The Tudor Bride (43 page)
Catherine reached out her hand, lacing her rag-nailed fingers with mine. ‘We have shared so much, Mette, and we will share much more. You are the only one I can send. I know you will do your best.’
L
ondoners watching King Henry the Sixth’s coronation procession began murmuring about bad omens when the rain started falling. Three days previously, Geoffrey and I had made good speed from Hatfield because the roads had still been dry and the streams and rivers low, but on the sixth day of November we peered out of our bedchamber window at dawn to find that autumn had suddenly taken a firm grip. Heavy dark clouds reached grey fingers down to the rooftops and icy winds were making whirligigs with the dead leaves that had dropped from the fruit trees in the garden.
‘We had best make haste to the Strand if we want to arrive dry,’ said Geoffrey, pulling on his hose. ‘Let us hope we have a good viewpoint.’
As a member of the Middle Temple, Geoffrey had reserved places for us to watch the procession in one of the stands erected outside the Inns of Court. I dressed hurriedly in the warmest clothes I could find, extremely grateful that Catherine had made me borrow her sable-lined hooded mantle especially for the occasion. It was a sleek and beautiful garment of the inheritable quality worn only by the highest in the land and I had protested my eligibility to wear it, but she had dismissed my doubts.
‘You are going on my behalf, Mette,’ she had insisted. ‘I would not like you to catch a chill as a result.’
As we waited for the procession to begin, I recalled the preparations Catherine had made the night before her own coronation and wondered if her son had undergone the same long prayer vigil and ritual of bathing and robing in the Tower. There could surely be no doubt that childish Henry would be even more nervous and fearful than she had been as a grown woman, contemplating the prospect of a grand ceremonial ride from the Tower of London to Westminster, the solemn anointing and crowning at the abbey and the protracted feasting afterwards. How sad it was, I thought, that he should be denied the reassuring presence of his mother, the only one with the experience to guide him through the ordeal.
Our seats in the flag-draped wooden stand were good ones, commanding a panoramic view down Fleet Street to the Strand, a thoroughfare which ran down to Westminster from Ludgate, passing a fringe of monasteries and noble mansions fronting the Thames. The rain held off while we settled down to wait, grateful for the arrival of a pie-man and a wine vendor who threaded their way between the benches to sell us some much-needed breakfast. We had napkins tucked in our purses and horn cups tied to our belts and the warm pies and spiced wine soon stilled our shivers and loosened the tongues of our fellow spectators.
The wimpled woman in front of me turned to address the man in a coney-trimmed hood, evidently her husband, who sat beside her. By the loudness of her voice she intended everyone around to hear. ‘I fear the king is over young for such a momentous occasion. What if he drinks too much ale at breakfast and gets caught short during the procession? I mean, he is just a child – still not eight years old.’
‘But kings are different, are they not? They are taught discipline from the cradle – have to be, I suppose.’ It was another goodwife who spoke, twisting round from the row in front and obliged to look up at the first speaker due to of the rake of the stand. Their male companions exchanged frowns, uneasy about the nature of the conversation.
The first woman shrugged and sniffed, unconvinced. ‘I would say my son was well brought up, but at seven when he needed a pee he had to go, there and then.’
‘Shush, madam!’ interrupted her husband. ‘It is the king you are talking about. We owe him the respect of his rank, especially on his coronation day.’
‘And for the sake of his great father, the hero of Agincourt,’ added the other woman’s companion, a florid man wearing a tarnished black chaperon. ‘It seems no time since we cheered him through here with his French bride. The noise was deafening then, but there are no triumphs for today’s warlords. The vanishing earls, I call them. Somerset has still to be ransomed, Salisbury got himself killed and now Suffolk has been captured.’ He ticked them off scornfully on his fingers. ‘Meanwhile, a French tart marches the Pretender to Rheims to be crowned king of France. Half a dozen cities opened their gates to him en route, even Troyes where good King Hal was married!’
This was news to me. Troyes had welcomed Catherine’s brother? I could not believe it. When I was last there, the people had been solidly against Prince Charles, whom they blamed for the murder of the Duke of Burgundy’s father.
