Fortune's Wheel

by Rhoda Edwards

  ‘Edward may be destroyed.’

  ‘For what? Once, Edward was your white hope. And I thought at one time you’d an affection for young Richard. It’s a wonder that boy hasn’t wrecked himself over this business. So we must destroy them?’

  ‘Before they destroy us.’

  ‘Richard, we’ve done that ourselves. You know it.’

  ‘If you weren’t a grown man, John, I’d clout you for that.’

  ‘Do it then!’

  ‘Get out!’ Warwick scarcely raised his voice. His brother left him, when it would have helped for John just to stay there, all night, not speaking. Or perhaps it would not help. Nothing could, now.

  Warwick broke his pen, threw it aside and took up another. He had it in mind to write a last letter to the King of France. It would be a last letter, too, if he put his real feelings onto paper. On 4 April — a week ago — King Louis, realizing that the promised help from England was not coming, had signed a three-month truce with the Duke of Burgundy, a preliminary to a treaty of peace. Warwick, who had been unable to keep his promise of aid, had been cut out of Louis’ plans as ruthlessly as dead wood out of a tree. For the first time he could see why men feared Louis of France so much. Warwick had received previously only good fellowship, charm and co-operation from Louis, now he had seen the other side of the coin. Louis was a man to whom other men — or women for that matter — meant nothing at all; he cared only for France, God and Our Lady, and dogs, in that order. It was sometimes said that men who, like Louis, played lunatic practical jokes, were always strange, cold fish.

  Warwick’s anger that Louis should so casually cast him aside like a pair of old shoes was unrestrainable. He began to write, his pen very nearly making knife slices in the paper, the words branding it. Nothing less than a harangue against the treacherous Louis, violent accusations of perjury, poured out of Warwick’s brain, things which never could be said to the face of any king without instant arrest, enough to endanger life. He might as well have sent Louis a keg of gunpowder and a touch wire with instructions to him to blow his head off. When Warwick had finished writing, he folded and sealed the letter with equal savagery and immediately jumped up, called for one of his messengers, and sent the man off in the middle of the night to France.

  When he sat down again, rage and bitterness vented a little, he felt empty, hollow as a drum. He had cut off his escape route to France; King Louis was scarcely likely to welcome him after receiving that page of invective. Worse, Warwick began to doubt the justice of what he had said. Louis’ reasons were clear enough; he was in a desperate situation in Picardy, with Duke Charles besieging Amiens, and treachery among his own followers, and he had heard that Edward had sailed to England. The aid from England had not come as promised, and Louis had acted in his own best interests. Warwick remembered his promise; it was the last letter he had sent to Louis, the words he had written on it himself — ’Sir, I promise you that all which is written above will be held to and accomplished in every detail, and so I have promised the ambassadors; and I will see you very shortly, if God pleases, for that is my whole desire…’

  God had not pleased, and nothing had been accomplished. It was himself who was perjured, not King Louis, and it was only the last in a chain of broken words: to Edward who had been king and thus obscurely to Edward’s father and to his own father, who had been allies; to Margaret of Anjou, a word sworn on a piece of the True Cross at Angers, to subdue England to his will, and he had failed. They said those who broke their oath upon the Cross of St Laud would meet death within the year.

  He reviewed the situation, without hope, or attempt to work out a remedy. Edward had taken London and imprisoned King Henry once more. His own brother the Archbishop had capitulated. Somerset and Devonshire had ridden off into the west just when they were most needed. The Queen had not reached England. Oxford and Exeter were with him, but only waiting their chance to destroy him, when he had served their purpose. His brother John was still with him, but even this gave him no comfort; John’s despair was obvious, and himself the cause. He sat on into the night, while the candles grew icicles of wax, petrified in the cold, as he was. His thoughts wandered only briefly towards his wife and daughter Isabel, but of little Anne he could not bear to think, for he had left her among the wolves, with no way of escape.

  He thought of nothing but the simple fact that he must stand and fight. Beyond that he could imagine nothing.

