The Queen's Bastard

by Robin Maxwell

  We cavalry are waiting still for the order to charge, our horses blowing and pawing the ground restlessly. Now we watch as the bulk of our infantry streams forth from the wood onto the field. From the road in the wood three gun carriages emerge — all that can fit on the narrow gravel pathway, for the fields are too soft for heavy cannon.

  The English form squares too, in the fields of tulips, but they are smaller squares, fewer men. They form wedges, S’s and D’s taught in drills on easy ground in England. Protect the ensign bearer. All squares and wedges firing. Men falling. We are outnumbered two to one.

  The sound comes for the cavalry to charge. A cold thrill shudders my tightly wound frame as suddenly horses all round me bolt from the greenwood into the scarlet field. I am unaware that I have spurred Beauty to action but she has none the less taken me, and we are running amongst them. We horsemen form, in four lines one behind the other, a great sweeping phalanx to harry the outer edge of the Spanish Square.

  My thighs squeeze Beautys sides with all my might for I must sit tall, a tower of strength galloping full speed forward towards the mortal enemy. All of my life, all of my dreams have driven me towards this moment. And I am afire, fearless, entirely mindless whilst altogether conscious.

  I am in the second of our four lines of cavalry. I slow to watch the first line approach for assault, discharge both pistols into the square. The man before me is knocked from his horse as if a great hand has dealt him a backhanded blow. His mount, confused, stops dead and is her self felled by enemy fire. That sight at close range — the horse dying so easily, even more than the man — is a lance to my belly. But wild blood now flows in my veins and no sight, neither pitiful nor infuriating, stays my course. Beauty and I charge ahead to take the position of the fallen rider. I have promised my self to never fire blindly in order to make a hasty retreat, so I halt for the space of a breath, silently thanking Beauty for her unearthly calm. Feel a pellet streak close by my ear. Steady. Find my target — a short Spaniard kneeling, aiming at me. I fire. He is knocked violently backwards and quickly replaced by another arquebusier who, kneeling, lowers his gun to aim. I fire again, wheel Beauty about and retreat to the rear line, never waiting to see the result of my second shot.

  I lie low down on Beautys back whispering frantic assurances in her ear. I reload my pistols but never have time to remove to the front line, for now the enemy cavalry is upon us. A mounted Spaniard gallops at me, a madman, guns blazing. In the moment before I fire back, still lying low on Beautys neck, I see a side of the Spanish Square crumbling, the terrible pikemen released from their protective shield wall of artillery, spilling from the rupture onto the field. Two blasts from my guns. The Spaniard spins sideways and tumbles from his stallion which keeps coming, coming. So close I can reach out and touch him, but I do not. I force my mind from the fate of horses on the battlefield.

  I see Captain Medford leading a wedge of infantrymen against the onrushing foot soldiers. I hastily reload. Catch from the corner of my eye the sight of a pikeman, weapon poised at myself, a perfect target on my high horse. He is running, shrieking an inhuman sound as he comes. I leap down from Beauty. Kneel below her belly. Fire. He falls. My horse bolts with the unexpected explosion under her. “Run for the trees!” I shout at her, but I know she can not hear.

  For one blessed moment my body is not under immediate siege, tho all round me are pairs of men doing heinous battle, one with the other, hand to hand. The shroud of smoke has obscured the clear morning sky. Fallen men and fallen horses lie torn and gutted, bleeding their scarlet blood onto scarlet flowers. Most obscene butchery amidst Gods greatest beauty.

  Another of the enemy rushes at me and I, this first day a soldier, find my self on foot, pistols useless, flung away. I raise my sword and as I charge the Spaniard I hear a loud bloodchilling cry — an animal cry — and only in the moment when metal clashes with bloody metal do I know the sound is in my own throat. Then I am lost entirely, have only vague memory of the melee, the anguished sounds of men dying, the numbers I have killed or maimed, how long I have danced that dreadful dance. I know only I am alive still when the fife sounds the retreat, hear that it comes not from the direction of the fortress but from the road away from Gouda. We are leaving the fort to its owners, and we attackers are fleeing. Roundly defeated, leaving our dead behind.

