The Lady of the Rivers (37 page)

Henry calls for his armour once more, again has his war horse saddled up. The lads in the yard tease his standard bearer that he will have another nice ride out for a day, and assure him that they will keep his dinner warm for him, for he will be back before sunset; but the lords of council and the commanders of the army are not laughing.

The queen and the ladies of her court go down to the frosty jousting green at Westminster to see the parade of the lords ride by on their way out to do battle with the Duke of York.

‘I wish your husband were here to support him,’ she says to me as the king mounts his great grey war horse, his standard before him and his crown on his helmet. He looks much younger than his thirty years, his eyes bright and eager; his smile, as he waves to Margaret, is excited.

‘God save him,’ I say, thinking of the battle-hardened forty-year-old Duke of York mustering his own men.

The trumpets blow, the drummers sound the pace of the march, the cavalry go out first, their standards bright in the icy sunlight, their armour glinting, their horseshoes thunderous on the cobbles, and then after them come the archers and after them the pikemen. This is only a small part of the royal army; tens of thousands of men are waiting for the king’s orders at Blackheath. His councillors have mustered a mighty army for him. From there he will march north to confront the rebel duke.

The march does not happen. Richard, Duke of York, comes into the royal tent and kneels before his king, praying earnestly that the king dismiss the favoured Duke of Somerset and citing old injuries: the loss of the lands in France, the shameful surrender of Rouen, and finally the likely destruction of the garrison of Calais by his selfish seizing of command, which is certain to fail.

He can do no more, he can say no more.

‘We don’t care,’ Margaret says to me, as I brush her hair before bed that evening. ‘We don’t care what he thinks of Edmund Beaufort, we don’t care what he says about Calais, or about me, or about you. He knew he was defeated when we raised an army three times the size of his. He knew he would have to withdraw everything he said. He knew he would have to beg our pardon. He is a broken man. His rebellion is ended. We have broken him.’

I say nothing. The duke does indeed kneel to the king in public and swear never to assemble his men again. The country sees that the king is beloved and the duke is not. The country sees that Edmund Beaufort is unassailable and the Duke of York is defeated.

‘
I don’t doubt the duke is outwardly penitent; but I doubt that the duke’s complaints are over
,’ Richard writes to me from Calais.

The royal couple at any rate are united in their joy. Margaret treats her young husband as if he had returned victorious from a mighty war. ‘He rode out,’ she justifies herself to me. ‘And if there had been fighting I believe he would have led it. He was at the head of his army and he didn’t run for Kenilworth.’

The king takes to riding out every day in his beautifully engraved armour, as if to be ready for anything. Edmund Beaufort comes back from Calais and ridwoueside him, his dark handsome face turned attentively to the king, agreeing with everything he says. The court moves to Windsor, and in an excess of happiness the king offers a pardon to everybody, for anything.

‘Why does he not arrest them all and behead them?’ Margaret demands. ‘Why pardon?’

It seems to be his way. After he has issued pardons to all the rebels his new enthusiasm for warfare spills over into a proposal for an expedition – to go to Calais and use the garrison as a base to reconquer the English lands in France. For the king this would be to step in the footsteps of his more heroic father, for Edmund Beaufort it would be to redeem his reputation. I expected the queen to be thrilled at the thought of Beaufort and the king on campaign but I find her in her room picking over some embroidery, her head down. When she sees me she shifts up in her seat and beckons me beside her. ‘I cannot bear for him to take such a risk,’ she says to me quietly. ‘I cannot bear to think of him in battle.’

I am surprised, and pleased at her emotion. ‘Are you so tender to His Grace the king?’ I ask hopefully. ‘I know I cannot bear it when Richard goes to war.’

She turns her pretty head from me as if I have said something too foolish to answer. ‘No. Not him. Edmund, Edmund Beaufort. What would become of us if he were to be hurt?’