  *

  King Edward’s army moved slowly up the hill out of Barnet town like a great funeral procession through the night. But instead of a blaze of wax tapers and candles and the chanting of priests, there was the dark, no moon, with only an occasional shuttered lantern winking out, and the low grumble and clank of an army on the march, trying to keep silent. Mounted scouts had been sent ahead, cloth tied over their horses’ hooves. They reported that Warwick was no further off than the top of the hill, his army drawn up across the fork of the roads leading off to St Albans and Hatfield. It was a strong position, protected by hedgerows, and he had the advantage in numbers and was also well supplied with guns.

  Even on a moonless night like this it was surprising to Richard how much one could see in the dark, when one’s eyes got used to it. On either side of his horse’s silvery dappled neck were the dull gleams of the rounded crowns of helmets, the white blur of soldiers’ upturned faces. The blades of halberds carried high glinted like a waving steel forest.

  Richard led the vanguard of the army, and in the morning would be expected to lead the attack. That King Edward had entrusted him with this most important section of the army was both an unimaginable honour and a colossal responsibility. His feelings swung between elation, fear, and a creeping desolation. His mind, in the few uncrowded moments allowed it, kept thinking of those other times, when the legends of his own boyhood were made, when Edward, Warwick and Montagu had been together, marching on their enemies at dead of night, sometimes along this same road. He remembered the telling of the tales, when they came back.

  The strong strides of his horse carried him step by step nearer to the end of it all, when either Edward and himself, or Warwick and his brother Montagu, would be finished for ever. He could not let himself weaken, that would invite death. Whenever there was a minute’s lull in the orders and questions and problems, visions of weapons of fiendish design loomed twice life-size in his mind.

  There were good men around him; his brother the King had seen that he was well advised. Nevertheless the final decisions lay with Richard himself, and any foolishness or error on his part would hamstring the efforts of even the best officers. He had never fought a pitched battle in his life. All that Warwick had taught him he would not forget, but he was without experience. This he was about to acquire the hard way.

  Richard knew what he had to do. Somehow, he had to manoeuvre the vanguard of about 3000 off the road to the right, spreading them out across the heath into lines, so that they would meet Warwick’s left in the morning. The men moved with surprising ease. The archers were no trouble, being used to stealing across country under cover of night. The horses were the noisiest; the uncut stallions of the knights could always be relied upon to squeal and lash out at the wrong moment.

  It turned out that Warwick’s army was so near that it would be dangerous to walk forward out of the front line, in case one walked straight into theirs. It was possible to hear the murmur of voices, though nothing could be seen. In the middle of the night, when all was quiet and the men were trying to get what sleep they could, Richard found himself straining his ears to catch the voices, insanely listening for Warwick’s, as if Warwick would be wandering about in the dark in a part of his army commanded by someone else.

  Richard had learned that the captain he was to encounter was his sister Anne’s discarded husband, the Duke of Exeter. Years of exile and enmity had probably made the embittered Duke even more foul-tempered than he had been before; he would give no quarter to any Yorkist.

  All night cannon were
banging away and shot whistling overhead, but it all fell beyond Richard’s lines. Most of it seemed to be coming from the left, from the centre of Warwick’s army. After midnight, Richard dozed off, sitting with his friends on wooden cases of weapons.

  He started awake and was on his feet at the sound of footsteps. An uncanny sight met his eyes. The glow of a lantern partly open hung by itself among what looked like new-sheared fleeces. As it bobbed along like Jack o’ Lantern, the hazy light brightened and the dark shape of a man formed up behind it, suddenly close enough for Richard to see the grease spots on his jacket. It was cold, and his breath puffed out, mingling with a swirling smoky whiteness. Fog. Richard stared around. The folds of his woollen cloak were covered with a silvery fur like mildew and the polished steel of his armour with a dull bloom of moisture. Fog floated across his face like clammy cobwebs.

  ‘Lord Jesus!’ he said under his breath. ‘How are we to fight a battle in fog?’ Then aloud, ‘When did this come down?’

  ‘Not half an hour ago, your Grace.’

  ‘What is the time now?’

  ‘Nearly three o’clock by the sand glass, your Grace.’

  Richard’s heart leapt up, and lodged in his gullet. ‘Then it’s time!’ he said. ‘At four o’clock we must be in order and ready to attack.’

