The Last English King

by Julian Rathbone

  ‘But you must not get the idea that this gaucheness led him to be in any way physically unskilful. He rode well but always with a sort of bullying savagery. One cannot imagine any horse ever felt happy beneath him. And, of course, he fought like a lion for strength, speed, and bravery. He did not believe he could be hurt and when he was he brushed it aside as of utterly no consequence --’

  ‘But was he intelligent?’ Quint asked.

  ‘He was cunning. Could always work out or accept from someone else what the next step should be to achieve what he had set himself. But stupid over anything long-term.’

  ‘Really? How so?’ Junipera asked.

  ‘There was no possible way that Normandy could conquer England. Normandy was smaller, poorer, in almost every respect more backward. He lacked almost all the resources needed for such a project . . .’

  ‘Yet for twenty years he had fought Brittany, France and Anjou . . .’

  ‘Fought them, yes. But those wars were basically defensive.’

  ‘But there was, is, more to him than mere cunning and an ability for physical savagery. ‘

  ‘Oh yes. He was utterly determined. Completely single-minded, steadfast, tenacious, unflinching, unwavering once his mind was made up. Nothing would shift him. He would listen to and follow, almost humbly, any amount of advice or wisdom, experience, call it what you like, so long as he could see it helped the drive to his final objective. But he was totally deaf to anyone who questioned this final objective, totally incapable of accepting the possibility of obstacles that could not be overcome. Once the men close to him, Odo, Robert, Lanfranc, realised this they became a good and reliable team. Once they sought not to find out or do what was best, but concentrated their minds and bodies on being their master’s tools, the servants of his ambition, then they worked for him extraordinarily well. We don’t have enough armed men in Normandy -- we’ll get them elsewhere. We don’t have ships or seamen - we’ll build the former and, as for the latter, we’ll wait for fair wind, quiet weather, and take the shortest route possible. We lack money -- we’ll screw the last ear of corn out of the peasantry, we’ll melt down the gold and silver in every church . . . and we’ll borrow. It’ll all be paid back in the end. Did you know, already, the plate, ornaments, reliquaries, vestments and all the rest in every Norman Abbey, cathedral and church, are English-made, looted from English churches to replace what he took to pay his army with?’

  Walt groaned.

  ‘He must have a prodigious eye for detail, a huge capacity for continuous work,’ Quint suggested.

  ‘Not at all, not at all.’ Taillefer was adamant. ‘Well, work perhaps, in a way. He never rested, was always restless, impatient, bullying, chivvying people to do yesterday what he was asking of them today, often meddling in things where the people he had given the tasks to knew far better than he how to achieve them. Often this ‘work’, this unrelenting effort, got in people’s way, hindered things--’

  ‘Was counter-productive?’ Quint, as usual, ready with an appropriate neologism.

  ‘Just so. But no eye for detail at all. He never noticed anything at all until it went wrong. Then, of course, he had a tantrum. But while he has no particular eye for relevant detail he does have a mania for neatness. Show him a line of wrong details with one right one and he’ll smash the right one. It’s because of this he’s got this great reputation as an organizer, and in a way it worked. I mean the crew that turned up during that summer-’

  ‘Mixed bunch were they?’

  ‘Mixed? They had one thing in common. What I’d call a criminal bent. There was nothing that gang wasn’t capable of in the way of savagery or mayhem. You know how it is. If a man has a good horse, good armour, and the ability to use them, and they’re his own, not given to him by some king or prince or lord who can take them back, then he virtually has carte blanche to do what he likes . . . until he meets two men with good horses and good armour. Well. If you have something worth keeping -- land, a family, even a sense of honour or knowing the difference between right and wrong - then you might use your horse and armour for reasonably civilized purposes, like defending the people who depend on you, or keeping your land out of some other guy’s hands. But this lot had nothing. Second sons. Bastards. Lots and lots of bastards, almost all fitz this or fitz that . . . Some were people of family or property who had committed some crime where they came from and were on the run. Others plain straightforward mercenaries. There were Vikings, Lithuanians, Lats, Poles, Franks, Lombards, Basques. A few Moors too, believe it or not.

