“Anne, don’t be silly, I’m not going to drop my heir out the window!” I held little Edward up even higher and he gave an excited squeal. “Listen, did you hear that? He said ‘boar’, Anne. He said boar…”
“Oh, if anything should happen to him…” Anne went ashen and her hand fluttered to her throat.
I stopped teasing my wife and brought Edward away from the window. He had been enjoying his flight high above my head, and began to grizzle in annoyance—showing a burgeoning little Plantagenet temper. Anne grabbed him from me and held him close, as if he had been in real danger. Most perturbed, he began to scream, hitting out at her with his chubby fists.
She needed another child to coddle...and I hoped she would have one soon, of course, the more the better, though too many sons could end up in inheritance disputes and too many daughters could ruin a man with their dowries. I glanced at Anne’s slender figure and flat belly. I could not understand why she was not with child again. When I was very young, it seemed I put a babe in the belly of almost every girl I lay with, and Edward had come along swiftly enough as well…but now, nothing. Yes, I was often called away to my brother’s side so could not always be with Anne but I thought by now Little Ned would have a brother or sister upon the way. The King’s family threatened to be huge, with Elizabeth Woodville an excellent breeder if naught else, and even George now had two legitimate children with Isabel.
I wanted the same. It was always a fearful thing to pins one’s hopes upon one solitary child. And it was, many wisemen said, a foolish weakness to love too much.
Eventually we went to Durham. At my insistence, Little Ned stayed behind at Barnard, and Anne would not speak to me let alone share my bed for several days, but once we reached the city, her mood lifted. As planned, we visited Cuthbert’s Shrine, and paid our respects at the tomb of the Venerable Bede. Palace Green’s delights beckoned; we visited the monks’ choir school and other foundations dedicated to grammar and music, and then saw a play about the Dun Cow, a milkmaid’s beast guided by God, that led the funeral bier of blessed Cuthbert to the town.
At Durham castle, I met with the Bishop, Lawrence Booth, just to get the measure of him, for his power was far-reaching; the bishops in that county had in truth the power of princes. I wanted him to know I offered no threat to his rule…as long as he provided no threat to mine. We got on tolerably well and soon understood each other’s aims, even though he was a dour fellow who seldom smiled and did not even seem to appreciate the beauty of his own chorister’s voices.
No ear for music, I told Anne with a sorrowful shake of my head. How could a man of God not feel elation in the sound of voices raised in song, praising He who made the Sun shine and the Moon rise? Ah well….even mighty Bishops could be Philistines when it came to beauty, I supposed.
When Anne and I returned to Barnard, our baggage carts were laden with silver, gold and leatherwork from the famous Durham tanners, and we found we were a little short of money—my treasurer, gentle Robert Brackenbury from nearby Saleby, chided me gently in his kindly, respectful way and showed me the ledgers with my expenditures. I felt a little sick.
Troubles with finances soon fell to the wayside, however, when a messenger came knocking at the gate. He wore the king’s device upon his cloak.
“There’s not to be another war?” Anne asked fearfully, after I heard out the messenger’s news then sent him to find food and rest.
I shook my head. “No. All is well. But with peace throughout the land, Edward has made a decision…One that will affect me.” I turned from Anne, bracing myself in the large Oriel window of my chamber and staring moodily down at the rushing Tees below the castle walls.
“What decision? Husband?” Anne’s fingers nervously brushed my upper arm.
“My father, my brother Edmund…After they were slain at Wakefield, their bodies were carried to a priory at Pontefract and given hasty burial. Mutilated. Headless…”
Shaking off Anne’s hand, I retreated from the window and stalked around the chamber, memories still burning bitter in me…an eight-year-old boy, a bleak Yule. Christmas festivities that turned to tears and blood, a hasty exile in Burgundy, carried over a stormy grey sea where I thought George and I should surely die as our ship tipped and tilted in the winter storms.
“Later,” I continued, “after Towton, Ned ordered their heads taken down from Micklegate and buried with their bones. Now that all in England is secure, he wishes their remains to be moved again; to lie in honour in our own family vault in Fotheringhay.”
“That is a noble gesture.” Anne nodded. “I agree—it should be done.”
