by David Field
Essex fixed him with a stern look. ‘You would be as well not to complete what you were about to allege. Simply initial the roll and let us hear no more about it.’
‘But if I initial the roll, I become the person who has kept two hundred pounds which were due to the royal vault. And if I am taken up on a count of treason, the only person who I can name in my innocence occupies such a high position of influence in this nation that it is almost treason in itself to besmirch his name.’
Essex smiled unpleasantly. ‘You are rapidly learning the real business of the Treasury. Now, good day to you.’
Henry, for various reasons, never returned to the Treasury. For the first week, he pleaded illness and hid himself away in the house at Mortlake. Then he felt safer retreating further into the countryside and delighted his mother by turning up at Woking unannounced, claiming that he had been granted leave by the Treasurer to visit family. When his so-called leave exceeded two weeks, his mother grew suspicious and made enquiries when she was next at Court.
‘Little wonder that you avoid London,’ she said to Henry, upon her return. ‘The King has let it be known that he wishes you to answer to various accusations made regarding your handling of accounts of State.’
Henry explained to her how Warwick was diverting royal revenue to himself and that even if Henry could give his honest account of the treachery he had discovered, Warwick would either talk the King into an attainder, or have him quietly murdered.
‘I will speak to Queen Margaret personally,’ his mother offered, although the look of alarm on her face belied the promise in her voice.
‘Best that you say nought of your knowledge of the matter,’ Henry told her, ‘otherwise the Tudors will lose two of their number instead of just one.’
‘But surely the Queen can be persuaded that no-one of our family would stoop so low?’
‘The Queen perhaps,’ Henry conceded, ‘but can she sway the King? And can either of them stem the poison that flows from Warwick’s mouth? Even if they believe him not, they are so overawed by the power that he wields that they will think it little price to sacrifice a mere boy who has no military force to command.’
They had been arguing backwards and forwards in this fashion for some minutes when there was a commotion to the rear of the main house and they could hear the raised voice of Jasper Tudor as he raced down the garden path yelling for them each in turn. He found them in the plant house and stood breathlessly in the doorway.
‘Warwick has over-reached himself this time, by God! He has pledged English forces to assist Louis of France against Charles of Burgundy. I have but today returned from Calais, where the best accounts are that Burgundy has taken so ill to the news that he is offering support to Edward of York to regain his throne. I go immediately to Westminster to advise his Highness and Warwick that we must prepare to defend the nation, although it sits ill with me to be assisting Warwick in anything.’
‘Warwick has been laying false charges of treason on young Henry,’ Margaret told him.
‘Another reason why we might all be best advised to leave this realm while we can,’ Jasper replied. ‘After all, if God has deserted England, may we not be permitted to do so also?’
V
The threatened invasion came just two weeks later, when Edward, together with his youngest brother, Richard of York, and an army of mercenaries supplied by his brother-in-law Charles of Burgundy, landed in a deserted rocky cove in Northumberland and headed for London. Picking up loyal Yorkists on the way, they reached Coventry, where they laid siege to Warwick’s hastily-convened forces as he awaited reinforcements under the command of the remaining Yorkist royal brother Clarence, his son-in-law. The feeble Clarence was easily persuaded back over the fence in secret talks with Edward and attempted to persuade his mentor Warwick to surrender. When Warwick would not even receive Clarence’s emissaries, Edward and his invading force marched on to London, which was supposed to be held for the Lancastrians by the Duke of Somerset.
At the first sight of Edward’s growing force, Somerset and his troops melted away, leaving Londoners to cheer Edward’s return as his weary soldiers marched back into the city without a blow being struck. While Edward was deciding what to do with Henry VI, who seemed content to offer himself up for another period in the Tower, Warwick’s army pursued Edward south and made camp in Barnet, on the northern outskirts of London. Edward marched his army back north out of London, taking Clarence with him, in case his inconstant brother decided on another change of side, and bringing along the Lancastrian Henry VI, partly as a showpiece and partly in order to prevent the Londoners rallying behind him while Edward’s back was turned. The Battle of Barnet that followed early the next morning was fought in a thick April fog, during which the confronting armies almost missed each other. Two hours and ten thousand armoured corpses later, it was all over. The Yorkists had won the day, and Warwick himself was dead, even though Edward had issued instructions that he be taken alive.