  His voice sounded to himself like a croak. A cannon blast made him jump out of his skin. He had become as tense as a crossbow cranked up to its limit. His ears felt strange, as if he were underwater, and he could hear his heart knocking in them. He tried swallowing, but his mouth was too dry. He was perished with cold, yet sweating.

  As his captains roused their slumped and comatose men, muffled voices came from all around. It was still dark, and bodies materialized almost from under Richard’s feet, and were swallowed again by the fog. No one could see more than an arm’s length in any direction. Soon Richard would have to lead his men in search of the enemy. It would make no odds, he thought grimly, if they were to blindfold him, twirl him round and shove him off to find Exeter’s army, like a child playing Hoodman Blind. Because they were all on high ground, the fog might clear as daylight progressed. It was the most that might be hoped for.

  Richard knew that he would not see his brother the King again that morning; there was no chance for toing and froing. The plan had been made clear last night. The attack was to be made at very first light, whether Warwick showed signs of moving or not. King Edward always had believed in being the first to attack.

  When the signal was given, the trumpets blared through the fog like horns of brass. Richard began to walk forward, out in front with the men-at-arms, the archers at either end of the line. The knights of his own household were close around him; Lord Say at his left elbow was growling imprecations to keep his temper up. They seemed to be creeping forward like caterpillars, feeling their way, expecting any moment to meet the bristling staves and drawn bows of Exeter’s from line. But it was horribly silent ahead. Guns were firing over to the left, but no arrows were being loosed at them.

  Richard’s feet and knees told him what his eyes did not; the ground was sloping away quite steeply in front of him. As he went carefully downhill, the grass grew squishy underfoot and he slid once or twice. He knew suddenly with terrifying certainty that he was leading the army down into marshy ground, and that Exeter was nowhere in front of them. The fog thickened like stirred milk, the lower they went. Richard was as lost as a blind man and on the verge of a disastrous error of judgement. He stopped walking and laid his hand on Lord Say’s arm.

  ‘We are marching in the wrong direction,’ he heard his voice saying. ‘We’d better wheel round so that we face towards the left. That’s where the gunfire was coming from. We’ve overshot the end of Exeter’s army.’

  The words came out as if placed in his mouth by the merciful agency of God. The instinctive decision was as right as possible under the circumstances. Soon they were moving uphill again, and as they went the slope became greasy with mud as their steel-clouted shoes cut up the grass. Noises of fighting came from further over to the left. An arrow whizzed past Richard’s helmet, another glanced harmlessly off Lord Say’s shoulder. Then the arrow shower began in earnest and, as the ground began to even out, they burst upon the enemy in the fog. Richard had no time to remember his terror of a few moments before, when he was hurled into hand-to-hand fighting. The enemy were yelling their heads off, surging and milling forwards and sideways.

  Richard realized that he had made a flank attack by chance and thrown Exeter’s men into confusion. There was confusion among his own men, too, still scrabbling to get up the slippery slope, scarcely knowing in which direction to advance. All the ways of fighting, of handling weapons, the techniques of killing, had escaped Richard’s conscious memory. His men formed an armoured wall around him, while Lord Say bawled through his vizor slit, ‘We must keep our ground up here, your Grace. If they force us back down there, we’re dead men!’

  Then he might have been alone, fighting Exeter’s entire three thousand by himself, except that he could only see in the fog the ones in front, with their weapons flailing at him from all directions. It took all his effort to keep his feet squarely on the ground, to fend off blows and to deliver as many as possible himself — hard. Above all, not to move backwards, when Exeter’s men rallied and began to press forward. He was glad now to have older, experienced men around him; they fought with dogged persistence, sparing of their energy, unlike the young hotheads whose yelling charges among the enemy made them blown and panting just when their strength was most needed. Richard tried to follow the example of Lord Say, who stood solid as a rooted tree and parried everything which came at him, wasting no breath on yelling.

  Soon the enemy began to heave and surge and press forward relentlessly and it became more and more difficult to stop edging back. Both sides made a solid wall of noise which was growing worse, though he did not realize that it was partly his own panting breath within his helmet. He had no idea of how many men he had killed or wounded; if they fell under the blows of his axe, they disappeared under the feet of all the rest, their screams lost in the din. He could see that the blade of his weapon was red, and feel that the leather palms of his gauntlets were wet, though that might as well have been from sweat as from blood running down its handle.