“Edward has accorded me a great honour on the occasion of their interment, Anne.” I took a deep breath. “He has asked that I be Chief Mourner. It is I, the youngest and least of the three Sons of York who will accompany our dead father and brother on their last journey home.”
Pontefract Castle sizzled in the sun. Under the blazing summer’s sky, I left my lodgings in the fortress known as the Tower of London of the North and walked with purpose across the castle’s bailey. Ten huge, impregnable watchtowers ringed the brow of the hill like a tiered crown; over all, the King and Queen’s towers soared sixty feet into the air, thin as blades, their stonework tapering as they veered toward heaven.
Despite the brightness of the day, my mood was dark, black as the dungeons that honeycombed the hillside below Pontefract’s gigantic towers. It was, after all, a sombre occasion, the reburial of the man who would have, should have been king of England. My father, Richard Duke of York.
The house of the Blackfriars was my destination, standing within the precincts of the town. Along with many other battle casualties, my father and brother Edmund had been dragged there after Wakefield and given ignoble burial, the monks labouring to dig a hasty grave while Marguerite’s men prodded them on, poking at the headless bodies, laughing….
Passing under the castle’s barbican, surrounded by loyal retainers clad in black, and the bishops and prelates who had travelled from afar to pray for the soul of the Duke on his final journey, I rode down the cobbled streets into the town, where crowds gathered to see the spectacle of the removal of the royal remains.
Despite the heat of the day, I was dressed in appropriate mourning clothes, a dark hat with a sapphire cross pinned upon it and a dark blue velvet robe covered by a cloak. As I reached the doors of the Dominican house, appropriately dedicated to St Richard of Colchester, a saint known to my sire and one intrinsic in my own naming, the brothers and their Guardian emerged with solemn faces to greet my party.
Sweating in his coarse black robes, the Guardian of St Richard’s ushered me into the darkness of the church. He looked poor, his robes threadbare, his face etched with suffering. The Blackfriars owned nothing of their own and begged upon the friary grounds for all they needed: food to eat, stone to repair the monastic buildings, cloth for their vestments. I would ease their suffering as best I could; I handed a heavy bag of coin to the Guardian for taking in the bodies of my kinsmen and saying prayers for their souls these past fifteen years.
The Friary church had a large, unlit nave and a narrow chancel arch, adorned with carven heads that grinned into the gloom. It was close, airless, the painted walls sweating as the relentless sun struck the roof and heated the night-chilled stonework. Hundreds of tallow candles, some standing man-high, burned in the gloom, filling the air with their fragrance and increasing the heat till it became nigh unbearable. Yellowish light speared through glass windows filled with depictions of the Day of Doom and the Resurrection; muted sunbeams caught coils of incense-smoke, turned them into twisting ropes that dispersed near the ceiling.
The hearse that would take the bones of my father and brother on their final journey stood in the centre of the nave. Caparisoned, and with an ornate roof upheld by mighty pillars, it was decked with the insignias of our House—the Falcon and Fetterlock, the Sunne in Splendour, a thousand roses wrought of pure silver. Banners and pennants hung dow
n over it, and saints’ faces gazed sorrowfully from every pillar. Candelabras flickered both outside and within the hearse, pallid light gleaming through the thin draperies where the Chief Mourner—I, Richard—and other high lords would enter.
Taking my rightful place near the hearse, the attending Bishops began the Dirige, the office of the Dead, for the souls of my kin. I closed my eyes, the familiar chanted words washing over me, there in the stifling gloom of the friary:
“Placebo Domino
Dilexi, quoniam exaudiet Dominus: vocem orationis meae.
Quia inclinavit aurem suam mihi: et in diebus meis invocabo.
Circumdederunt me dolores mortis: pericula inferni invenerunt me.
Tribulationem, et dolorem inveni: et nomen Domini invocavi.
O Domine, libera animam meam, misericors Dominus, et iustus: et Deus noster miseretur.”
The words assailed my soul, those and many others, familiar and yet more poignant than ever before: “Put not confidence in Princes: in the children of men, in whom there is no salvation…..Eternal rest give unto them O Lord: and let perpetual light shine unto them. From the gate of hell, deliver their souls O Lord... O Lord hear my prayer, and let my cry come unto thee….”