In the meantime, Margaret of Anjou had been raising troops in France, willingly supplied by Burgundy’s enemy. She landed at Weymouth and immediately marched her mercenaries towards Wales in the belief that the traditional Lancastrian heartland would again answer the call to arms. Edward’s army headed her off at Tewkesbury, where, on 4th May 1471, the Lancastrian side in the Wars of the Roses suffered its last defeat. Among the dead was the Lancastrian heir to the throne, Edward Prince of Wales. There were no Lancastrian claimants left three weeks later, after Henry VI died in the Tower.
The Battle of Barnet was to claim another victim in due course. Heavily wounded while fighting for Edward, Sir Henry Stafford was not among the victorious Yorkists who clattered back into London. He was helped off the battlefield with serious wounds and laid for his comfort in a neighbouring house, from which his wife Margaret had him carried back to Woking. He lay, groaning, as Henry nervously slipped to his bedside, mainly to comfort his mother who was crying pitifully. The wounded man turned his head to look at his young stepson.
‘Take care of your mother, young Richmond. And stay out of affairs of State, else you will leave this world in the same manner as I am destined to do shortly. Tell your uncle to take you out of England while he can, since I know it is his dearest wish, and it would be best for you if you wish to live a long life. And now leave me, that you may not hear my cries when they change the dressings, as they must do if I am not to die of poisoned blood.’
Henry slipped quickly from the bedchamber and winced as he heard the battle-hardened man’s shrieks of agony and his mother’s wails of grief and sympathy. In the hallway stood his uncle Jasper with a stern countenance.
‘I should rejoice to hear a Yorkist suffer so, yet I have not the heart. Nor shall I have a head if I remain much longer here in England. I am to be attainted for treason simply because I served the true king, Henry. You may come with me, or wait for further devilry that will lay your head also on the block. Which is it to be?’
‘Where shall we go?’ Henry asked.
‘Wherever God and the prevailing wind shall decree. Anywhere but this benighted land that the Fates have cursed so roundly.’
VI
‘Why are we heading west?’ Henry asked breathlessly, as they thundered through Reading at dead of night, accompanied only by two of Jasper’s armed Welsh henchmen.
‘Because the Channel ports will be watched by Edward’s men,’ Jasper yelled back, ‘and you are probably the person in England he most wishes to see in the Tower.’
‘Why me?’
His uncle laughed out loud. ‘You really have learned nothing of your destiny, have you?’ he responded. ‘Think yourself lucky that you have a mother and uncle to guard your interests, else the Tower ravens would have had your eyes long ere you reached your thirteenth year.’
‘Where are we headed?’
‘Where else? Pembroke Castle, where a vessel awaits us, moored in the river. Now please be silent — or if you cannot, then at least say loud praye
rs that we may continue to elude our pursuers.’
Those pursuers had almost caught them in Woking, but had been distracted by Margaret, who had berated the armed soldiers sent by Edward to secure the persons of Henry and his Tudor uncle for causing such a disturbance while her husband — the loyal warrior Sir Henry Stafford, who had given his all in the Yorkist cause — lay dying in an upper chamber. Fortunately, Henry and Jasper had already made their farewells and had been saddling up in the stables as the King’s troops clattered past them in the courtyard.
By daybreak they had cleared Newbury and by sunset on the third day they were safely across the Severn and into Tudor country. Jasper had a chain of sentinels across the whole south of the country and by sending fast messengers ahead they were able to change their second horses, which were almost dead with exhaustion, and refresh themselves at wayside inns whose landlords not only refused no payment, but insisted on sending their own retainers out with them as additional bodyguards for the man who, to them, was a local hero who had so often defended their interests against marauding Marcher lords. When they learned that the youth with him was none other than Henry Tudor, some of them even knelt and called him ‘Majesty’, to Henry’s acute embarrassment.