  Gradually, he was forced back a couple of yards nearer to disaster, to the slippery downhill slope which would lead to wholesale slaughter. Then he went down for the first time. A man tried to trip him with a halberd stave and his feet slid from under him — the ground felt as if covered with tallow — and he fell, the halberd blade plunging down on top of him. He got his knees up, curled like a hedgehog instinctively trying to protect himself from injury in the place everyone dreaded it most, and several men trod on him, seemingly all at once, and then strong arms hauled him up as if he weighed nothing. A defensive circle formed about him. Lord Say, seeing him whole, yelled, ‘We need more men! Send to the King — your Grace, we need reinforcements — they’re weighing on us like lead!’

  ‘Not yet!’ Richard yelled back, shaking his head from side to side like an obstinate mule. Falling, being trodden on, the panic feeling that if more feet descended he would suffocate, had made him shake all over. The only remedy was to hurl himself at the enemy again. He must hold out — he could not take his brother’s men.

  He saw Lord Say crash down, his helmet crushed into his skull by the blow of a mace. His own squire John Milwater was no longer with them; those who disappeared could only be in one place, underfoot. Before he could do more, a whacking blow coming from the side sent him off his feet like a spinning top. This time the panic of being down among trampling feet lasted longer; a terrible weight across his back pinned him down, and he thought someone had broken him in two. That was his chief disadvantage in fighting on foot; he was small and light, easy to knock down, in spite of being strong and agile. He was pulled up again by sturdy arms, and someone yelled to tell him the weight on his back had been one of
his own squires, who had thrown himself down to take the jabbing weapons in his own body; he was dead.

  Richard began to feel that he could not hold out much longer. He could not tell where he was treading, only a confusion of lumps and humps, armoured hardness, and worse, yielding softness and an appalling sliding in slushiness. He could hear nothing but a deafening roar like mighty oceans; his lungs laboured like overworked pumps, and air seared them as if he were a fire eater at a fair. He could see very little because sweat ran from him like water and the saltiness prickled and blurred his eyes. Briefly he felt a burning pain in his left arm, a sensation of gouged flesh, but soon forgot it. The fog still cut him off from the rest of the battle. He could not know if his brother the King did well or badly, whether he was alive or dead, whether all the rest were routed and he were fighting on uselessly, alone.

  He wedged one foot against the breastplate of a dead man lying behind him and fought on. If Exeter’s men did not give soon, he thought he would be killed where he stood; he and the men around him were fighting themselves to a standstill of exhaustion.

  Suddenly, a sound penetrated the noise in his head and helmet, coming urgently from in front of him, again and again. It was the rallying call of trumpets, trying to strengthen a weakening side. Exeter was no longer driving forward in attack.

  Richard’s men-at-arms found themselves able to push forward, step by step, faster and faster, until they were almost running, and the enemy wildly in retreat. Richard stumbled forward over a litter of bodies and limbs; in places he had to climb over the heaps, regardless of which were living or dead. The high pitched yells and screaming of a rout told him he had won a victory. It was only just in time.

  The fog seemed to have thinned out a little. Richard suddenly in the confusion found himself tripping over something roundish and hard, which could only be a severed head, still wearing its helmet. He was unwittingly embracing an archer in a jacket of the unmistakable parti-colour, the King’s murrey and blue. The embrace became genuine; a greasy, gory arm laid on his bore a smeared and tarnished golden sun. Then there were more of them all about him, archers and men-at-arms and knights, all yelling in triumph. The glorious moment came when King Edward strode out of the thinning mist like a giant of olden time. As the brothers met, their breastplates banged together tinnily and Richard found himself half crushed in the hug of an enormous, very bloody-fronted bear. There was no sense in forcing hoarse-voiced greetings, it was enough to find each other alive, to know that victory was certain. Then Clarence stumbled on them, too, and all three hugged each other, enmities forgotten in the heat of the triumph, still not knowing what had happened to bring it about, but giving thanks to God for it.