I take a breath. ‘These are the fortunes of war,’ I say. ‘Your Grace should perhaps hold a special intercessory Mass for the safety of the king.’

She brightens at the thought of it. ‘Yes. We could do that. It would be terrible if anything were to happen to him. He would leave no heir but Richard, Duke of York, and I would rather die myself than see York inherit the throne after all he has said and done. And if I were to be widowed I would never be married again, as everyone will think I am barren.’ She looks askance at my broadening body. ‘You don’t know what it is like,’ she says. ‘To wait and to hope and to pray but never, never to have a sign of a child coming.’

‘There is still no sign?’ I ask. I had hoped that she might be with child, that the king militant might have been more of a husband than before.

She shakes her head. ‘No. None. And if the king goes to war he will face my uncle the King of France on the battlefield. If Henry withdraws or retreats, then everyone will laugh at us.’

‘He will have good commanders in the field,’ I say. ‘Once he gets to Calais Richard will put a strong standard bearer beside him, to keep him safe.’

‘Richard was beside him before, when all he had to face was Jack Cade and a rabble,’ she says. ‘A half-pay captain and a band of working men with pitchforks. You didn’t see the king then, Jacquetta, he was terrified. He was frightened like a girl. I’ve never seen him ride as fast as when we left London.’ She puts her hand over her mouth as if to stop disloyal words. ‘If he runs from the French king I will be shamed to the ground,’ she says very quietly. ‘Everyone will know. All my family will know.’

‘He will have his friends beside him,’ I say. ‘Men who are accustomed to warfare. My husband, and Edmund Beaufort the Duke of Somerset.’

‘Edmund has sworn to save Calaisce at my be says. ‘And he is absolutely a man of his word. He swore to me, he went down on his knees and swore to me that nobody would blame me for the loss of Calais, that he would keep it for England and for me. He said it would be his gift to me, like the little fairings he used to give me. He said he would have a golden key made and I can wear it in my hair. They will sail in April.’

‘So soon?’

‘The king has told the Calais garrison to send all their ships to ferry him across the narrow seas. He is taking a great army and a thousand sailors to sail his ships. He is going in April without fail, he says.’

I hesitate. ‘You know, once he gets the fleet assembled, he must go,’ I say carefully. ‘It is very hard to keep a force together, waiting.’

The queen has no idea that I am talking of a year of our lives that Richard and I wasted on the quayside at Plymouth, waiting for her husband to do what he had promised. She has no idea of what that cost us.

‘Of course,’ she says. ‘Edmund Beaufort will get the ships without fail, and then the king will go. Edmund will keep him safe, I know it.’

I see that Edmund Beaufort has completely filled the place of William de la Pole in the affections of the young couple. The king has always needed a man to command him, he is afraid without someone at his side. And the queen is lonely. It is as simple as that.

‘My lord Beaufort will take the king to Calais; thank God that we can rely on him.’

THE WEST OF ENGLAND, SUMMER 1452

He does not go. Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, commands my husband to muster a fleet in Calais and sail with it across the narrow seas to escort the king to France to start his campaign. Richard in Calais recruits the fleet and waits for the order to send the ships to bring the English army to Calais; but spring comes and goes and the order never comes.

I enter my confinement in Grafton, glad to know that Richard is not campaigning this year, and, as it happens, I am right about the baby, I am always right about my babies. I hold my wedding ring on a thread over my curved belly and when it swings clockwise it is a boy and if it is a girl, it circles counter-clockwise. This is hedge-magic, superstition and nonsense that the midwives believe, that the physicians deny. I smile and call it nonsense; but it has never been wrong. I call the new little mite Eleanor and put her in the wooden cradle that has now rocked nine of Richard’s children, and write to tell him that he has a little girl, that she has his dark curling hair and blue eyes, and that he is to take leave from Calais, come home, and see his new daughter.