  I am numb, can barely whistle for Beauty. I stumble round the field blinded by the thick smoke, tread with my boot upon the gutted body of an Englishman, his face strangely peaceful in death. I recoil. Then remember seeing Hirst die. He was kneeling, struggling to reload. A horseman racing up behind him, sword in hand. The blow. My friends blood spurting a terrible fountain.

  I shout Beautys name unable to mask my growing desperation. Suddenly she appears through the grey mist. She is unhurt, entirely sound. I love that brave horse in that moment all that I ever loved my faithful Charger. Mount her and she gallops off, trampling with her hooves a path amidst the red Dutch tulips on the way to our shameful retreat.

  Twenty-six

  Even as a young soldier I knew that the close companion of victory was defeat, but I did never imagine how bitter losing could be when the cause was stupidity and the outcome unnecessary. In the Battle of the Tulips, as the soldiers came to call it, together with the losses of the siege, we lost almost three quarters of our force. A thousand men dead and three hundred horses. Medford and Billings both mortally wounded, dying on the road during the days of our ignoble retreat. Hirst was gone, tho Partridge had survived.

  Our return to the city with our vastly diminished force, tails tween our legs, alarmed the Hollanders. One day soon after our return I saw a group of solemn and dignified burghers going to meet with Holcomb in his headquarters, no doubt to demand some intelligence of the engagement, wondering if England would be sending more troops to refortify the garrison. I saw the old men emerge even more grim than they had entered, and guessed Holcombs answer had not pleased them.

  I wondered if my Captains corruption was so great that he would continue to receive dead pay on the thousand men he had lost in the Battle of the Tulips, or whether conscience would overtake him and he would confess the loss to his superiors. But it was not till we had been back in Haarlem a week that I understood the danger this mans shameful conduct posed to myself. With Billings and Medford dead, only one young private knew how great a folly was the siege of the fort at Gouda in the first place.

  Holcomb shortly began sending me on every dangerous mission he could conceive. Spanish troops were in the countryside round Haarlem — I was sent out alone in full uniform to scout their positions. A deadly epidemic of dysentery broke out in the English garrison at Amsterdam — I was sent to deliver a shipment of homing pigeons to them and stay there, no good reason given, for a fortnight. An ancient tunnel was discovered under Haarlems south wall — I was to lead the team assigned to fill in the dangerously crumbling passage, so the Spanish could never make use of it in an attack. I somehow managed to avert death and confound Holcomb at every turn. Each time I returned from a deadly mission unscathed the Captain fumed more vehemently, and it became a joke within the ranks that I was unkillable.

  Partridge meanwhile had profited from the defeat at Gouda. Tho he had lost his longtime friend Hirst, with the severe reduction of troop levels — encypherers amongst them — he put him self forward as an expert in that field and was taken at his word. Whilst I remained a mere private, he was raised to lieutenant and found himself working in the relative luxury of headquarters. What skills he did not possess when he began his assignment he quickly learnt on the job, and I found much to commend in him for sheer audacity and inventiveness.

  Whenever I could I slipt away to visit the Hoogendorps, but all was not well in their family. Two of the sons fighting with the resistance had been killed, and Moeder’s jolly laughter was silenced, the rosy cheeks now lustreless. Spanish ships off the coast were harrying the Dutch fishing boats and diminishing the catches.

  Jacqueline, th
at fresh faced youngster, had in the space of a year become a woman. She alarmed her mother by the company she kept, tho twas not some man who her Mother feared might deflower her daughter. Twas a band of girls who fancied themselves soldiers, led by a strange widow woman and shipwright named Kanau Hasse-laeer. To everyones dismay and not a little derision, they trained for battle in armor Hasselaeer had paid for herself — with guns, old fashioned bows and arrows, kitchen knives and sharpened broomhandles. Captain Holcomb especially condemned them as freaks of nature, and forbade them to continue. Unperturbed, they simply ignored him and became as defiant a band of warriors as any I had ever known.

  Jacqueline spoke to me of her soldiering, and I found her much changed by it. She was hardened, no longer the flirtatious young girl I had first encountered on the day of the herring parade. Kanau, she told me, had herself been made a grieving mother by Alvas troops.

