The King's Bed

by Campbell Barnes, Margaret

  It was difficult for Dickon, at work or in love, to keep his thoughts from this revival of old loyalties which so closely concerned him. He did his utmost to appear unconcerned and to hide his eagerness for news, but an uncontrollable excitement burned within him whenever he heard of the doings of Lovell or Lincoln or of this young pretender being discussed. And although he had been entrusted to carve the pillars of a particularly beautiful hearth canopy, when he heard his master and Sir Walter Moyle’s steward discussing them mind and hand slipped from his work.

  “It appears that when Lincoln joined the others in Ireland he told Lovell that young Warwick had escaped from the Tower,” Hurland Dale was saying, as he led his companion from room to room of the almost completed house. “So now these crazy Yorkists are claiming that the lad is Edward, Earl of Warwick.”

  “He must be a bright pupil to impersonate a royal earl,” laughed the steward, his interest really more on whether the house could be finished by the date of his master’s return from Calais.

  “He would need to be bright as a Toledo blade to hoodwink Henry Tudor,” said Dale, whose ambition, as everyone knew, was to be commissioned for work on one of the royal palaces. “Weeks ago the King himself told Vertue, his master mason, that he had sent secret agents to find out all about this boy. He knows, for instance, that his real name is Lambert Simnel. And that he is the son of an Oxford joiner who helped build this new college called Magdalen, and who saved enough money for him to be educated by a tutor there.”

  The two men passed out of earshot and Dickon stood still as a statue in his white apron, with chisel and mallet poised. His mind was back in the narrow archway entrance of St. Edmund Hall where a kindly priest who was in a hurry to get to Ireland had offered him and Tansy the use of his house. A priest who was to pit his wits against Henry Tudor.

  And then news spread like wild-fire over England that the Irish had received Lambert Simnel enthusiastically, and that Lincoln and Lovell had had him crowned as Edward the Sixth in Dublin Cathedral.

  As soon as his week’s work was finished Dickon called in at the Blue Boar. He always had a kindly welcome from Mistress Goodyear, although she warned him that she would never forgive him when he took Tansy from her. However busy the inn, she generally contrived to let them have a few minutes together, and this night he wanted to tell Tansy of the coincidence about the Oxford tutor. “His name was Richard Simon,” he recalled. “He remarked, on it being the same as mine.”

  “And then he looked at you with that special kind of interest which always frightens me, and instead of mistrusting us he liked you and lent us the key,” said Tansy. “I wonder what will happen to the poor man if the King ever gets hold of him?”

  “But, Tansy, does it not occur to you that what these Tudor hangers-on say may be all a pack of lies? That this lad may really be the Earl of Warwick?”

  Tansy stared at him in pitying surprise. “Oh, Dickon, have you not heard? Of course, you have been stuck all day at your building. But the town criers have been shouting the news all afternoon. The inn is seething with it.”

  “What news?” asked Dickon, almost sullenly.

  “That the Earl of Warwick is alive. And to prove it the King has ordered that he be brought out from the Tower. He is to ride through the city. Up Thames Street, East Cheap and past here to St. Paul’s, and then back by way of Tower Street.”

  “When?”

  “On Sunday. So that everyone may be free to go and see him for themselves — young folk like ourselves and the older citizens who will recognize him.”

  Dickon did not answer. Only in that moment of surprise was he truly aware of how much his personal interest had been involved — of how much he had hoped that, one way or another, there might be Plantagenet kings again. That his father would be avenged. “So the trump card is with the Tudor again,” he said bitterly.

  Among the babel of customers all discussing the same thing, Tansy could only press his arm. “Must you mind so much?” she whispered, compassionately.

  He scarcely seemed to hear her, being lost in some intuitive study of the Tudor’s inmost thoughts. “But he must have hesitated to use it — hated to use it,” he muttered.

  “But why — if it confounds his enemies?”

