Some Touch of Pity

by Rhoda Edwards

  The friar broke off suddenly, for the King grabbed his arm and hung on as if drowning. ‘Their hatred is terrible,’ he said, in agony, ‘they wished to humiliate me… They forced humiliation on me.’ His voice rose in a great rending cry, ‘Before Christ on the Cross — I am innocent!’

  Father Roby summoned all his strength and began to intone very rapidly, calling upon God to rescue His son from trouble. It seemed an endless litany, a testimony of all those in every book of the Holy Bible, who had been saved from peril by the bounteous grace of God, and of how Christ’s sufferings for us should redeem us all.

  ‘Even so,’ he went on, ‘Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, deign to free me, Thy servant King Richard, from all the tribulation, grief and anguish in which I am held, and from all the snares of my enemies, and send Michael the archangel to my aid against them. Deign, O Lord Jesus Christ, to bring to nothing the evil designs which they make against me, just as You brought to nothing the advice with which Achitophel counselled Absalom against David the King.

  ‘Even so, deign to free me by Thy most Holy merits, by Thine incarnation, by Thy nativity, by Thy baptism, by Thy fasting, by the hunger and thirst, by the cold and heat, by the labour and suffering, by the spit and abuse, by the blows and by the nails, by the crown of thorns, by the lance, by the drink of vinegar and gall, by Thy most cruel and unworthy death on the Cross.’ Roby spoke the words over the King as if they were an incantation to protect him. He was very quiet now, his face buried in his hands. Only when the friar moved and the shadows shifted aside, I saw that tears ran out between his fingers, trickling down the backs of his hands and wrists. Lovell saw too, for he made a choked sound, and with a look at me, got up and fled from the chapel. I followed him.

  Outside, he said, ‘Dr Hobbes, what can we do for him? What can I do?’ He was wiping sweat off his forehead, ruffling up his hair into a veritable rook’s nest.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said heavily, ‘nothing — only wait. Leave him to God.’

  ‘I cannot endure to witness it.’ Lovell sounded anguished himself. He is unusually thoughtful of others, for a young man of twenty-eight, more like a brother to the King than a chance friend.

  ‘No. Go to the King tonight, my lord; stay with him. Most likely he’ll take more comfort from your silence than from anything you can say. If he is so bad as to need a physician, send for me.’

  The remaining days of Passiontide sank in my mind without trace. I was in constant attendance upon the King. The day after our going to St John’s being Maundy Thursday, he was required to perform the accustomed duty of washing the feet of his subjects, in remembrance of Our Saviour’s act of humility. This year thirty-three poor men were assembled at Westminster, one for each year of the King’s age, and one for the year to come. After the ceremony was ended, and the gowns, shirts and purses of money distributed, Lovell came to me, more distraught than ever.

  ‘Will you go to the King as soon as he is free of all these people, Hobbes? He is not well. After the Mandatum, when he had given back the towels to the Abbot, he fainted. It only lasted a moment, but he’d have fallen if I’d not seen it, and held him. He knew what had happened, and that I knew, but he’s too stubborn to admit any weakness. He can’t sleep. Last night was worst of all. Is there anything you can do to ease him?’

  That afternoon I visited the apothecary, and had him mix juice of white poppy, hemlock, wild bryony and henbane — I use this for rendering patients unconscious in difficult amputations. In the evening I took the King a sleeping draught in hot, sweet wine, which I was surprised to find he accepted without argument.

  Each year’s Good Friday is now a reminder to me that my bones are growing old. Everyone, from the King, who is half my age, to his humblest subject, goes creeping on his knees in church to the Cross of Christ. My knees creak like ungreased wagon wheels half-way up the chancel. After his sixtieth year a man should attend to his will, make his peace with God, and prepare his soul for death. There was a time, as a young man careless of God’s displeasure, when I thought the only things worth enduring Lent and a diet of stockfish for, were the Easter games and the Paschal lamb, succulent and fragrant of rosemary in its case of pastry, and the tansy pudding. This year, the lighting of the candles on the eve of Easter, and the joyful pealing of bells all over the City of London upon Sunday morning, left me unmoved, either by the night’s vigil, or the day’s joy. Years ago, in the troubled time of civil war, men bade farewell to one another with a little prayer:

  Jesu, for thy mercy endless,

  Save thy people and send us peace.

