A Play of Lords

by Margaret Frazer

  Bishop Beaufort seemed to consider that seriously, then said, “He was seen both of those times by any number of other people. None of them thought to follow him. Without you had been thinking so much on the matter, would you have troubled to follow him that first time? And if you had not followed him that first time, you would not have followed him the second and not thereby given me what I needed to know. It was for your ability to think that I paid you. You thought well, followed where your thinking took you, and have well earned your pay.” What might have been buried laughter showed in a slight crinkling at the corners of Bishop Beaufort’s eyes. “Or do you think that, having done so well, you should have more payment for it?”

  “No, my lord,” Joliffe said quickly. “I’m well content with what you’ve paid. Except—” He put that hint of episcopal laughter to the test by looking toward the red doublet now lying neatly folded on one of the chests along a wall. “—that did cost me some few shillings I’d not mind having back.”

  Bishop Beaufort laughed openly and from among papers on the desk beside him slid out some coins he must have purposefully had waiting. He held them out, and Joliffe went down on one knee to receive them, not so coarse as to look at them as he did but swallowing thickly with surprise as he felt their weight. There was more than the price of even a very fine doublet there, and when the bishop turned his hand over, offering his ring, Joliffe kissed it willingly and with respect. As Basset had been known to say, there was nothing like fair pay to earn a man respect. This being very fair pay, Joliffe willingly gave the respect. Then he stood up, ready to be dismissed and to bow himself from the room, only to hear himself say, “But—”

  He stopped himself. It was not his place to ask questions of a royal bishop.

  “But?” Bishop Beaufort echoed, and added when Joliffe still hesitated, “If there’s something you want to ask, ask it.”

  There was something Joliffe very much wanted to ask, and he said quickly, “I’ve found out someone behind at least some of the trouble there’s been, and I think I know at least some of the why of it. But I don’t know if I have the right of it or not.”

  “What do you think is the why of it?” Bishop Beaufort asked, sounding not so much bishop to servant but rather one man honestly interested in what another thought.

  Yet Joliffe hesitated before saying, “Those men I pointed out in the hall. At least one of them is an Italian merchant . . .”

  “Not himself. He serves a merchant of Genoa who’s presently a guest here in my household.”

  Although not for much longer, to judge by the bishop’s tone.

  Joliffe accepted the correction with a slight bow of his head and went on, “This puts at least these Italians behind deliberately keeping high the anger against the duke of Burgundy and the Flemings. Since the Italians have no political interest in Burgundy or the Low Countries, it has to be trade that’s behind it. The wool trade. Most of English wool goes to the Low Countries, to the Flemings, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “If they could be cut off from English wool, then the Italians could take more of it, probably at less cost, since their adversary for it would no longer be in the field against them, as it were. I think that’s the why of all the trouble there’s been.” Including the attack with threats on the players. It was all so that some already wealthy men could grow the wealthier.

  “That is very much the sum of it, I think,” Bishop Beaufort said.

  But Joliffe suddenly saw more and said, “It isn’t only the wool trade and who makes more money from it, though, is it? It’s probably no more than that for the Italians, but open war with Burgundy will be costly. The war in France is already costing England too much. To have war with Burgundy, too . . .”

  “May be more than the government can carry,” Bishop Beaufort said levelly. “Yes. And that will play into the Italians’ hands, too, of course. In need of money, our government will lay a tax on those best able to pay it. The merchants. The merchants, to meet the tax, will therefore have to sell more readily to those best able to buy.”

  “The Italians.”

  “Putting them in position to bargain for an even lower price on our wool. I suppose it could be looked on as some manner of revenge for the Italian bankers ruined by my royal grandfather a hundred years ago.”

  Joliffe let his ignorance show, not knowing what he meant.

  “King Edward III, to finance his war with France, borrowed from one Italian money-dealing house and then another,” Bishop Beaufort answered. “When he decided there was no way he would ever be able to pay them back, he cancelled his debts to them, and they were ruined. No foreigner will likely lend to the crown of England again. Which is why, as you have likely heard, I must needs lend money to my nephew the king.”

  As he indeed did, but able, because of his high place in England’s government, to assure repayment of his loans out of the customs and taxes charged on, among other things, wool being exported from the realm. Which meant Bishop Beaufort had more interests than one in how the wool trade went.

  And then Joliffe made a leap he had not made before, away from that side of the matter to, “If the Italians succeed at this, their next attack will likely be against the cloth trade. They’ll want, probably as much as the Flemings do, to stop the making of English cloth, to keep all that market as well as all the wool for themselves.”

  Grimly, Bishop Beaufort said, “That’s very much what I think, too, and now I should be able to do something toward stopping them.”

