structures of the kingdom.”
“And let us not forget your greatest accomplishment,” the Queen sneered. “Do tell his Grace how you cleverly engineered the arrest of my Lord of Somerset.”
“In fact,” said Somerset stonily, “all you’ve done has been for your own aggrandisement.”
“Not true!” said York, making one last appeal to Henry, who still sat with that obdurate look like a mask over his bland features. “I protected myself as a prudent man must but –”
“Very good.” Henry nodded, smiling vacuously. “But you are no longer needed. As you see, Almighty God has restored us to health. We are fully capable of taking up our royal duties again.”
“Your day is done,” said Exeter smugly.
“But I wonder what this is about reform,” Margaret murmured. “Do enlighten us, your Grace.”
“Yes, what is this about reform?” asked Henry, managing to look affronted. “Do you imply that our government doesn’t run efficiently under our direction? And you are the only one who can reform it? Such pride! ‘Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.’ You should get down on your knees and pray Almighty God’s forgiveness for such sinfulness!”
With an inward shrug, York gave up. It was useless. He would never get a fair hearing from Henry with this contemptible lot present. But he wasn’t done quite yet. Since he had nothing to lose, he decided a bit of plain speaking was in order.
“Yes, Henry, I mean to imply that your government is not only inefficient but corrupt!” he said with the kind of brutal candour he deplored in his nephew, Warwick. “Every petty official dips his fingers in the royal honey-pot without compunction. Taxes are crippling the poor. Your officers are lazy scoundrels who take what little the people have and grind their faces into the dust for good measure!”
“How dare you?” Somerset growled.
As if he hadn’t spoken, York swept on, while Henry gazed at him slack-jawed. Margaret’s hands curled into claws on the arms of her throne.
“For every licence granted, for every writ that passes through Chancery, for every office or benefice that changes hands, for every promotion or exemption, bribes pass like water through a sieve and every man who handles the transaction, from the beginning to the end, skims his bit of silver from the top. Your silver! You don’t believe me? Ask them! Go out into the streets and ask your people what they think of sheriffs and reeves and chancery clerks. Oh, and how long has it been since you’ve visited your law courts? Do you know what the going price is for a jury? Two marks a head! How can a poor man prevail against his rich neighbour? You have no idea, have you, how bad things are for the common man, for the bulk of your subjects?”
“Be silent, you cur!” hissed Margaret, white-lipped with fury.
> “I’ll be silent when I’m finished and I’m not finished by a long shot. Henry, what do you intend to do about the Crown’s finances? Do you know you’re bankrupt? You owe almost ten times your yearly income and yet I see you still giving away your revenue.” York moderated his tone. “It is necessary for a king to be open-handed. I would not have it said abroad that the King of England is a niggard. The trouble is that when you give away too much of the sources of your revenues, there isn’t enough left to pay your expenses. Then you resort to borrowing – with interest of course. And when those loans come due, there is nothing with which to pay them off. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle, and any schoolboy could guess where it will lead. No government can function without money.”
Henry was looking vaguely into the middle distance. Margaret was stiff with outrage, her dark eyes flashing. Somerset curled and uncurled his fist and his son looked ready to leap off the dais.
York ploughed on. “What do you intend to do about the lawlessness in the land? There has been too much heinous crime lately that has gone unpunished. A great deal of it is due to soldiers released from service in France. We taught them to fight, to plunder and rape, and now that we have no further use for these skills they’re just being tossed aside like so much rubbish. You can’t just take the soldier out of them now that they’re unemployed.”
“They are criminals,” Henry roused himself to say. “They have to be rooted out. Lawbreakers must be punished. The murder of men of God…” He shook his head sadly. “Poor, poor Salisbury… What was his crime?”
He officiated at your wedding, York thought but didn’t say. Dragged from the altar at Edington and stoned to death by a mob. When the King sent a commission to root out the perpetrators the people of Wiltshire rose up to drive them out! Disaffected soldiers killed the Bishop of Chichester, and the Bishops of Lichfield and Norwich were attacked in their dioceses and barely escaped with their lives because Lichfield was the Queen’s chancellor, Norwich her confessor.
Such incidents were a graphic illustration of the virulent hatred that had spread throughout the kingdom with the loss of the war, much of it directed at Margaret. It was dreadful to think that a man may kill a prince of the church and not pay the ultimate penalty for it.
“And let us not forget the murder of the Duke of Suffolk,” York reminded them. “Not one of these murderers has been brought to justice! Why? Because the law is a toothless old crone teetering on the edge of the grave, and so the law must pardon the men of Wiltshire, so its impotence is not exposed for the entire world to see and laugh at!”
Margaret shot to her feet. “Your Grace, I have heard enough. I ask that you dismiss this man and not give him the opportunity to insult you further.”
“I agree,” Somerset snarled. “An audience is not the proper venue for a traitor to vent his spleen. Send him packing, your Grace.”
Trembling, Henry, who wasn’t accustomed to being spoken to with such bluntness, said querulously, “You are no longer needed as Defender and Protector of the Realm, as we are well enough to resume our responsibilities. You are dismissed, my lord of York.”
The faces around him were smug, scornful. They had won, for the time being.
“Naturally,” he said scathingly. “An honest man has no place in such a government. An honest man might upset the lucrative apple cart.” He jerked a bow, turned his back on them all, and strode out of the chamber. And felt very much better. If nothing else, he had achieved that. There was something immensely satisfying about delivering oneself of a bit of plain speaking.
