“I will protect you now,” Arthur promises. “If they come, they will find us ready. I am not afraid.”
At my side, I feel My Lady shrink back. She has no such certainties.
We walk around the walls to the north side, so that we can look down into the streets of the City. The young apprentices are running from house to house, banging on doors and holloaing to summon men to defend the city gates, borrowing weapons from dusty old cupboards, calling for old pikes to be brought out of the cellars. The trained military bands are running down the streets, ready to defend the walls.
“See?” Arthur points them out.
“They’re for us,” I observe to My Lady the King’s Mother. “They’re arming against the rebels. They’re running to the city gates to close them.”
She looks doubtful. I know that she fears that they will throw open the gates as soon as they hear the rebels cry that they will abolish taxes. “Well, anyway, we’re safe in here,” I say. “The Tower gates are shut, the portcullis is down, and we have cannon.”
“And Henry will be coming with his army to rescue us,” My Lady asserts.
Margaret, my cousin, exchanges a quick skeptical look with me. “I am sure he will,” I reply.
In the end it is Lord Daubney, not Henry, who falls on the exhausted Cornishmen as they are resting after their long march from the west. The cavalry go through the sleeping men slashing and hacking as if they were practicing sword thrusts in a hayfield. Some of them carry a mace—a great swinging ball that can knock a man’s head clean from his shoulders, or smash his face into a pulp, even inside a metal helmet. Some of them carry lances and stab and thrust as they go, or battle-axes with a terrible spike at one end that can punch through metal. Henry has planned the battle and put cavalry and archers on the other side of the rebel army so there is no escape for them. The Cornishmen, armed with little more than staves and pitchforks, are like the sheep of their own thin-earth moorland, herded this way and that, rushing in terror trying to get out of the way, hearing the whistle of thousands of arrows, running from the cavalry only to find the infantry, armed with pikes and handguns, stolidly advancing towards them, deaf to all calls of brotherhood.
They beat the Cornishmen to their knees, they go facedown in the mud before they drop their weapons, raise their hands, and offer their surrender. An Gof, their leader, breaks away from the battle and runs for his life, but is ridden down like a leggy broken-winded stag after a long chase. Lord Audley the rebel leader offers his sword to his friend Lord Daubney, who accepts it grim-faced. Neither lord is quite sure if he has been fighting on the right side; it is a most uncertain surrender, in a most ignoble victory.
“We’re safe,” I tell the children, when the scouts come to the Tower to tell us that it is all over. “Your father’s army has beaten the bad men and they are going back to their homes.”
“I wish I had led the army!” Henry says. “I should have fought with a mace. Bash! Swing and bash!” He dances around the room miming holding the reins of a galloping horse with one hand and swinging a mace with his other little fist.
“Perhaps when you are older,” I say to him. “But I hope that we will be at peace now. They will go back to their homes and we can go back to ours.”
Arthur waits for the younger children to be distracted and then he comes to my side. “They’re building gallows at Smithfield,” he says quietly. “An awful lot of them won’t be going back to their homes.”
“It has to be done.” I defend his father to my grave-faced son. “A king cannot tolerate rebels.”
“But he’s selling some of the Cornishmen into slavery,” Arthur tells me flatly.
“Slavery?” I am so shocked that I look at his serious face. “Slavery? Who said so? They must be mistaken?”
“My Lady the King’s Mother told me herself. He’s selling them to barbarian galleys and they’ll be chained to the oars till they die. He’s selling them to be slaves in Ireland. We’ll have no friends in Cornwall for a generation. How can a king sell his people into slavery?”
I look at my son, I see the inheritance we are preparing for him, and I have no answer.