  “Except you can’t challenge them outright on what they’ve done, can you?”

  Bishop Beaufort acknowledged that truth with a wry, one-sided smile. “No. England cannot afford to add another quarrel to the ones we already have. They’ll be blocked from doing more, will be given to understand in quiet ways that what they’ve done and what they intend is known and has to stop. That it will be stopped one way or another. The wool trade with Flanders is an unchanging necessity, both for England and the Flemings. It will continue. The game will go on.”

  The game that was played out with men’s lives and deaths; and Joliffe asked, “What of today’s murderer?” Who had likely killed other times, including very possibly Bishop Beaufort’s own man a few days ago.

  “He cannot be touched by the law without giving away too much of what I wish kept private. Meaning you, among other things. But his Genoese master will have it explained to him why his man had best be out of England on the next ship leaving London, wherever it may be going. To Iceland, I may hope. His master is a reasonable man. He’ll see to it and that the man never comes back here, wherever he goes. As for the Englishman who companioned him, he will be seen to. I do not like treachery in my own household.”

  That was said with a grimness that Joliffe hoped would never be turned toward him and made this seem a good time to take himself away, but yet again his curiosity got the better of what passed for his good sense and he said, knowing how bold it was of him, “The other great matter is presently who’ll be made governor of Normandy. Will it be your nephew the earl of Mortain?”

  Bishop Beaufort’s look at him was shrewd. “You mean do I intend to use my power to put him into the office.”

  Joliffe gave a half smile and slight shrug for answer, and, “I am beset by curiosity. I can’t help it.”

  Bishop Beaufort’s look at him continued shrewd, but for an uncomfortably long moment no answer came with it. Then he said, laying the words out with great care, “Your curiosity and the skill with which you put it to use are what I value in you. That, and that you are able to look at what you learn from different sides, not merely one, are not so caught into the web of things that you’re unable to look at what you learn from different sides, instead of merely the one that serves your ambition. Too many men are blinded by the constraints of their particular ambitions. So if I tell you things, it’s because, first, I depend on you to keep them to yourself, as you will keep this present matter to yourself; and secondly, because I hav
e hope you can make use, to my good, of what I tell you. Do you understand?”

  There was no way not to understand. By hearing whatever Bishop Beaufort next told him, Joliffe knew he would be agreeing to serve him not simply now but in the future.

  And slowly, fully meeting Bishop Beaufort’s straight gaze, he gave a single accepting nod.

  Chapter 22

  What brightness there had been to some of Octo-ber’s days seemed utterly lost now early November was come. It was with a spine-stiffening cold wind at their backs and under a gray-clouded sky that had been gray-clouded for a week that the players trudged up the hill that left London behind them. Still, it was a trudge made heavy only by the hill, not by their hearts, with Ellis maybe the merriest of them, sitting on the fore-edge of their hired cart, easing his hip and talking over with their hired carter, walking beside his horse, which tavern along the way might be best to stop at for their mid-day meal.

  Their talk of pottage and pies and ales and wines had Piers soon begging his mother for some of the bread she had bought before they left London this morning. Time was that he would have had to wait to eat until they all did, their food saved carefully from meal to meal, but success was coming with them out of London. To eat now did not mean to go hungry later, and Rose, smiling, told Joliffe to give him a loaf-end from the bundle tucked in a back corner of the cart.

  Rose smiled much these days, Joliffe had noted. Once The Duke and the Dauphin had been ready and in play, she had had very little to do—had had time simply to sit if she wanted to, to talk by the hour with Maud Hyche and wander the shops of London, one end of the city to the other, for simply the pleasure of looking. She did buy a length of thick, dark green cloth one day, to make new cloaks for herself and Ellis (with Piers complaining mightily at having to make do with Ellis’ old cloak cut down to his size), but hemming a cloak was simple sewing, she said, something for her hands to do while she talked with Maud Hyche.

  So one way and another London had been good to her, but the rest of them had not had her chance to rest. They had done The Duke and the Dauphin more times than they bothered to count anymore, had done their other plays, too, sometimes, and were leaving London now not because London was tired of them but because Lord Lovell was lessening his household against the high cost of maintaining it in London. Lady Lovell and her ladies and some of the servants had left by boat up the Thames a few days ago. If the players had chosen to stay elsewhere in London at their own cost, Lord Lovell would not have objected, but a little talk among themselves had shown they were ready to be done with London for now.

  “What we need is a rest for all of us,” Basset had said. “There’s a thought we’ve rarely dared to have, but we’ve done well enough these few weeks that we can have it. Both the thought and the rest.”

