Tudor Dawn

by David Field

  TUDOR DAWN

  The Tudor Saga Series

  Book One

  David Field

  Table of Contents

  PART I

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  PART II

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  A NOTE TO THE READER

  MORE BOOKS BY DAVID FIELD

  ‘The king was in his counting house, counting out his money,

  The queen was in the parlour, eating bread and honey’

  Extract from the children’s nursery rhyme ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’, popularly believed to be a reference to Henry VII and his queen, Elizabeth of York

  PART I

  I

  Twelve-year-old Henry, Second Earl of Richmond, sat hunched in front of the roaring fire in the Great Hall of Pembroke Castle, shivering uncontrollably despite the heavy cloaks that the grooms kept piling onto his shoulders and the mulled herbs that servant girls would periodically bring up from the kitchen, on strict orders from the physician. Henry was suffering another of his agues and he knew from sorry experience that in spite of all the excessive solicitations being fawned upon him, it would last at least another two days.

  The door burst open and ‘Black William’ Herbert stamped in with his usual lack of grace. Throwing himself onto the bench beside Henry, he removed his boots and hurled them towards a corner of the fireplace, stretching his stockinged feet towards the blaze.

  ‘God’s tits, it’s a cold one out there,’ he complained.

  Henry wrinkled his nose, partly against the blasphemy of the man and partly against the rank smell of his stockinged feet, which had no doubt been imprisoned in riding boots since sunrise. William enjoyed his hunting and it was to be doubted whether any wild boar still existed within a fifty league radius of Pembroke; however, in their absence William was not above driving an elderly or weak peasant into the undergrowth, though very few of the castle’s retinue could be persuaded to join him on his forays of butchery.

  ‘How goes your ague?’ Herbert enquired, as if he cared.

  Henry sniffled in response and wiped his running nose on yet another kitchen cloth before hurling it into the open fire. ‘It will be gone ere the banquet,’ he assured his questioner. ‘When does my mother come from Woking?’

  ‘Three days hence, before nightfall, according to the Steward,’ Herbert replied. ‘Sir Henry must first attend to a matter at Court, then they ride west, breaking their journey first at the castle at Kenilworth. It seems they are held in high regard by the Earl of Warwick.’

  Henry’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, had given birth to Henry — with considerable difficulty, as she was wont to remind him — at the age of thirteen. His father Edmund’s untimely death of the Plague whilst being held a prisoner in Carmarthen Castle by William Herbert — the same William Herbert who now held the young Henry a virtual captive in Pembroke — had left his mother a widow at fourteen. Not only had Herbert been indirectly responsible for Henry’s father’s death, but he had also been granted his Uncle Jasper’s lands and title when he fled into exile, leaving Henry at the mercy of Edward IV, and his mother a homeless widow.

  Sir Henry Stafford, a staunch Yorkist, had married his mother when she had been a widow barely a year and the boy had seen little of her since. He had grown up more familiar with the professional embraces of a succession of nurses than the more natural ones of his birth mother, who was, with her new husband, now regularly at the Court of Edward IV.

  Mother and stepfather were due to visit Pembroke for only the fifth time in as many years. Henry, for his part, had little regard for the man who had replaced his father in his mother’s bed and only wished for the return from self-imposed exile of his uncle, Jasper, who had been more like a father to him for several years, before being obliged to flee the country when Henry VI was deposed by Warwick and Jasper was attainted for treason for his support for the former Lancastrian King. It was through Jasper that Henry had been made aware of a more romantic side to his ancestry. He could trace his Tudor bloodlines all the way back to the legendry Cadwaladr of Anglesey, who the Welsh regarded as the last of the ancient Celtic Kings. It had also been whispered to him that Welsh folklore foretold the return of a hero called ‘The Son of Prophecy’ by the bardish poets, who would pick up the mantle laid down by the likes of Owain Glyndwr and, before him, the magical Arthur Pendragon himself and lead the people of Wales to a new freedom.

