“And only Lovell is alive to tell of it,” added Stafford.
In all the talk there had been about the battle no one had told Elizabeth this before. “You actually saw it?” she asked, scarcely above a whisper.
Surprisingly it was the deep voice of Stanley's son that answered her from out of the gathering gloom. “I saw it from that hill,” he said. And although he spoke reluctantly, as became a confirmed Lancastrian, he seemed to be seeing it still. “The Plantagenet set his spear in rest and charged, leading that heroic little handful. His untiring sword seemed to cleave a passage for them. He looked like some inspired superman fighting his way through bare steel, with his horse slipping and stumbling over the dead and wounded he left behind. There was that burly giant, Sir John Cheney, I remember, standing guard before his Lancastrian master. But the King, slight of frame as he was, unhorsed him. With one stroke he slew Sir William Brandon, the Tudor standard-bearer, and, wrenching the silken banners from his dying hand, threw them con temptuously to the ground—then pressed on so that the proud Pendragon emblems were trampled into the blood-red earth by White Surrey's hoofs. There was no one between the two rivals then. Yorkist Richard had fought his way across the field and the Lancastrian was almost within his grasp. I wouldn't have given a row of pins at that moment for Henry Tudor's life!”
“Riding back to help him, I could see his face, and it was livid,” said Stafford. “Henry Tudor is no coward, but seeing that invincible surcoat of English leopards bearing down upon him he must have believed his last hour had come!”
“And then a miracle happened—”
“My uncle, William Stanley, moved for the first time. With his three thousand men he dashed in and surrounded Richard, cutting him off within striking distance of his prey—”
“Nothing could have been more neatly timed—”
“'Foul treason!' yelled Richard, turning in the saddle to strike in all directions,” went on Brereton. “Catesby tried to get him out of it, but he just went on hacking and fighting his way through the growing number of Sir William's men. When his horse was killed under him he stabbed yet another man and stumbled forward, his hands outstretched as if to get at his enemy's throat. His head was bare, his gauntlets gone, and his green eyes were blinded with blood. He must have had a dozen wounds before they closed in and killed him…”
Elizabeth was thankful that the tall candles had burnt themselves out. “And then they set his crown upon Henry,” she said in a proud calm voice, hoping that they would not notice that her face had been hidden in her hands.
“A soldier found it in a hawthorn bush and gave it to Sir Reginald Bray, and my father put it upon the Tudor's head and everyone shouted 'Long live King Henry,'” said Strange, repeating the words she had heard so often during the last few days. “The new King called all his supporters together and made a fine speech of thanks and then we all chanted the Te Deum. Towards evening, after we had eaten and cleaned ourselves, we rode with triumph into Leicester. No one dared to oppose us, so my father ordered all the trumpets to be sounded and my stepbrother was proclaimed Henry the Seventh of England.”
They had told their story well, but somehow the recital of that splendid moment, which should have been the climax of it all, fell flat and stale. They talked a while of how well Henry had been received as they came southwards down to London, and of how modestly he had avoided all military display; but their minds kept going back to the battle.
“Where was Richard buried?” Elizabeth said, voicing the question she had long been wanting to ask.
“The Grey Friars in Leicester begged his body after it had been shown to the people at one of the city gates,” one of them told her.
“That was kind,” she said. “But how was he brought there? From Bosworth, I mean.”
There was an uncomfortable silence during which Tom Stafford picked up his lute and Humphrey Brereton fiddled quite unnecessarily with a disarranged ribbon on his doublet. “George was the last to see him,” he said evasively.
Tom Stafford moved behind her stool, swinging the gaily ribboned lute, and his free hand rested momentarily on her shoulder. “You do not want to hear that, Bess,” he said gently. “After all, he was your uncle—and had been an anointed King.”
“But I must hear,” said Elizabeth, brushing aside his hand and still looking expectantly towards Stanley's son.
“His body was brought into Leicester across a horse,” Strange said with slow reluctance. “Dusk was drawing on and after the long hot day it had begun to rain—that steady, hopeless rain that beats slantingly across open country.”
It was quite dusk in the Princess's apartment and rain was beating hard against the window-panes. Elizabeth tried to picture those long, sodden, midland fields. “Not on poor White Surrey,” she said, sighing.
“No. Some borrowed farm nag, I should think. But the sorry brute was so bespattered with his blood I could not really see.”
Elizabeth could picture that too. It was her own blood—her father's… “If—he was so wounded—hadn't someone taken off his armour?” she managed to ask.
“They had taken off—everything,” muttered Strange. “He was stark naked, with his head hanging down on one side and his feet dangling from the other.”
“And his face?”
“I could not see it. His brown hair hung over it, all matted. And although they had pulled his body from beneath a pile of the slain, some sadistic fool had found it necessary to put a halter about his neck. I do assure you, Madam, this was no doing of my father's—”
Elizabeth had left the fireside with a swish of skirts and gone swiftly to the window. “Merciful Mother of God!” she moaned, leaning her forehead against the coolness of the painted glass.
“You should not have told her!” she heard Stafford hiss savagely. And then Strange's reasonable retort, “She asked me!”