  To which I say, never more fervently than now, amen.

  April–June 1485

  10

  Tenebrae

  Told by King Richard

  I ask you, O most gentle Christ Jesus, by all these things, to keep me Thy servant King Richard, and defend me from all evil and my evil enemy, and from all danger, present, past and to come, and free me from all the tribulations, griefs and anguishes which I face…

  O Lord, hear me by all Thy benefits for which I give and return Thee thanks, and for all the benefits and gifts granted to me, because You made me from nothing and have redeemed me by Thy most wonderful love and mercy from eternal damnation to everlasting life. Because of these and for other things which eye hath not seen nor ear heard, nor can heart of man comprehend, I ask You, O most gentle Christ Jesus, to save me from all perils of body and soul by Thy love and deign always to deliver and succour me, and after the course of this life deign to bring me to You, the living and true God.

  Part of a prayer translated from the Latin in King Richard’s own Book of Hours

  Dreams are strange. Often they do not assume the distortions of fantasy, but come so startlingly lifelike as to verge upon a reincarnation of reality. One morning in winter, near the very end of a fragment of sleep, I dreamed in this way. I was carrying my son up the steps of the keep at home, at the end of the day, as I often did when he was small. There appeared no vision of the place, it being so familiar, only a sense of the worn dips in the stones underfoot. I could feel the warm weight on my arm, his hair brush my face and stray into my mouth, as the wind blew it up. It smelt of hay, and grubby child after a long summer afternoon in gardens and meadows. When I woke, I was wiping away the imagined tickle with one hand, though it was not in fact imagined: tears were trickling down my face. When my eyes cleared, the grey dawn rattled the windows of Westminster, rain driven in dribbles between the casement-hinges. That day, I remember, we rode to Windsor.

  The winter had been so cold. I shivered, half smothered by furs and feather-beds in the fug of Westminster, having slept warmer in the dismal Border fortress of Bewcastle in a blizzard blowing over the peat-hags of Liddesdale. How I hate this place. The whole ancient warren of it stinks. I’d never have thought myself sensitive in such matters; too much of my life has been spent in garrison-towns, camps and pele-towers. But this royal palace reeks of dead revels and smiling treacheries. One could turn the place over to a pack of untrained hounds and it would smell sweeter; there are too many sea-coal fires, too few privies. You cannot walk down a corridor without finding men relieving themselves against the walls, or dogs squatting in the rushes. Well, it’s no different to what it has ever been, the distaste lies within myself. I feel like a hawk mewed-up overlong, fidgeting from foot to foot, pining for light and air. Once or twice, I escaped to walk in the dank winter gardens, among skeleton trees. Fog, overlying the Thames, hid the Archbishop’s palace at Lambeth, and the tower of St Mary’s church. Shrivelled fronds dangled off the trellised vine, which looked as if it could never bear even little, sour grapes. The peacock known as the Grand Turk inspected me with a disinterested eye, and huddled within his feathers, trailing his folded tail behind carelessly as a sheaf of rushes. I watched him, until interrupted by those who came out looking for me; Kings are denied the luxury of solitude.

  That winter, how many times out of habit, I had rolled over in bed thinking to find human
warmth at my back, I’d find myself on the edge, ready to fall out on the floor, before remembering Anne was not there. She never objected if I turned my back on her; often she’d curl there in her sleep. So we became, even in affection, creatures of habit. Now, I still reach out for her on waking. Foolish, for I was often absent from her company before, and seldom distressed in this way. Perhaps that valley between sleeping and waking holds more pain than the harsh daylight world.