  “Because if Richard’s nephew rides through the streets of London again, even for one short hour, the waves of sympathy will bring Richard back — into the hearts of the people — where he belongs. The Tudor is no fool. He must have faced this — weighed it against the value of proving himself no murderer and upsetting Lovell’s plans.”

  “They say the Earl is to be brought out at noon. We shall both be free then. Let us go and see him.”

  “I must see him,” said Dickon. “I have never seen or spoken to a relative in my life, except my father. By blood, this Edward of Warwick is my cousin.”

  17

  Well before noon on Sunday, Dickon and Tansy took up their positions by the outer gates of the Tower. They could have watched the procession from Cheapside, but whereas most people just wanted to see the young Earl out of curiosity, Dickon wanted to share more intimately in the start and finish of his short, dramatic journey into freedom. Yet even so there were many spectators with them — warehousemen from Thames Street and dockers who worked on Tower Wharf. And all the way along the route to St. Paul’s the crowds were gathering.

  “Coronations, executions, weddings, how you Londoners love them all,” a wool merchant from Flanders was rallying them good humouredly. “But surely this is the oddest procession of all? Parading a man just to prove that he is alive.”

  “He is scarcely a man yet, this son of the murdered, attainted Duke of Clarence,” a scholarly-looking man told him.

  “Do you remember seeing him, Sir? Do you know what he looks like?” asked Tansy, partly because the man reminded her of Master Jordan.

  “Why, surely. Most of us do,” he assured her. “It is true that he lived chiefly up at Middleham, in Yorkshire, which the late King and Queen made their home. For not only was he King Richard’s nephew, but also Queen Anne Neville’s — her sister having married Clarence. But many a time some of us have seen the young Earl riding his pony among the royal party when they were in London.”

  “So you will recognize him when you see him?” persisted Dickon.

  “Recognize him for his gentle, unassuming self, beyond all this nonsense of faked pretenders,” chuckled their informant.

  There was a stir among the guards, a trumpet shrilled somewhere within the thickness of the Tower walls, the crowd pushed forward but were held back in friendly fashion by the crossed pikes of men-at-arms. As the bells of All Hallows rang the hour, the great gates swung open and some of King Henry’s newly-formed Yeomen of the Guard marched out in charge of the Lieutenant of the Tower on his tall black charger. And then, discreetly guarded on either side by foot soldiers but with ample space before and behind so that all might see him, rode Edward, Earl of Warwick — a dark, slender youth attired in rich purple velvet, as became his noble estate.

  Dickon and Tansy were so close that, but for the spaced-out pikemen between, they could almost have touched him. They saw him rein in his mount involuntarily, coming for the first time for months into the outside world. At sight of the straining, staring crowd he raised a gloved hand as if to shield his eyes from some unaccustomed glare … But it was May time and the sun shone and he was young, and after that first moment of shock they saw a smile of pure joy transform his gentle features as he rode forward eagerly, grasping at this unexpected illusion of freedom. A murmur of sympathetic welcome went up from most of the spectators. “Is it really the Earl?” the younger people asked, clustering round the scholarly-looking man as soon the gatehouse guards moved back to wait for the cavalcade’s return.

  “Yes. Really the Earl,” he assured them again, speaking a little wearily perhaps because during the long Wars of the Roses he must have seen so many titled people rise and fall.

  And as they stood about i
n groups they could hear their own murmurs of sympathy being echoed, and swelling in volume, all along Thames Street.

  “Is it true, what some of the Palace servants say? That he is a little simple?” asked a ’prentice goldsmith, who had more than once taken his master’s precious wares to Westminster.

  “Henry the Sixth was simple. And look at the fighting we had then all up and down the land,” someone reminded them.

  “We want no more simple kings,” agreed another.

  “Better to cherish the one we now have, who keeps the peace,” added a third. There seemed to be a little group of them, Lancastrians all, trying to damp down the old reviving loyalty.

  “Peace at any price,” murmured the scholarly man, to no one in particular.