  She inflamed her followers with stories of the Amazon women of ancient Scythia. Tho she did not suggest the Dutch girls should lop off their right breasts as the Amazons had — to make shooting arrows easier — she did demand obedience and a fierceness of spirit from her troops. Every one of them, said Jacqueline, would gladly die for their leader and the cause of Dutch Freedom.

  And all too soon the call came. The Spaniards, led by Alvas son Don Frederick, marched that winter up from the south to attack the city of Haarlem. It began with a bombardment which went on for days, spewing death and destruction far into the city. One cannon-ball flew as far as the centre of the town, lodging in the wall of the Great Church, but the ancient city bastion held firm against the assault. The townspeople — tho all together with the English garrison could count no more than four thousand armed defenders — did rally together for the defence. They took to the battlements, fired torrents of bullets, threw rocks, poured vats of boiling pitch and oil onto the Spanish invaders. After several more days both sides resigned themselves to the inevitability of a long siege. Twas in that time, six months in all, that I learnt the true valor and mettle of the Dutch.

  After weeks of fighting we were much cheered by the sight of countryfolk who appeared thro the mists, gliding on the ice covered canals in sledges, delivering food and ammunition to their city brethren. But Prince Williams first battalion of three thousand soldiers, sent to rout the Spanish besiegers, were themselves demolished by Don Fredericks superior numbers. Those who were not killed outright were taken prisoner and hanged en masse in front of the city gate for all to see. But the people would not despair. William began sending messages by carrier pigeons, promising further troops, but even more important a message of hope and courage, that our fight was just and that all of Holland was rallying to our aid.

  Weeks, then months passed in waiting for that help, and food and firewood ran short. Partridge reported to me that a dispirited Lord Holcomb had retreated into seclusion, leaving the business of the English defence of Haarlem to several of his officers. He himself spent the days composing long letters to the Privy Council begging for withdrawal of his troops from the Netherlands. Partridge was charged with encyphering the letters. But the only means to get them out of the city were the homing pigeons — and these when thrown into the air were promptly shot dead by Spanish marksmen who knew that any other kind of bird in the entire city had already been eaten by the hungry citizens.

  Prince William kept his word, sending more troops to fight the besiegers, but we in the city were forced to watch helplessly from the walls whilst the tiny Dutch force was decimated. Soon after the battle had begun, the Spanish catapults sent flying into the city a gruesome cargo — severed heads, arms and legs, halves of torsos, male sexual organs of the defeated resistance fighters. This horror at first did much to dishearten the Haarlem townsfolk who wept openly for their countrymen lost in the defence of their own city. But as the people came together to gather that terrible harvest, and dug the impossibly frozen ground to bury the dead decently, I saw come over their faces so fierce a hatred and as grim a determination to punish those who punished them, that I was not surprised when another delegation of burghers went marching into the English garrison — their purpose to propose bolder measures than had yet been attempted.

  As the missions were dangerous I, of course, was called upon by Captain Holcomb to lead or participate in several of them. But now in the defence of Haarlem I gladly went. One moonless night a band of English, Dutch and a dozen well trained horses snuck out the city gate, and with the most extreme stealth and much stumbling about — for even a small candle would have given us away — we planted mines round the tents on the perimeter of the Spanish encampment, set our fuses and crept away. When the explosion came, flames and chaos enveloping the camp, we quickly hooked our horses to six gun carriages and dragged back in thro the gate six good sized cannon, without a single casualty amongst us.

  There was so much rejoicing at our conquest, small tho it was — for we had no proper ordnance for the cannon — that men, women and children danced in the streets and sang songs of victory. They screamed the name of William of Orange and carried the attackers on their shoulders to the city square. Some climbed the walls and shouted down at the Spaniards that they were pigs, and hurled garbage into the burning camp with catapults borrowed from the English garrison.

