by Livi Michael
‘No?’ said his mother. ‘Well, let us see. Let us hear the lady in question speak for herself.’
The king looked away as she was brought in. She seemed terrified, as well she might.
‘Do you know why you are here?’ said Dame Cecily, and the poor girl shook her head.
‘Well,’ said Dame Cecily, leaning forward, ‘I will tell you. We are here to establish who the father of your child is.’
‘Mother,’ said the king warningly, but she ignored him.
‘And whether or not any promises were made, by him, to you.’
Elizabeth Lucy looked devastated. ‘The father?’ she said, glancing towards the king. ‘I do not know who you suppose could be the father. I did not know it was in question.’
And she started to weep.
‘There is no need to distress yourself,’ said Cecily, but it was too late for that. Faced with the barely concealed scorn of the king’s mother, and her erstwhile lover’s refusal to even look her way, the poor girl could only wring her hands and sob until even Cecily Neville was discomfited by her abandoned grief.
‘Come now,’ she said, while her son turned his back in disgust. ‘You have nothing to fear. Tell the truth, that is all.’
More passionate crying.
‘Who is the father of your child?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Mother,’ Edward cried, turning round at last. ‘I am the father of her child. And no – I did not offer to marry her.’
‘No?’ said his mother incredulously. She leaned towards the girl. ‘Did you hear that? Your most unchivalrous lover denies ever offering to marry you. What do you say to that?’
The girl’s sobbing quietened at last. She pressed the tips of her fingers to her eyes, so that none of us could see her face, and shook her head, but it was not clear what she meant. Cecily raised her voice.
‘He is saying, child, that you were whore enough to let him use you without any offer of marriage. That’s not what you said to me.’
‘Mother!’ Edward said again.
‘Well?’ she snapped, and the girl flinched and started crying once more. ‘Did you understand that there was a contract between you?’
‘You do not have to answer,’ Edward said, but his mother thundered,
‘Let the girl speak!’
Aye, do, I thought. Or we shall be here all night.
‘Mistress Lucy,’ Cecily Neville said. ‘Tell us in your own words what happened between you and my son, the king.’
At last the girl managed a few gulping words. ‘He spoke so kindly,’ she whispered.
‘And made you fair promises?’
‘I promised nothing!’ shouted the king.
‘Mistress Lucy,’ said his mother. ‘Did you or did you not understand that there was a contract between you and the king?’
The girl glanced anxiously at Edward then away. ‘N-not exactly,’ she began and Edward shot his mother a look of violent triumph.
‘That is not what you told me,’ she said evenly.
‘No – I mean – he spoke so kindly that – I did truly think he loved me – and meant to marry me – and so –’
‘So you kindly let him get you with child,’ said Cecily Neville, her words dripping scorn, and Elizabeth Lucy became a veritable fountain of tears.
‘I have had enough of this,’ said the king. ‘I do not see what you hope to accomplish.’
‘I hoped,’ said Cecily, ‘to establish that if there was a pre-contract between you and this foolish girl, then what you present to us now as your marriage could not be valid.’
Elizabeth Lucy gasped.
‘Ah, I see he has not told you either,’ Dame Cecily said pleasantly. ‘How surprising. Edward – how long were you planning to keep this little matter secret?’
The girl was looking with open mouth from Edward to his mother.
‘Yes,’ my aunt said, with bitter pleasure. ‘He is married. Has been, in fact, for four months. And how pregnant are you?’
The girl looked at the king, but he could not return her gaze. ‘Edward?’ she faltered.
‘Go on, ask him,’ his mother urged.
‘That’s enough, Mother,’ Edward said in a low voice, but she ignored him.
‘He must have tired of you quite quickly, don’t you think? Made a whore of you and passed on. Yet he does not think he will tire of this other woman in the same way.’
‘Who – who is it?’ the girl managed to say.
‘Edward?’ said his mother. ‘Your lady friend wants to know for whom you have deserted her.’