In the early light of the fifth day, having arisen at cock-crow from their pallets at the final inn on their long journey west, Henry and Jasper sat on a hill looking down at Pembroke Castle. Any memories, happy or otherwise, that might have flooded back for either man were suppressed by the sight of hundreds of armed men in royal livery laying siege to Henry’s birthplace and Jasper’s traditional stronghold. Jasper’s seneschal must have chosen to defy the siege in the hope that the King’s men would believe that the men they were seeking were within the castle walls.
Jasper turned in the saddle. ‘Quickly,’ he urged. ‘Back the way we came, this time to Tenby. It will not be long ere they discover that their quarry has flown and the mayor of the town will aid us.’
Before they had time to leave the brow of the hill, a shout rose up from the besieging troops and a group of men broke away to gallop up the hill towards them. Henry and Jasper had a half mile start on them and the advantage of fresh horses and a lack of heavy armour; they raced to the mayor’s house in Tenby and hammered furiously on the door. Mayor Thomas White was surprised, but delighted, to see Jasper again and he led them through a series of natural caves down to the harbour, where he persuaded a local captain to take the two escapees on board his fishing vessel and out to sea. All that they had was either on their backs or in their pockets, since even the few meagre possessions they had managed to leave Woking with were still in the panniers of the abandoned horses, but as the shoreline faded from view and soldiers in York livery could be seen from a distance, running in and out of houses on the harbour-side, they heaved sighs of relief and sank back against the gunnels of the boat.
An hour later, Henry was facing the other way, heaving his stomach contents over the side as their transport bounced up and down in a swell that it had never been designed to withstand. It was meant to be a coastal fishing barque, not an ocean-going transport, and its captain was hard put to prevent it being blown out into mid-Atlantic by the strong easterly gale that was not unheard of in August, but was destined to drive them miles off the course that Jasper had originally intended.
As his uncle conducted a conversation in Welsh with the captain, yelling to be heard above the wind, Henry began to pray hard. He had rarely been on water before and if this was what foreign travel was all about, he wanted none of it. The waves crashing over the bulwarks had soaked him to the skin within minutes of their leaving harbour and by the time they had crossed the mouth of the Bristol Channel he was shivering and coughing, in between fits of dry-retching with nothing left inside his stomach.
‘It seems that you are as fit a sailor as you are a soldier.’ Jasper grinned as he sank down beside Henry and handed him a hunk of dry bread. Henry closed his eyes and shook his head, only to find that his uncle was trying to force-feed him.
‘I have felt like you many times in the past,’ Jasper assured him, ‘and nothing is worse than puking when you have nothing left to puke. This may only be dry bread, but it will be nothing lost when you heave it over the side later. Would you like some wine from my gourd? I filled it from the landlord’s supply in Carmarthen, so it is probably the quality of cow’s piss, but it will settle your stomach.’
Henry shook his head again. ‘Where in God’s name are you taking me?’ he croaked.
‘France, I had hoped,’ Jasper replied. ‘It is over there somewhere, beyond these mountainous waves. I had intended that we should follow the French coast back up the Channel until we made Calais, or perhaps only Honfleur, but our captain assures me that we could reach it only as kindling, if this gale continues. But France is very large and we both believe that if we maintain our present course, we may make land somewhere on its north-west coast. After that, who knows?’
‘The captain is both brave and generous,’ Henry replied. ‘Have you coin with which to pay him?’
Jasper smiled. ‘You remember those at the inn at Carmarthen, who knelt before you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Those men were the first of many who will one day kneel before you, if God keeps faith with the worthy and the deserving. The captain is similarly persuaded and holds it great privilege to be providing sanctuary to the future King of Wales.’
‘England, surely?’
‘To them it is Wales. But either way, he refuses payment.’
