The King's Grey Mare

by Jarman, Rosemary Hawley

  Most of the royal army was asleep, stretched beside their fires, their weapons close at hand. King Richard was wakeful. He stood by his pavilion and watched the sky, the movement of the clouds, the occasional dull flicker of a star. As if it were written in large letters on the sky, the ground, the sleeping tents, he knew this to be his last night on earth. Very strongly he felt the presence of those he had loved; Anne’s gentle face, the small laughing Edward, and the larger, the adored golden brother. And Warwick, hands clasped about his knee before the fire at Middleham. The great knight, and himself, the untaught boy. All Plantagenet. All York. All dust.

  And he? With the uncanny certainty that comes in lonely, pre-dawn hours, he knew himself a sacrifice, the last offering to a force so strong that no philosophy could reckon it, no priest exorcize it. Gazing at the dark bowl of the sky, he shuddered at the mystique of this knowledge. The clarity of his thought would be gone in the morning, driven off by the primaeval urges of survival and conquest. Yet now he knew himself bought and sold; knew, as surely as Noah anticipated the Flood, that the Stanleys would endeavour to bring about his downfall. He was not afraid, only awed by certainty. He felt destiny rapping at his soul.

  A moment’s guilt, a moment’s pity for the brave men slumbering beside their little fires, brought the sting of tears to his eyes.

  ‘But we will fight, by God!’ he said aloud.

  He would give this destiny a run for its money. Tudor was the target; if Tudor were slain, this hungry, urgent fate might be appeased.

  Yet thinking thus, he knew it vain. As surely as he was born, so would he die, and his dynasty with him.

  If only Edward had contained his lust. Had he but married, as Warwick wished, a foreign princess. Or had he but thrown the woman down at Grafton Regis and ravished her, leaving her conquered and himself sated and bored. To Edward all women had been foreign citadels, to be invaded …

  Too late, too late to change the pattern of the years. By that marriage, so secret, so cunningly devised, the houses of York and Plantagenet fell like Sodom, burnt up to ashes. Richard thought: the salt of their wounds is the smile of Elizabeth.

  The white-edged thunderhead was dispersing, moving swiftly away. Dawn was coming, hailed by a brave trumpet.

  She stirred in her bed, awakened by dream or noise or movement, but unaware of which. The heavy curtains at the window made it impossible to tell whether it was night or day. Grace was still sleeping at the foot of the bed, her breathing so peaceful that Elizabeth was envious. It must surely be dawn. And what would this dawn bring? How many nights lately had she lain in this London bed, fretting the hours until another day of disappointment? Could this one be different at last? Margaret had seemed so sure, so proud and confident. Pressing her hand, whispering as the royal army left a week ago, not to fear because of their great number. Stanley would not fail, even if he came to Henry’s aid at the last moment …

  Elizabeth turned her face, seeking coolth from the pillow. A swarm of worries bombarded her. Would Henry conquer? Was he weak? She conjured his face for the thousandth time; so strange, so significant to her. He had never fought a battle in his life. Would Stanley and his brother and Northumberland, and the Welshmen, be strong enough to uphold him? She wound her hands together beneath the covers, imagined disasters spearing her like toothache. There would be no further forgiveness from Richard. Could she pray? Our cause is God’s, Margaret had said. Often Elizabeth had prayed to God, and gone away empty. It was not God to whom she had prayed, before the battle of Barnet …

  ‘Oh, Melusine,’ she said very quietly. ‘Send me a saviour, Melusine!’

  She waited, while faintly a growl of thunder passed over, miles away. Neither omen nor answer; only the ever-present tempest talking to itself.

  ‘My soul in payment!’ she said. ‘My soul and those of all I love. Aye, and their bodies too!’ reckless with anxiety. Then, like a lover: ‘Melusine, ah, Melusine …’

  With incredible swiftness sleep took her again. As if drugged she lay fathoms deep, entranced, exhausted. A pleasant dream coiled about her. She walked in a forest; her mother held her hand. Jacquetta, young again, and sumptuously dressed, towered above her, bright eyed. Elizabeth skipped beside her, laughed, listened. Lyrical words accompanied their walk, and the wood thickened, and the treetops closed about their heads. Bright fungi clustered at their feet.

