Georgette Heyer (19 page)

But just when King Henry had decided that the Welsh danger was more pressing than the Scotch, Glendower, the self-styled Prince of Wales, sought counsel of a seer, who informed him that he would shortly be taken prisoner, under a black banner, between Carmarthen and Gower. The next news that reached the King was so good as to be almost incredible: Owen had abandoned his advance, and was retreating to the mountains. The King seized the opportunity to make one of his swift moves. Writs had already been issued to the sheriffs of the midland and northern counties; the King reached Lichfield on the thirteenth day of July, intending to march against the Scots; and while he lay at the castle word reached him that the Percies were in open revolt. Hotspur, with a counterfeit King Richard in his train, had arrived at Chester, on his way to join forces with Glendower and Sir Edmund Mortimer; and from Shrewsbury, where Prince Harry lay, the Earl of Worcester had slipped away to his nephew’s camp.

4

‘My lord,’ said Sir Hugh Waterton, ‘I am going to join the King, for in this pass he has need of his friends.’

‘With my good will!’ said the Lord John. ‘I am for Westminster!’

Sir Hugh eyed his charge sideways. It had been reported to him that upon hearing the tidings from the West my lord had hurled his books into the stewpond, and had broken his ink-standage on the head of a protesting valet. The Lord John was the easiest tempered of Sir Hugh’s royal pupils, but once or twice he had shown his governor that Plantagenet fire ran hot in his veins. Sir Hugh temporised. ‘To what end, lording?’ he asked, pulling his long moustache.

‘I must have speech with my uncle the Chancellor!’ declared the Lord John. ‘I have done with books!’

Sir Hugh was not overly fond of Henry Beaufort, but he had a plain man’s respect for a man of letters, and he thought that perhaps the wily Bishop of Lincoln would know better than he how to deal with rebellious youth. He said: ‘Well, you may do so!’

‘Witterly! Go, you, and join my father! And I pray you send me tidings, Sir Hugh!’

‘As to that,’ said Sir Hugh, ‘I am not apt with my pen – ’

‘No force of that! Send me tidings!’

‘Well, I will do so if I may – and if you talk to me in this malapert manner, lording, it will be the worse for you!’ said Sir Hugh.

‘No force of that either. Sir Hugh, set a strong guard about the Mortimers!’

‘My lord, it needs not that you should teach me where my duty lies!’ exploded Sir Hugh.

‘Nay, but take care that no stranger comes near them! King Richard is dead, and Hotspur knows it: he will declare for March before the month is out!’

‘I hope,’ said Sir Hugh, with feeling, ‘that my lord Bishop will take order to you, lording!’

But my lord Bishop, confronted by a large and hawk-faced nephew, who demanded that he should be released from his books and given employment befitting a man, took no order to the Lord John. He regarded him with interest, invited him to dinner, and listened to the outpourings of his chafed spirit with sympathy. When he judged that the sensibilities of youth had been sufficiently soothed by meat and wine he said: ‘How old are you, my son?’

‘Fourteen – past!’ replied John.

The Bishop looked thoughtfully at him. Rage had coloured the Lord John’s discourse, but under it the Bishop perceived kind-wit. He sipped his wine, considering the big, flushed boy, who gave him back stare for stare.

‘I am as apt as Thomas for a command, Father!’ John urged.

‘Yes, I think you are,’ said the Bishop. ‘Also I think that you will have your command. Patience a while yet, John!’

‘I will not go back to Berkhampsted!’ said John.

‘You may go to Westminster,’ said the Bishop.

‘I had liefer you sent me to Shrewsbury.’

‘That shall not serve. Westminster!’ repeated the Bishop.

At Westminster his stepmother made John welcome. She was trying to decide between two sets of hallings for the King’s Great Chamber, for (little heart though she now had for the task) she was refurnishing the royal apartments.

‘I would I were at your father’s side,’ she told John. ‘Alas, he would in no wise permit it, but bade me be of good cheer! So I am busying myself with making the palace more easeful for him. For myself, I don’t care how I live. I have always said I could be happy in a peasant’s hovel.’

‘Have you word from my father, madam?’ John asked.