  Pain. Yes. My soul bears wounds that bleed it near death. There is no other way to describe. I could not pray. Not upon Good Friday, when Christ died a shameful death for us sinners, nor upon Easter Day, when He was risen. I almost forgot that Easter, the third day of April, was my own Saint’s day, St Richard of Chichester. I took no comfort from the Blessed Sacrament. The child’s words in the carol came sadly to me:

  Upon Easter Day, mother,

  My uprising shall be;

  O the sun and the moon, mother,

  Shall both rise with me.

  I could not rejoice; my utterances were sterile. The week after Easter marked the passing of a whole year since my son died, and he was a mortal child, who cannot rise from death. It was a cold week, too, we did not see the sun. Cold Easters remind me of Barnet. Father Roby, my confessor, urged me to think on the Blood of Christ, which heals and cleanses men of sin, but I cannot look on a picture of Christ, His bleeding Heart, without remembering my friend John Parr, who died in my arms at Barnet, his body laid open in a way worse than any picture. We were both eighteen. He had fought as my enemy Warwick’s squire. Being who I was, my brother’s chief general, I was allowed no time to weep for him. Now, if I had tears left to weep, I would, and say: John, it would have been better if I had died, not you, that Easter fourteen years ago.

  Father Roby begs me to give myself the solace of prayer, it being the only defence against the malice of enemies. I, who have sinned and erred in the manner of men born in high places, must, it seems, be punished.

  Westminster is riddled with rumours. Immediately after Easter, I sent Elizabeth and Cecily to Sheriff Hutton near York. My brother George’s children are there, my own bastard son John should be, though I haven’t the heart to send him away just yet. How far Elizabeth has been the source of rumourmongering, I can only guess. That she should conceive a passion for me, of all men, passes belief. I would not see her, however she begged. Let her tears flow like a river, it will have to serve as the waters of Lethe, to make her forget her monstrous scheme. It horrifies me. How easily a woman’s schemes are turned to incriminate a man. Why should we always be credited with initiating lust? Am I more easily hoodwinked than any other male within this palace? Am I, among them, an unparalleled example of moral turpitude? I’ve been harsh, examining my own feelings, but can find no spark of lust left in me to respond to the advances of an undeniably beautiful woman. I’m cold as a stone. For six months now, I’ve not touched a woman, and I couldn’t care if it were to become six years. At the end, I could scarcely bear to touch my wife, the sickness had so ravaged her.

  My trouble has had its effect upon the business of state. Work takes longer than before: it seems impossible to make eyes and mind move coordinately. The one becomes sore and watering in candlelight, the other empties itself disconcertingly into vacuity in mid-conversation, or in the dictation of correspondence. Sometimes all the letters appear afflicted with St Vitus’s dance, frenziedly lurching across the page as if to tumble clean off it, so that I’ve found it difficult to follow even a sheaf of my own notes. True, I write a vile screed for my own use, but now it passes beyond legibility. I caught John Kendal staring, as I was signing an Exchequer warrant, at my hands. They were shaking so, one would think the pen had taken on life of its own. Perhaps they are often like this; I hadn’t noticed before. Kendal looks worried half into his grave, and I cannot find it in me to reassure or cheer him.

  Hobbes, when he was free to turn his attention to me, delivered a pithy lecture, which made me feel guilty as when a child of five, refusing to allow him to draw a milk tooth. If it had been anyone else, I’d not have had the patience to hear him out. In the end, he gave me potions to bring sleep. Whatever the contents — every item described in the herbal of Dioscorides for all I know — the stuff has the effect he desires. I sleep leaden as a drunkard and cannot wake myself in the morning; the squires have to prod me into consciousness. They look so frightened when I am finally roused, as if caught in a treasonable act. I won’t let them leave me sleeping after five o’clock, there’d be no day left to work in. They are bad days, those, Hobbes’s drugs cling in the blood like a gallon of hippocras. I crawl about, as if suddenly aged, afflicted by blinding headaches. Few notice; they try to defend me when in this state from others who would belabour me with anxieties, to which my sodden and stupid head must be forced to produce answers.

