Philippa Gregory's Tudor Court 6-Book Boxed Set (56 page)

And finally, I was forced to find a doctor in secret and consult with him in hiding because she had done her part in driving from Christendom the best physicians, the best scientists, and the cleverest minds in the world. She had named their wisdom as sin, and the rest of Europe had followed her lead. She rid Spain of the Jews and their skills and courage, she rid Spain of the Moors and their scholarship and gifts. She, a woman who admired learning, banished those that they call the People of the Book. She who fought for justice had been unjust.

I cannot yet think what this estrangement might mean for me. My mother is dead; I cannot reproach her or argue with her now, except in my imagination. But I know these months have wrought a deep and lasting change in me. I have come to an understanding of my world that is not her understanding of hers. I do not support a crusade against the Moors, nor against anyone. I do not support persecution, nor cruelty to them for the color of their skin or the belief in their hearts. I know that my mother is not infallible, I no longer believe she and God think as one. Though I still love my mother, I don’t worship her anymore. I suppose, at last, I am growing up.

*     *     *

Slowly, the queen emerged from her grief and started to take an interest in the running of the court and country once more. London was buzzing with the news that Scottish privateers had attacked an English merchant ship. Everyone knew the name of the privateer: he was Andrew Barton, who sailed with letters of authority from King James of Scotland. Barton was merciless to English ships, and the general belief in the London docks was that James had deliberately licensed the pirate to prey on English shipping as if the two countries were already at war.

“He has to be stopped,” Katherine said to Henry.

“He does not dare to challenge me!” Henry exclaimed. “James sends border raiders and pirates against me because he does not dare to face me himself. James is a coward and an oath breaker.”

“Yes,” Katherine agreed. “But the main thing about this pirate Barton is that he is not only a danger to our trade, he is a forerunner of worse to come. If we let the Scots rule the seas then we let them command us. This is an island: the seas must belong to us as much as the land or we have no safety.”

“My ships are ready and we sail at midday. I shall capture him alive,” Edward Howard, the admiral of the fleet, promised Katherine as he came to bid her farewell. She thought he looked very young, as boyish as Henry, but his flair and courage were unquestioned. He had inherited all his father’s tactical skill but brought it to the newly formed navy. The Howards traditionally held the post of lord admiral, but Edward was proving exceptional. “If I cannot capture him alive, I shall sink his ship and bring him back dead.”

“For shame on you! A Christian enemy!” she said teasingly, holding out her hand for his kiss.

He looked up, serious for once. “I promise you, Your Grace, that the Scots are a greater danger to the peace and wealth of this country than the Moors could ever be.”

He saw her wistful smile. “You are not the first Englishman to tell me that,” she said. “And I have seen it myself in these last years.”

“It has to be right,” he said. “In Spain your father and mother never rested until they could dislodge the Moors from the mountains. For us in England, our closest enemy is the Scots. It is they who are in our mountains, it is they who have to be suppressed and quelled if we are ever to be at peace. My father has spent his life defending the northern borders, and now I am fighting the same enemy but at sea.”

“Come home safely,” she urged.

“I have to take risks,” he said carelessly. “I am no stay-at-home.”

“No one doubts your bravery, and my fleet needs an admiral,” she told him. “I want the same admiral for many years. I need my champion at the next joust. I need my partner to dance with me. You come home safely, Edward Howard!”

*     *     *

The king was uneasy at his friend Edward Howard setting sail against the Scots, even against a Scots privateer. He had hoped that his father’s
alliance with Scotland, enforced by the marriage of the English princess, would have guaranteed peace.

“James is such a hypocrite to promise peace and marry Margaret on one hand and license these raids on the other! I shall write to Margaret and tell her to warn her husband that we cannot accept raids on our shipping. They should keep to their borders too.”

“Perhaps he will not listen to her,” Katherine pointed out.

“She can’t be blamed for that,” he said quickly. “She should never have been married to him. She was too young, and he was too set in his ways, and he is a man for war. But she will bring peace if she can. She knows it was my father’s wish, she knows that we have to live in peace. We are kin now, we are neighbors.”