  On the heels of that victory came another, again small but one which gave the Haarlemers more hope still. A group of perhaps a dozen of the youngest and “prettiest” of the men — I was chosen from the garrison, and Dirk Hoogendorp from the town — were tarted up as painted whores, complete with falls of hair cut from the heads of city matrons. The girls who shaved us and dressed us did so with the greatest of hilarity, pulling the corset strings tight so, they claimed, we should know the pains they suffered just to put on their clothes in the morning. We were perfumed, our lips and cheeks rouged, bonnets tied under our chins with pretty bows, and then in full daylight, accompanied by only one real woman — twas one of Kanau Hasselaeers girls — we opened the gate and sauntered out in sight of the Spanish army.

  The girl, Margriet, called out in her most alluring voice that we were starving prostitutes and were sick of the siege. As we were Netherlanders, she continued, we were good business people and would not mind taking money from Spanish customers, as men in the city could no longer afford our services anyway. Then we sat down on a low wall and waited. Three soldiers approached, but warily, until Margriet moved to the fore, puckered her lips and scooped her pretty white breasts right out of her bodice! The men fairly ran the rest of the way into our circle — and were dead, stabbed a dozen times each, a moment later. All in a piece we turned our backs to the Spanish camp who we had no doubt were watching, hiked up our petticoats, bent over and jiggled our hairy balls and arses at the enemy. Then we hied back in thro the gate, carrying the dead soldiers with us. Later the burghers of Haarlem chopped off their offensive heads, and the townsfolk gleefully catapulted them over the wall into Don Fredericks camp.

  But our victories were short lived. Supplies of food from the country had dwindled and we in the city had well and truly begun to starve. All stores of dried herring and flour were gone. People had begun eating the spring grasses and flowers, and even killing dogs and cats for meat. The once prosperous folk of the jewel of Holland had gaunt faces and too bright eyes bulging from dark sockets. Clothes hung on skinny frames. Tempers flared, and people whose children were nearly dead of hunger began to argue about surrendering to the Spanish.

  I went to see the Hoogendorps but I did not at first recognize the person who opened the door. I thought I had perhaps gone to the wrong house, as they all looked the same. But indeed it was Moeder. Gone was the plump maternal woman who had plied me, her family and herself with mountains of dumplings and fishes and cakes. There stood a bag of bones with great folds of skin hanging like obscene flesh draperies from face and neck and arms. Her clothing she had not bothered to tailor to her new shape, and that too hung limp on her sad frame. She smiled a brief but sincere smile on seeing me a
nd invited me in, but I could tell she was ashamed, unable as she was to provide her former hospitality. I tried to make light of it, launching into a story of how I had left the garrison bearing her a box of succulent mice to make into a stew, but before I could finish the tale she began to cry — great, round tears which coursed down her hollow-cheeked face. Through her sobs she admitted that she had actually stooped to catching rats and mice, and cooking them. All the housewives were doing the same, and now there was not a rodent to be found in all the city.

  In the height of summer a carrier pigeon from Prince William made it through to Haarlem, its message that a huge force of Dutch soldiers was coming to liberate the city. Weak tho we were we allowed ourselves to hope, and soon we heard the booming of cannon from what seemed like all directions. I ran through the deserted boulevards to the Great Church and breathless — my own strength at low ebb from starvation — climbed the steeple stair. From that high vantage point looking east, I could see the vessels of the notorious Sea Beggars doing battle with Spanish galleons on Haarlem Lake. Turning south I saw the armed encampment outside the city walls now thrown into disarray by William’s infantry and cavalry. I stared in disbelief, for there looked to be as many as five thousand Dutchmen! Twas a great battle, and as I gazed out over that field of action, I wished fervently to be fighting the enemy as a true soldier and not as I was — a trapped, helpless and starving animal in a walled prison. In that moment I knew, too, I longed to be fighting at the side of the good Prince of Orange, having more allegiance to him than even the Queen of England.

  Then I watched with growing alarm as the battle on land and sea turned in favor of the Spanish, and hope died. As I descended the tower I saw congregated a crowd of city folk, quiet and still, awaiting my report. At first sight of me a great moan went up, for I was unable to hide from their eyes the truth of our terrible defeat. Later that day we heard loud pounding and crying at the city gate. Guards opened it to find Williams most senior officer, alive and walking, but with nose and both ears slashed from his head, come to bring evil tiding from Don Frederick.