Some Touch of Pity

by Rhoda Edwards

  King Richard’s title was confirmed by Parliament, and his son’s succession. My mother cursed. When she heard that the King had abolished benevolences, a hated royal tax, which amounts to outright demands by the King for money from whoever he chooses, she scoffed and said, ‘That won’t last!’ The King and his advisers had drawn up some good Acts. Most of them concerned the working of the law. My father used to say that his brother knew as much about the law as the men who’d studied at the Inns of Court, and twice as much about putting it into practice. There was an Act to stop oppression by bailiffs and stewards who turned the law to their own advantage, one to prevent men getting placed on juries by bribery, and one to protect those thrown into prison on flimsy evidence. I didn’t pretend to understand the legal things, but it seemed as if the King would be popular with his subjects because of these reforms. ‘The lords won’t like it,’ my mother said, with malicious glee. ‘All those poor men able to turn the law against their masters, when everybody knows the only way to rule is by keeping the commons under the thumb of the lords.’ There were also some Acts to help English merchants, and one to protect foreign booksellers, writers and printers. Master Caxton would not be too pleased about this one, as it gave freedom to his rivals in trade.

  Though Parliament confirmed that my uncle’s son should inherit the crown, the King wished to make more solemn these mere words in ink on parchment. Accordingly, all the lords spiritual and temporal were required to swear on the Holy Gospels, in the presence of the King himself, an oath of allegiance to the Prince, acknowledging him as King if something should happen to his father. My mother’s face looked ugly when she heard this. ‘He swore the same oath to my son. He may well fear sudden death; the sword of God’s justice will strike. That is what I pray for.’

  God knew who she prayed to. Soon after she had uttered these wicked words, something occurred that made me shrink from my mother’s company. I would not enter her room without crossing myself, or saying a prayer. I found the Things in a little casket hidden at the bottom of her clothes-chest, while rummaging for something she insisted was there but wasn’t. I paid for my curiosity in opening that box for long afterwards, in fear that haunted even my dreams. At first I thought little Bridget had hidden away some dolls. But they were no toys.

  There were three of them, horrible, obscene manikins made of flesh-coloured wax. They were more revolting than anything I could imagine, and more terrifying. That did not stop me looking closer. Two of the things were made like a naked man and woman, and the third like a male child. The bigger ones were crowned with gold paper, and most horrible of all, had hair on their heads. I knew whom they were meant to represent. Women could be burnt for making these things, and using sorcery against the King and Queen. How had she managed to get hold of the hair? It must be theirs — some very devious bribing of servants, I supposed. It wasn’t the first time my mother had dabbled in making images. My grandmother Bedford had been accused of the practice more than once; she made one of the Earl of Warwick, and said spells over it to bring about his death. Maybe she had invoked the aid of Satan. Trembling, I shoved the box back where I’d found it, and ran out of the room. I was first violently sick, then went to my room to pray for protection against evil. I did this every day after.

  On the eleventh of February, I was eighteen. I cried when I woke up that day, because I was growing old, had been made a bastard, and for all the hope there was of finding a husband to look after me, I might as well have been a nun. I cried because I knew nothing of my little brothers’ fate. I cried because I was frightened of my mother, and because my beloved father was dead. I cried also, because I remembered my seventeenth birthday, last year. It had been Shrove Tuesday, and Lent beginning the next day, but a banquet was held in my honour. My father was trying to comfort me for having been jilted by the Dauphin, though I think he needed comfort more than I did. He found me a special partner for that evening — not one of the single men of my own age, for he was not looking for another husband for me — but his own brother, Richard. As my uncle was at Westminster for the Parliament last year, without his wife, my father honoured us together. I was happy enough to fly; my uncle was the hero of the time, because he’d beaten the Scots. I know he’s not a flatterer, or a flirt, and they say, in astonishment, faithful to his wife, but he said I was the loveliest princess in Christendom, that night. I had a gown of green cloth of gold, which is one of my best colours, and I wore my hair down, bound back by gold ribbons. I was shy of dancing with him at first, because of being quite a lot taller than he is. He didn’t seem to mind though, and is a good dancer, which always makes things easier. I’m the only one of us girls old enough to remember my uncle before he went away to live in the north. Until I was six, he lived most of the time at Westminster. Maybe it was because of my father’s affection for him, that I followed suit. My father was my mentor in all things.