  ‘They began to trickle in with the Spring. And course, lined up on a beach on the Normandy coast they looked like a rabble. The Bastard of all bastards was furious. No one would cross the Channel unless they were wearing a standard conical helmet with nose-piece, a coat of mail to the knees but split from the waist both fore and aft, so it wouldn’t get in the way on a horse, but protect the soldier’s thighs, a spear, a lanceolate-shaped shield and a side-arm. Only with the side arm would he allow any variation, knowing that this was the one most of the killing would be done with and they’d get on better with what they were used to: could be mace -- ball and chain or spiked - axe or sword. Boots with spurs. And a damned good horse, preferably a stallion or a gelding. If the arms and armour they had didn’t fit, then either they bought a new lot out of their own pockets or they chucked in what they had to be melted down and reforged according to regs for free. Nearly all took the second option since very few of them had any gold or money. This was April, May, and since they’d settled on September, he reckoned he had time to do all this.

  ‘Then he split them up into three divisions. All those from the west and south were called Bretons and would fight on the left. Those from east of the Rhine and the north would be called Franks and would fight on the right. And those who were Normans or claimed to be so (a lot of them came from Norman colonies in places like Sicily) fought in the middle where he himself would be. At least he could be pretty sure that the middle lot would understand what he said when he gave a command. And within each group there were Norman commanders or people who pretended to be Norman by taking on Norman names: Howard, Keith, Waldegrave, Howe, Hague, Warenne, Fitzosbern, Malet and so on. ‘What you’ve got to remember about this gang of dissolute adventurers, often convicted murderers, lootists, church-burners and rapists, is that they had nothing to lose when it came to a battle: an arm, a leg, a life, but they were lucky to have survived as long as they had, and all knew they’d be chopped up or hanged sooner or later. Nothing to lose and everything to gain. While the English had everything to lose. Put it in one word -- England. When you have something worth fighting for you want to stay alive to enjoy it, when you’re fighting to get something you never had you might as well die if you’re not going to get it. It’s a hairbreadth between the two, and it’s more a question of blind, evil desperation against real courage . . .’

  He had realised that Walt was showing signs of distress at what he was trying to say, and his voice faded away. Junipera stood up.

  ‘Time for bed,’ she said. ‘Your children are asleep already. Tomorrow evening perhaps Walt can resume telling us the final chapter of this tragic tale. Personally I can’t wait to hear what happened to Harald Hardrada.’

  As they struggled with weariness and tipsiness down the marble passages to the rooms Junipera had set aside for them, with Taillefer carrying Adeliza in his arms and Quint leading Alain by the hand, Walt overheard their postscript to Taillefer’s account of William’s army.

  ‘What a crew! I think I’ve thought of a word to describe them -and their leader. A word which means sickness of the soul, morbidity in the spirit, so no action is unthinkable. Psychopath. What do you think? A bunch of psychopaths. And to think, if they hold on in spite of rebellions and uprisings, these people will become the rulers of the English for . . . Well, I suppose for ever.’

  ‘For a thousand years anyway,’ Taillefer answered.

  Rebellions? Uprisings. It still went on,
then? It hadn’t all ended at Hastings with the slaying of the King?

  Walt felt a cold clutch of terror, self-disgust and sheer misery close round his heart.

  Later, lying on his bed in the near dark, Taillefer was haunted by a memory, a vision - that of the tall mad duke, pulling at his goatee, lurching along with his head on one side, spitting and raging in his high nasal voice at some minor breach of order he had spotted. ‘A place for everything and everything in its place,’ he howled. ‘Write it down. Write it all down. Only way to be sure we know where we’re at. I want it all on record, till Doomsday, if necessary.’

  Odd, really, considering the man was virtually unlettered.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  ‘You actually saw Harald Hardrada.’ Quint looked across the table at Junipera, fixed her violet eyes with his pale blue ones, She blushed a little.

  ‘It was a long time ago.’

  ‘Nineteen years since he left this part of the world. He went back to Norway to be king when Magnus died.’

