For the first time since leaving Hertford Castle I saw an expression of despondency on Catherine’s face. ‘I hope it looks better inside than out,’ was all she said when Owen came to lift her down from the cart.
It did not. Every surface in the hall was covered in dust and an army of spiders had been busy spinning webs in the exposed rafters. There were also ominous beams of light descending through the sarking boards which supported the thatch and puddles on the floor below confirmed that neither roof nor walls were weather-tight. The light was welcome though, because the filth on the windows rendered the place as gloomy as our mood.
‘Perhaps we should have recruited a team of people to clean the place before we arrived,’ squeaked Anne, flapping frantically at something with long legs which had fallen on her from the beams above.
‘There was no time,’ I reminded her. ‘Dust and a few insects are infinitely preferable to the pox.’
‘You are right, Mette,’ said Catherine. ‘Let us look over the rest of the house while the babies are quiet and then we can make a plan of attack.’
I loved her for her down-to-earth practicality that day. As a queen she could have sat down and let the rest of us toil to make the place habitable, but the thought obviously never occurred to her. During a quick tour of the wings that led off each side of the hall, we discovered enough bed-chambers on the upper floors to allow each family one of their own and one to set up as a nursery for the babies. At the back were a pantry and a servery, lean-to store-rooms and still-rooms and, located separately, a brick-built bake-house and kitchen with a hearth wide enough to hold a roasting spit. Later we found a tumbledown brewery and some rickety latrines built out over the moat. Catherine held her nose at these and Thomas assured her that there were close-stools packed on the carts which would serve the same purpose.
‘We will establish stool-rooms in the house,’ he suggested.
‘Yes, Thomas,’ observed Catherine darkly. ‘But who is going to empty them?’
‘The usual people, Madame,’ he replied with a broad smile. ‘Servants and gongfermours. Such things should not concern the king’s mother.’
‘The king’s mother is concerned, Thomas.’ Catherine sounded rather cross. ‘It is important.’
The stocky receiver-general blushed. ‘I apologise, Madame. I did not mean to imply otherwise.’
‘Well, we must make plans and that is one of the first things to consider. We have few servants with us, let alone – what did you call them, gongfermours? – and jobs must be allocated among us all.’
Funnily enough, scrubbing the filthy flagstones on the kitchen floor seemed to bring the sparkle back to Alys’s eyes in a way that no coaxing or sympathy had achieved. The physical effort of bringing a neglected room back to useful service seemed to be of more therapeutic value in restoring her love of life and sense of purpose than any amount of heart to heart persuasion on Catherine’s part or mine. When I actually heard her humming a little tune to herself as she showed Catrine how to clean out a rusty cauldron with river sand and a hank of old sacking, I began to believe that we might succeed in getting her to stay on with us.
It took three days to get the house into a reasonably habitable condition and at the end of it Catherine decreed there should be a feast to celebrate. In view of the ride there and back, she even suggested that, being pregnant, she should stay behind with the servants and look after the babies while the rest of us went off to Hatfield to buy food and other necessities.
On a busy market day our presence in the town sparked no special interest apart from a few admiring male glances cast at Mildy and Alys, pretty in their colourful shawls and coifs as they filled their baskets with vegetables and fresh ewe’s milk cheese. Out of nostalgia for my childhood, I was drawn by the smell of fresh bread to the baker’s stall where I discovered that Hatfield boasted only one bakery but as many as eight breweries and two wine shops. What that said about the priorities of the populace I hesitate to suggest, but it certainly meant that we need not run short of ale, should we fail to brew enough of our own. The bakery was run by laymen at the nearby priory and, in my humble opinion, produced an inferior loaf, but then I often complained that I had not tasted decent bread since leaving France. However, the wafers and fruit pies looked delicious and I loaded my basket with these as a sweet treat for the feast.