‘Oh, my dear John, no, and I am for-pained with dread! And now they tell me that my lord of Worcester has deserted your dear brother, and I can see that everyone believes it to be my fault. I am sure I would have borne anything rather than have brought trouble on your father. Over and over again I implored him not to think there was anything amiss between that man and poor little me, but of course he could not but see that something had happened to distress me, try as I might to conceal it!’

She told him that to have him at her side was the greatest comfort to her, for she felt herself to be friendless in a strange land. John looked surprised at this, for the palace seemed hardly large enough to accommodate all her Breton attendants; but she explained that she kept these persons only because she had no other friends. She could not help shedding a tear or two, but she wiped them away, and smiled bravely, begging him not to repeat her words to the King. She added, sighing, that he did not know what trials assailed women. Two days in her company, however, enlarged his horizon; and he soon knew that the trials of women included almost every persecution, from unsolicited advances from such persons as the Earl of Worcester, to the churlish behaviour of the English Parliament, in refusing to allow her Breton ships to discharge their cargoes at the Port of London without paying duty on wares which she imported solely for her husband’s benefit.

John spent the following days anywhere but at Westminster, and mostly at the Bishop of Lincoln’s inn without Ludgate, by Temple Bar. The Bishop had little time to spare for him, but he several times entertained him at supper. He learned from his secretaries that the Lord John’s way of passing these anxious days was to make himself familiar with as many of the details of government as could be gleaned from them. The Bishop’s interest in this scarcely-regarded nephew grew. He encouraged John to talk, and answered at least some of his questions. It did not take him long to discover the mainspring of this rather taciturn boy’s hopes and fears. ‘How many men has Harry with him?’ John asked. ‘Is Shrewsbury a defensible town? What force can Hotspur lead against Harry?’

‘You are very fond of Harry, are you not, my son?’

John nodded.

‘I too,’ said the Bishop. ‘But you will have to learn not to let your heart be so much troubled when he goes to war. If I read Harry aright, war is his trade. As for his present plight, I do not believe it to be desperate. Certes, Hotspur will find many to support him in Cheshire, for that was ever King Richard’s stronghold; but chiefly he is relying on the Welsh rebel. What has Harry told you of Owen Glendower?’

‘That he fights no pitched battles. But if he could join hands with Hotspur might he not venture?’

The Bishop’s quizzical brows rose. ‘It is not likely that your father will permit him to join hands with Hotspur, my child.’

‘Father has never been fortunate in Wales,’ said John bluntly.

‘He has always crossed the Border at the worst time of the year,’ replied the Bishop. ‘It is now high summer, and there will be no storms to hold him back. If the issue lies between him and Harry Percy – why, the King, my son, is very much the better man!’

‘Yea, no charge! But where is my lord of Northumberland, Father?’

‘In his own country, where I trust my good friend of Westmoreland will keep him,’ said the Bishop.

‘I have seen one of Hotspur’s manifestos,’ said John. ‘And I am right glad that it bears Northumberland’s name, for now we may see an end to that accursed brood!’

‘H’m, yes!’ said the Bishop dryly. ‘We may!’

5

Antelope Pursuivant, the herald who brought the tidings of the King’s victory outside Shrewsbury to the Chancellor, brought also a letter from Sir Hugh Waterton to the Lord John. It told him only one new thing, and that made him look up quickly from the letter, and demand: ‘How is the Prince wounded?’

‘An arrow struck him in the cheek, my lord. He said it was no matter, and he would in no wise leave the field. It is given out that he will be speedily amended.’

John crushed the letter into a ball, and tossed it aside. He pushed forward a stool with one foot, and said: ‘Sit! Now unbosom! I want to know the whole!’ He saw that the man was shy, and added: ‘I know that Hotspur was slain, but who else? What of Worcester? What of the Earl of Douglas?’

‘As for the Scottish Earl, my lord, he is the King’s prisoner. My lord of Worcester was taken also, but him they headed. The King’s grace would have spared him, but the great lords wouldn’t have it so, saying that if Hotspur had sent another than he to parley before the battle was joined the bloodshed would have been spared. As for Sir Harry Hotspur, no man can say whose was the hand that slew him. But he knew himself a dead man before ever he put on his harness.’

