Fortune's Wheel Page 11

  Nothing could have pleased King Louis better. ‘He is my vassal already,’ he said dryly. Then, to make the Prince feel that he had suggested an English-French war alliance out of his own intelligence, when in reality, he, Louis had worked towards this end ever since Warwick set foot on his shores, he said, ‘My Prince, you are a true English fighting cock! You bring my lord Warwick and plenty of Goddams over to Calais, and we will set fire to Duke Charles’ tail with his own flint and steel!’

  After the Feast of the Assumption, King Louis left Amboise to go to Normandy. He was worried because the Duke of Burgundy was sending his ships to raid French ports, and had trapped the Earl of Warwick’s fleet in the harbours at Harfleur and La Hougue, causing a delay which might lessen the chances of the Earl’s success in England. During the time that the King was away, Margaret of Anjou kept the Prince from any meeting with Anne and, in her husband’s absence, Queen Charlotte had no authority over her guest. Anne’s mother, although humiliated, was relieved, for it meant that she did not have to endure the frightening company of Margaret.

  A letter came from Isabel in Valonges, saying that she now felt a little stronger, and that her father could not leave France because of the Burgundians. She also said something about Clarence which worried her mother. Isabel had seen letters sent to him by his own mother in England, and by his sister Margaret in Burgundy. Both pleaded with George to desert the Earl of Warwick and to return to his brother King Edward. Both were exceedingly forceful women, and Isabel had realized they had more influence over her husband than anyone else. The Duchess of York told her son plainly that he had disgraced his family and his honour, but that there was still time for him to make some amends for it; if he did not, she would cease to regard him as her son. Isabel complained that George thought more affectionately of his sister the Duchess of Burgundy than he did of her. One could not imagine what he would do when his wife’s father made war on his beloved sister’s husband. While conceding that the loss of Clarence would be a blow, for he owned huge estates and could muster many soldiers, the Countess thought that any desertion by him would be a disaster for Isabel. It was bad enough seeing one of her daughters torn between enemy factions.

  On the ninth of September, a lucky chance enabled the Earl of Warwick to leave France. A gale scattered the Burgundian blockade on the Cotentin, and the Earl sailed his fleet out on the following calm, side by side with an escort of French ships commanded by the Admiral of France. They made a rare sight, if only because the leopards of England and the lilies of France displayed together in friendship on the Channel had not been seen in the memory of man. With Warwick went Jasper Tudor and the Earl of Oxford. They all knew the risks but believed enough in success to be optimistic. Though they would never forget past enmity, Warwick was a man to follow.

  Anne knew that the news of her father’s departure had made her mother very frightened indeed, though whether this was because of fears for his safety, or the prospect of being left without his protection, she was not sure. She wondered what would happen to them, left to wait in a strange land, if disaster should befall the expedition. She felt that if her father were to die, King Louis would lose all interest in them; he was quite likely to sell them back to King Edward if it would profit him.

  The Prince was full of plans for war, fretting that he had been left behind while his uncle Gaspard and the Earl of Warwick went into action. What would he do for the rest of his life if they failed?

  6

  The World Upside Down

  July – October 1470

  Sum tyme I rodde in clothe of gold so red,

  Thorow-oute ynglond in many a town;

  Alas, I dare nowth schewe now my hede —

  Thys world ys turnyd clene uppe so down!

  God Amend Wicked Counsel (c. 1464)

  6

  ‘Poggio the Florentine told a story about a donkey!’

  ‘The girl who couldn’t make out why her husband hadn’t got one as big as a donkey’s!’

  Snatches of noisy conversation floated across from where Thomas Grey, Elizabeth Woodville’s son, was lounging against the gallery of the tennis court, surrounded by an admiring group of cronies. Their talk was often bawdy. Grey was in his shirtsleeves, for he had been playing, and his hose were of particoloured silk, blue and green, like a peacock. Richard found his screeching suggestive laughter offensive. Grey’s younger brother Dick stood as usual in his shadow. Of these two nasty youths, Tom was the nastier, if only because of his seniority. He was near Richard’s own age but had the advantages of being both a head taller, and as beautiful as one might expect a son of his mother to be. His long, floppy hair was the exact shade of hers, but when you looked closely, his eyelashes were almost white, like a ferret’s. His light eyes ran speculatively over every woman that passed.