But the border lords, the Percys and the Nevilles, reported that the Scots had recently become more daring in their raids on the northern lands. Unquestionably, James was spoiling for war; undoubtedly he meant to take land in Northumberland as his own. Any day now he could march south, take Berwick, and continue on to Newcastle.

“How dare he?” Henry demanded. “How dare he just march in and take our goods and disturb our people? Does he not know that I could raise an army and take them against him tomorrow?”

“It would be a hard campaign,” Katherine remarked, thinking of the wild land of the border and the long march to get to it. The Scotsmen would have everything to fight for, with the rich southern lands spread before them, and English soldiers never wanted to fight when they were far from their villages.

“It would be easy,” Henry contradicted her. “Everyone knows that the Scots can’t keep an army in the field. They are nothing more than a raiding party. If I took out a great English army, properly armed and supplied and ordered, I would make an end of them in a day!”

“Of course you would.” Katherine smiled. “But don’t forget, we have to muster our army to fight against the French. You would far rather win your spurs against the French on a field of chivalry which will go down in history than in some dirty border quarrel.”

*     *     *

Katherine spoke to Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, Edward Howard’s father, at the end of the Privy Council meeting as the men came out of the king’s rooms.

“My Lord? Have you heard from Edward? I miss my young chevalier.”

The old man beamed at her. “We had a report this day. The king will tell you himself. He knew you would be pleased that your favorite has had a victory.”

“He has?”

“He has captured the pirate Andrew Barton with two of his ships.” His pride shone through his pretense of modesty. “He has only done his duty,” he said. “He has only done as any Howard boy should do.”

“He is a hero!” Katherine said enthusiastically. “England needs great sailors as much as we need soldiers. The future for Christendom is in dominating the seas. We need to rule the seas as the Saracens rule the deserts. We have to drive pirates from the seas and make English ships a constant presence. And what else? Is he on his way home?”

“He will bring his ships into London and the pirate in chains with him. We’ll try him and hang him on the quayside. But King James won’t like it.”

“Do you think the Scots king means war?” Katherine asked him bluntly. “Would he go to war over such a cause as this? Is the country in danger?”

“This is the worst danger to the peace of the kingdom of any in my lifetime,” the older man said honestly. “We have subdued the Welsh and brought peace to our borders in the west; now we will have to put down the Scots. After them we will have to settle the Irish.”

“They are a separate country, with their own kings and laws,” Katherine demurred.

“So were the Welsh till we defeated them,” he pointed out. “This is too small a land for three kingdoms. The Scots will have to be yoked into our service.”

“Perhaps we could offer them a prince,” Katherine thought aloud. “As you did to the Welsh. The second son could be the Prince of Scotland as the firstborn is the Prince of Wales, for a kingdom united under the English king.”

He was struck with her idea. “That’s right,” he said. “That would be the way to do it. Hit them hard and then offer them a peace with honor. Otherwise we will have them snapping at our heels forever.”

“The king thinks that their army would be small and easily defeated,” Katherine remarked.

Howard choked back a laugh. “His Grace has never been to Scotland,” he said. “He has never even been to war yet. The Scots are a formidable
enemy, whether in pitched battle or a passing raid. They are a worse enemy than any of his fancy French cavalry. They have no laws of chivalry, they fight to win and they fight to the death. We will need to send a powerful force under a skilled commander.”

“Could you do it?” Katherine asked.

“I could try,” he replied honestly. “I am the best weapon to your hand at the moment, Your Grace.”

“Could the king do it?” she asked quietly.

He smiled at her. “He’s a young man,” he said. “He lacks nothing for courage—no one who has seen him in a joust could doubt his courage. And he is skilled on his horse. But a war is not a joust, and he does not know that yet. He needs to ride out at the head of a bold army and be seasoned in a few battles before he fights the greatest war of his life—the war for his very kingdom. You don’t put a colt into a cavalry charge on his first outing. He has to learn. The king, even though a king, will have to learn.”