  Now, a miserable year later, I cried because I’d liked my uncle Richard so much, and he’d brought such terror and grief to us; our uncle Rivers and half-brother Grey dead, our brother’s crown usurped. As for our bastardy, in my heart I believed it true, and blamed my mother, never my father. He must have been bewitched in some way; it was a marriage with the Devil’s blessing, not God’s.

  Before the end of the session of Parliament, the King sent ambassadors to treat with my mother. He chose two men even she could not refuse to see. They were Lord Howard, who had been given my younger brother’s title of Duke of Norfolk, and the Lord Chancellor, the Bishop of Lincoln. They had been two of my father’s most trusted servants, not my mother’s friends perhaps, but never openly hostile to her. I saw them come into the house. They looked astonished to find the former proud Queen living in such humble surroundings. They were unsmiling; the long and the short of it, I thought. The Duke of Norfolk always had a soft spot for children, and made a special pet of me when I was small; I hoped he would still be kind. The Chancellor was a tall, very thin man, with a sick, yellow face and round shoulders, on which his gowns hung like a scarecrow’s clothes. With his big nose and white hair, he looked like a stork. The Duke did not try to kiss my mother’s hand. He was not going to treat her as a Queen. He gave her a perfunctory bow. The Chancellor looked ominous in the background.

  ‘Madam,’ Howard said, ‘my Lord Chancellor and I would be obliged if we might speak with you in private.’ My mother nodded, her mouth pursed up, though she looked oddly tremulous and scared. She led them into the best room. When she came out, she looked very strange — old, almost. As the two men left, I managed to touch the Duke of Norfolk’s arm. He stopped, and his stern face suddenly creased up into his cheerful smile. ‘We’ll soon have you out of here, Lady Bess,’ he whispered, like a conspirator.

  My relief was so huge, I almost burst into tears. ‘My lord,’ I said, very low, in case my mother heard, ‘will you tell the King — I don’t want to stay here. For love of my father, help us.’

  After they’d gone, my mother called me and Cecily to her. She was crying, weakly. ‘They brought terms,’ she said, ‘from the King.’ It was the first time she’d called him that. ‘They swore to me that the King had proofs that my sons still live. He wishes me to send you all out of Sanctuary into his care. If I accept his proofs, and terms, he will leave me free to live as I wish. Your brother Dorset may have a pardon if he comes home. I’m too weary,’ she said, ‘to know where I am to go, how I am to live. Daughters, what am I to do?’ She’d never asked us anything, before.

  ‘Please, madam,’ Cecily said, taking courage, ‘wouldn’t it be best to accept?’

  ‘I wish to leave this place,’ I said, as I’d never dared before.

  ‘So be it,’ she answered, sighing. ‘He offers me seven hundred marks a year, and to find husbands for all you girls, and to give you dowries — annuities of two hundred marks each. The sums are paltry. Gloucester’s a hard man. But what can I do? Take it, or leave it, Howard said. You see how they speak to me now.’ Put baldly, it didn’t sound an
over-generous offer.

  ‘He’s not panting to make amends,’ Cecily said.

  On the first day of March, the King assembled his lords spiritual and temporal, who were left in London after the Parliament, the Mayor and Aldermen, and swore publicly, upon the Holy Gospels, to protect me and my sisters, if we would come out of Sanctuary into his care.

