Some Touch of Pity

by Rhoda Edwards

  Richard was going to send for my mother, but I said no, not until the end. I wanted only him. I shall have to die at Westminster too, when I long so much to go home. If it were possible to go north again, dying would not seem so terrible. My spirit longs for so many sights and sounds of home. If it were a bird, it would fly away and perch near a river, to hear the sound of running water. Not a river like the wide, grey Thames, but narrow, rushing and peat-stained, chattering over stones, clear and cold, bright-glancing under the sun.

  The north is full of memories: warm milk drunk in hill pastures, by a lonely road, the kindness and humble dignity of its offering, the cows standing among clover and meadowsweet, butterflies dancing around them, to ride up some seemingly desolate hillside, in silence broken only by baa-ing sheep, clouds hanging low and rain sweeping into your face, then suddenly to hear the Angelus bell from some abbey many miles distant, and know that in that wet waste busy human beings are tending the soil and worshipping God, season after season. Perhaps the very best season is haytime, when our men and women of the dales climb up and down hill under their pitchforked burdens like moving haycocks. The hay is sweet-scented with herbs, too many for me ever to have known all their names. The borage and clover in it gave us good honey. All those summers from 1473 when I was first married, for the next seven years, were hot and dry, the hay crop abundant — summers of sunshine and laughter.

  No more than eighteen short months ago, on the first day of spring, Richard and I had been happy, and I had thought that we might stay in our north-country kingdom until death claimed us. Now death has come for me. Happiness ended for us on that April day in Wensleydale, as the lark’s song ended with the merlin’s strike, as the sun was blotted out by a cloud. It was the day on which King Edward died, and we poor blind creatures in our ignorance dared to be happy.

  I think of my son often now; he seems so close to me, for the wall that divides the places where we dwell is frail, and soon to be broken down. Sometimes, I’m not sure, in dreams, which child is which, my son or my husband. One came to me when he was eight, the other left me. I’ve known Richard ever since I can remember, in childhood, youth and maturity, and I want to grow old with him. There’s so much of his life left that I may not share. I can’t bear to think that some other woman will have him. I shan’t even know what he’ll be like, grey or bald, or sad in his age. Bad things are happening — more danger threatens him. Lord Jesus, who knows what is past and what to come, help us, help him. What is his destiny?

  November 1484–March 1485

  9

  The Unicorn

  Told by Dr William Hobbes, the King’s physician

  Where as longe saying and muche symple Comunycacion amonge the peple by euyll disposed parsones contryved & sowne to verrey grete displesure of the Kyng shewyng how that the quene as by concent & will of the Kyng was poysoned for & to thentent that he myght than marry and haue to wyfe Lady Elizabeth, eldest doughter of his broder…the Kynge sende fore & had tofor hym at sent Johnes as yesterdaye the Mayre & Aldermen where as he in the grete Hall there in the presens of many of his lordes & of much other people shewde his grefe and displeasure aforesaid & said it neuer came in his thought or mynde to marry in suche maner wise nor willyng or glad of the dethe of his quene but as sorye & in hert hevye as man myght be…

  Court Minutes of the Mercers’ Company, 31 March 1483

  ‘I tell you, Hobbes, I give her Grace the Queen no more than three months. Some go quicker, some more slowly. There are remedies I might prescribe, but…’

  The learned Dr John Argentine, of Kings College, Cambridge, lowered the glass flask containing a urine sample from our patient, which he had been examining at the dull light of the window. He adjusted his spectacles, regarding me gravely over them. Not for the first time, I observed his likeness to a barnyard fowl. He had the same blinking, parchment-lidded eye and long, flexible neck, protruding from the beaver collar of his voluminous gown of musterdelvers, into which he huddled as if laying an egg. Though in his early forties and twenty years my junior, he is one of those who wear their scholarship like grave-clothes. He handed the flask to me. ‘An unhealthy colour.’ He clucked with gloomy triumph, as if he’d achieved his egg at no small cost.

  He told me no more than I knew already, but had been reluctant to state without a consensus of opinion from the most important physicians in England. We had just spent a good hour with the flask, in reaching a conclusion that the level of turbidity in the sample told us the obvious; the seat of trouble lay in the chest. I put the flask back in its basket, to retain for further study, and we returned to our chairs.