  ‘… and there, she built Lusignan. She bore Raymond children: Urian, with his one red and one green eye; Gedes, of the scarlet countenance; Gyot, of the uneven eyes, Anthony, of the claws and long hair; a one-eyed son; and Geoffrey of the Tooth; he had a boar’s tusk.’

  The forest grew black, and all about the foliage was on fire. The soft voice repeated the names, over and over; then, without warning, there appeared an abbey, an abbey with wounded firefilled windows, an abbey running red with blood; she knew it to be the monastery of Malliers, where Geoffrey of the Tooth had attacked his brother. There was the abbot, and a hundred monks, bleeding, burning. Shrieking, half weeping, half laughter, filled the air. She looked up at her mother for reassurance and saw a scarlet countenance, one leaking, suppurating eye, a mouth that was no mouth but a hole from which jutted a bloody tusk. The hole spoke:

  ‘See, child! See what you have borne! Monsters all!’

  The screams grew louder, lifting her scalp; a cry pitched in ecstasy yet keening like a mourner. High above her bed, above the towers, it tossed and wailed. Her blood heard it, the springing sweat on her face acknowledged it. She plunged in the bed; she cried: ‘O Jesu, Jesu …’

  She was dragged from certain disaster by Grace’s arms, felt Grace’s cheek against her own, and clung desperately.

  ‘Lady, my sweet lady Elizabeth.’

  ‘Is it morning?’

  ‘Yes. Yes. It’s morning.’

  ‘Draw back the curtains … Nay, don’t leave me!’

  They stayed together, Grace on her knees, Elizabeth almost falling from the bed, her hair shrouding them both. Grace stroked the heavy silken mass and kissed it, murmuring little loving words, while Elizabeth leaned shivering on Grace’s neck. They stayed thus for some time. Then Elizabeth detached herself with a great sigh.

  ‘Let in the light now, Grace.’

  Grace arose and went to the window. She tugged at the drapes and sunlight streamed in. Then she glanced down at the courtyard and was suddenly still.

  They were raising the drawbridge. A party of horsemen galloped in, their mounts black with sweat, their gear and their harness visible under their habits mired with blood and mud. Even from the height of the tower she could see their wild faces, and heard indistinctly their shouting.

  ‘What is it?’ Elizabeth asked from the bed.

  ‘Part of the army returning.’

  ‘Open the window. Let me look.’ She came to stand beside Grace. Across the cobbled yard a figure was running; comically foreshortened, the black-clad tonsured form of Reynold Bray. Joined by half a dozen other men, he rushed towards the knights now swinging down from their punished horses. The cheering rose like smoke. The men were embracing, dancing in the courtyard. Stewards rushed out with flagons as more horsemen surged over the drawbridge; standards flying, men wearing stained liveries, the horned bull of Cheney, the buck of Stanley, the silver crescent of Northumberland; and a score more, Welsh arms, red roses, red dragons, harness red with blood.

  Bray turned in the midst of his capering to wave like a boy up at the tower window. He cupped his hands and shouted, then flung out his arms in a wild exultant gesture. Elizabeth murmured in annoyance:

  ‘How can I hear at this distance?’

  ‘The Hog – is – dead!’ Bray bawled, long-drawn-out notes. ‘Henry lives! Vivat Rex!’

  ‘Does he say – is it …’ Elizabeth said hesitantly.

  Bray, desperate to impart his message, turned and seized a banner from an esquire. A soiled despoiled banner, furled and carried as proof of conquest, as booty. He unrolled it, and for a moment the White Boar ramped
and snarled on an azure ground. Then Bray in savage pantomime, flung it to the cobbles, stamped upon it, and for good measure, spat. Over his head the Red Dragon flamed, tongue and claws like gouts of fire.

  Elizabeth turned from the window. Grace looked at her and knew that the warmth, the intimacy between them was over for that day. Triumph and crystal hardness sat on the worn, dewy face.

  ‘Gown me,’ she ordered. ‘I must look my best. My saviour is come.’