  ‘Gloucester, will you give me a game?’

  ‘Not now. I’m on my way elsewhere.’

  Tom Grey grinned unpleasantly, as if he had known it was not worth asking such a dull fellow.

  ‘Hey,’ he said more familiarly, ‘I’ve a riddle for you. What is it: the more one seeks it, the further one is from it?’

  Richard shook his head, preparing to move away.

  ‘Le fond d’un con!’ Grey and the others all collapsed in coarse laughter.

  Richard felt himself grow red in the face, which was just what Grey had wanted. This was partly, however, because of his furious desire to throttle the Queen’s insolent son, or to tip him head first over the gallery onto the tiled court below.

  Down there, the King was playing with Anthony Woodville, the new Lord Rivers. King Edward would have been an outstanding player if he had given more time and effort to the game. He leapt about the court with every sign of enjoying himself without a care. As he said, ‘It serves no purpose, to march up and down, chewing my fingernails.’

  The Earl of Warwick was expected to invade the kingdom at any time to drive the King from his throne — and the Queen too. At a time when the realm was on the verge of civil war again, all the Queen’s son could think of was scoring off the King’s brother, and tales of Poggio the Florentine and a donkey’s member.

  Bitterly, Richard compared himself with his brother Clarence. George had known whose side he was on. He had chosen exile in France rather than endure Grey and his minions, the umpteen uncles, aunts and hangers on. No, Richard called himself to heel, George had not chosen exile, he had been given no choice, having made himself Warwick’s puppet. One brother the tool of a traitor and himself a Woodville lover, Richard thought. He could not wait to get away from Westminster in the service and company of the King. At least he would then not have to see or hear these Woodville parasites, whom his own painfully given loyalty to his brother was helping to keep fat.

  Not that his own allegiance was of much interest to anyone except himself. He was too young. If only he were a year or two older; if he had a household of his own, an income sufficient to live by, retainers upon whom he could call, all the things which George had possessed from childhood by right. But he was the youngest son. It would not have entered his head to question the King’s plans for his provision in the future, or his brother’s generosity; it was simply that he needed now to play a man’s part, as the second royal Duke in the kingdom, and found himself ill-equipped to do so.

  When King Edward came bounding up from the tennis court, laughing and victorious, Richard smiled too, for he could not remain gloomy in his brother’s presence. He felt guilty at his own discontent.

  The King patted his belly with some satisfaction. ‘I shall have no need of new harness,’ he said with a grin, ‘if Anthony keeps me running as fast as he has done today!’ King Edward had, at twenty-eight, more than the beginnings of a paunch. ‘What I’d give to be seventeen again!’

  ‘Give me some of your years, and I’d be more than happy,’ Richard said.

  Something of his previous state of mind must have shown in his voice, because the King glanced at him shrewdly and said,
‘You’ll feel your years soon enough without any I could give you. I’ve had enough bad news for one morning. The north is in a turmoil and ready to flare up like a bonfire at any moment. I plan to go to York, to shake my mailed fist at them.’ He clenched his hand, and admired his large muscles bulging under his sleeve. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if the lord of the north heads for home.’

  Indeed, it would be no surprise if Warwick were to land in Yorkshire, where his own following were strongest.

  In the last days of July, the King left to go north. It was the third time Richard had travelled the north road that summer. Waltham Holy Cross, Ware, Royston, Huntingdon, Wansford Bridge, Stamford, Grantham, Newark, Doncaster, York… It was a good road, the surface hard and gravelly, with a steep camber on either side which drained off water. Once he had seen men repairing a hole on one of the long straight stretches near Huntingdon, and the road had been made of rusty-looking compacted gravel, a man’s height in thickness. Those foundations were very old, he had been told; the Roman army had made the road at a time so long ago he could not calculate, and it was still so iron hard the men could not get a pickaxe into it. They were doing daywork for the parish, shovelling gravel into the hole and hoping for the best. Richard wished that every time he had to march soldiers, they might use a road as good, and he was going to do a great deal of marching of soldiers.