“I did,” she called back to him from the window. “Go on!”
The unfortunate young man had no choice. “The fellow who led the horse had hunched himself into his jerkin against the rain,” he recalled, with a trained soldier's eye for detail. “It was quite dusk by the time I saw them, and they were crossing that narrow bridge that leads across the Soar into Leicester. And as the horse jogged over the hump of it so Richard's head bumped like a dangling wet mop against the wooden struts of the bridge.”
“Don't!” cried Elizabeth sharply.
There was a long silence in the darkening room. The three elegantly dressed young men stood about discomfited until she rejoined them. It had been her own fault, and they all knew it. “He was the last Plantagenet King,” she said apologetically, feeling like a murderess of her race. And then suddenly she clapped her hands impatiently. “Bring lights, some of you!” she called. “Are there no servants in the Palace that we must endure this abominable darkness?”
And when the servants came running and the lovely room sprang into soft golden light again she turned to her guests with eyes unnaturally bright—whether from excitement or from tears they knew not. “But what I have destroyed I will restore,” she vowed. “From now on there will be Tudors. Born of my body.” She seemed scarcely to be speaking to them, but rather to some unseen audience beyond the Palace walls, and with a gesture of magnificent certainty she passed her hands, palms spread, down her body from breasts to slender thighs. “With the agonies of childbirth I will pay for what I have done. Without warmongering or murder, I will give England and Wales a new dynasty. My children's children will bring this country peace and prosperity.”
Then, dropping from her high prophetic mood, she began to laugh crazily and held out her hands invitingly to Stafford, drawing him into a gay measure. George Strange, relieved that their conversation was over, reached across the settle for his friend's lute and began to pick out an accompaniment to their steps. Humphrey Brereton's dark eyes lighted with half-envious laughter as he stood watching the two of them prance and turn about the room—watching Elizabeth dancing away the desolat
ing picture of Richard Plantagenet's body being jogged ignominiously over Leicester Bridge.
ELIZABETH'S WEDDING HAD BEEN every whit as splendid as her mother-in-law had promised. There had been the beautiful ceremony in the Abbey and feasting in the Palace, and a procession through London with all the church bells ringing. And when, in their relief at the cessation of years of civil warfare, the people had lit bonfires and danced around them in the snow, Elizabeth knew that their singing had been a spontaneous expression of their love for her. All her sisters had begged to help dress her in her bridal finery, and Cicely and Ann, looking almost like stately grown women, had held her train. Remembering her mortification over her first wedding gown, Elizabeth had thanked God that this one betokened no lifelong exile in a foreign land. Instead of being covered with fleur de lys it had been lovingly embroidered with red and white roses; and when her kinsman, Cardinal Bourchier, placed her hand in Henry's, people had wept for joy because at that moment it had seemed that the familiar war-worn emblems had turned into a single bloom. A great Tudor rose, with red encircling white. And to her delight Henry had taken this as their mutual badge, and already it was woven on her bed-hangings and his chair of state and on the royal servants' liveries.
In the midst of her own triumph it had been good to see her mother's mended pride, and the happiness that shone in Margaret Beaufort's lovely, ageing face; but in her secret heart Elizabeth had been most grateful of all for Pope Innocent's considerate kindness when, in his dispensation, he had purposely alluded to her as “the undoubted heir of her illustrious father,” thus killing for all time the ugly slur upon her name.
But even the magnificence of her wedding could not make her forget its tardiness. The battle of Bosworth had been fought and won in August, yet it was not until after Christmas that Henry had married her—and then only because Parliament, prodded by the angry mutterings of the people, had specially petitioned him to do so. And because Parliament had been astute enough to make the petition synchronize with their proposal to grant him poundage and tonnage for life, Elizabeth was never sure whether it was the remembrance of his promise or the considerable addition to his income which had persuaded him.
For her part, she had gone to her marriage with gladness. With all the natural sweetness of her nature she had striven against resentment, preserving her gaiety and trying to please him. Again and again she reminded herself that, except for hearsay, she and her husband were practically strangers, believing in her optimism that she would soon come to understand him.
“Have you seen what our loyal poet John de Gigli says about us?” she asked one morning, sitting up in their great state bed and laughing delightedly over an illuminated presentation scroll. “He calls me 'the fairest of King Edward's daughters.' Surely I am not more beautiful than my dainty sister Ann?”
She looked so much more beautiful, and her question was so provocative, that it was the moment for any new bridegroom to be passionately definite; but Henry Tudor had risen early and was putting on his furred bed-gown because he had a great many business plans for the day.
“Look, Henry, what the dear man says, too, about all the happiness we are going to bring our people!” persisted Elizabeth, waving the flattering verses beneath his nose.
Ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have let their business go hang and taken her fragrant body in their arms; but Henry only took the scroll. He did not care particularly about the personal happiness of a lot of Englishmen, but he skimmed through the lines politely. To his more critical, cosmopolitan mind they seemed more loving than polished, and overfull of pro-Yorkist enthusiasm. “I see the fellow has the impertinence to infer that your title has become mine,” he remarked, laying the effusion down on the gorgeous coverlet.