  PART FOUR

  The Dragon of Wales

  1485–7

  Jasper will breed for us a Dragon,

  Of the fortunate blood of Brutus is he,

  A Bull of Anglesey to achieve,

  He is the hope of our race …

  Welsh Song (ca. 1484)

  The glory was still with him. He sat in the Bishop of London’s Palace, while outside, September, as if in penance for wild August, brightened the city with a day of gold. Like a sovereign insect in the hive’s deepest cell he sat, able at last to determine the things which excitement and trepidation had snarled together in a wanton skein. For the first time in many days he could catch his breath; the swift nightmare and the ecstasy of conquest were equal; the nightmare fled and the glory remained. Through the high window’s diamond panes the sun sparkled. One dusty beam played downward and rested on Henry’s head so that he was at the end of a tunnel of light. He felt his mind restoring itself to order and to plan. Part of the glory was that, thanks to the Stanleys, he had quit himself well. In truth they had done it all; they and Northumberland had placed the day in Henry’s lap. He thought: I am indebted. A little of the glory fled, leaving watchfulness, and an irony that made his long lips smile. They will expect fair payment, he told himself. And what shall I give them? Only the honour of being ever under my eyes. For if they betrayed one king, what might they not work upon his successor?

  They would do nothing against him, for they would never have the chance. Before him on the table lay Richard’s crown, taken from a thorn bush in the field and placed on Henry’s head with great drama and reverence by Lord Stanley. Henry took it up and held it in the sun-shaft. It was rather misshapen; the side of the slender ellipse was dented almost beyond repair. There was the half print of a hoof in the soft gold, and one of the delicate trefoils was broken off. Although it had been cleaned it still bore, deeply ingrained, traces of blood and mud. He lifted it higher; it weighed very little; it had been built to circle a battle-helm. The hard joyless glory left him as he stared at the ruined bauble, his imagination augmenting it with a head, a face. A raised visor, a white face distorted with fury. He would not easily forget that face. Richard was dead, hacked almost to pieces by Stanley’s men. Yet even thinking of that last charge when the demented figure on the white horse came straight for him, started the sweat upon his hands so that the crown moved in their grasp.

  He had been no more than a bowslength away; so near that he could see the hairs on the muzzle of the great white horse, the frog of the deathly hoof raised to strike. He could see the bloody whites of Richard’s eyes, the froth-filmed teeth, the razor edge of the whirling axe, that red-edged axe shaped to shear a man in twain. He could hear the screams of ‘Richard!’ – the tribal cries of the Household – the blind exaltation of the handful of men who rode behind the Boar on that last lunatic charge, their lances like teeth, their armour running blades of light. Across Redmore Plain at him they came, a sweeping wave of menace. He had thought, sharply: So this is my end. Standing on the little knoll whence he had watched the battle thus far in safety, he had clutched at Jasper’s mailed arm with frantic fingers. Then Richard was almost upon him; he had felt his tongue cleaving to his palate; shamefully, secretly, had felt the spurt of wetness on his thigh. He had watched his standard-bearer, William Brandon, go down to meet the charge and be swept away by a blow from that axe, the Dragon falling, undulating gracefully, its scarlet deepened by Brandon’s blood. The giant Cheney had stepped out to do battle and Richard had sliced him through the throat. And Henry had taken his first pace, backwards, to fly, anywhere, to bury himself in the bushes, never to see or speak again.

  Then Sir William Stanley had come, so tardy that Henry would always resent him for it. At the very last of last moments he had ridden up with a sparkling pristine force, red roses and fresh mounts, like actors on cue but only just. They had smashed into the flank of Richard’s little company, translating it in moments from a monster of hell to a toil of severed limbs and massacred flesh. He had not watched while they killed the King; not through any squeamishness but only through the necessity to turn and vomit his relief into the grass. None saw; the pallor he later presented was marked down as reverence to the moment when Stanley crowned him in the field.

  He set the crown slowly down upon the table. As soon as it left his fingers he felt warm, for it had been like touching a ghost. He would have a new crown fashioned, a crown of greater magnificence. Emeralds in honour of the Dragon’s green ground. He looked up to where his banner hung. The Dragon was so powerful, with its rippling body and serpentine tail, its fierce gory colour. Men said that the Dragon had originally come from the sea; so it possessed all the inexorable tumult of the ocean. Against the sea even fire was powerless.