  Worst of all, the council are determined to badger me into taking another wife. They’d pitch a stranger into my bed and expect me to acquire an heir within nine months to the day. Please God, not yet, not yet. Anne knew very well what was expected of me; she faced it more bravely than I do. They mutter of the King of Portugal’s sister, which led Brampton into offering to teach me his language, and a less likely tutor than that swaggering Portuguese pirate for the sweet phrases of wooing is hard to imagine. Where can I find a princess of a European royal house who is not either mad, hideous, a child, or a widow eager for a nunnery? I want an heir, it’s true, but not of tainted blood. Most likely is a fourteen-year-old virgin, full of disappointed romance, who lies counting my grey hairs, or some sloe-eyed Iberian with a moustache who counts her beads and longs to be the bride of Christ. It’s a prospect to render a man impotent for life. Well, I’m a poor bargain to set in the marriage market, possessing neither a handsome physique, nor a merry face, still less the reputation of a man like Dorset, to bring the bees to the honey-pot. The royal sergeant painter made what is supposed to be a likeness of me; it’s no inducement to women. I’m not young any more. Besides, no King whose throne is threatened and insecure can attract bidders. As with every other matter, nothing can be decided until after Tudor’s invasion, which by summer is a certainty. In this one thing, it gives me a little respite.

  Though I must live in constant awareness of this threat, elsewhere the year proceeds within its usual pattern. In mid-April the Courts of Law sat for Easter term. When in London I have been accustomed to preside severally in King’s Bench, Chancery and Exchequer as often as possible during session at Westminster, or in council within the Star Chamber. My brother, for all the time spent in pleasure, did not neglect to do this; Edward worked harder at his duties than I’ve heard some give him credit for. This year, the cases appear more tortuous and illogical than ever and the machinery of justice lumbers like an overloaded wain on a rutted road. It is sometimes possible to check interminable delays by personal investigation, though I’ve often had to consult the recorded proceedings of dozens of cases that have been wrangled over for years, and to query the operation of the law. My presence makes the Justices wary; some of them grudge me any legal knowledge, or any rights on their preserve. But I cannot achieve the progress that a year past seemed so desirable. I’m so tired. No, to be truthful, I’m so exhausted as to be unable to wrestle any longer with corruption and policy, or to drive others to do the same. I cannot see where all will lead — I’m too empty of purpose or hope, clackety-hollow as a coconut cup.

  More worrying than any other problem is the lack of ready money. Not that the crown is become impoverished, but to pay wages, purveyors’ bills, to maintain defence-posts, gold and silver coin in the coffers is a necessity. Last August I squeezed more than £2000 from the City of London. Though a sum this size to their combined wealth is nothing but a flea-bite, London Aldermen squeal as if a surgeon had attacked a vein and gone off with an illicit quart of blood in his bowl. Another month, at most, and I must of necessity prick them again for the same sum. I can’t feel much compunction in bleeding the citizens of London, bu
t it’s a dangerous policy. The Londoners have no love for me, nor I for them; I’ve found them a mercenary, mucky-minded lot, too eager on seeing a stranger to clout his head first and ask his name second. I’m a stranger, out of the north country, though my brother wore London like a jewel in his hat.

  But the Londoners’ loans have been spent before they were even pledged for. Ships had to be commissioned to patrol the coast from Harwich to Poole, to guard against invasion from France. By the time the softer winds of April had come, every port and sea-coast hamlet was alerted, beacons stocked with firing on every shingle-bank and cliff. The county levies held themselves ready to march at half a day’s notice. I stood beside John Howard of Norfolk and watched the ships sail from the wharves at Stepney, where the caulking yards, rigging and sail makers had fitted them for service. Fair names they had: Mary of Barking, the Elizabeth, the Carragon, Nicholas of London, and made a brave sight, tacking to and fro on the ebb tide.

  John Howard took me to his house at Stepney, among green fields and gardens, but near enough the shipyards for a whiff of tar to drift in the windows on a southerly breeze, and fed me on his Colchester oysters, fresh gathered the day before and brought up river by a sailing-barge on the next tide. He takes pride in the size of the pile of empty shells beside his plate. I do not share his passion; they taste of very little more than fishy estuary water. By way of compensation, John offered to send me melons from beds in his own gardens, later in the summer.