  The next day, we walked out of the house in the Sanctuary, and were escorted to the palace, leaving my mother alone, and tearful. It was Shrove Tuesday again. I didn’t want to think of that other time, a year ago. I didn’t want to meet my uncle, the King, either. In the end, it was the Queen who met us. She looked grave, and uncomfortable, and kissed each of us on the cheek very quickly, as if she did not know whether we’d like it or not. I was curious about her, having not seen her since my brother’s wedding to little Anne Mowbray. I remembered nothing about her appearance; perhaps because it is unmemorable. I couldn’t judge how different she’d been then, at twenty-one. She is not beautiful. Her face is serious and pale, the colour comes and goes in it easily. I noticed how slender her neck was, like the stalk of a flower; in fact she was downright thin. I was shocked, having expected to find my uncle’s wife a pretty woman, whose delights had kept him out of others’ arms. Her perfume was delicious, though; it made me aware how I’d missed these things in the past year. I resented her from the start, though I felt guilty about it, because she went out of her way to be kind. After I’d thought her a sober, dull little creature, she surprised me, by taking my hand and smiling most charmingly, saying, ‘Lady Elizabeth, I’d almost forgotten, we are sisters in a way; my father was your godfather.’ I had forgotten; I couldn’t remember her father, the Earl of Warwick. My mother had hated him even more than she now hated the King.

  After the first formal greeting he gave us, I scarcely saw the King. I couldn’t remember what he said to us. My eyes were fixed on the floor most of the time, and when I had to kiss his cheek, I kept them shut. He had an ordinary, warm, man’s face. I was trembling like a leaf. Afterwards, I wondered if he felt embarrassed to be landed with five nieces, all little bastards, whose lives he’d ruined.

  Cecily and I were to wait upon the Queen, while the little ones were merely added on to the already large nursery of children in her care. Before, I’d have thought it humiliating to wait upon my uncle’s wife, but after nearly a year of attending my mother, it didn’t seem so bad. Anne is a gentler person than my mother. I hoped her ladies would not be hostile to us. In those first days, I watched the Queen. She gave me the satisfaction of being both better looking and younger than her, yet she made me feel large, and robust as a peasant. Whenever I saw her and the King together, I seemed to grow twice as large, and wanted to leave the room, without exactly knowing why. When they talked in private, they used all sorts of queer, north-country words and expressions, which I did not understand. I felt shut out, though I had no right to be included. The first time I saw my uncle kiss his wife, I was reduced to hopeless desolation. It wasn’t the sort of explicit embrace my father had thought nothing of indulging in public — just a touch, really — but she turned her face to him, and it was as if a shutter had been opened upon a sunny day; I wondered why I had not thought her pretty. I blushed hotly. If only there were someone to show me that tenderness, to look after me. I’ve never been kissed properly, and I’m eighteen. Tears swam into my eyes, and I forgot them, the King and Queen, in my longing to have my father back, to be picked up like a little girl, and to be enfolded in his huge, warm hug, to hear his lovely laugh.

  No sooner had we girls got our freedom, such as it was, we were told to pack our belongings, because at the end of the week we were going to Cambridge, beginning a progress that would last all summer. The King wished to be in the north by the end of May, to take whatever action was necessary against the Scots. The day we set out for Cambridge, March roared like a lion. It seemed too early to be going off on a progress though it was wonderful to be on horseback again, out of doors, and setting out to see fresh places in England. I was now convinced my brothers were alive, in the north, where we were going. My mother had sent a letter to my half-brother Dorset, and expected him to come home and make his peace with the King. In spite of the cold, bleak day, life seemed better.

  Many of the villagers in places we passed through left their work to watch us. In their weekday clothes, the people always look so drab, like flocks of sparrows gathering round a peacock in his pride. There were plenty of peacocks among us. I found myself looking covertly round at all the young men, and wondering which ones were unmarried. My sister Cecily was doing the same. Whenever we see one under thirty who is good looking, he’s bound to be married already. What seems to be missing in my uncle’s household are the sort of young men who’d made up my half-brother Dorset’s circle. Clothes, jewels, money, eating, drinking, tennis, gambling and endless women; they thought of nothing else. I was kept very carefully away from Tom’s friends, my mother and, surprisingly, my father, were both strict about this. Beside them, so many of the men at court now would have looked country yokels. I supposed my uncle would marry me to one of his followers. There are so many north-country men; it would probably be one of them, whom I’d need an interpreter to understand. They have such absurd names — well, they sound absurd to me — one of the squires is called Ellis Entwhistle; how could anyone marry a man with a name like that!