The time had come, the hour in which the tomb would be opened and the bones lifted for their long journey home, those pitiful remains that were more important to me than any gold.
The Dominican brothers hastily emptied the church of all-comers, save me, the Guardian and the various churchmen who had travelled from all over England to escort the bones to their final resting place. A party of stout workmen carrying hammers to break the stone were ushered down the nave. The Guardian led me into the choir, to a spot near the high altar where my father and Edmund lay under grey flagstones marked by shallow crosses; a poor grave for the true King and his second son. The flooring around the grave had been retiled since the burial; one tile bearing a white rose blossomed in burgeoning light as the Guardian kindled an extra torch so that the workers could see.
Everyone looked to me; a terrible silence descended over the church.
“Let it be done,” I said in a whisper that came out as loud as a shout.
The hammers crashed down; cracks appeared in the flagstones and their centres buckled inward. The surrounding tiles sprang from their beds, standing up like broken teeth, while dust motes spun into the air, thick as smoke.
“Have a care,” I said dully, fearing the workers would strike with too much enthusiasm and destroy the precious remains below.
The hammers thudded into the gravestones again, dislodging several large chunks; the workmen gathered round, swift and industrious, using heavy wooden poles to lever the heaviest fragments aside. Cracks zigzagged outward, wrenching the carved crosses apart, and then, as the hammers struck again, the floor fell away with a roar. A dark hole gaped, emitting the rank smell of the grave: death and decay, wormwood and gall. Cold air also flooded from the crater, battling against the stale hot air of the living world; the candle flames fluttered, some went out, and I saw some of the Bishops cross themselves with fervour.
“My Lord?” The Guardian of St Richard’s looked at me querulously, waiting for my next move.
Swallowing through a throat grown tight, I edged towards the lightless cavity in the Friary floor. Sweat rolled down my back, wet spots bloomed under my arms. The heels of my high boots made cracking noises that seemed as loud as gunfire as they struck the age-worn flagstones.
Dry-mouthed, I came to the edge of that pit, that tomb of all hope, and forced myself to gaze downwards.
There they were, my father, my brother, lying side by side. Thin, white leg-bones gleamed faintly, wrapped in shrouds made of shadow; and as the Guardian lifted his torch higher, the curve of collapsed ribs became visible, and sticks that had once been arms. Arms that had held me, played with me when I was a child…
The Duke lay on the left; less long-limbed than Edmund and broader with age. Edmund almost seemed curled up, as if the monks had not quite enough room for him and had forced his body in beside my father’s. Their heads were set next to them, not where heads should have been; I bit back an involuntary cry as I noted the marks on their neck-bones where a sharp weapon had sliced cleanly through them.
My lips moved in silent prayer; my mind was flooded by memory…memory I had long thought lost…the Duke, stern but kindly, bringing me a wooden sword as a gift just weeks before he was slain outside the walls of Sandal Castle, tricked into exiting his stronghold by false promises of a truce. “You are getting a big boy now, my namesake, little Richard,” he said. His eyes smiled; blue like mine, a deep shade like the sea; his hand had been warm on mine as he pressed my small fingers round the hilt of the toy sword. “You practice with this while I am gone, and one day you will fight beside me and your brothers.”
Edmund had been with him, preparing to ride north to what would prove his death. A lean youth dressed in sea-green, he had spun me round playfully while we engaged in mock battle, Edmund trying to slap my hat off while I prodded him furiously with the wooden sword. As I looked at him, there in the courtyard of Baynard’s in London, a sudden premonition of doom had rushed over me, making my bony boy’s knees tremble; he was clad in green, and my superstitious old nurses whispered that the colour green was an unlucky colour, the colour of faeries and the dead…I dared not say anything, could not tell him, because he might laugh at such notions and think me craven…
Standing above his bones in that cheerless hole, I struggled to recall Edmund’s face upon that final day; it had been fifteen years since Clifford had stabbed him to death upon Wakefield Bridge and his countenance had grown blurry in my mind, the edges softened, the features indistinct and hazy as if wrapped in mist. I recall his eyes were blue, like father’s, like my own, and his hair soft brown and curling; I suspect he may have looked a little like me as a grown man, though a few fingers taller, since he had not my affliction of the body. A perfect prince, as I was not, would never be.