That sanguine mood didn’t last long. By the time he turned his horse’s head onto King Street, depression had settled on him with the familiarity of an old friend. It was a bright and chilly noon with icy puddles on the ground and a crust of frost where the weak sun hadn’t yet reached. His breath vaporised around his face as he rode. Since his family had returned to Fotheringhay, he knew he would only spend the day brooding on his wrongs if he went home and decided instead to go to The Herber.
The waggons standing in the courtyard and the servants loading them with household goods told their own tale.
Entering the hall, he found Salisbury and Warwick seated near the fire among some of their household knights. Stripping off his cloak and gloves, he handed them to a servant and went to join them. His mouth was a perfect inverted U as he slumped into a seat a knight vacated for him, the very portrait of defeat and despair.
“Wine for his Grace,” Warwick called, and then asked cheerfully: “Why so gloomy, Uncle?”
Warwick’s unfailing good humour often nettled the Duke, never more so than now. It was not as if he didn’t know that the protectorate was at an end and they were all back where they had been before the onset of Henry’s illness – which was to say out of favour and out of office! Had a lesser man asked him that question at that particular moment, he would have clouted the fellow off his chair. As it was, York contented himself with a blistering look meant to shrivel his nephew’s flesh from his bones but which in fact had no effect on him.
“I have just come from Westminster, where I had to endure the presence of Somerset and son, Wiltshire and Exeter – damn him! – while I stated my case to Henry. The result, a foregone conclusion, I admit, is that I out of office. And nary a thank you for my services.” He shook his head, lightly streaked with grey, and the corners of his mouth plunged to new depths. “It’s over,” he said morosely. “All the work, all the plans, all come to nothing.”
“I had to give up the Great Seal to Bourchier,” Salisbury said. “No thanks for me either. In fact, I was treated as if I’d stolen the damned thing and was forced to return it to its rightful owner.”
“The archbishop or the earl?”
“The archbishop. The two offices are combined in one man.”
York shook his head. They wouldn’t even let him have that small victory. A servant put a brimming tankard into his hands. Not wine but mead, hot and aromatic. He nodded his thanks and turned to Salisbury. “I gather you’re leaving?”
“I’m for Middleham. Warwick’s going to Warwick Castle. I’d advise you to get out of the city, too.”
“I intend to. There’s nothing to be gained by staying here. We are at the mercy of events, no longer masters of them.”
“Oh, well put,” said Warwick, and York turned on him with lowered brows.
“You seem to be surprisingly unaffected by this reversal in our fortunes.”
“As you say, it’s a reversal.” Warwick leant forward with his hands dangling between his knees. “But it’s not over, Uncle. Far from it. We all knew what would happen as soon as Daft Harry – oh, pardon me, King Henry – recovered his senses. It was inevitable, wasn’t it? Why be surprised or disappointed? Another time will come. Another opportunity.”
Everyone was silent for a few moments, staring into the fire, chasing his thoughts.
“But will it end any differently next time?” York shook his head as if in answer to his own question.
“We must make sure that it does.”
“How?”
“As we have seen,” Warwick said, very slowly and deliberately, “power that is given us from other hands can be snatched back again too easily, and all that we’ve worked for comes to nothing. We must seize it for ourselves and hold it in the teeth of all opposition if we wish to keep our faces out of the muck.”
York glanced at Salisbury, but that seamed face gave nothing away, and back to his nephew. “Is this so much rhetoric, Warwick? What are you saying?”
“We can retire to our estates or the deepest cave in remote Africa – it doesn’t make any difference. Because our enemies will never leave us in peace!” he said, thumping fist against thigh for emphasis. “Never! We know that. When I get back to Warwick Castle, I intend to arm my retainers. I intend to be ready when they move against us.”
“God’s death, you speak of war… as if war is inevitable.” York slumped further into his seat.
“I’m a
realist, and that is the reality. Sooner or later, we must resort to arms. Later, if you like, as a last resort, when we have explored all alternatives. But it will happen, as surely as Christ died on the Cross! And I’ll not flinch.”
“Dear God,” the Duke muttered. “Dear God.” He could almost hear Warwick’s words echoing in the smoke-blackened rafters, as challenging as a clarion call.
He had seen the results of the war in France: blackened fields, poisoned wells, slaughtered livestock, whole villages burned to the ground, women, even nuns, violated, children butchered, looting on a grand scale, cruelty beyond measure. The people starved. Whenever he rode abroad, he saw bands of the homeless, the despoiled and desperate, wearily trudging the roads, carrying their meagre belongings, looking for help, for succour, that was not to be found anywhere. He had also seen men hanging from gibbets at crossroads or the limbs of sturdy trees, the stink of them giving warning before they came into view. He had seen a woman with her skirts covering her face, her legs spread wide, her privates torn and bloody and a dog eating there and snarling at carrion birds trying to get their share. He had seen men impaled on pikes, headless bodies, a small child cut in half and babes with their heads smashed in. It was impossible to move from one place to another without coming upon scenes of carnage. Would the men who had committed these atrocities be any kinder to their own people?
“Do you agree?” he asked Salisbury.
“It is inevitable,” said the old earl, hawking into the fire, “as I think you will see once you’ve considered it rationally. I just don’t want us to be the ones to strike the first blow, but if we must, we must.”
The Duke pushed himself heavily to his feet. “I don’t want even to consider it rationally. We’re talking about civil war and all its attendant horrors. My belly heaves at the very thought. There must be another way to gain our ends.”
“Be sure to let me know when you think of one,” Warwick said with a shrug.
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