On the way back to the lodge we made a detour to collect a fresh supply of ewe’s milk from the nearest farm, which nestled at the edge of the forest. I watched fascinated while in a matter of minutes two sturdy milk-maids filled the new wooden buckets we had bought at the market. The small sheep stood quiet and patient, staring at us with their limpid yellow eyes, little knowing that their curly pelts of fleece, almost fully re-grown after their summer shearing, were the primary source of England’s wealth. Geoffrey had told me that when the barons held their parliaments at Westminster Hall, the lord chancellor, who held the nation’s purse-strings, sat on a sack stuffed with wool to demonstrate its value to the English crown. However, for little Edmund Tudor and my own sweet William, the ewe’s milk was of far more worth.
At the feast, queen, courtiers and servants all sat around a big trestle in the hall and Owen opened a cask of wine, brought by Geoffrey from his brother’s vintry. He had loaded it on a pack-horse, which he led from London to Hadham then, after discovering our absence, on to Hatfield, arriving just as the cloth was spread. He surprised me at the kitchen hearth, putting pies into the warming oven and our kiss was hot and hungry – hot on my part, hungry on his.
‘I could swallow one of those in a mouthful,’ he said as I closed the oven door. ‘I have not eaten since dawn. My belly thinks my throat has been cut.’
I tapped the front of his padded doublet. ‘It does not look like it,’ I said. My cheeks were fiery from the heat of the fire, where only minutes ago a spitted stag had been roasting, brought down in the forest by Owen and now being carved in the servery. ‘How did you know where we were?’
‘John Meredith told me. I rode through Hadham village but I did not speak with anyone. I noticed there was a row of fresh graves in the churchyard though. John said it was the pox.’
‘We did not like to leave but we have the children to think of and you will see now that Catherine is pregnant again.’
‘You did the right thing.’ He looked about him; the sooty ceiling of the kitchen still bore remnants of its festoon of cobwebs. ‘Not exactly a palace, is it?’
‘You should have seen it before we cleaned it up. I do have a chamber though and it has a bed in it with a mattress and I might even share it with you.’
He laughed and tweaked my bright-red cheek. ‘I’ll be warm tonight then. But bed can wait. Show me the board first, please!’
When we had all eaten our fill, while the cloth was being cleared and Owen was tuning his harp, Catherine brought her cup to sit beside Geoffrey and me on a bench. ‘I have a favour to ask of you both,’ she said.
She was at a glowing stage of her pregnancy and, in honour of the feast, wore one of her court gowns. Its blue brocade skirt and sweeping fur-lined sleeves gleamed in the light of the fire, looking royally out of place in the yeoman surroundings of the hall’s open rafters and mud-plastered walls. But the torn nails and grazed skin on the hands that rested on the small mound of her baby-belly bore mute witness to her thorough share of the clean-up process.
‘I want you both to go to London for the king’s coronation.’ One hand moved indicatively over the brocaded bump. ‘Because of this I cannot support my son on his day of days, but I know Henry will regret my absence. I am the only one who knows the powerful force of the anointing, the only one who could offer him the strength of experience; how to pray for divine guidance in the God-given task he has been born to.’ Tears welled in her eyes as she contemplated her son’s future and the void her absence formed in it. ‘I ask you to witness anything you can of the event and bring me back your impressions. Go to Westminster. The king may be hearing petitions and i
f Henry should chance to hear your name or see your face he might insist on you being admitted. I will give you a letter for him just in case. It would be so good to know if it is actually placed into his hand, for I fear that those I send each month do not always reach him and those that do are always read first by another.’
‘Of course we will go to London, Mademoiselle,’ I said, moved by her earnest pleading. ‘But I do not know how much we will be able to achieve.’
Catherine reached out her hand, lacing her rag-nailed fingers with mine. ‘We have shared so much, Mette, and we will share much more. You are the only one I can send. I know you will do your best.’
32
Londoners watching King Henry the Sixth’s coronation procession began murmuring about bad omens when the rain started falling. Three days previously, Geoffrey and I had made good speed from Hatfield because the roads had still been dry and the streams and rivers low, but on the sixth day of November we peered out of our bedchamber window at dawn to find that autumn had suddenly taken a firm grip. Heavy dark clouds reached grey fingers down to the rooftops and icy winds were making whirligigs with the dead leaves that had dropped from the fruit trees in the garden.