Edward shot his mother a look of pure hatred but did not speak.
‘No?’ she said. ‘My nephew then – he can explain. My Lord of Warwick – tell her who exactly has replaced her.’
I expelled a long breath. I had little stomach for this scene, but I looked directly into the girl’s eyes. ‘His majesty the king has married one Elizabeth Woodville, or Grey.’
The girl shook her head, not understanding, perhaps.
‘Surely you recognize the illustrious name,’ my aunt said.
‘Stop it, Mother,’ said the king. But the girl began to walk towards him, quite slowly, looking at him all the time, and when she reached him she put her hand on his arm.
‘Is it true?’ she said.
‘Tell her it isn’t true, Edward,’ his mother said.
For the first time Edward looked fully at his former mistress, and spoke with weary gentleness.
‘Everything my mother says is true. I am married.’
The girl gave a little frightened cry.
‘I did not offer to marry you because I could not – being already contracted to marry another,’ he said. ‘I am sorry if you understood differently. You will be treated well – with all honour – and your child – our child – will be well provided for.’
A kind of shudder ran through the girl. For a moment I thought she would faint and looked around swiftly for a chair. But she straightened and turned to face us both. She was very pale; in her eyes there was the universal look of the betrayed.
‘Is your business with me done?’ she asked, and from our faces she saw that it was. ‘Then I think that I would like to leave.’
She swayed a little and held her side, so for fear that she would miscarry there and then I ran to help her and escorted her from the room.
When I returned, Cecily was standing in front of her son.
‘I would never have believed,’ she was saying, ‘that you could do more damage to this nation than the last king. Did it never occur to you that if that sorry man had married differently he might still have his throne?’
He was angry, very angry, but he restrained his tone. ‘I have not given away half of France, nor taken up arms against my own lords. All I have done is marry the woman I love.’
Cecily Neville made a sound part way between disgust and despair. ‘Then there is nothing more to say,’ she said.
‘No, Mother,’ he answered, very cold. ‘You have done your work here.’
Cecily walked towards me and towards the door, but I was not finished yet. ‘Might I ask,’ I said, ‘whether you are going to present your new wife to us at some point?’
He looked at me in that same frozen manner.
‘She will be presented to you all,’ he said, ‘on Michaelmas Day, in the Abbey.’
I bowed.
There were other things I might have said – about the French – who would break the news to them. And to the people. But the interview had gone on long enough. My aunt took my arm, and we left. But I remember thinking as we turned our backs on the king that he would forgive none of us for this.
And shortly after, he had her solemnly crowned queen. This the nobility and chief men of the kingdom took amiss, seeing that he had with such immoderate haste promoted a person sprung from a comparatively humble lineage, to share the throne with him …
Crowland Chronicle
As for Edward’s brothers, of whom two were then living, althoug
h both were sorely displeased at the marriage, yet one, who was next in age to Edward and called Duke of Clarence, vented his wrath more conspicuously by his bitter and public denunciation of Elizabeth’s obscure family and by proclaiming that the king, who ought to have married a virgin wife, had married a widow in violation of established custom …
Dominic Mancini
Then were the children of Lord Rivers hugely exalted and set in great honour, his eldest son made Lord Scales and the others to sundry great promotions …
Annales Rerum Anglicarum
Thus kindled the spark of envy which … grew to so great a blaze and flame of fire that it flamed not only through England but also into Flanders and France …
Great Chronicle of London
The queen, wife of King Henry, has written to King Louis that she is advised that King Edward and the Earl of Warwick have come to very great division and war together. She begs the king to give her help to recover her kingdom. The king remarked, look how proudly she writes …
Milanese State Papers: Newsletters from Burgundy and France, Axieto, February 1465
19
The Visions of King Henry
After the horrid and ungrateful rebellion of his subjects had continued a long time … [King Henry] fled at last with a few followers to a secret place prepared for him by those that were faithful to him and as he lay hid there for some time [after the Battle of Hexham] an audible voice sounded in his ears … telling him how he should be delivered up by treachery and brought to London without all honour like a thief or an outlaw … and should endure many evils … all of which he was informed by revelation from the Blessed Virgin Mary and saints John Baptist, Dunstan and Anselm …
John Blacman
John the Baptist came first, in his cloak of thorns, his tunic of camel hair. He ran towards the king roaring, so that it was hard to hear the words.