  There were ten of us in all, assembled round a table in an anteroom to the Queen’s apartments at Westminster. It was upon her condition that we sat in consultation. The King, half out of his mind with worry, had begged me to convene as many expert advisers as possible. These learned colleagues now passed round a sheet of paper on which the astrologer had cast the Queen’s horoscope. It appeared unfavourable in the seventh, eighth and twelfth houses, predicting unhappiness in marriage, death and sorrow. Some shook their heads and resigned the case to Fate; others pooh-poohed.

  Though he had stated his disapproval of astrologers in forthright terms, the King had asked in particular for Argentine, obviously impressed by his repute as a scholar. He had sent for him before, during the time of the Protectorate, to attend the eldest son of King Edward, but the boy remained sickly. I had to conceal my dislike and mistrust, knowing Argentine’s opinions to be governed by theoretical treatises. Galenist doctrines are quoted as if Holy Writ; every time he sees me he feels obliged to expound on the virtues of the ‘laudable pus’ or induced suppuration, with which I, as a result of bitter experience with battlefield wounds, am in entire disagreement. He also adopts an air of superiority towards me, as might befit a learned lecturer at a university to an ageing surgeon. I have a suspicion that he blames me entirely for allowing King Edward to die, and thinks me no better than a skilful butcher, or a horse leech. That I had been awarded a doctorate in medicine by his own university when he was in statu pupillari there, appears to increase his disapproval to choleric proportions. My hands, lying on the table in front of me near his clasped claws, looked crude as a labourer’s, each fist the size of a mason’s hod, with thick fingers that sprouted hairs along their upper side, though I noticed with satisfaction that my nails were pared shorter and kept cleaner than his.

  At the window, a chill November rain pelted the panes. An arras on the wall shuddered, as if secret listeners were concealed behind it, and showed a spreading stain of damp in a sunny land of huntsmen and flowers. If it were left hanging, mildew would spoil it. The fire refused to burn well; an adverse wind blew smoke out from the chimney, that tickled the lungs. We coughed discordantly at intervals.

  Geronimo Ganducio di Verona, an Italian physician of my acquaintance, for some years resident in London, ventured his opinion. ‘The lady, her Grace, è cosi triste — how you say — sad, low of spirit. Also she is barren in the womb. Eight year ago, you say, she bear the one child, the son. Since then she do not conceive…’ He sniffed and shrugged in the dismissive manner of a Lombard money-lender. ‘It make her sad, then, to lose this one child. She waste away in sadness. I see death sit beside her,’ he said with finality, ‘and I think he come as a friend.’ Though he had not set eyes on the Queen until that day, he saw clearly what to my mind was the most unhappy feature of the case.

  Another Cambridge man, Walter Lemster, who is much consulted in his part of the country, and vouched for by the Lady Elizabeth Mowbray, the widowed Duchess of Norfolk, said, ‘I have seldom seen her Grace the Queen. Twenty-eight years old you say, Hobbes? Many die of the wasting sickness at approximately that age, particularly women. I cannot see any hope of recovery. She has lost both her youth and her looks, such as they were. How long has her Grace been in bad health — years? months? She has been absent so long from court, until eighteen months ago. The wet, cold climate in the north
has infected her with an excess of the phlegmatic humour.’

  ‘On the contrary, Dr Lemster, she showed no signs of this disease before she left the north. Not that I could say she has ever looked robust, but she has survived more than twenty winters of our climate without ailing in any uncommon way. I am inclined to think that melancholy predominates.’ This came from Thomas Bemmesley of York, who has had a closer acquaintance with the Queen than any of us, having acted as her physician in the north. ‘Her childbed was very bad, one of the miracles of God that she did not die. The child tore her… She healed, but I think perhaps there was some other damage — no more children.’

  The last of our number who appeared to have anything to contribute to the verdict other than gloomy looks and shakes of the head, cleared his throat in his usual modest, apologetic way. But we all paid him the respect due to his age and wisdom by listening to him in silence. James, or to give him his born name, Jacob Friis, had been a physician in King Edward’s service almost as long as I had. His fur-lined cap concealed a shining cranium fringed by a dandelion fluff of white hair. He looked at us sadly with eyes of washed-away blue, his round pink face crumpled as a new baby’s.

