by Livi Michael
She’d been assured by her councillors that the Yorkist army would also have suffered. They’d travelled along the old drove road, which was wide and clear, but there was nothing for them there, so high up on the Cotswold Ridge, no food nor drink, just the sun beating down.
That was one source of comfort and another was that her army was bigger. She had more than 7,000 men, though some had deserted, and the Yorkists less than 5,000. So she was told.
But her son was on the field.
‘Maman, n’aie pas peur,’ he’d said in the old intimate way. ‘I’m in good hands here.’
She’d taken his hand and squeezed it, then put up her other hand and touched his cheek and for once he did not shy away. There was so much she wanted to say to him, but Lord Wenlock had stepped forward. ‘I’ll take good care of him, my lady,’ he said. Then he said that he’d arranged for her to stay at a manor a few miles away, which belonged to some relatives of his. When the battle was over a messenger would be sent and she could easily return.
They did not want her on the battlefield. Though it was her army and her cause that she’d fought for so long now that she could hardly remember a time when she had not been fighting it.
But she’d had to defer to him, and to her son, because by God’s grace, at the end of that day he would be king. Or as good as.
And so she’d touched his cheek and kissed him briefly on the lips. God bless and keep you, she’d said. She couldn’t say any more. She’d left with her daughter-in-law, Anne Neville, and the other ladies. Dr Morton and Dr Ralph Mackerell were accompanying them. But she’d insisted on stopping at this high place to watch the start of the battle.
Dr Morton didn’t like the delay. He’d arranged for two monks to guide them across the river at the bottom of the hill. ‘My lady,’ he said, ‘this is not what we agreed.’
But she could not stop scanning the field for her son.
Surely she should have said something to him before she’d left – about all the years they’d spent together, waiting for this day, how he was all her world. But he’d turned away from her, impatient for his first battle.
But he’d been smiling, she remembered that – smiling and full of hope.
‘We can’t ford the river without help,’ Dr Morton said.
‘I can’t see him,’ she replied. She could not see anyone in the dense crowd of fighting men.
‘He’s probably not on the field yet, my lady,’ said Dr Morton. ‘He was with Lord Wenlock – not the duke. It will take too long to search him out now.’
The queen looked for a sign of Lord Wenlock’s men. But she couldn’t see him either.
What she could see was the hail of arrows raining on the Duke of Somerset’s party, then the duke manoeuvring himself out of line, the shape of his battalion altering, veering round and up the slope of a hill.
Then he launched into a headlong charge.
The queen leaned forward in her saddle.
In the fierce combat that ensued she saw the Duke of Gloucester leading his men in a great wave to join his brother. Then they sounded a retreat.
The queen gripped the reins of her horse as if she would ride down to join them. All the blood drained from her fingers.
But it was a ruse, a trick. The Duke of Gloucester only pretended to withdraw, then attacked again. Somerset’s army, having lost their defensive position, crashed fully into the Yorkist left flank.
And she could see, as her army could not, a contingent of spearmen emerging from the wood.
The said spears … came and broke upon the Duke of Somerset and his vanward all at once … whereof they were greatly dismayed … [and] took them to flight in the park and the meadows that were near and into the lanes and dykes where they best hoped to escape the danger …
The Arrivall
Dr Morton caught hold of the reins of her horse. ‘We must go,’ he said. On his face was a look of pity, or fear.
‘No,’ she said, but he pulled her horse round.
‘There’s no time,’ he said, and she tried to object but he was tugging the reins. ‘You can do nothing here,’ he said and, overtaken by a sudden weakness, she allowed him to lead her down the track to where the rest of their company were waiting.
Perhaps it was the strain of the last two days, or the trepidation of battle, but she could feel her limbs juddering.
She could not remember whether she had told her son that she loved him, or had only said it in her heart.
Of the queen’s forces, either on the battlefield or afterwards by the avenging hands of certain persons, there were killed Prince Edward, King Henry’s only son [and others].
Crowland Chronicle
This then done and with God’s might achieved the king went straight to the abbey [at Tewkesbury] to give praise to Almighty God … and there were fled into the same church many of his rebels in great number, hoping there to have been relieved and saved from bodily harm, [and the king] gave them all free pardon. So in that abbey were found Edmund, called Duke of Somerset, the prior of St John’s called Sir John Langstrother, Sir Thomas Tresham and other notable persons which all were brought before the king’s brother the Duke of Gloucester, Constable of England, and the Duke of Norfolk, Marshal of England and … were executed in the midst of the town upon a scaffold therefore made, beheaded every one without any dismembering …
All these things being done, the Tuesday the 7th day of May, the king departed towards his city of Worcester and on the way had certain knowledge that the queen was not far from there in a poor religious place …
The Arrivall
48
Little Malvern Priory
They had come here, some fourteen miles from the battlefield, because after the messenger had arrived at the manor where they had taken refuge, Dr Morton had said it wasn’t safe to stay.