‘I cannot tell what you are saying,’ the king said.
John the Baptist stopped and looked at the king as if he had only just noticed he was there. Then he lifted his skeletal arms and said, He maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men.
The king recognized the verse, of course, from Revelation, but he did not understand, as he had not understood so much of what his teachers had tried to tell him. He shook his head humbly but this made the saint angry. He smote his staff on a rock and all the kingdom of England was turned into a desert.
That was plain enough. The king woke with tears on his face.
Dunstan was calmer, holding his book and pointing with his knife to words that the king could not read. But he was standing in the ruins of a great church, branches and vines growing through the windows.
Then Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, holding his crozier and addressing the king in Latin: Nam et hoc credo, quia nisi credidero, non intelligam. Unless I first believe I shall not understand.
‘But I do believe,’ the king told him, ‘and I do not understand.’ And St Anselm seemed displeased by this; he shook his head and disappeared.
The Virgin was kinder, as he might expect. There was a soft halo of light around her face as she bent over him.
‘Sleep,’ she told him, ‘eat and sleep. You will need all your strength for what is to come.’
‘What is to come?’ asked the king, but she only fed the great babe at her breast until he fell asleep.
‘They are just dreams, sire,’ Richard Tunstall told him. He spoke quietly, intent on the matter at hand. ‘We will sleep tonight at Waddington Hall, and you will be able to eat well and rest. You will feel better there.’
The king thought this was probably true, for they had spent two nights in Clitheroe Forest, and the cries of night birds, the bark of foxes, the rustlings and movements in the dense trees, were enough to give anyone bad dreams. But it was hard to tell if he was dreaming, exactly, when he saw the saints. He felt permanently as though he was stumbling through some dark dream.
Richard Tunstall tugged the king’s robes forward over his bony shoulders and pulled the hood over his head so that he could hardly see. ‘We are about to leave the forest, sire – you must keep your hood up,’ he said. ‘We can stay as guests of Sir John for several days while you rest. But he asks that you remain in disguise, since he will have other guests at the same time.’
The king said nothing to this; there seemed to be nothing to say.
‘You will not need to speak, sire,’ Richard Tunstall said. ‘These are Carthusian robes, and the Carthusians do not speak. No one will know who you are, if you do not speak. Apart from Sir John, of course.’
The king could detect a note of anxiety in his voice; that he would, in fact, speak; say something startling that would make people wonder, and give them all away. He did not always know when he had spoken aloud.
Richard Tunstall but straightened the king’s robes again. They were too big for him since he had lost so much weight, and inclined to slip.
‘There,’ he said, with a small smile. ‘Now you are Brother Henry.’
Brother Henry followed Richard Tunstall humbly along the path that led out of the forest, immersed in his own thoughts.
He wondered why the saints did not communicate with him directly, but in the language of signs and symbols. It was hard enough interpreting the world he was in, without being given glimpses of another one he could not decipher.
He thought he could understand the order in which they appeared. St John the Baptist had forsaken human society and gone into the wilderness, where he’d eaten wild honey and locusts. He had lived as a hermit, as the king had often longed to do, free from the trappings of Church and state. St Dunstan, however, had been minister and advisor to several kings. And abbot of Glastonbury, the great church which the king hoped was not the desolate ruin of his vision. But Dunstan had been the first to insist on the unity of Church and state. He had altered the coronation ceremony to emphasize the indissoluble bond between them, and, it was said, designed the coronation crown with its spiritual significance.