It is a victory, but one so reluctantly won that there is little joy. Henry gives out knighthoods grudgingly, and those who are so honored dread the charges that will come with their new titles. Massive punitive taxes are laid on anyone who sympathized with the rebels, and lords and gentry have to pay huge fines to the Exchequer to guarantee their future good behavior. The leaders of the Cornishmen are briskly tried and hanged, their entrails drawn out of them and then they are quartered, hacked alive as they die in agony. Lord Audley loses his head in a prompt execution when the crowd laugh at his grave face as he puts his head on the block for defending his tenants against his king. Henry’s army pursues the Cornishmen all the way back to Cornwall and they disappear into the lanes which are so shielded with hedges that they are like green tunnels in a green land, and nobody can tell where the traitors have gone, nor what they are doing.
“They’re waiting,” Henry tells me.
“What are they waiting for?” I ask, as if I don’t know.
“For the boy.”
“Where is he now?”
For the first time in many months Henry smiles. “He thinks he is setting out on campaign, financed by the King of Scotland, supported by him.”
I wait in silence, knowing that triumphant beam well enough by now.
“But he is not.”
“No?”
“He is being tricked on board a ship. He is to be handed over to me. James of Scotland has finally agreed that I shall have the boy.”
“You know where he is?”
“I know where he is and I know the name of the ship that he will set sail in: him and his wife and his son. James of Scotland has utterly betrayed him to me, and my allies the Spanish will pick him up at sea, pretending friendship, and bring him to me. And at last, we will make an end of him.”
WOODSTOCK PALACE, OXFORDSHIRE, SUMMER 1497
Then, we lose him again.
The court behaves as if we are on a summer progress, but really we are trapped in the middle of England, afraid to move in one direction or another, waiting for trouble but not knowing where the boy may land. Henry hardly ever leaves his room. At every place where we stay he creates a headquarters ready for a siege, receiving messages, sending out orders, commanding more arms, mustering soldiers, even getting his own armor fitted new, and he readies himself to wear it on the field of battle. But he does not know where the battle will be, as he has no idea where the boy has gone.
Arthur cannot return to Ludlow Castle. “I should be in my principality!” he says to me. “I should be with my people.”
“I know. But your guardian Sir Richard has to command his men in the king’s armies. And while your father does not know where the boy might land, it is safer if we are all together.”
He looks at me, his brown eyes dark with concern. “Mother, when are we going to be at peace?”
I can’t answer him.
One moment the boy was said to be in his love nest with his new bride, beloved of the Scots king, confidently planning another venture; but then we hear that the boy has sailed from Scotland, and disappeared once again, as this boy so skillfully seems to do.
“D’you think he has gone to your aunt?” Henry asks me. Every day he asks me where I think the boy has gone. I have Mary on my knee, and am sitting in a sunny spot in her nursery in a high tower of the beautiful palace. I hold her a little tighter as her father stamps up and down before us, too loud, too big, too furious for a nursery, a man spoiling for a fight and on the edge of losing control. Mary regards him gravely, not at all afraid of him. She watches him as a baby might watch a bearbaiting: a curious spectacle but not one that threatens her.
“Of course I don’t know where he’s gone,” I say. “I can’t imagine. I thought you told me that the Holy Roman Emperor himself had ordered the duchess not to support or succor him?”
“Why would she ever do as she is told?” Henry rounds on me. “Faithless as she is to anything but the House of York? Faithless as she is to anything but ruining my life and destroying my rightful hold on my own kingdom!”
This is too loud for Mary and her lower lip turns down, her face trembles. I turn her towards me and show her a smile. “There,” I say. “Hush. Nothing’s wrong.”
“Nothing’s wrong?” Henry repeats incredulously.
“Nothing for Mary,” I say. “Don’t distress her.”
His angry glance falls on her as if he would shout to warn her that she is in danger, her house on the brink of collapse, thanks to an enemy like a will-o’-the-wisp. “Where is he?” he asks again.
“Surely, you have all the ports watched?”
“Costs me a fortune, but there is not an inch of the coast that is not patrolled.”
“Then if he comes, you will know. Perhaps he has gone back to Ireland.”
“Ireland? What d’you know about Ireland?” he demands, swift as a snake.