The queen didn’t want to move. The battle might be lost, but there was still no news of her son, she said. But Dr Morton said there would be news soon enough.
It was a difficult journey. All the women apart from the queen were weeping and stricken. The queen rode very straight in the saddle, head tilted, muscles braced as though to bear incalculable loss.
She entered the priory and refused to leave. This was as far as she was going, she said. They were all free to travel on without her. She would wait here until she had news of her son.
Dr Morton, for the first time in their acquaintance, seemed not to know what to do.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘we will stay here this night. In the morning you may think differently.’
But in the morning Sir William Stanley arrived with the king’s men.
She had never liked the Stanleys. The older brother, Thomas, was only interested in saving his own skin. Sir William was little more than a henchman.
‘Come, my lady,’ he said, ‘your son is dead. It is time to leave.’
She would not sit down, she would not fall. She stared at him and would not lower her gaze.
‘You lie,’ she said.
Sir William glanced back towards his men with an unpleasant smile on his face.
‘I do not have his corpse with me,’ he said, ‘but perhaps King Edward will let you attend the burial. If he is to be buried,’ he said, and there were grins all round from his men.
Behind her there was the sound of sobbing. She took a step towards him and Dr Morton laid a warning hand on her arm. ‘You are the low-born son of a filthy whore,’ she said.
She did not know if she had spoken in English or French, but Sir William’s face changed. He nodded. Then he advanced towards her, stepping too close, much closer than was permissible, and put his mouth next to her ear.
‘Your son died weeping and begging for his life,’ he said. ‘He cried out to the Duke of Clarence to save him. He did not stop begging or crying as they butchered him like any animal. From what I saw,’ he said, ‘it is just as well that he will never be king.’
There was a rushing noise in her head where his words had
been. Perhaps she swayed or stumbled, or lifted her hand to strike him, for Dr Morton had caught her arm again.
‘Tell King Edward that we are at his commandment,’ he said.
Queen Margaret was captured and kept in security so that she might be borne in a carriage in front of the king at his triumphal procession in London …
Crowland Chronicle
And in every part of England where any commotion was begun for King Henry’s party they were rebuked so that it appeared to every man that the queen’s party was extinct and repressed for ever without any hope of revival.
The Arrivall
Yesterday King Louis heard, with extreme sorrow … that King Edward has not only routed the prince but taken and slain him. He has also taken the queen and sent her to London to keep King Henry company, being a prisoner there.
Newsletter from France
49
The Tower of London
It had always seemed to King Henry that each man suffered not only on his own account, but collectively; that the sins of the many fell upon the few. One man could offer himself in expiation, for all humanity to be washed in his blood.
It was a necessary oblation. Also hard, beyond the capacity of language to express.
Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani!
But if it was hard for him, he knew it must be so much harder for his wife.
If he had never loved her he would never have known that wound; the suffering that comes from witnessing suffering. The helplessness as they travel on their destructive road, because it is the only road they can travel.
If he had never loved her he would never have known that love would not redeem either of them. But he had always loved her, from the moment he’d seen that tiny portrait.
There were those who’d doubted it, who thought it delusion, but he remembered that moment; he remembered that his heart shook.
His heart shook, there was no other way to put it. There was that sense of knowing, of always having known.
It was a mystery, great and impenetrable, like the mystery of God.
The more time he spent on his knees, the more he saw there was only the mystery.
His wife knew he loved her. It bound her to him, despite everything, so that she could not entirely let him go.
Many, many times he had wished that for her, that she would let him go.
But there was their son.
He did not know how to even think about his son. His hand trembled as he lit a candle for him; his head emptied of prayer.
All that was required of him was that he should pray. And prayer was very often not of words at all. He could feel his tongue moving, groping towards familiar words.
At the same time he thought he could hear movement in the corridor outside his room; his cell, as he had come to think of it, because it was like a hermit’s cell.
Thou knowest what thou will do with me …
That was the knowledge that He kept secret from man. Necessarily secret.
There were footsteps now, approaching.
Deal with me according to thy most compassionate will …
The footsteps had stopped outside his room.
King Henry VI opened his eyes. He could see the candle flame with its halo of light, and the crucifix with its wounded Christ. He could not remember any more of the words of his prayer, though he had said them most of the days of his adult life.
It seemed to him best to remain kneeling, facing away from the door as it opened.
The same night that King Edward came to London, King Henry being … in the Tower of London was put to death, the 21st day of May, on a Tuesday, between 11 and 12 of the clock, being then at the Tower the Duke of Gloucester, brother to King Edward, and many others, and on the morrow he was chested and brought to St Paul’s and his face was open so that every man might see him and in his lying he bled on the pavement there and afterwards at the Blackfriars was brought and he bled new and fresh …
Warkworth’s Chronicle
I shall pass over the discovery of the lifeless body of King Henry in the Tower of London. May God show mercy and grant sufficient time to repent to whomever it was who dared raise a sacrilegious hand against the Lord’s anointed. Let the perpetrator deserve to be called tyrant and the victim to be called martyr.