  ‘Will they be tarrying long?’ Henry asked Herbert hopefully.

  The older man inclined his head both ways, in a gesture of uncertainty. ‘That will depend upon how matters go at Court, and whether the King has other duties for your stepfather.’

  ‘Other duties?’ Henry echoed.

  ‘Duties other than keeping a hawk’s eye on me,’ Herbert replied with a sneer.

  ‘Why does King Edward wish to keep an eye on you?’ Henry asked, more out of politeness than anything.

  Herbert narrowed his eyes as he turned fully to confront Henry on the bench where they both sat. ‘Because I keep an eye on you,’ Herbert told him. ‘Your family’s loyalty to the cause of Lancaster is an open secret and you are its most obvious pawn in the game, should the witless Henry not regain his reason.’

  ‘Do they then keep such an eye on my mother?’ Henry countered. ‘If so, then it must be a kindly eye, for her letters are full of the fine compliments she receives from the royal couple.’

  ‘From the Woodville whore, you mean,’ Herbert sneered back. ‘They say she bewitched young Edward, as she has no doubt bewitched your mother. As for why your mother is received so regularly at Court, there is an old saying that you must keep your enemies closer to hand than your friends.’

  ‘Is that why you keep me so closely confined?’ Henry challenged him.

  ‘You would do well to keep a civil tongue in your head,’ Herbert warned him. ‘Those who have crossed me in the past have not lived long enough to reflect on their error. Now, I must leave you to contemplate the faces in the fire, ere I contract your contagion.’ Herbert stood up, retrieved his boots from the side of the fireplace and shuffled to the door in his stockinged feet. He dropped the boots in the hallway outside and bellowed for one of the grooms to collect and clean them, before slamming the door behind him.

  Henry sighed despondently and stood up. His legs felt weak and he persuaded himself that he must exercise them, before he lost all power of motion. It was a large hall, with many tapestries with which Henry had become over-familiar during his enforced leisure, while seeking excuses to put down the scholarly works that his tutor insisted that he study. He was an indifferent scholar and had no calling for the French, Latin and Greek that he was forced to consume twice daily. Nor was he interested in more manly pursuits, which was perhaps as well, since he was rarely allowed outdoors, and even then only with a heavily armed escort of surly-looking retainers who were clearly not employed by William Herbert for either their natural charm or their powers of conversation.

  But he found relief, and pleasure of sorts, in the neatly-woven tapestries that kept the howling coastal wind from blowing out the candles that were lit daily to lighten the gloom of a Welsh winter. They were wool on linen and as Henry examined the fine weft carefully he mused over how long each one would have taken to work. His favourite was at the far end, on the wall behi
nd the Steward’s post. It was a full-length depiction of St. George, surrounded by saintly figures wearing surcoats on which were emblazoned the dragon of Wales; St. George himself, while wearing the more familiar red cross on the front of his surcoat, displayed the portcullis emblem of Henry’s mother’s Beaufort family underneath. The tapestry had been designed by Jasper and worked by nuns in a nearby convent. In happier days, little Henry had been carried on the pommel of his uncle’s saddle to watch the holy women at work and they had each placed a hand on his head and called down a blessing on his soul. ‘See how they revere you?’ his uncle had said, ‘and they being brides of Christ, sworn only to worship God. See that you do not betray their faith in you also.’

  II

  Three evenings later, Henry was looking down anxiously from his chamber window into the courtyard, as the retinue began to dismount and hand their bridles to the grooms. His mother was lifted from her side saddle by the still youthful Henry Stafford and as her feet found the solid ground she was seen to reach up for a kiss from him. Henry turned away in embarrassment and shame — his own mother, in the forecourt of the castle in which she had obtained sanctuary through her brother-in-law, the castle that housed her only son by a man who had fought for what he believed to be right and had not simply twisted and turned with the vagaries of the Court wind.