“He was taught nothing of warfare,” she said. “He has not had to study other battles. He knows nothing about observing the lie of the land and positioning a force. He knows nothing about supplies and keeping an army on the move. His father taught him nothing.”

“His father knew next to nothing,” the earl said quietly, for her ears only. “His first battle was Bosworth and he won that partly by luck and partly by the allies his mother put in the field for him. He was courageous enough, but no general.”

“But why did he not ensure that Henry was taught the art of warfare?” asked Ferdinand’s daughter, who had been raised in a camp and seen a campaign plan before she had learned how to sew.

“Who would have thought he would need to know?” the old earl asked her. “We all thought it would be Arthur.”

She made sure that her face did not betray the sudden pang of grief at the unexpected mention of his name. “Of course,” she said. “Of course you did. I forgot. Of course you did.”

“Now, he would have been a great commander. He was interested in the waging of war. He read. He studied. He talked to his father, he pestered me. He was well aware of the danger of the Scots, he had a great sense of how to command men. He used to ask me about the land on the border, where the castles were placed, how the land fell. He could have led an army against the Scots with some hopes of success. Young
Henry will be a great king when he has learned tactics, but Arthur knew it all. It was in his blood.”

Katherine did not even allow herself the pleasure of speaking of him. “Perhaps,” was all she said. “But in the meantime, what can we do to limit the raids of the Scots? Should the border lords be reinforced?”

“Yes, but it is a long border, and hard to keep. King James does not fear an English army led by the king. He does not fear the border lords.”

“Why does he not fear us?”

He shrugged, too much of a courtier to say any betraying word. “Well, James is an old warrior; he has been spoiling for a fight for two generations now.”

“Who could make James fear us and keep him in Scotland while we reinforce the border and get ready for war? What would make James delay and buy us time?”

“Nothing,” he declared, shaking his head. “There is no one who could hold back James if he is set on war. Except perhaps only the Pope, if he would rule? But who could persuade His Holiness to intervene between two Christian monarchs quarreling over a pirate’s raid and a patch of land? And the Pope has his own worries with the French advancing. And besides, a complaint from us would only bring a rebuttal from Scotland. Why would His Holiness intervene for us?”

“I don’t know,” said Katherine. “I don’t know what would make the Pope take our side. If only he knew of our need! If only he would use his power to defend us!”

*     *     *

Richard Bainbridge, Cardinal Archbishop of York, happens to be at Rome and is a good friend of mine. I write to him that very night, a friendly letter as between one acquaintance to another far from home, telling him of the news from London, the weather, the prospects for the harvest and the price of wool. Then I tell him of the enmity of the Scottish king, of his sinful pride, of his wicked licensing of attacks on our shipping and—worst of all—his constant invasions of our northern lands. I tell him that I am so afraid that the king will be forced to defend his lands in the north that he will not be able to come to the aid of the Holy Father in his quarrel with the French king. It would be such a tragedy, I write, if the Pope was left exposed to attack and we could not come to his aid because of the wickedness of the Scots. We plan to join my father’s alliance and defend the Pope; but we can hardly muster for the Pope if there is no safety at
home. If I have my way, nothing should distract my husband from his alliance with my father, with the emperor and with the Pope, but what can I, a poor woman, do? A poor woman whose own defenseless border is under constant threat?

What could be more natural than that Richard, my brother in Christ, should go with my letter in his hand to His Holiness the Pope and say how disturbed I am by the threat to my peace from King James of Scotland, and how the whole alliance to save the Eternal City is threatened by this bad neighborliness?

The Pope, reading my letter to Richard, reads it aright and writes at once to King James and threatens to excommunicate him if he does not respect the peace and the justly agreed borders of another Christian king. He is shocked that James should trouble the peace of Christendom. He takes his behavior very seriously and grave penalties could result. King James, forced to accede to the Pope’s wishes, forced to apologize for his incursions, writes a bitter letter to Henry saying that Henry had no right to approach the Pope alone, that it had been a quarrel between the two of them and there is no need to go running behind his back to the Holy Father.