‘How?’ John interjected.

‘They say, lord, that it was foretold by a soothsayer that he would meet his end at Berwick. He was in right blithesome humour, but when he learned that the village where he lay that night was so named his mirth forsook him, and he stood as still as a stone a paternoster-while. And at last he said full heavily: ‘Then has my plough reached its last furrow!’ But he fought manfully, seeking all the time to come at the King, and slaying three that wore the King’s cognisance.’

‘It was not the King who slew him?’

‘Nay, lord, it was not the King. The Scots Earl of March, and some others, would by no means permit the King to venture his person in that cause. And, sooth, I think he did not desire Hotspur’s death, for when we brought the body to him later he wept in all men’s sight. He had no joy in the victory, nor any man, for it was the worst battle that ever was fought in England, lord, and the unkindest.’

When the full tale was known few men wondered that the King had little joy in his victory. The heralds, whose bleak task it was to go forth on to a stricken field, counting and naming the dead, reported that sixteen hundred men lay stiff and stark amongst the trampled crops. Chief amongst them was the Lord Stafford, who had led the vaward of the King’s army. People shook their heads, and signed themselves: no charge but Thomas of Gloucester’s bale had descended upon his children. Twice had his daughter Anne married a Stafford, and twice had she been widowed, this time left to mourn the flower of knighthood, with his heir an infant in swaddling-bands.

To the last the King had striven to avoid bloodshed. Slipping through Hotspur’s lines, he had reached Shrewsbury on the eighteenth day of July, and had sent immediately to parley with Hotspur. But Hotspur, some said urged thereto by his uncle of Worcester, whom the Witch Queen had driven off from his allegiance, was determined to try the issue upon the field of battle. Many of his men wore Richard’s badge of the White Hart; others, as John had foretold, held by the White Lions of Mortimer; but neither his father, mustering men in the north, nor Glendower, hovering in the Welsh mountains, came to join him. My lord of Northumberland found Ralph Neville of Westmoreland blocking the way, and was forced to retreat to Newcastle; and Owen Glendower still hesitated to risk a pitched battle. The engagement was fought out between fairly matched armies, and for a long time the issue hung in the balance. But Hotspur fell; the great standard of the rampant blue lion wavered; the cries of ‘
Esperance, Percy!
’ faltered; and the heart went out of his levies.

The King gave his body to a kinsman for a decent burial, against the advice of all his officers, and it was interred at Whitchurch. But the King’s advisers had been right: within a day a whisper was abroad that Hotspur lived yet, and would fight again. They were obliged to dig up the corpse, and to set it, rubbed in salt, between two posts on the highway for all to see. After several days it was taken down and dismembered, the head being sent to York, to be set above the bridge there. Worcester’s head was sent to London; and for many months the crones on the Surrey side of the river earned groats from travellers by pointing out to them the grinning skull that was all that was left of M. de Guyenne’s old friend, the Earl of Worcester.

6

From Shrewsbury the King marched north, trying to come to grips with the Earl of Northumberland. The Earl sought refuge in his hold of Warkworth, closely beset, but John’s spirits sank when he learned that he had been induced to render himself up to the King at York, under promise that no hand should be lifted against him before he had appeared before Parliament to answer for his treachery. The Fox of the North, the very picture of benevolent old age, reminded the King of his great services, and pleaded that he was not accountable for the misdeeds of his son. The King sat like an image; and the only words he spoke in answer to his Mattathias were not comfortable. He carried him in his train to Pontefract, and compelled him there to render up all his offices. But he did not head him; he sent him instead to await impeachment at Baginton.

John was so angry when he heard this that he spent the day amongst his falcons, preferring feathered company to man’s. The King had appointed him Master of the Falcons; and he was the first of the Masters for many years who treated the honour as something more than a distinguishing title. The astringers grew to like and respect a prince who was not content to ride out with a hawk on his fist, but who kept a tally of their accounts; knew when fresh turves were really needed for the Royal Mews; understood the use of orpiment and dragon’s blood for sick birds; and was not above inspecting hoods, and stocks, and terrets.