  He had proposed they take themselves away, rejoin Tisbe and their cart, go to maybe Oxford, where they were known and knew people, “And put ourselves and Tisbe all to pasture for a while,” Basset said. “We’re bid to Minster Lovell for Christmas, after all. This will give Joliffe chance to finish writing us something new to do there.”

  “Ah, rest for everyone but me,” Joliffe had said, not minding. It was work he enjoyed and there would be no haste to it, with weeks instead of days in which to do it.

  Besides that, it would serve to keep his mind from being too busy at other things. Such as what had been said—or rather, not been said—between himself and Basset when he had told Basset of his last talk with Bishop Beaufort.

  Basset had looked at him with something of the same long, deep look that Bishop Beaufort had, then said, “I can only pray to Saint Genesius and all the saints you know what you’ve let yourself in for. Yourself and us.”

  Having no answer to that, Joliffe made none, and neither he nor Basset had said more about it then or later, leaving Joliffe only to suspect that being away from Bishop Beaufort was among the reasons Basset was glad to have London behind them.

  Not that Bishop Beaufort would not find them should he want them again. Or, more correctly, when he wanted them again.

  But anything that might come of that was not yet, and all in all Joliffe was finding it surprisingly good to be on the road again, headed toward somewhere else after so many days in one place; and Basset, striding beside him, was humming a walking song that Gil on his other side now started to sing aloud and happily. “Go, penny, go! Spend, and God shall send.”

  Joliffe laughed and joined in, “Spare, and ever more care. No penny, no fear.”

  And then he and Gil and Basset sang all together, with all the triumph of men whose purses were full and Ellis joining in from the cart-seat, “No penny, no care. Go, penny, go! Go, penny, go!”

  And Rose from where she was walking hand in hand with Piers looked back over her shoulder at them, smiling.

  Author’s Note

  There is much actual history in this book. The situation among England, France, and Burgundy in the autumn of 1435 was just as described here. The Congress held at Arras that summer had been disastrous for the English (The Congress of Arras by J. G. Dickinson is the chief scholarly study of the debacle), and the concomitant death of the duke of Bedford made matters in France desperate, as well as threatening to unbalance the political situation in England with rivalry among the lords over who would replace him. Mixed with that was the general populace’s outrage at the faithless duke of Burgundy. His little embassy of two heralds and a friar was very badly received by both the government and Londoners while at the same time the bishop of Therouenne was there at his brothers’ request in a behind-the-scenes attempt to defuse the exploding situation.

  On the whole, it would have been far more convenient for me to refer simply to the duke of Burgundy’s subjects as Burgundians throughout the course of the story, but by various means, fair and foul, the dukes of Burgundy had acquired a number of formerly independent princedoms, duchies, and counties and thereby ruled over not just Burgundians but Brabanters, Hainaulters, Flemings, Zealanders, and more. I somewhat compromised by referring most often to Flemings, Flanders being the focal point of English trade with the Low Countries. For a single-volume history of the dukes of Burgundy, The Golden Age of Burgundy by Joseph Calmette is a handy source, while Philip Vaughan has written a series of individual biographies of these ambitious, rather shallow men.

  How to refer to the man known as the Dauphin was no trouble for me, but it was for the English government in the 1400s. “The Dauphin” had been disinherited by his French royal father years before this and the crown of France given to the English. Despite that, the Dauphin had been crowned King Charles VII of France through Jeanne d’Arc’s efforts six years before this story and was accepted as a king by those French still resisting English rule and by much of diplomatic Europe. The English of course refused to do so, which made such things as talks toward treaties and truces awkward and led to such English circumlocutions as “our adversary of France” and “our uncle of France,” the Dauphin being brother of King Henry VI’s mother.

  There are numerous biographies of Charles VII in French; in English, M. G. A. Vale’s Charles VII is happily recommended. For those interested in knowing more about Cardinal Bishop Beaufort and Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, there are Cardinal Beaufort by G. L. Harriss and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester by Kenneth Vickers.

  A minor note: Master John Russell of the duke of Gloucester’s household is as historical as all the bishops and lords in this story. His Book of Nurture, detailing his duties in the duke’s household, still exists, an excellent window on the complexities of the noble life and manners in late medieval times. It can be found in Early English Meals and Manners, edited by Frederick J. Furnival, along with several other books of manners from the time.

  The anti-Burgundian plays that Basset’s company performs are of my own imagining. Any such immediately topical plays as there might have been at the time would have been ephemera and unlikely to have been deliberately saved.

  Those who also read
my Dame Frevisse series may be interested to know that the earl of Mortain in this book appears as the marquis of Dorset in The Bastard’s Tale and—as the duke of Somerset—is pivotal, although off-stage, in several later books of that series. An actual nephew of Bishop Beaufort, in the fullness of time he played a very large part in bringing on England’s Wars of the Roses.