  It was too much to hope that she would visit his sick chamber and within the hour a page knocked quietly and entered with the message that ‘the Countess’ wished to see him in her chambers. Henry changed into his favourite blue surcoat, checked his brown hose for flaws, smoothed his thin hair down under his bonnet and walked down the upper hallway to where his mother and Stafford were being accommodated in the guest quarters. He knocked on the heavily studded door. A groom pulled it open and Henry caught sight of his stepfather stepping swiftly into an adjoining chamber before his mother strode forward to meet him, stopping sharply a few feet from his dutifully outstretched arms.

  ‘They tell me you were sick with the ague. Has it left you?’

  ‘Yes, Mother,’ Henry smiled indulgently. ‘It is safe — as ever — to embrace me.’

  She hugged him warmly to her, before whispering, ‘Have a care of what we speak — I trust not Sir Henry’s loyalty.’

  ‘Yet you sleep with him?’ Henry whispered back, before his mother cut in more loudly.

  ‘My darling boy — how you have grown! This Welsh air obviously favours your natural humour.’

  ‘It must therefore be a humour of driving rain and endless sea fog,’ Henry quipped back. ‘Had I the constitution of a frog it would suit me well. As it is, it gives me nothing but shivers that would unseat a cathedral statue and a nose that runs more freely than the Severn at high tide.’

  A few minutes later, a page entered with a tray on which sat a flagon of Rhenish wine and two goblets. The colour rose briefly in Margaret’s face before she controlled her irritation and asked the page, ‘Were you not informed that Sir Henry is with us, boy? Why are there only two goblets?’

  The page dropped his glance to the floor and spoke with the heavily accented Welsh form of English that Henry had learned to interpret. ‘Sir Henry is below, isn’t it, Countess.’

  ‘Where exactly below?’

  ‘In the Master’s Chambers, where I served them both wine lastly before coming up here.’

  ‘Set the wine down on that side table and both of you may leave us.’

  As the boys backed out into the corridor, closing the door deferentially behind them, Margaret slipped silently to the door of the adjoining chamber and peered in. Nodding with satisfaction, she beckoned Henry to the double seat in the window from where she could keep an eye on the adjoining chamber whose door she had left wide open.

  ‘We do not have long to talk, but there will shortly be a challenge to the throne.’

  ‘Another one? After the last, my uncle was forced to flee to France — will I lose you as well this time?’

  ‘Hush child, and listen. It is not I who will be at risk this time, but yourself.’

  ‘How can this be, while I am condemned to sit behind these dripping walls and listen to the rain and wind as they conspire to batter the sea birds into mere bundles of wet feathers?’

  ‘Because of who you are, and who I am.’

  ‘We are both mortal and we are both at the whim of the Yorkist usurper. Was it ever any different?’

  Margaret pressed her fingers to his lips in a sign for him to remain silent, then lowered her voice. ‘It is talk such as that as will lead to your downfall. Once the uprising takes hold they will be seeking sacrifices and will search every nook and cranny of the nation until they find someone to blame and execute. You — and to some extent I — have the most to gain should Henry be restored to his rightful throne.

  ‘Warwick has fallen out badly with King Edward, because of his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, which has led to the ascendency at court of the Woodville family, some of whom have been granted positions of great office. The Woodvilles are also inclined towards the house of Lancaster and Warwick seeks to promote his own cause further by replacing Edward on the throne with his brother Clarence. He aspires to marry his own daughter Isabella to Clarence, so that she may become Queen, but Edward opposes that marriage as well.’

  ‘Is there anything that Warwick does that is not opposed by the King?’