Anselm, of course, had fallen out with his king, William Rufus, over that king’s refusal to accept the authority of the Church. The rift had been so severe that Anselm had gone into exile, while William Rufus, son of the Conqueror, had continued to plunder the church to fund his wars.
It seemed to King Henry that the visions pointed to some coming rift or schism between Church and state. But also they told the story of man, from spiritual purity to decline, and the rise of temporal power.
He had done everything he could to prevent that; to embody in his own being the union of temporal and spiritual authority. He did not know where he had gone so wrong.
He stumbled, and Richard Tunstall said, ‘It will not be long now, sire.’
He had tried, more than any other king since Edward the Confessor, to bring Christ’s rule to his people. In the long line of kings since the Confessor, who was his model, he would be the one to see that rule disintegrate. That was his role, his part in the great pattern of kingship, and he would not be spared the pain of seeing everything he believed in destroyed. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, he thought.
They could see the grey stone frontage now of Waddington Hall, which they would approach on foot, like monks. But Richard Tunstall explained that he had sent a man ahead of them, and there would be horses for them there.
Sir John and his wife greeted them at the door. He could tell that they were overwhelmed; his wife did not know whether or not to curtsy.
‘You will be safe here,’ Sir John said to him. ‘Monks are our most frequent visitors.’
The king started to thank them, to acknowledge the great risk they were taking, then remembering his instructions, tailed off, leaving Richard Tunstall to thank them for their hospitality towards poor monks.
Sir John’s wife, Alice, led them up a winding stone stair to a room which had an oak floor, a large window and thick walls. ‘It is a plain room,’ she began. ‘We did not have much time …’ but Richard Tunstall said i
t was a fine room, and exactly what was needed. Obviously they did not want to announce their presence to the other guests. His own room was smaller, leading from it.
Lady Alice seemed about to curtsy again, but stopped herself. ‘I will have the maid bring up some water,’ she said. When she had gone, Richard Tunstall opened the doors from his room and the king’s, examining the exits. ‘It’s good that this is the back stairway,’ he said. ‘It cannot be reached from the main entrance.’ He did not add that it would be good if they needed to escape. ‘You have a fine view,’ he said, indicating the window.
When the maid came with a bowl, Richard Tunstall helped the king to wash and shaved him himself, but when it came to the king’s hair he hesitated. ‘I think if you keep your cowl up, there will be no need to cut it –’
The king looked up at him. He wanted to say that it did not matter, he had no qualms about his appearance, but what he said was, ‘I can never repay you for everything.’
And Richard Tunstall’s face contracted a little, from pity or shame, but he said there was no need for that, none at all. It was his duty and his honour to serve his king. ‘It will not be for ever,’ he said.
Somewhere he had a wife, and a family, whom he had not seen for years, perhaps, since Towton. After Towton he’d held the castle at Bamburgh until Warwick’s siege, when he’d joined the king in Berwick. After the Battle of Hexham he’d accompanied the king into hiding. There had been months of moving about from one place to another, often sleeping rough, never daring to stay anywhere for more than a few days at a time. He had looked after the king all that time, urging him on through rough weather and rough terrain, disguising the worst effects of the king’s illness from his men, sending his scouts out to look for shelter, food, disguise. Most of his men had now deserted them; only three or four soldiers and a few attendants remained. But Richard Tunstall was a plain, dogged man, who had a capacity for not questioning his duty or his fate. He did not want the king’s gratitude. He would only say, ‘I for one am looking forward to dinner.’
And in fact they dined well, on a variety of birds such as curlew and plover. The other guests seemed to regard them with no curiosity. Except for one, who was dressed in a black habit like a Benedictine and who did not speak either. When the king was eating he could feel a certain intentness of attention directed towards him, but when he looked up the Black Monk wasn’t looking his way at all. And no one else seemed to notice anything. Sir John’s wife, Alice, passed among them herself, serving wine, and Richard Tunstall thanked her and said that the wood pigeon was very good. Then a small boy came to the table and began to sing.