“My lord?” The Guardian glanced at me again, his voice a little impatient. “Shall I send someone in to bring out their most noble lordships?”
“No, I will do it. It is my right.” I knew it was unorthodox for a Duke to do toil of that nature, and yet…it was what I wanted. A form of farewell where none was possible before.
I eased myself into the grave; it was shallow, so shallow. Hastily dug, but that was no surprise; the Lancastrians were victorious and my kinsmen had been dead for some days already.
Reaching down, I picked up my father’s skull with both hands. It gleamed with almost preternatural light as the candle flames flickered upon the dome. Round and smooth, the remains of him I had loved, who had made me. Tears I never shed as a petrified, exiled child spilled from my eyes and ran down my face, dripping into the dark depths of the grave pit. I could see the wounds that had killed him, delivered from behind as he knelt, forced by Marguerite’s men upon a crawling anthill—gashes in the back of the skull, blows to the pate that had broken in to the very brainpan.
A chill ran through me as I observed the evidence of those blows, graven in bone as a saint in carved in stone, and for a moment the same awful prescience gripped me as when I last saw Edmund wearing the cursed faerie-green in the courtyard of Baynard’s.
Then the sensation passed and I was myself again, no longer unmanned by this ancient sorrow, and I called for assistance to bring the Duke of York and Lord Edmund out into the light.
Kneeling on the chill stone, with my own hands I gently wrapped my father and brother’s bones in cloth of gold marked with a white satin cross and carried them to waiting coffins within the hearse in the nave. Placing them reverently into the two receptacles, I draped them with palls of black velvet trimmed with gold.
More candles were lit and the heat in the friary intensified; it felt like hell and my stomach was pinched but I ignored the discomfort. I had no cause to complain. I was alive as my kin were not; this was the price, the pain of living.<
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Pulling up my mourning hood, I knelt inside the hearse, beside the bones, beside my lost father, where I would spend the rest of the night in contemplative prayer.
Early next morning the Bishop of Durham spoke a Requiem Mass for Richard Plantagenet and Edmund of Rutland. Once done, the banners and pennants were stripped from the hearse and given to the monks of St Richard’s. The coffins of the Duke and Edmund were lifted and carried out of the friary to a waiting chariot drawn by seven horses swathed in black.
As the Duke’s coffin was laid in the chariot, a life-sized effigy of my father was placed at its foot. Dressed in a gown of royal mourning blue, his hands were clasped in prayer and he gazed heavenwards toward an image of Christ upon a rainbow. A carved angel, robed in white, held a golden crown above his head to signify his lost Kingship.
Bearing my father’s banner, Sir John Skipwith mounted the foremost horse in the cortege, and as Chief Mourner, I took my place behind the hearse with Northumberland, Lord Welles and Lord Stanley around me, all clad in gowns of mourning black. I could cope with dour Northumberland, and knew little of Welles, but Stanley’s presence irked me; he was a side-changer, a turncoat, and once he had the better of me when I tried to defend my friend James Harrington. However, I had no say in his presence; Edward had appointed him to be there as he was a great lord with a personal army numbering in the thousands. And he had been loyal enough…of late.
In slow, sorrowful procession, we set out from Pontefract, the Officers of Arms and the King of Arms guarding the bier. Worn over their mourning robes, their colourful surcoats were the only bright raiment in a sea of dark blues and blacks. Behind the cortege, streaming away into the distance, marched hundreds of poor men draped in ebon cowls and carrying burning torches.
Solemnly the procession headed along Ermine Street to Doncaster, where it halted for the night at the house of the Greyfriars, before the shrine of the Virgin. The next morn it moved on to Tuxford, then in order Blyth, Newark, Grantham, and Stamford. At each stop, the Dirige was chanted in the evening and the Requiem early the following morning. Clad in their resplendent robes, the assembled Bishops forged on ahead of the cortege each day to prepare for its arrival at the next church or priory. Silent and brooding, sweltering in my dark cowl, I rode on the chariot behind my father’s war-scarred bones and prayed for his immortal soul.
I, Richard Plantagenet: Book One: Tante le Desiree Page 22