The man in the fur-hood nodded vigorous agreement. ‘How does the French whore get away with it? She claims she is sent by God to save France – hah! In England we call bitches who rant like that witches.’ He made the sign of the cross to reinforce his point. ‘And put them to the flames.’
‘But the regency council is rattled enough to rush the young king into this coronation,’ grubby coif pointed out. ‘And next year he will travel to Paris to receive his French crown.’
‘If John of Bedford can hold Paris long enough.’ Fur hood was becoming more agitated. ‘The whore has already tried to storm the gates, but at least this time she was sent packing.’
‘Someone should put a stop to her before she bewitches the whole of France. She is costing us a fortune! Ugh, here comes the rain.’ The second man pulled his hood over his coif.
There was the nub of it, I thought, retreating under my own hood. London merchants were sick of financing wars in France that did not result in rich pickings and the success of this girl Jeanne, who these men called a whore and the French knew as the Maid, was seriously affecting trade. For her own sake I prayed that she would go back home before it was too late, because I knew exactly what kind of man her ‘king’ Charles was and I would have wagered my best silver belt buckle that he would do nothing to help her if she fell into English hands.
Geoffrey slipped his hand into mine under the folds of my cloak and squeezed it in warning. He could see I was fulminating and feared that if I opened my mouth I would spark an argument. Luckily at that moment we heard the sound of trumpets and everyone’s attention switched to the Ludgate where heralds on the battlements were signalling that the king’s procession was about to leave the city walls. On a platform beside us at the Temple Bar a group of costumed boys hastily assembled themselves into a choir of angels, each of them harnessed with feathered wings and crowned with a gilded halo, while a beautiful girl in a blue robe mounted a raised throne in their midst and someone passed up a small child with golden hair, perhaps her own offspring or it might not have sat so calm and still on her lap. The Blessed Virgin Mary and the Christ Child were waiting to honour the king as he passed by – an appropriate image in view of the tender age of the monarch, but ironic too, I thought, in the absence of his own mother.
Out of every window and from the city battlements people waved banners and shouted greetings. The Lord Mayor and Aldermen in robes of scarlet and gold led a column of guild masters through the Ludgate, resplendent in their tasselled hats and chains of office, dispersing to either side of the roadway, ready to bow the king from the city precincts. They were followed first by a detachment of the royal guard, marching in gleaming breastplates and sallet helmets under a forest of long pikes and then by the king’s retinue of knights, wearing highly polished plate armour and crested surcôtes, their horses in full trappings, embroidered with colourful heraldic devices. Behind them and surrounding the king came his most noble vassals led by the Duke of Gloucester and the Earl of Warwick, who, as the king’s governor, held the lead rein of Henry’s prancing white pony.
A lump came to my throat when I saw the little king, for he sat ramrod straight in his saddle like a true chevalier, a gold coronet on his head and an expression of intense pride on his face. Riding beside the warlike Earl of Warwick, he could not help appearing small and vulnerable and I was too far away to glean any sense of his true feelings from his expression, but there was no doubting his self-belief. Henry was playing his role to the manner born. Catherine would have been immensely proud of him. Then we were all given a clue to his character, for as soon as the angel choir began to sing he turned his head to listen, ignoring the deep farewell bows of the London guildsmen. When Warwick drew them to the king’s attention, he shook his head impatiently and drew rein, raising his hand to indicate that he wished the procession to halt.
‘I want to hear the angels sing,’ he declared in a voice high enough and loud enough to carry up to the stands.
Faced with this very public display of the royal will, the Earl of Warwick had no choice but to acquiesce and the whole procession ground to a halt behind them, waiting while Henry sat on his fidgety pony and enjoyed the whole anthem, ignoring the steady curtain of rain which soaked his ermine-trimmed mantle and dripped off the helmets of the stern-faced pike-men. Just as Edmund Beaufort had told us at Hadham, the king obviously preferred a choir above everything.
Meanwhile the rain increased in intensity and once the procession had passed, no one was sorry to quit the stands. As fast as they could, the lawyers, their wives and families hurried to their respective Inns to indulge in the celebratory feasts provided. When the bells of London began to peal from every direction we knew that in St Peter’s Church at Westminster Abbey the probably still damp boy-king had been crowned.