  On the road, there were a few pilgrims, going to Our Lady of Walsingham, though not many, for the season was too early. A friar or two plodded along, their brown habits bellying out in the wind. The Queen said, ‘I would like to go to Walsingham,’ and sighed. She didn’t tell me why; perhaps she wanted more babies. My mother had said something about her being barren for six years, and how it was a wonder she kept her husband’s fancy from wandering. She had, though; they slept in the same bed every night, the whole court knew. I hated to think of my mother, working some evil on her, to make sure she stayed barren, and was almost sorry she might not go to Walsingham.

  Cambridge should be a gracious place, full of college buildings and learning, but whatever it was to the eye, it offended the nose. One might think all the pigsties and cattle yards in the kingdom were there. They told me this was because the townsfolk drive their beasts to the common meadows by the Cam in the day, and allow them to wander loose in the town by night. The streets were like middens, and though the Mayor and the college Provosts had seen loads of green rushes were laid down, we were forewarned, and wore pattens.

  We spent three whole days being shown colleges and half-built colleges, hearing Latin speeches and learned disputations. The unfinished chapel of the college of St Mary and St Nicholas, known as King’s College, which was endowed by Henry of Lancaster, was a most marvellous building. The King gave Provost Field gifts towards it amounting to a thousand pounds, which is an enormous sum of money. He spent a long time looking at the drawings of the timber roof and fan vaulting, and of the intended bell tower, and talking to the architects and masons; he was really interested, I could see. The chapel was as beautiful as the one my father lies in at Windsor, more so, perhaps, from the outside. The stone was very pale grey, clean and newly hewn, rising out of a flat, muddy field, against the cold March light and wide-open, scudding sky.

  From Cambridge, we took the road across the fenny lands towards Huntingdon and Stamford. I came that way once before, with my father. He told me the fenmen go on stilts, because of the wet. My little brother Richard had said, ‘But you wouldn’t need stilts, Father, you’ve such long legs!’ My father had roared with laughter at this. When we crossed the river Nene at Wansford Bridge we were very near the castle of Fotheringhay.

  The Queen said, smiling a little, amused smile, as if she saw something that we did not, ‘Richard — the King — was born at Fotheringhay.’

  ‘Madam, didn’t you know him when you were both small?’ I asked her, curious.

  ‘I can just remember him when I was four, and he came to live in my father’s household. Wh
en he arrived, he was very grubby and bedraggled from travelling. Poor Dickon, I thought he looked like a little owl who had fallen down the chimney of my bedchamber one morning, and we found sitting dejected in a heap of soot, with its feathers all out of place. They both brightened up later.’ I could not visualize the King as a grimy brat of nine, but the memory seemed to touch some special tenderness in his wife.

  We came to Nottingham in mid-March. After that, we were going north to York to meet the Prince. I was curious to see this child. The title that had been my brother’s was now his. I wondered if he were as clever at his books as my brother Edward had been at seven, reading half a dozen Roman authors. The Queen said that his father wanted him to have a good grounding in Latin, because it would help him with law, which is one of the most important things for a Prince to learn. It would impress people if he were taught Greek, but it was better to use that time in sending him into law courts and councils, to learn how to administer the royal justice to those who would later be his subjects. He’d soon begin his serious training in the use of weapons, horsemanship and other sports, because a King who cannot lead his men into the field will forfeit his subjects’ respect — as happened to poor Henry of Lancaster. The Queen showed me the gift that had been prepared for the Prince’s eighth birthday, which would be in early June. It was a book, the English translation of Vegecius’s De Re Militari. This is a treatise of instruction for young men beginning their training in knightly exercises. There were some coloured borders in it, with flowers, the King’s arms in the initial letter on the first page, and the Prince’s device of a golden griffin, to show it was specially for him. ‘He loves books,’ his mother said, and looked as if she would like to tell me of his accomplishments. She longed to see him. I turned away, thinking of my own poor mother, all alone.