  “A capable ruler who had the sense to keep this rival decently shut up,” went on the bullet-headed man, who appeared to be the leader of the Tudor faction.

  “At least we know now that the malicious rumours were false — that King Henry didn’t have him put to death,” crowed one of his friends.

  “As Richard Plantagenet murdered his brother’s sons,” added the bullet-headed one with venom.

  “Perhaps those rumours, too, may one day be proved false,” suggested Dickon quietly.

  The crowd began to drift away, but Dickon and Tansy moved out into the middle of the road, looking in at the open Byward Gate. In the inner ward sunshine bathed the pathway leading to the royal lodgings, and some kind of fruit tree made a splash of hopeful green against the walls. “There are gardens and pleasant rooms in there, as well as racks and dungeons,” said Tansy, holding half-fearfully to Dickon’s arm. “From the windows of the royal residence one could watch the shipping on the river.”

  “It must be reasonably pleasant, because it is a tradition that all our kings sleep there before they are crowned,” agreed Dickon, wondering if his father had done so.

  Tansy edged a little nearer to the gate and a kindly guard allowed her to peer further in. Somewhere she could hear a bird singing, and it lightened her heart for the royal lad who would soon he going back there. “Dickon,” she whispered, “do you suppose the two young Princes, Edward the Fifth and Richard, Duke of York, could still be in there?”

  Dickon, whose brief love for his father had flamed fiercely, would have given much to know. “It is possible. But no one seems to think so,” he said sadly, drawing her away.

  The noisy group of Lancastrian enthusiasts were still there. “At least it is proved beyond all doubt that King Henry spared his rival nephew,” one of them was insisting all over again.

  Dickon stepped aside, avoiding him as if he were a particularly offensive clot of dung. “Were I any King’s nephew I should find swift death kinder than life-long captivity,” he said quietly.

  “Shall we not be going?” asked Tansy, both for her lover’s sake and because she was growing tired.

  But for once Dickon did not do as she wished. “It will take them at most an hour to go slowly to St. Paul’s and back. Let us wait and see him return,” he said, lifting her on to the wall of the moat that she might rest.

  Most of the people had drifted away to stroll on Tower Hill. But for some reason or other the jovial wool merchant remained. He, too, sat on the wall of the moat to-rest, and with mutual liking — or because they appeared to have equally disliked the departed Lancastrians — Dickon and Tansy fell into desultory conversation with him. He was English-born, he said, but now traded wool to Flanders. His ship was moored just across the river. Before that he had been a soldier, and as he had served Richard, when Duke of Gloucester, in some of the same places as Robert Marsh, it formed a bond between them. He asked them their names, and himself gave them the apt name of Weaver. The afternoon passed quickly until sounds of approaching voices warned them that the procession was returning.

  “At least this Lambert Simnel has given the young Earl a morning’s excursion,” Jan Weaver said.

  “Did you ever see him?” Dickon asked their new acquaintance, since he was obviously a much-travelled man.

  “Yes, once, in Dublin,” he said, after the faintest hesitation.

  “What is he like?” asked Tansy.

  “Oh, likeable enough. A strong, pleasant-faced lad. The trouble was he never held himself like royalty, but like the joiner’s son he is.”

  “I am but a mason’s apprentice,” volunteered Dickon, with a grin.

  Weaver glanced at the upstanding, well-knit figure beside him. “But now on Sunday, without your ’prentice garb, you might well pass for anybody,” he said.

  The crowd was almost at the end of Tower Street, so the three of them slipped off the wall and hurried to the gates. “Surely it was stupid to pick a pretender who did not look like the person he was supposed to be?” Tansy was saying.

  “I thought so,” agreed Jan Weaver. “This Lambert Simnel is no more like the Earl of Warwick than I am. Or you, or — ” He turned as he spoke and looked straight at Dickon, who was close behind him — and left his sentence hanging in mid-air, as if suddenly silenced by what he saw. And just then the sad little cavalcade turned out from Tower Street and the real Earl approached the gates, still open like a hungry, unrelenting maw to receive him.