  ‘Of course,’ he murmured gently, ‘the cohabitation of the King and Queen must cease immediately.’ Noises of assent were made round the table, but I detected a slight embarrassment. If it had been any ordinary man, this would have been absent. But he was the King, and they feared his reaction. So did I, but for different reasons, for his sake rather than my own.

  ‘The King has eyes, my learned friend,’ I said, ‘like you or me. He has no choice but to heed our verdict.’

  That verdict was unanimous but we went on talking, reluctant to admit defeat. Remedies, tried and trusted, were bandied about the table like tennis balls. Venice treacle, that panacea for all ills, will do no harm and may be beneficial. An electuary syrup will help soothe the cough at first: a compound of horehound and comfrey, mixed with figs, liquorice, anise and hyssop, blended with honey and administered in spoonfuls. My colleagues had a number of pronouncements to make on the subject of diet. Milk is held to be particularly efficacious when drunk still warm from the udder. That of asses and goats is most nourishing — a goatherd I know of grazes his flock in the fields towards Chelsea. Honey, dried figs and a soothing drink made from barley can do good, and the white meats such as chicken, veal or kid, which do not lie heavy on the stomach. Not that any amount of coaxing her to eat would make much difference, she had no more appetite than a captured linnet that mopes in a cage. Six months ago a diet of this kind, rest, and happier circumstances might have had some effect. If I’d kept her in the north I might have saved her. But she had refused to leave her husband. Against such determination, I remained helpless.

  I was sufficiently aware, having observed many cases at Bethlehem and other hospitals, of the ugly, irremediable progress of the disease. Every symptom weakened the body — the night sweats, pains in limbs and chest, the hurried breathing, the constant flux — and resulted in emaciation. This last sometimes reached such grotesque extremes that the patient was reduced to a living cadaver. No tomb sculptor could produce a grimmer reminder of mortality than a patient at the termination of phthisis. I’ve seen them lie too weak to move, speak or swallow, mere collapsed bladders of skin containing a perfectly visible skeleton. I crossed myself and swore that if she became like this, I’d forbid the King to see her at all. It’s bad enough when it is brother or sister, mother, father or helpless child, but when there has been love between two bodies, this dissolution has a special, lazar-house horror for the surviving partner.

  It remained for us to tell the King of our decision, either by advancing on him in our whole number to lend force to the argument, or by a deputation. Someone said, shirking, ‘Who is best acquainted with the King?’ and everyone looked at me.

  I said, ‘If you wish me to speak with him on our behalf, I am willing. It is perhaps best that I do.’

  I had borne news that killed hope in men many times, to many people, but never found it so hard to begin. He heard me out in silence. When I came lamely to a halt, he said quietly, ‘So I have lost everything.’

  At this, Dr Rotherham, Archbishop of York, felt obliged to offer his churchman’s comforts, though he is no friend of the King. Oozing solicitude, with the intimacy permitted by his cloth, he put a commiserating hand on Richard’s arm. ‘Your Grace takes too harsh a view of the situation. God has performed miracles before. Sarah and Abraham…’

  Richard broke in savagely, ‘My lord Archbishop, since the Queen will not live to three-score years, nor I to a hundred, that would be no solution.’

  Rotherham, realizing his blunder, quailed visibly, and as is his way, had his revenge by saying, ‘A divorce then, your Highness. The Pope…’ He got no further. The King snatched his arm away as if he’d been touching a viper, and deliberately turned his back on the Archbishop. He didn’t say a word, but a more damning gesture of royal displeasure would be hard to imagine. Rotherham had the sense to extricate himself discreetly from the room. As he passed me, his face was ugly with anger, a rich rose-madder, glaring against his archiepiscopal scarlet. He’s a haughty prelate, that one, who takes a rebuke hard and never forgets it.

  It was left to me to call in upon the Queen every day, to keep an eye on her progress — decline, I fear was a more suitable term. Four weeks out of those three months predicted by Argentine passed. The women were still trying to check the cough with simple remedies: syrup of honey and thyme, pennyroyal in hot wine, or the powdered root of elecampane, that we call ‘horseheal’, but it worsened daily.