  Road-weary as he was, Richard felt glad to see the pale stone walls of York gilded by the evening sun, the weather-vanes on the many churches glinting, all of it laid out like a gingerbread city on a green cloth for his delectation. He felt as he always did in the north, as if he had come home to somewhere he had left only a day or two before, though he had no special proprietary rights in the place — for here Warwick’s kingdom began. He never felt so much a Neville as here; he could scarcely believe that he and his brother had come to subdue the north, to spill their own Neville blood.

  As it turned out, they did not have to spill any blood. There were only a few hundred rebels, led by Henry, Lord Fitzhugh of Ravensworth, Warwick’s brother-in-law. When Lord Fitzhugh heard that King Edward in person had marched as far as Ripon and was after him, he fled northwards to Scotland. Most of the rebels were members of his family, many of them women. How some wives and mothers seemed to enjoy packing their menfolk off to fight. Richard hoped that when he had a wife she would not send him off so gleefully to face death, A wife! There was not much prospect of his marrying with the kingdom in such a turbulent state. His prospects were uncertain and he was still largely financially dependent upon his brother the King.

  At Ripon, Richard was appointed to head the commission to try the rebels. By the same warrant, he was given an office that a few years before would not even have entered his head to dream of holding. King Edward made him Warden of the West Marches against Scotland. This was Warwick’s office, one the Earl had held since he himself was seventeen. Richard knew that in the present circumstance he would meet with hostility where he had once looked for friendship. The people of the north did not take kindly to new faces, were mostly Warwick’s supporters, and had an instinctive dislike of ‘young pups’. Richard was very sure that he would have a hard row to hoe. After all, he had spent only four years of his life here in the north, even if during that time he had never thought of himself as anything but a native. He was a Neville; this was the best way to go to the people. He felt too young to carry the enormous burden ahead, of winning acceptance in the north, without a family to back him, for all his Neville relatives would see him as Warwick’s enemy. This made him as miserable as he knew his cousin John Neville to be. John had been deprived not only of his Earldom of Northumberland in order to reinstate Henry Percy, but had been ousted from his office of Warden of the East Marches. The Marquisate of Montagu was poor compensation. Yet he had struggled with his family loyalty and still supported King Edward. But Edward in a cynical mood had said, ‘He will go to his brother Warwick in the end. I will not wait to be betrayed by another of them. I want a man who owes his position in the north to me and is not a Neville.’

  But Richard’s new office in the north was a burden he was given no chance to assume. News came that the Earl of Warwick’s fleet was assembled at La Hougue, though unable to come out, past the Duke of Burgundy’s ships; it was only a matter, however, of how long they could hold him there. King Edward alerted the Kentish ports, but still made no move south. Richard was among those who urged him to do so, but he said that he preferred to wait for definite news that Warwick had crossed the Channel, and to discover in which part of the kingdom he intended to land.

  At York, King Edward had the toothache. This made him even more disinclined to set out southwards. Richard had never seen his brother so devastatingly sorry for himself, one side of his face like rising dough, wincing at every step and thoroughly unsociable. For days he put off the inevitable pincers, praying the pain might go away. He wrapped a toothpick in a scrap of linen saturated with oil of cloves, which would be sure to draw out the mischievous worm in his tooth, and dabbed away. The pain lessened, then redoubled; King Edward capitulated and sent for his surgeon.

  He was still nursing his damaged face when a messenger pounded into York to tell him that the Earl of Warwick had landed in Devon on Holy Rood Day in Harvest, and had been welcomed in Exeter like a returning hero. With him were the Duke of Clarence — everyone looked the other way when informing the King of his brother’s doings — Jasper Tudor, and the Earl of Oxford.