‘We had best make haste to the Strand if we want to arrive dry,’ said Geoffrey, pulling on his hose. ‘Let us hope we have a good viewpoint.’
As a member of the Middle Temple, Geoffrey had reserved places for us to watch the procession in one of the stands erected outside the Inns of Court. I dressed hurriedly in the warmest clothes I could find, extremely grateful that Catherine had made me borrow her sable-lined hooded mantle especially for the occasion. It was a sleek and beautiful garment of the inheritable quality worn only by the highest in the land and I had protested my eligibility to wear it, but she had dismissed my doubts.
‘You are going on my behalf, Mette,’ she had insisted. ‘I would not like you to catch a chill as a result.’
As we waited for the procession to begin, I recalled the preparations Catherine had made the night before her own coronation and wondered if her son had undergone the same long prayer vigil and ritual of bathing and robing in the Tower. There could surely be no doubt that childish Henry would be even more nervous and fearful than she had been as a grown woman, contemplating the prospect of a grand ceremonial ride from the Tower of London to Westminster, the solemn anointing and crowning at the abbey and the protracted feasting afterwards. How sad it was, I thought, that he should be denied the reassuring presence of his mother, the only one with the experience to guide him through the ordeal.
Our seats in the flag-draped wooden stand were good ones, commanding a panoramic view down Fleet Street to the Strand, a thoroughfare which ran down to Westminster from Ludgate, passing a fringe of monasteries and noble mansions fronting the Thames. The rain held off while we settled down to wait, grateful for the arrival of a pie-man and a wine vendor who threaded their way between the benches to sell us some much-needed breakfast. We had napkins tucked in our purses and horn cups tied to our belts and the warm pies and spiced wine soon stilled our shivers and loosened the tongues of our fellow spectators.
The wimpled woman in front of me turned to address the man in a coney-trimmed hood, evidently her husband, who sat beside her. By the loudness of her voice she intended everyone around to hear. ‘I fear the king is over young for such a momentous occasion. What if he drinks too much ale at breakfast and gets caught short during the procession? I mean, he is just a child – still not eight years old.’
‘But kings are different, are they not? They are taught discipline from the cradle – have to be, I suppose.’ It was another goodwife who spoke, twisting round from the row in front and obliged to look up at the first speaker due to of the rake of the stand. Their male companions exchanged frowns, uneasy about the nature of the conversation.
The first woman shrugged and sniffed, unconvinced. ‘I would say my son was well brought up, but at seven when he needed a pee he had to go, there and then.’
‘Shush, madam!’ interrupted her husband. ‘It is the king you are talking about. We owe him the respect of his rank, especially on his coronation day.’
‘And for the sake of his great father, the hero of Agincourt,’ added the other woman’s companion, a florid man wearing a tarnished black chaperon. ‘It seems no time since we cheered him through here with his French bride. The noise was deafening then, but there are no triumphs for today’s warlords. The vanishing earls, I call them. Somerset has still to be ransomed, Salisbury got himself killed and now Suffolk has been captured.’ He ticked them off scornfully on his fingers. ‘Meanwhile, a French tart marches the Pretender to Rheims to be crowned king of France. Half a dozen cities opened their gates to him en route, even Troyes where good King Hal was married!’
This was news to me. Troyes had welcomed Catherine’s brother? I could not believe it. When I was last there, the people had been solidly against Prince Charles, whom they blamed for the murder of the Duke of Burgundy’s father.
The man in the fur-hood nodded vigorous agreement. ‘How does the French whore get away with it? She claims she is sent by God to save France – hah! In England we call bitches who rant like that witches.’ He made the sign of the cross to reinforce his point. ‘And put them to the flames.’
‘But the regency council is rattled enough to rush the young king into this coronation,’ grubby coif pointed out. ‘And next year he will travel to Paris to receive his French crown.’
‘If John of Bedford can hold Paris long enough.’ Fur hood was becoming more agitated. ‘The whore has already tried to storm the gates, but at least this time she was sent packing.’