He does not come. The garrison is under pressure from the Duke of Burgundy, whose forces are mustered nearby; they fear he may set a siege. Although Richard is just across the narrow seas and Calais is only a day’s sail away, it feels as if we have been parted for a long time, and that he is far away.

In the nursery one night, while the wet nurse is having her dinner in the hall below, I sit with my new baby and look at her sleeping in the cradle and I take my great-aunt’s cards from the hanging pocket ag rt, and shuffle them, cut them, and take the one card and put it on the little embroidered blanket in the baby’s crib. I want to know when I will see Richard again, I want to know what the future holds for me.

It is the Fool, a peasant man with a stick over his shoulder, a gaping bag at the end of it, without a fortune now but with hopes. In his other hand he carries a stick to help him stride out on the road ahead. A dog pulls at his breeches, his lowly nature which draws him back from his destiny; but he goes onwards. He keeps trying. It is a card that tells the reader to set off in hope, that great things can be achieved, that one should walk out filled with courage, even if one is a fool to hope. But what catches my eye is the white rose he wears in his cap. I sit for a long time, the card in my hand, wondering what it means to be an adventurer with a white rose in your cap.

When I return to court I ask the queen if Richard may come home but she and the king are distracted by news of trouble, petty uprisings and discontents in all the counties around London. They are the old complaints, stated all over again. Jack Cade was hunted down to his death, but his questions were never answered, and his demands – for justice, for the law, for fair taxation and an end to the court favourites – go on and on. The men of Kent turn out for another unnamed captain, saying that the king must dismiss his favourites who steal the royal fortune and give him bad advice, the men of Warwickshire take up arms, saying that Jack Cade is still alive and will lead them. The king, deaf to all complaints against him, sets out on a summer progress determined to try men for treason and, wherever he goes, Edmund Beaufort the Duke of Somerset rides alongside, a companion and confidant, and sits beside the king when they go south and west to Exeter. Together they pass the death sentence on men who have done nothing more than complain of the duke’s influence.

The men here in the dock are the very ones who complained of having troops quartered on them for a year, the very ones who said that we should go to Gascony and reclaim it, who raged against the waste and the shame of the army on the quayside of Plymouth. They saw, as none of this court will ever see, the spendthrift folly of creating an army and then leaving it with nothing to do. Now they will die for saying that. They said nothing more than Richard and I said to each other when the sailors wore out their patience and the soldiers ate up all the stores. But these men said it aloud when spies were listening and now they will die, for the king’s forgiving nature spins on its axis and suddenly turns to reveal its dark side and is sour.

‘It is sorry work,’ Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, remarks to me, as he sees me walk slowly back from chapel to the queen’s rooms at Exeter. ‘But you must not let yourself be saddened by the sins of the country people, my lady.’

I glance at him, he seems genuinely concerned. ‘I saw the cost to them of the expedition that never sailed,’ I say briefly. ‘It was my husband who quartered the soldiers on them. We knew at the time that it was hard. And this is another price that they have to pay.’

He takes my hand and tucks it into his arm. ‘And there was a heavy cost to you,’ he says sympathetically. ‘It was hard on you, I know, and on your husband, Lord Rivers. There is no better commander in England, and no safer man to hold Calais. There was no doubt in my mind he did everything he could to keep the army ready.’

‘He did,’ I say. ‘And he will do everything in Calais, but if the king sends no wages to pay the troops then the garrison will turn against us. Just as Kent turned against us, just as Devon is turning against us now.’

He nods. ‘I am trying, my lady,’ he says, as if he is answerable to me. ‘You can tell your husband that he is never far from my thoughts. I am Constable of Calais, I never forget my duty to your husband and the garrison. There is no money in the treasury and the court eats gold, every time we move it is a small fortune, and the king, God bless him, will have all the money for the colleges he is building to the glory of God, and for his friends who strive for their own glory. But I am trying, I will satisfy the king and I will not see your husband and his comrade Lord Welles left short of funds in Calais.’