Crowland Chronicle
King Edward has not chosen to have the custody of King Henry any longer though he was in some sense innocent and there was no great fear about his proceedings, the prince his son and the Earl of Warwick being dead, as well as all those who were for him … as he has caused King Henry to be secretly assassinated in the Tower where he was a prisoner … He has, in short, chosen to crush the seed.
Newsletter from France, 17 June 1471
50
Consequences
This unhappy plague of division had spread not only among princes but in every society … the slaughter of men was immense, for beside the dukes, earls, barons and distinguished warriors who were cruelly slain, innumerable multitudes of the common people died of their wounds. Such was the state of the kingdom.
Crowland Chronicle
There is many a great sore, many a perilous wound left unhealed.
Rotuli Parliamentorum
Reginald Bray came to her room. He was carrying a tray of food. ‘You must eat, my lady,’ he said. He set the tray down in front of her but Margaret barely glanced at it.
‘What would Sir Henry say?’
A rhetorical question, of course. But he was waiting. She thought of telling him it was not his job to carry food, but then he would only say how concerned he was, they all were. At length she said dully, without looking up, ‘He would say I must eat.’
‘Yes, my lady,’ Reginald Bray said, ‘he would.’
Without asking her permission he sat at the table facing her. She wondered briefly what she must look like to him. Her eyes felt sore and were probably red; she had not combed or dressed her hair. But his expression did not change as he looked at her; it remained one of gentle, grave concern. She did not want to talk, however, and she didn’t want to eat. Her husband was dead.
He had not died heroically, on the battlefield, but months later, after terrible suffering. One of the uncounted, unsung dead.
‘A little bread, perhaps,’ Reginald Bray said.
She did not want to have to speak sharply to him. He was her husband’s longest-standing, most trusted retainer. He had searched the battlefield for his body, among all the bodies of the dead. And had brought him back still living, but barely alive. He’d helped her nurse him through all the terrible months that followed. And when Henry finally died, he’d made all the arrangements for the funeral.
Now he was running her household, while she remained in her room.
She did not want to have to rebuke him, but he was breaking up the bread and dipping it into the soup. Even the smell of it made her feel sick.
‘Take it away,’ she said.
‘My lady –’
‘Don’t,’ she said. She turned away from him, sitting sideways in her chair.
There was a long pause. ‘He was a good man, my lady.’
Her eyes filled and she blinked hard. She didn’t want to cry in front of this manservant, however trusted. She’d had enough of crying.
‘Yes,’ she managed to say. ‘He was.’
‘We are all of us grieving, my lady.’
‘Yes,’ she said again.
‘He was such a good master,’ he said, and she wanted to tell him to stop saying that – there was no point, no meaning to the words. He was a good man, and now he was dead. How did that make sense?
‘He would want me to take care of you now – to make sure that you eat.’ He held a piece of bread out to her, but she was not a child. She twisted further away.
‘You may go.’
‘You have not eaten.’
‘Go.’
For a moment she thought he would refuse to leave. But then he rose, scraping the chair back noisily.
There were many things she had to do. She had letters to write. There were many people to write to, but she could not find the words she needed to say. Every time she tried her mind was filled with swarming, incoherent thoughts. She sat down again at her table, forgetting to take paper from a drawer.
Her husband was dead.
He’d taken the decision to fight without her, had sent to her for his armour. And when she’d sent it to him he’d sent the messenger back with his will. And instructions for his body to be buried where it best ples God that I dye.
Even now those words almost undid her. The thought of him putting on the armour she’d sent, preparing for battle, made her want to weep uncontrollably. He’d died fighting for her, there was no doubt about that. He’d saved her from the prospect of attainder, imprisonment, the loss of everything she had. If she’d received the document earlier she would have done everything in her power to stop him going. But by the time she’d got it there was nothing she could do. The battle was being fought.
When she’d heard the outcome she’d thought for one brief moment that it would be all right. His side had won, he would be coming back to her. But two days had passed without any news. She knew he would have tried to send a messenger at least. On the third day she’d sent out riders, Reginald Bray and others. She would have gone with them, but Reginald Bray had talked her out of it. ‘We will find him, my lady,’ he’d said. ‘But it may take some time.’
It is no place for a woman, he did not say, or He may not be alive.
And they had found him, still alive, among all the bodies of the field. Where he had lain for three days.
If they had not found him he might well have been buried, for the digging had already begun. All the unclaimed bodies piled into trenches, earth shovelled over them.
But she couldn’t think about that. It made her feel sick.
It had taken him nearly six months to die of a festering wound. Compounded by his own illness, of course, which had flared up again. And by fits of madness in which he thought he was among the dead; his wife, his servants, his brother who visited, all of them were the dead.