  ‘I was just ... a chit, a child. He was in his early twenties. But so handsome. And . . . huge. I was actually at Ephesus at the time with my first husband,’ she looked round the table, her face as bland as milk, ‘I married at a very young age, you know? It was a meeting of merchants, men of wealth and so forth. Harald was raising money for an expedition to Crete and Malta to reclaim them for the Empress.’

  ‘Did you meet him?’

  ‘Actually, yes. Quite briefly. After he had got promises of funds and promised in return, in Empress Zoe’s name, to reduce the tariffs if he were successful, there was a small social function, not a feast you understand, more a sort of soirée . . .’

  She tightened her lips, stared them all down.

  ‘Go on Walt,’ she concluded. ‘Tell us about Harald Hardrada in 1066. He must have been an old man by then.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose so. Just turned fifty, I should think . . .’

  Junipera gave a tiny sigh.

  ‘He was a great warrior,’ Walt went on. ‘Some have called him the last of the Vikings. But he was a good leader too, and a good general. I don’t know why he thought he should be King of England-’

  ‘Actually,’ said Quint, ‘I believe it went something like this: when Canute died Magnus claimed the English throne. Then Harold Harefoot died and that left Harthacanute. He and Magnus came to an agreement . . .’

  ‘This is getting boring again,’ Junipera declared.

  ‘Certainly is,’ agreed Adeliza and Alain. ‘Go on Walt, get to the exciting bits.’

  ‘I’ll try. Well. What went on between Tostig and Hardrada, how long they’d been in touch with each other, no one knows for sure --’

  ‘So we don’t have to be told about it.’

  ‘Anyway, early in September, with the weather still bright and what wind there was from the north, Hardrada brought a big army and fleet across from Norway via the Orkneys, where he probably met Tostig, and landed on the Northumberland coast. He sacked Scarborough . . .’

  ‘Big? How big was this army?’

  ‘Two hundred long boats. Getting on for ten thousand men.’

  ‘Oh dear, that is big.’

  ‘Precisely. We were in London when we heard about Scarborough. It was the twelfth of September . . .’

  ‘Ten thousand? You’re joking.’ Harold was horrified.

  ‘Two hundred boats anyway,’ said little Albert who had brought the news. ‘I counted them myself. So it can’t be far off ten thousand.’

  ‘Let’s look at this sensibly.’ Gyrth leant across the table. ‘Horses, backup, auxiliaries, with luck it might be as few as six thousand fully-armed warriors.’

  ‘That’s still double what Edwin and Morcar can get out.’

  ‘Oh, come on. The harvest’s in, they can raise the fyrd - ten, twenty thousand.’

  ‘That will need a month, maybe longer. Hardrada will have cut them up by then. Anyway. Hardrada could take on a stripling like Edwin with half the numbers and beat him. For Christ’s sake, bloody Tostig could.’ Silence. Six of them, Harold’s brothers Leofwine and Gyrth, with Walt, Wulfric, Timor and Albert, looked at the King and waited. Harold pulled his palms down across his face and got up. They watched him walk down the small hall and out into the sunlight. Leofwine made as if to follow him, but Gyrth put a hand on his arm and held him back.

  Outside Harold walked slowly, head bent, down a narrow sandy path flanked with rosemary bushes to the west door of the abbey church. His abbey church. Waltham Abbey. He paused in front of oak doors framed in a rounded arch and for a moment or two let his eyes wander up and down the pillared sides and then across the semi-circular tympanum above the doors. None of it was on a grand scale, indeed he could easily put his hand on St Helena’s foot at the bottom of the tympanum without really stretching. Along with most people, he believed her to have been British, indeed, as far as he was concerned, never having much bothered himself with the minutiae of history, English.

  She was kneeling in front of the True Cross which, inspired by a dream, she had just caused to be uncovered, and was surrounded at a lower level by workmen with spades and picks, smaller than her, since they were less important, but with angels above her and finally the Trinity. The whole thing, done in very deep relief, in places almost free-standing, was painted brightly with lazuli, vermilions, and gold leaf amongst other tinctures, was filled with swirling life.