For the next three days Henry divided his time between praying, when awake, and dreaming of a watery Hell when asleep. His stomach had somehow settled to the constant but unpredictable bucking and lurching of their seemingly frail boat as it was tossed this way and that, while the captain — who seemed never to require any sleep — kept the rudder tightly gripped in his rough red hands while swearing profusely in Welsh. On the fourth day the wind — but not the sea — dropped away and Henry awoke from a half slumber to hear the captain shout in Welsh to Jasper, who scrambled to his feet and gave a cheer as he looked over the bow of their vessel.
‘St. Michael and all the angels know where we are, but at least it is land, and hopefully French land at that.’
Henry rose to stand uncertainly beside him, but all he could see was what looked like a chain of rocky islands, against which the waves were crashing in mountains of spray. ‘Can we land on those?’ he asked disbelievingly.
‘Not unless we are seabirds,’ Jasper replied, grinning. ‘But if our good captain follows the shoreline, as the wind seems to insist that he must, we may find safe anchorage somewhere along here.’
Two hours and a good deal of Celtic cursing later, the captain steered the boat into some sort of estuary, where the swell dropped most noticeably once they passed the rocky outcrops on either side of the entrance. On the right hand side of the channel there appeared to be a township of some sort and the captain unfastened a set of oars from the inside of the boat and steered the vessel towards it. As the bow clunked up against the stone jetty of what looked like a small harbour, Jasper leapt up onto dry land. Once Henry had lurched unsteadily onto the quayside, Jasper looked around him and spotted an inn further down the greensward.
‘I assume that your lessons in French were as useful as tits on a bull, so yet again it shall be Uncle Jasper to the rescue. If anyone manages to engage you in conversation, remember that you are the unjustly exiled King of England.’
‘That would be a wicked falsehood,’ Henry objected.
Jasper sighed. ‘So would it be were I to pretend that we had money with which to pay our way.’
‘I cannot lie so glibly,’ Henry objected with a grin.
‘But I can — and in French, even more miraculously. Follow me, your Highness.’
‘When I am King, you shall be my Treasurer.’ Henry told Jasper between mouthfuls of what tasted like mutton and what he hoped was not some sort of mountain goat.
‘A
nd when I am,’ Jasper grimaced back, ‘I shall order better wine than this pig’s piss. It is thinner than one of Warwick’s smiles and I fear it may have been strained through the landlord’s hose. How good is your French, may I enquire?’
Henry frowned. ‘According to my tutor, it was better than my Latin, about as good as my Greek, and infinitely worse than my English — why?’
‘Because we are in a land in which they insist on speaking French and you must learn it if you are to survive without me.’
A look of alarm crossed Henry’s face as he put down his paring knife. ‘You would not abandon me in this foreign land? Not now that you have brought me to it?’
Jasper smiled and shook his head. ‘Not of my own choice, no. Your mother would have my entrails. But who knows what will happen soon? You are, after all, a king and I a mere servant of the Privy Chamber.’
‘Is that what you told these people? That you are merely my servant?’
‘Indeed — how else to explain why I have no coin? I have told them that we were wickedly cast adrift by those in Edward’s Court who had been ordered to kill you, but who took pity on the man they regard as their rightful sovereign. I have also advised them of an ancient custom — which, I am proud to say, I have just invented — whereby one sovereign lord assumes the care of another in times of adversity. I have asked that word be sent to their ruler that just such a sovereign is now seeking to invoke that ancient custom.’
‘Do you think the French King will be so disposed?’
‘The French King most likely, since he supported the most recent Lancastrian Queen, Margaret of Anjou, when her throne was usurped by the return of Edward of York. It was King Louis’ soldiers, in the main, who fell at Tewkesbury. But since he and Margaret were distant cousins, and since Edward was a supporter of the rebel Duke of Burgundy, he had little choice. Likewise, he will no doubt support your cause, since you are related through your common grandmother, Catherine of Valois. However, we are not, as yet, in France.’