“I don’t know!” I protest. “How should I know? It’s just that he was there before. He has friends there.”
“Who? What friends?”
I stand up to face him, holding Mary close. “My lord, I don’t know. If I knew anything, I would tell you. But I know nothing. All I ever hear is what you tell me, yourself. No one else speaks to me of him, and anyway, I would not listen if they did.”
“The Spanish may yet take him,” Henry says, more to himself than to me. “They have promised him their friendship and they will capture him for me. They have promised me that they have ships waiting off the coast for him and he has agreed to meet with them. Perhaps they will—”
There is a sudden loud hammering on the door, Mary cries out, and I clutch her tighter to me and stride across the room, away from the door, towards the bedroom, as if I am running away, suddenly afraid. Henry spins on his heel, his face white. I pause on the threshold of the bedroom door, Henry just a step before me so that when the messenger walks in, dirty from the road, he sees the two of us, pale with fear, as if we are expecting attack. He drops to his knee. “Your Grace.”
“What is it?” Henry demands roughly. “You frightened Her Grace, coming in so loudly.”
“It’s an invasion,” he says.
Henry sways and clutches at the back of the chair. “The boy?”
“No. The Scots. The King of Scots is marching.”
We have to trust Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, my sister Anne’s husband, to save England for Henry. We, who trust nothing and fear everything, have to trust to him; but it is the rain that serves us best. Both the English and the Scots set sieges and are all but destroyed by the unceasing rain. The English troops, camped on wet ground before stoical castles, fall ill, and melt away in the driving mist to their own homes, to warm fires and dry clothes. Thomas Howard cannot keep them loyal, cannot even keep them in their ranks. They don’t want to fight, they don’t care that Henry is defending his kingdom against England’s oldest enemy. They don’t care about him at all.
Thomas Howard stands before Henry in the privy chamber. I am at one side of Henry’s great chair, his mother at the other, as Henry rages at him, accusing him of dishonesty, treachery, faithlessness.
“I could not make the men stay,” Thomas says miserably. “I could not even make their leaders stay. They had no appetite for the fight and there were scant rewards. You don’t know what it was like.”
“Are you saying I don’t go to war?” Henry bursts out.
Thomas shoots a quick horrified glance at me, his sister-in-law. “No, Your Grace, of course not. I only meant that I cannot describe to you how hard this campaign is. It’s very wet and very cold in this part of your country. The food is scanty and it’s hard to get firewood in some places. Some nights the men had to sleep without anything to eat in the cold rain, and wake without breakfast. It’s hard to supply an army and the men had no passion for the fight. Nobody doubts Your Grace’s courage. That has been shown. But it is hard to make the men stand firm in this country in this weather.”
“Enough of this. Can you take the field again?” Henry is biting his lips, his face dark and furious.
“If you command me, Sire,” Surrey says miserably. He knows, as we all do, that any hint of refusal will see him back in the Tower, named as a traitor, his marriage to Anne not enough to save him. Again he glances quickly at me, and sees at once, from my impassive expression, that I cannot help him. “I should be proud to lead your men. I will do my best. But they have gone home. We will have to muster them all over again.”
“I can’t keep hiring men,” Henry decides abruptly. “They won’t serve, and I have no funds to pay them. I shall have to make peace with Scotland. I hear that James is down to the last coin in his treasury too. I shall make peace. And I shall move what men I have left away from the borders. They must come south to be ready.”
“Ready for what?” his mother asks.
I don’t know why she asks, except to hear her own fears in words.
“Ready for the boy.”
WOODSTOCK PALACE, OXFORDSHIRE, AUTUMN 1497
A team of dirty, exhausted messengers rides post, passing the message from one station to another, changing horses as they tire and fall lame, one man pantingly passing a scroll sealed in sheepskin to another. “For the king, at Woodstock Palace!” is all they say, and a new horse and a new man plunges on along the dusty autumn roads, little more than dirt tracks, to ride from dawn till it grows too dark for him to tell the deep sloughs of mud on the road from the overgrown grass of the verge, until he has to sleep, sometimes wrapped in his cloak, under a tree, restlessly waiting for the first light of dawn to thunder to the next post with the precious packet: “For the king, at Woodstock Palace!”