  By the Feast of St Matthew, King Edward was ready to leave York. He sent word to his lords to ready their men, and to John Neville to bring in his soldiers from Pontefract. The next day they moved to Doncaster, where they rested a night or two at the house of Carmelites, waiting for John Neville to catch up with them. Warwick was marching towards his Warwickshire estates, and the town of Coventry, where he was certain of support. This time there might be a battle — win or lose all.

  On the second night at Doncaster, Richard was woken at some hour of his deepest, dead sleep by a tremendous shouting. He hated being woken suddenly, and the shouting seemed directed into his ears with all the volume of a giant’s yell in a vaulted building. He mumbled crossly and rolled reluctantly over, but before he had time to lever himself up on his elbow to confront his tormentor, someone had stripped the bedclothes off his shoulders and begun to shake him. Anger and alarm drove sleep away quicker than any other remedy, and he jumped awake, shouting back, in a slurred, stupid fashion.

  ‘That’s enough! Am I a sleeping scullion for you to show the toe of your boot? What does this Devil’s din mean?’

  His squire had too urgent a message to be discouraged by angry protests. ‘Your Grace, he’s on the Doncaster road already — armed men — marching at night — coming to take us! We’ll be murdered in our own beds!’ The candlelight distorted the man’s face into that of a grimacing puppet.

  ‘Who? How can he be on the Doncaster road; he’s a hundred miles away — or do you think he’s grown wings like Lucifer?’

  Richard thought only of Warwick. It was not possible for him to be near Doncaster when he had been south of Coventry the day before. They had woken him on some Tom fool alarm.

  ‘We have one of Montagu’s captains here,’ said his squire, urgently. ‘He got away while the going was good. Will your Grace see him at once?’

  ‘Montagu!’ Richard went cold. Surely John Neville could not be marching for Doncaster with any evil intent. There must be some mistake. John was probably pushing on at night to catch up with them, as the King had asked. ‘Bring the man in,’ he said.

  John Neville’s mail found the Duke sitting on the edge of his bed, yawning and rubbing his eyes with his fists, a small, thin boy with a mop of tousled, curly hair. Not another lordling wet behind the ears, he groaned inwardly; I’m wasting my time. Why not let ’em all be swept into the Neville net. But birds kept out of the net did live to pay rewards. The Duke looked sleepy, creases from the pillow down one side of his face. But he looked expec
tantly at the man, demanding instant information, without wasting words.

  ‘Your Grace, I have been with my lord Montagu’s men at Pontefract.’ He had Neville’s griffin badge on his sleeve. ‘He is marching to join his brother the Earl of Warwick. He briefed us yesterday, saying we were now Warwick’s men and King Henry’s! That was the first we knew of it; he’d always sworn we were King Edward’s men. It seems he won’t take arms against his blood brother, and if he joined with you, he could see a battle coming — once a Neville, always a Neville.’

  Richard cut in on him in a curt way that was startling, coming from one who looked as if he should be still at his grammar books.

  ‘The King will make a decision on this. If you are telling the truth, you will be thanked as appropriate. If not, well, bearers of false news are treated as thieves where I give orders.’

  Neville’s captain felt he had underestimated both the boy’s age and his authority.

  ‘Come with me. You can give your news to the King yourself.’ This was an order.

  Because he did speak the truth, the captain had no real cause to be apprehensive, except that he might be caught and murdered before these lords got themselves on the move. He was a hard nut of a soldier, but his heart beat faster as he thought of speaking to the King. He followed the Duke along the bare corridors of the Carmelite friary. The Duke’s head was on a level with his chin, and the boy was all wrapped up in a long gown of very expensive fur, long-haired stuff that made him look like a little squirrel scurrying along.

  King Edward had been roused in the same abrupt way as Richard. Because he had not been drinking the night before, or enjoying a woman, he was wide-awake, fresh-faced, and not in the least out of temper. He did not believe in worried frowns until he was sure he had cause for them. Like his young brother, he was swaddled in a ransom’s worth of fur, but roughly twice as much of it was needed to cover him. Everything about King Edward was very big, from his face to his feet, stuck carelessly into red slippers. The man wondered fleetingly and irreverently if the organ the King was well known to make frequent use of was in proportion to the rest of him.