  They all turned to watch, and Tansy wondered if it were her imagination that he rode more reluctantly, moving more and more slowly with every hoof beat. Or it might have been that the following crowds dosed more protectively about him, trying to block his path, as if reluctant to let him go. Most of the women were weeping by now and stretching out their arms as though they would hold on to some child of their own; one hysterical young girl threw an armful of white may she had been gathering so that the sweet blossoms scattered over him. The low roar of protest from men’s throats was mounting and becoming dangerous. Yeomen thrust them all back, far less gently this time. And just outside the gates Edward of Warwick stopped, half-turning his horse, to look back at the city streets. With a gesture half-childish, half-despairing, he lifted a small branch of white may, caught in his horse’s mane, to his lips. It was as if he were thanking the Londoners for the love which he so much needed in his lonely life.

  Driven by urgent need to know more of his father, Dickon seized his opportunity. He pushed his way between two pike-men. “Are they in there with you? Are they still alive too? Edward and Richard, your cousins?” he called.

  “Yes, tell us!” joined in many of the crowd who were within earshot.

  The young Earl looked down at Dickon and smiled. He opened his mouth as if to answer. But the lieutenant rode forward calling a sharp order, and Warwick’s escort hustled him forward so suddenly that the white blossom fell from his hand into the dust. He passed through the archway, out of sight.

  “Oh, no! Merciful God, no!” cried Tansy, as the great gates slammed shut behind him. She was only vicariously interested in rival royal claims, she had seen him only for a few minutes, but the mothering heart of her was torn. Like most of the other women milling about her, she felt her face wet with tears.

  “Poor, parentless lad!” protested a fat market woman with a baby in her arms.

  There was nothing more to see. The crowd began to thin. Their excited, arguing voices grew fainter. “At least he is well cared for,” said Dickon, trying to comfort his betrothed. “And, as you say, there are gardens in there. Listen, my love, yesterday I sold some carved figures to a shop-keeper for a good price. So today we will take a boat up river and under London Bridge to Westminster, and as we put off from Tower Wharf you will see the trees rising behind these grim walls.”

  With an arm about her shoulders, he drew her towards the river. “Oh, Dickon, he didn’t answer you. We shall never know now.”

  “They saw to it that he had no chance,” said Dickon, kicking an inoffensive stone out of his way.

  He tried not to dwell on it — to give his whole mind to the happy present and the hopeful future. To make Tansy enjoy her rare excursion on the river. “Soon I shall take my examination before some master
mason,” he reminded her, skilfully rowing their hired boat through the shipping on a slapping tide. “And if I do well, as I hope, I shall become a paid journeyman and a member of my Guild, and then we can marry. Tansy, my rare, patient jewel, where shall we get married and where shall we live?”

  And more quickly than ever the precious hours passed, seeing London from the water and discussing that inexhaustible, golden theme.

  18

  Unaware that Henry had already called their bluff, Lincoln and Lovell landed in Lancashire, bringing Lambert Simnel with them. They had raised some brave Irish troops who believed in him, and Margaret of Burgundy had sent well-organized foreign mercenaries. It was a desperate effort to revive the Yorkist dynasty, but eventually only played into the Tudor’s hands because of the way in which he dealt with it. His forethought showed him in a more favourable light. He had ports guarded and beacons trimmed all along the east coast in case the French should seize the opportune moment to invade, then went himself to Nottingham, that stronghold in the very middle of his kingdom, to await the advancing Yorkists. And after his army had completely routed them at the battle of Stoke, he once again won general approval by forbidding reprisals, pillage or rape.

  When the pretender and his tutor were taken prisoners Henry was far too clever to inflame their cause by butchery. He brought them both back to London, damping down Yorkist sympathy by unexpected clemency. Knowing the value of ridicule, he quite humanely employed Lambert Simnel in the palace kitchens, which would soon put a stop to all grandiose notions, while leaving the lad chance of reasonable advancement.