  ‘Warwick is by far the most powerful noble in the land and the King would do well to appreciate that, if he wishes to retain his throne.’ She lowered her voice as she continued to explain. ‘I have of late been allowed access to the former King Henry, who languishes in the Tower. He was a great friend to your late father and his queen Margaret and I were once on intimate terms. His wits are much restored and in return for my visits — that were made possible through the Constable of the Tower, who is secretly also in the pay of Warwick — I was instructed to pass letters between Henry and Margaret, who is currently in France, amassing her own army. These letters were entrusted to one of Warwick’s men, who I dare not name since he is close to the throne, but he in turn conveyed the letters via Yorkshire, where another trusted Warwick captain is raising his own force. It is all designed to restore King Henry to his rightful throne.’

  Henry shook his head and smiled. ‘Dearest mother, this is obviously something close to your heart, but my head spins with all this detail. As I understand it, there is to be a rebellion based in Yorkshire and yet the King is himself a Yorkist, is he not? Why would Yorkist supporters seek to restore a Lancastrian monarch to his throne?’

  Margaret sighed. ‘You have much to learn about statecraft. The House of York is divided in many ways and no less so since King Edward took up with the Woodvilles. If Edward is deposed, Clarence becomes the next in line and he is thick with Warwick.’

  ‘But none of these would seek to restore the Lancastrian Henry to his rightful throne, surely?’

  ‘The restored Henry would owe everything to Warwick, who seeks only to continue wielding a power greater than the King. When the wind so directs him, Warwick may well choose to restore a Yorkist, if it suits his purpose. No doubt, when the time is right, he will depose Henry again and replace him with Clarence.’

  ‘And what thinks this powerful Warwick of we followers of Lancaster?’

  ‘A poison that must be swallowed, it would seem, if his ambitions are to be satisfied. But should aught go wrong, do not doubt that he will seek to blame everything on the Lancaster cause and those who are known to be loyal to it will be imperilled. Hence my warning you to be circumspect in your dealings and wary of who you contact.’

  Henry laughed ironically. ‘My only “contacts”, as you call them, are with the Steward of Pembroke Castle, my tutor, and a few scrofulous local children who pass for pages and serving girls. But if we are discussing dangerous contacts, do you not share a marriage bed with a man loyal to King Edward?’

  Margaret blushed briefly, but was determined to get her point across. ‘There is no accounting for lov
e and I dearly love Sir Henry. But, as you rightly say, he is closely bound to the King, particularly after he graciously gave dispensation for our marriage. Should there be a general call to arms against any uprising in the north, be assured that my husband will loyally perform the knight service in return for which he holds his lands. There is also much personal warmth between him and King Edward, who but two years ago graced us with his presence on our estate at Woking.’

  ‘So you really came here to warn me, while going behind your husband’s back?’ Henry pointed out. ‘And I fondly imagined that for once you had remembered my birthday — it was some six weeks ago, on the twentieth-eighth of January, in case you had forgotten. It is now March.’

  Margaret slapped Henry playfully across the head, pulled him towards her and kissed his cheek. ‘You were ever an impudent, disrespectful boy. There was a horse in our train loaded solely with gifts. Who shall I give them to now, I wonder?’

  Henry laughed lightly and pulled away from her, standing up to his full height, which for a boy of twelve was not great. ‘I thank you for the presents and for your motherly concern. I must now give you fair warning — the castle cook is a hopeless soak and her food is more of a threat to my continued health than any Earl of Warwick.’

  Henry spent an uncomfortable hour or two at the banquet, seated at the head table with only his mother between himself and Stafford and William Herbert on his right, drunk as usual. Stafford was his typical nervous self, attempting to establish some sort of relationship with his stepson, but clearly anxious not to give anyone cause to accuse him of being too close with a Lancaster. In a perverse way, Henry felt sorry for him, although he resented his mother’s obvious affection for the man who wasn’t his father.

  Herbert was as boorish as ever, snarling at the serving boys and fondling the bottom of the poor girl who was kept busy filling his wine goblet from a jug that seemed almost as heavy as she was. At one point Herbert spat out a piece of mutton fat and turned to Henry. ‘Does your tutor teach you mathematick?’