We heard that King Henry would be meeting petitioners at Westminster Hall the following day, and I had announced my intention of being among them. Sensibly, Geoffrey would not let me walk to the Palace of Westminster. ‘You will want to wear your finest clothes to meet the king,’ he said, ‘and the hem of your skirt will get filthy. We will ride there and take Jem to hold the horses.’
He was more confident than I was of getting anywhere near the king but, early the following day, the rain mercifully having stopped, we rode down the Strand, open to traffic once more and bustling with people, carts and flocks of farm animals being herded to market. Although the muckrakers had cleared the thoroughfares for the king’s procession, the previous day’s downpour had turned them to mud, which was already foul with refuse and droppings and I patted Genevieve’s neck, grateful that it was her feet and not mine that squelched through the mire. Under Catherine’s magnificent mantle I felt suitably clad for court in the gown I had worn to my own wedding and, safely tucked into my best red leather purse, I carried her sealed letter to her son.
As a meeting-place for parliament, both lords and commons, and many sessions of the various courts of law, Westminster Hall was used to crowds and many hundreds of people could cram in under its wondrous network of rafters and beams. Being among the first to arrive, we waited for hours while more and more petitioners jostled in behind us, pushing us to the foot of the steps which led up to the royal dais and the guarded entrance to the palace and council chambers. There had been some coming and going through this privy entrance, but no one had emerged that I recognised or who we felt bold enough to approach to ask whether the king would be coming or not. We ate the bread and cheese I had stuffed into Geoffrey’s purse and bought some ale from an opportunistic man with a barrel strapped to his back, but when the None peal began to ring from the abbey bell tower for the monks’ mid-afternoon Office, we became tired and despondent. Even the patient Geoffrey decided that we had waited long enough.
‘You have tried, Mette, and that is all you can do. Queen Catherine will understand.’ He put his hand under my elbow to steer me through the milling crowd of petitioners back to the main door, but just as we were turning away we heard a commotion and the elaborately carved palace doors were flung back to admit a procession of stylishly clad courtiers and richly apparelled clergy with the young king in their midst. The royal party moved to the centre of the stone dais and gazed down at the mass of onlookers who dropped to their knees and broke into a ragged burst of cheers and greetings.
‘God save the king!’ ‘God bless your grace!’ ‘Heaven protect our little king!’
I made no shout myself but gazed up intently at Henry, letting his image etch itself on my mind so that I would be able to describe it to Catherine. From close to he did not look as proud and confident as he had the previous day. His shoulders drooped and his head sagged forward as if he was very tired. I even wondered if, the day before, he could have been wearing some kind of brace under his furred gown when he rode his pony so erectly in the coronation procession. His brow, which yesterday had felt the touch of the holy chrism, was today deeply furrowed in a way I did not like to see in one so young and the expression in his eyes was wary rather than keen. His face was pale and possessed of a large jaw for a boy, his nose long and straight as I remembered his uncle Charles’s had been and he looked tall for his age, despite being dwarfed by the imposing stature of Warwick who stood beside him. My abiding impression was that he would prefer to be somewhere else.
Briefly I dragged my eyes from the king to scan the people gathered around him, dreading to see the Duke of Gloucester, but to my intense relief he was not there. When I returned my gaze to the king, it was to find that he was staring straight at me. The cheers and blessings in the hall had dwindled into murmurs and subsided into complete silence as King Henry raised his hand and pointed at me.
‘I know that woman,’ he said, turning to the Earl of Warwick. ‘I would like to speak to her.’
Warwick looked down at me, frowning, clearly unable to identify me, but he jerked his head at a squire who took note of me and returned the nod. Meanwhile the earl bent down to address the king. ‘Very well, your grace, but first, have you remembered what you would like to say to the people here?’
‘Of course I have remembered,’ declared Henry indignantly and cleared his throat to deliver his well-rehearsed speech to the assembled company. ‘Beloved subjects, I thank you for coming here today. Now that I am your crowned king I will be attending to as many of your petitions and grievances as I can, as soon as I can, but you must be patient. Please hand them to my squires if they are written and tell them to my clerks if they need taking down. May God bless you all.’