‘Someone should put a stop to her before she bewitches the whole of France. She is costing us a fortune! Ugh, here comes the rain.’ The second man pulled his hood over his coif.
There was the nub of it, I thought, retreating under my own hood. London merchants were sick of financing wars in France that did not result in rich pickings and the success of this girl Jeanne, who these men called a whore and the French knew as the Maid, was seriously affecting trade. For her own sake I prayed that she would go back home before it was too late, because I knew exactly what kind of man her ‘king’ Charles was and I would have wagered my best silver belt buckle that he would do nothing to help her if she fell into English hands.
Geoffrey slipped his hand into mine under the folds of my cloak and squeezed it in warning. He could see I was fulminating and feared that if I opened my mouth I would spark an argument. Luckily at that moment we heard the sound of trumpets and everyone’s attention switched to the Ludgate where heralds on the battlements were signalling that the king’s procession was about to leave the city walls. On a platform beside us at the Temple Bar a group of costumed boys hastily assembled themselves into a choir of angels, each of them harnessed with feathered wings and crowned with a gilded halo, while a beautiful girl in a blue robe mounted a raised throne in their midst and someone passed up a small child with golden hair, perhaps her own offspring or it might not have sat so calm and still on her lap. The Blessed Virgin Mary and the Christ Child were waiting to honour the king as he passed by – an appropriate image in view of the tender age of the monarch, but ironic too, I thought, in the absence of his own mother.
Out of every window and from the city battlements people waved banners and shouted greetings. The Lord Mayor and Aldermen in robes of scarlet and gold led a column of guild masters through the Ludgate, resplendent in their tasselled hats and chains of office, dispersing to either side of the roadway, ready to bow the king from the city precincts. They were followed first by a detachment of the royal guard, marching in gleaming breastplates and sallet helmets under a forest of long pikes and then by the king’s retinue of knights, wearing highly polished plate armour and crested surcôtes, their horses in full trappings, embroidered with colourful heraldic devices. Behind them and surrounding the king came his most noble vassals led by the Duke of Gloucester and the Earl of Warwick, who,
as the king’s governor, held the lead rein of Henry’s prancing white pony.
A lump came to my throat when I saw the little king, for he sat ramrod straight in his saddle like a true chevalier, a gold coronet on his head and an expression of intense pride on his face. Riding beside the warlike Earl of Warwick, he could not help appearing small and vulnerable and I was too far away to glean any sense of his true feelings from his expression, but there was no doubting his self-belief. Henry was playing his role to the manner born. Catherine would have been immensely proud of him. Then we were all given a clue to his character, for as soon as the angel choir began to sing he turned his head to listen, ignoring the deep farewell bows of the London guildsmen. When Warwick drew them to the king’s attention, he shook his head impatiently and drew rein, raising his hand to indicate that he wished the procession to halt.
‘I want to hear the angels sing,’ he declared in a voice high enough and loud enough to carry up to the stands.
Faced with this very public display of the royal will, the Earl of Warwick had no choice but to acquiesce and the whole procession ground to a halt behind them, waiting while Henry sat on his fidgety pony and enjoyed the whole anthem, ignoring the steady curtain of rain which soaked his ermine-trimmed mantle and dripped off the helmets of the stern-faced pike-men. Just as Edmund Beaufort had told us at Hadham, the king obviously preferred a choir above everything.
Meanwhile the rain increased in intensity and once the procession had passed, no one was sorry to quit the stands. As fast as they could, the lawyers, their wives and families hurried to their respective Inns to indulge in the celebratory feasts provided. When the bells of London began to peal from every direction we knew that in St Peter’s Church at Westminster Abbey the probably still damp boy-king had been crowned.
We heard that King Henry would be meeting petitioners at Westminster Hall the following day, and I had announced my intention of being among them. Sensibly, Geoffrey would not let me walk to the Palace of Westminster. ‘You will want to wear your finest clothes to meet the king,’ he said, ‘and the hem of your skirt will get filthy. We will ride there and take Jem to hold the horses.’
The Tudor Bride Page 33