Watching the frown gather on his forehead, Elizabeth remembered too late that this was just the impression he had been trying so hard to avoid. “But won't you read on?” she invited hastily. “He says all manner of admiring things about you later.”
“I am afraid what Master de Gigli thinks of me is not highly important, and my secretary will be waiting,” he excused himself, inserting his slender feet into his neatly placed slippers.
“Is your secretary so much more important than your wife?” pouted Elizabeth.
Henry smiled indulgently and bent to kiss her, explaining something about his plans for reducing the immense private armies of the barons which he was anxious to have prepared before Parliament reassembled; but Elizabeth scarcely listened because of the resentment rising hotly within her. “Does it mean nothing to you that other men consider me beautiful?” she demanded.
“It means a great deal,” he assured her, straightening himself and passing a careful hand over his hair where she had ruffled it.
“Then why will you not sh-show it?” she persisted, her pansy-blue eyes filling with disappointed tears.
Instead of holding her close against his heart and showing her then and there beyond all possible doubt, Henry merely handed her his handkerchief. “Surely, my dear, I showed how proud I was of you in that so fine wedding procession which cost me more than my coronation,” he pointed out gravely.
He was trying to please her, but the very temperance of his praise enraged her. And it did not help matters that his precise English sounded as if it had been conned out of a book, with occasional sentences arranging themselves like an exact translation from the French; although she supposed that in some people—people with more sense of humour, perhaps—it might have sounded charming. “In a public procession, where other men are judging what you got for your money—yes!” she cried, with a fine echo of her father's temper. “But what about when we are alone—in bed?”
She was talking straight out of her mind, just as her younger brothers were wont to do, without weighing her words. It was the way they all talked between themselves in her family. But, in spite of the adventurous life he had led, her husband was singularly full of inhibitions, and his obvious embarrassment made her feel crude. “Though, after all,” she thought in exasperation, “bed is the only place in which he ever bothers to see me alone. And even that he probably looks upon as part of his state duties.”
Seeing that she was really upset, he came and sat down beside her. “Marriages like ours are—only arranged,” he reminded her patiently.
Obviously he could not comprehend the cause of her anger; but he looked thoughtful and considerate, and perhaps a trifle forlorn himself. “Of course you are right, and I have probably been foolish to expect—whatever I did expect,” agreed Elizabeth, sniffing a little and absent-mindedly arranging his damp handkerchief in a square across her drawn-up knees. It was hard to admit that perhaps all that hopeful, rosy haze of romancing might have been on her side only. That while she was thinking of the all-important invasion in terms of rescuing knights and grateful meetings he had probably been thinking only about transport and supplies. Hard; but, after all, quite reasonable. And even after his arrival, while she had been eating her heart out impatiently and filling in time at Westminster, she knew that Henry had been busy establishing himself securely and making so many wise plans for the country that it had probably seemed to him no time at all.
“You are not imagining, are you, that I married you only because the Commons pressed me to it?” he said. “Had I wanted an excuse to delay our wedding still longer there was the sweating sickness in London; but, as you know, I disregarded it.”
There was no gainsaying his argument, and the sweating sickness had been so bad that even her own mother had wanted the ceremony postponed because of the swift contagion. Elizabeth had found him to be one of the least pretentious of men, but was beginning to understand how extremely touchy he was about his own rights and capabilities. “I do not let other people move me,” he went on explaining rather unnecessarily. “I do whatever I have planned neither sooner nor later than I have planned to do it.”
“Like God Almighty!” thought Elizabeth irreverently; but, realizing once again that her spontan
eous reactions were more worthy of her unregenerate young brother Dickon than of a Queen, she managed to answer with a suitable mixture of dignity and wifely submission. “I understand perfectly your reason for wanting to be crowned first, and I pray that our 'arranged' marriage, which was so necessary to your plans, has not proved too distasteful. We are neither of us children, and you have lived precariously abroad. Both of us have had ample time to meet and care for someone whom we might have preferred to marry.” She was delighted to see how sharply and searchingly he looked up at her unexpected words, and forestalled him with any questioning there might be. “Has it been more difficult for you, Henry, because you were once in love with Maude Herbert?”
“How did you hear of that?” he asked, shaken out of his usual complacency.
“Your mother told me how kind Lord and Lady Herbert were to you when you were my father's prisoner in Pembroke Castle, and that you two were friends. But since you were little more than a lad when your uncle took you away to Brittany I hoped that you might have forgotten her.”
An almost boyish smile curved Henry of Richmond's thin mouth. “You don't suppose that I submitted to exile as tamely as that, do you?” he said. “Your father and that war-mongering uncle of yours would probably have worried themselves into yet earlier graves had they known I was back home in Wales!”
“You were in Wales?” Elizabeth leaned forward, watching him. Watching the intrepid young Earl of Richmond he must have been. She was seeing him as a new person, and he had never interested her so much.
“More than once. Keeping my place warm against my return,” he laughed shortly.
“And meeting Maude?” Somehow, because of his venturesomeness, she minded much more now about the Yorkist Governor of Pembroke's pretty daughter.
The Tudor rose Page 18