  He pressed his bare bony hands together, and squinted into the floating gold sunlight. Like a myriad motes of debris in the bright ray, the weird talismen and beliefs, his since childhood, arose, pushing back all uncertainty. In one trembling moment omnipotence crystallized, and he was wise enough to know he must work to enslave it. The first lesson was to profit from the mistakes of others. Richard Plantagenet had trusted his ministers and was now bloody defiled carrion in the mean house of the Greyfriars at Leicester. What of his predecessors? Where had their paths forked, their feet trodden in error? Detail, thought Henry, is the great instructor. On the table lay a pile of tomes, heavy ledgers bound with brass. The Household Books, the Grants from the Crown, the Privy Purse. The Docket Book, the Parliamentary Statutes. He pulled one near at random and opened it. The pages smelled musty, with a faint reek of incense. Even without looking at the rusty writing he would have known whose reign this was. From The Issue Rolls he read:

  To John de Serrencourt, who came to witness Queen Margaret’s coronation and report the same: thirty-three marks.

  A hundred pounds to be paid out of the customs on wool and skins at Southampton, to William Andrews, for his services during his attendance on the Queen in foreign parts.

  Skipping a few pages, he read:

  To Jean de Jargean, minstrel, 50 livres for his succour of the King in great melancholy.

  To the masters of Alchemy, 2001 to the manufacture of gold for the King’s pleasure.

  Henry opened another book and read from the Acts of the Privy Council: ‘This day Wm Cleve, King’s chaplain and clerk of the works, made supplication for money to pay the poor labourers their weekly wage. This he has the utmost pain and difficulty to purvey.’

  Slowly he closed both books. Dust rose and vanished. So, Henry. Men would not hear the later Henry miscall that saint, that dupe. Half-brother to Uncle Jasper, a vein of royalty to be cherished for Lancaster’s sake. This did not alter the fact that, according to the Books, he had left the realm almost bankrupt.

  He reached for another tome. Gayer writing here, bright with gold leaf

  Writ the feast of St. Crispin and Crispinian, the sixteenth year of King Edward the Fourth:

  To John Goddestande, footman, ten marks; for purveying of six ells of sarcenet and three of velvet, and two counterpanes, cloth-of-gold, furred with ermines, for the pleasure of Mistress Shore.

  Henry sucked in his lip. Whoremaster. His righteousness was tempered by not a little envy. For a moment he grudged Edward the years of hot beds and willing bodies; he remembered his own stunted youth. He had been driven to learning and piety as a substitute for more earthly pleasures. Always subservient; to Uncle Jasper, Lord Herbert, Francis of Brittany. And yet there had been sweet moments. Maud Herbert had loved
him truly, and of her he had had his pleasures, fleeting thing though it was. Maud still loved him and she was here with him in London. He would not, however, like Edward flaunt his concubine to the derision of Europe and the deficit of the Privy Purse. He would never on Crispin’s Day, when Harry of Lancaster had done so nobly at Agincourt, defile the Household Book with entries such as these. Particularly when he was wedded to Edward’s daughter…

  He opened another ledger, thin and small. The reign of King Edward the Fifth. The bastard king; the king that never was. He looked blindly at the expenditure, clothing for knights, grants in preparation for the coronation. He stroked the book, and closed it, drawing another ledger, the latest, towards him, bending to a random page.

  An annuity of £20 to Joan Peysmarsh for her good service to King Richard in his youth and to his mother.

  To Master John Bently, clerk of poor estate, four pound to defray his expenses at Oxford University.

  He pulled the Statute Book towards him. From it he learned that Richard had halved the Crown dues on eighteen cities, had forbidden the benevolence tax begun by Edward the Fourth; had loaded the poor with gifts and so doing had depleted the estate of many barons. He read on and was taken aback by what he saw. The lifting of taxes, together with the financing of Richard’s last battle, had brought the country again to the brink of ruin.

  To Katherine Bassingbourne, goodwife of York, a pension. For my Lord Bastard, two doublets of silk …