The court is preparing to go out hawking, the riders mounting, the hawk carts with the rows of hooded hawks rolling out of the mews, the falconers running alongside the carts speaking soothingly to the blind birds, promising them sport and feeding if they will be good birds, be steady and patient now, stand proudly on their perches: don’t bate, don’t flap.
Henry is dressed handsomely in dark green velvet with dark green leather riding boots and green leather gloves. He is trying so hard to look like a king living on his own fortune, comfortable with his court, happy in his kingdom, beloved of his people. Only the new lines around his pinched mouth betray him as a man living with gritted teeth.
We are near the open gate of Woodstock Palace when I hear hooves on the road and turn to see a hard-ridden horse and the rider bowed over his neck urging him on. The yeomen of the guard at once gather before the king and six of them turn and stand in a line before me, and I observe, amazed, that they are shouldering their arms and then grounding their pikes. They have seen a single man riding as fast as he can towards our palace and they are readying for an attack. They actually think that a man might ride up to our court as we prepare to go hawking, and cut down Henry, King of England, where he stands. They actually think that they have to stand between me and any subject of this kingdom. I see their fear and I realize that they know nothing of what it is to be a queen of the House of York.
They hold their pikes firm, in a line of defense, as the man hauls on his reins and his weary horse skids almost to a halt and then walks towards us. “Message for the king,” he says, hoarse with the dust in his throat, as Henry recognizes his messenger, puts a hand on one of his beefeaters’ shoulders, turns him away, and approaches the shivering horse and the exhausted rider.
The man jumps from the saddle, but he is so weary that his legs buckle beneath him and he has to grab on the stirrup leather to keep himself up. He puts a hand inside his jacket and pulls out a battered sealed packet.
“Where from?” Henry asks quietly.
“Cornwall. The very far west of Cornwall.”
Henry nods and turns to the court. “I must stay and read this,” he calls. His voice is determinedly light, t
he smile he is straining to show them all is a grimace, like a man in pain. “A little business, nothing but a little business must detain me. You go on, I’ll ride after!”
People murmur and mount up, and I gesture to my groom to hold my horse as I stand beside Henry and watch them go by. As the hawk cart goes past us, one of the falconers is tying the leather curtains to keep the birds cool and clean till they get to the fields where the hunt will start; then they will take the hoods off and the hawks will mantle their wings and look about them with bright eyes. One of the lads is running behind, carrying spare jesses and leashes. I glimpse his face when he ducks his head in a bow as he goes past the king: Lambert Simnel, promoted from his place as scullery boy, now a royal falconer, loyal in the king’s service—a pretender who has found happiness.
Henry does not even see him. He does not see anybody as he turns and goes into the east door that leads up the great stairs to his presence chamber. I follow, and there is his mother, waiting in his rooms, watching from the window. “I saw the messenger coming from far away,” she says to him quietly, like a woman waiting for the worst news in the world. “I have been praying since the moment I saw the dust on the road. I knew it was the boy. Where has he landed?”
“Cornwall,” he answers. “And I have no friends in Cornwall now.”
It is pointless to tell him that he has no friends in Cornwall now since he broke their pride, and broke their hearts, and hanged the men that they loved and followed. I wait in silence as Henry rips open the wrapping of the letter and takes out the paper. I see the seal of the Earl of Devon, William Courtenay, my sister Catherine’s husband, and the father of her adored son.
“The boy has landed,” Henry says, reading rapidly. “The Sheriff of Devon attacked his camp with a strong force.” He pauses; I see him take a breath. “The sheriff’s men all deserted and went over to the boy as soon as they saw him.”
The White Princess Page 39