  One day in early December, I came upon her sitting by a window, staring out at wheeling gulls over the Thames at ebb tide, and was shocked by the change a month had effected. She had that hunch-shouldered posture which comes with this disease, making it cruelly obvious that the base of her neck and shoulders was sinking into pot-holes. Her dress was of the newest style, square-necked and smoothly fitting at the waist — one could have circled it with two hands — held by a gold chain girdle, from which dangled a musk-ball of fretted gold. I would have thought the style flattering to most women, and the colour, a deep violet velvet, pretty against pale skins, but she seemed to have dwindled within it, like a poor ghost at dawn; her outline had become oddly childlike, no breasts to speak of. As she stared into nothing, the soft lips trembled, and her eyes were lakes of unspilt tears. Lovely eyes still, unusually large and limpid, but sunk in sockets stained as deeply purplish brown as a rotten plum. The flush on her cheeks was brighter than ever. It brought a deceptive look of vivacity to her face, until one noticed the rest was the colour of a tallow dip, the flesh shrinking from the bones. I put my hand on her forehead gently, and felt it burning, though she shivered and said she was a little cold.

  ‘Madam, have you drunk your milk today?’ I said, like a father. She asked, as if nothing were amiss, whether she might have some dates, fancying something sweet. But her voice, always low-pitched, was husky with tears. She blinked up at me and tried to smile. I could not long meet those guileless, wet-lashed eyes. The shy glance made me careful not to move suddenly, or talk too loudly in her presence, as if she were a timid doe, easily frightened away.

  This woman, out of all others, should not die in such an unhappy way. There is a rare quality about her, as if those innocent eyes contemplated a deeper vision of life than her female contemporaries. Perhaps this had come as a result of her misfortunes as a girl. It is a quiet thing, with no outward distinction, matching her appearance. Two years ago she had been — pretty? no, not quite; beautiful? no, not upon immediate judgement, but never a plain or uninteresting woman. Though hardened to sights of disease, I felt old, and disillusioned with my profession. Death makes a fool of the old physician. If she did this to me, God alone knew what her husband suffered every time he looked at her.

  That early December sky seemed dark with every imaginable trouble. News came that the rebel Tudor had been welcome
d in Paris at King Charles’s court like a prince, albeit a threadbare one. The French were terrified by the story fed to them by Tudor agents, that King Richard was intending to descend on them like a second Harry V, to win a new Agincourt. The Welsh adventurer seemed to them a God-given weapon to use against the English. Tudor had gained an advantage.

  As if to rub salt in our wound, in November, John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, escaped from the castle of Hammes, having persuaded his gaoler, the Lieutenant James Blount, to treason, and the pair of them fled to join Tudor in France. Oxford’s escape was serious, because apart from Tudor’s uncle, Jasper, who calls himself Earl of Pembroke, he was the only Lancastrian of rank and military experience left. He’d commanded the right wing of Warwick’s army at Barnet. Having been imprisoned at Hammes for the last ten years, and now a man of about forty-two, he was desperate enough to do anything to avoid returning there. Though Tudor was unlikely to make an attempt on England this winter, the King, goaded into retaliation, issued proclamations against the rebels and set all the county levies on alert for service at half a day’s notice. Beyond that, there was little he could do but wait.

  Also at this time, William Collingbourne, the traitor who’d become famous for his rhyme on Paul’s door — the rude couplet about the Cat and the Rat — was taken. He was tried at the Guildhall by the Earl Marshal the Duke of Norfolk, the Constable Lord Stanley, Sir William Hussey the Chief Justice, and many other peers, a commission designed to put fear into Tudor agents. The charge: on tenth July last past, Collingbourne had offered a man £8 to carry a letter to Tudor, urging him to land in England before St Luke’s Day in October. The sentence: the penalty for treason. Collingbourne was not of sufficient rank to escape with the axe. On a gloomy, nose-dampening day, London saw its best execution for years. A great crowd turned out. I did not attend. Later I heard Collingbourne had not been granted the hangman’s grace of being taken dead off the gallows for the butchery. The executioner is as skilful as a surgeon; Collingbourne did not die until his belly was slit and his entrails drawn. The crowd didn’t often see that punishment carried out. Some said his last words had been: ‘Jesu, yet more trouble!’, others that he merely screamed. Though only small fry among traitors, he was made a grisly example to others, who, when crossing London Bridge from Southwark, might see his head and quarters stuck on spikes there.