  He pushed open the doors and walked slowly up the nave towards the main altar. On either side of him the round solid pillars stood sentinel, each carved differently with dogstooth patterns, herring-bone, lozenges and with differently foliated capitals through whose leaves little ogres and imps occasionally peeped out. They supported oak beams and vaulting which continued the illusion of a forest or tree-temple as well as supporting the barn-like roof. Again gold leaf and other colours glimmered from bosses and supporting brackets sculpted to resemble angels singing or playing harps, lyres, hautboys and trumpets. He stopped a yard or two in front of the chancel step and let his eye wander over the marvellous intricacy of the gold and crystal reliquary, enamelled and studded with jewels, in the centre of the cross. He could not quite see, not without going right up to it, the splinter of elder set in amber. But he knew it was there, knew it was a piece of the Cross itself.

  Harold was not devout - not in the Christian sense, anyway. But he understood and felt the numinous, that he was in the presence of an object which, though it did not inspire him to conventional veneration, emanated power.

  Slowly the agitation which he had felt faded and a calm peacefulness filled his mind. It was as he had expected. He had not needed to know what to do -- that was obvious. What he had needed was courage and certainty. The certainty that he was right, and the courage to carry it through with unwavering resolution, and that was what those few moments gave him. He walked back to the hall.

  ‘We march north,’ he said.

  For all his certainty they looked up with doubt, even dread, though in their hearts they, too, knew he was right -- it was the only possible decision.

  ‘But,’ he went on, ‘we must cover our arses.’

  The housecarls, four-and-a-half thousand of them now, were stationed in five companies along the coast -- at Portchester, Bosham, Littlehampton on the Arun estuary, Pevensey, and Hastings -- each with enough ships to carry them to a concentration whenever the Norman threat should develop. They were of course so mounted, so if they were faced with a contrary wind they could move by land. Indeed, Harold had made sure the coastal tracks were clear, the bridges in place, the fords passable. Behind the coast, up in the downs in front of the great forest of the Weald, were the twenty or so camps where the Sussex and Kent fyrd, a further five thousand strong were already regrouping since the harvest was now in.

  Harold made three crucial dispositions, bearing in mind that William would cross the Channel as soon as he had a fair wind and that this might happen even before he could move against Hardrada or, even worse, at that m
oment when he and the housecarls would be at the furthest point away from the south. He ordered the housecarls to concentrate on London - thus they could move south again right up to the moment he committed himself to a move to the north. He ordered the fleet into the Thames estuary too - without soldiers to man it as a fighting force, it could do little or nothing to hinder William while he was at sea. From London it could go north or south as –

  ‘Hang on,’ Quint grunted. ‘The general understanding we have now of the campaign is that thanks to William’s strategic brilliance in delaying his crossing for so many months Harold’s ships were falling apart and had to be refitted, supplies were running out, and the fyrd had more or less disbanded itself.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ cried Walt. ‘No such thing at all. Harold was far too good a commander to let anything like that happen.’

  Quint shrugged, popped half an apple into his mouth.

  ‘So,’ he went on, munching through it, ‘what was his grand strategy?’

  Harold laid it all out there and then, in the hall at Waltham, within ten minutes of hearing the news of Hardrada’s landing.

  He ordered the fyrd to break up into yet smaller groups so they could sustain themselves without being a burden on the countryside, but to maintain the line of the Downs in front of the forest.

  ‘If,’ he said, ‘William lands before we get north of Watford Gap, we turn back and face him. The fleet sails back and destroys his, wherever it is. The fyrd harry him but avoid general engagements until we come up with him on ground of our choosing. If, however, we get to Watford Gap without news of his sailing then we push on and deal with Hardrada. If Edwin and Morcar can keep out of trouble until we get there we’ll see him off, no problem.

  ‘Then if William still hasn’t sailed, we come back and nothing has been lost. But if he has, and he lands when we’re up in Northumbria or wherever, then we let him march inland, as far as the Thames if he likes. He’ll have left his fleet, and with luck ours will be able to catch it. The fyrd will be scouting round his tail all the time he’s in the forest. By the time he reaches the Thames he’ll have the armies of both the north and the south in front of him. If he fights he’s licked. If he sues for peace we make him eat shit. But the whole thing depends on one factor. Edwin and Morcar must not fight on their own. They must fall back in front of Hardrada until we can get there.’