A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury Page 10

  But into that flight, though he looked at him thoughtfully and searchingly, Hotspur would not follow him. And so they parted.

  * * *

  When the prince heard the story, over a conference table uttered with notes, despatches and letters, he first opened eyes and mouth wide with shock and disbelief, and cried: “Never say so!” and then as suddenly laughed aloud, crowing: “A judgment!” looking, for once, a year or so less than his age and capable of mischief; and then he looked very grave indeed, and sat staring moodily at his table-full of papers, and said, dismayed: “The king will be out of himself with anger. He values Grey.”

  “Too well!” said Hotspur grimly. There was no third present, and they spoke openly as they always spoke together. “I don’t say the man could not be of the highest value, if he did not ruin everything he touches with his implacable spleen. He fights well, he mans and maintains his castles well—God knows not all in the marches do so!—and he has a good grasp of tactics in the field. And yet he is the man who first made this needless quarrel, and now inflames it even when Glendower is disposed to be reasonable. He would never in life agree willingly—or let the king agree—to any settlement but a total victory over the Welsh, and the hanging of all their leaders into the bargain.”

  “To be fair,” the prince pointed out generously, “in this case it seems to have been Owen who took the offensive.” And briefly, before resuming his burden of responsibility with a resigned sigh, he laughed again. “It must have been a rare sight! I wish I’d been there to see.”

  “Faith, and so do I, but we’re like to pay dear for it. And what do you think Grey was doing, skirting the forest with such a force? No, he had his information, no question—only it seems it was none too accurate. And the upshot is, there will be war on hotter terms than ever, and no more listening to counsels of peace. And we had best get our fences in order, you and I.”

  “We must get back to Chester,” the prince said, “and call a council at once. We can better keep care of Denbigh and Mold and Flint from there, and I must see to it that Ruthyn is properly garrisoned, now that Grey’s gone. Where do you suppose they have taken him?”

  Hotspur laughed shortly. “Where no one but a Welshman is likely to be able to track them. The king had his fill of trying to find the Welsh in their own mountains, a year and more ago. The most we can do is expect Owen everywhere, and be strong enough to match him wherever he strikes. For strike again he will, now the die’s cast. There’s no going back from Grey’s capture—not until time has dulled the sting, at least, and made it possible to mention peace without being called a traitor by some city haberdasher in the commons. I’ve already written the news to my uncle of Worcester in Cardigan. Who knows, the next foray may be into the south. And, Hal, from Chester I must go north to the march as fast as I may, for Walton sends me word there are new raids threatening, and it’s his belief and mine there are French knights serving there with Douglas.”

  “France has declared its intent to maintain the truce,” the prince objected.

  “To send a force with King Charles’ official blessing is one thing,” Hotspur agreed with a hollow smile, “to finance small parties of adventurers and let them slip away privately to Scotland is another. It’s cheaper than out-and-out war, and they can be disowned if things grow too difficult. But trust me, they’re there. And both France and Scotland are receiving Glendower’s letters, and finding them tempting too. We may yet find ourselves fighting a war on three fronts, and all one war.”

  “I know it is a possibility my father has much in mind,” the boy admitted soberly.

  They did not speak of what lay behind France’s bitter enmity, though it was always present in their minds, a spot too sore to touch on lightly. Charles of France might shrink from fomenting a direct war, but he would be glad to use every oblique weapon against the upstart king who had deposed his son-in-law, and sent his little widowed daughter back in clumsy state, but without her dowry, which had been fed of necessity into King Henry’s treasury to keep it solvent during his first year of kingship.

  “Dunbar is there in the north,” said the prince, offering what even he felt to be dubious reassurance.

  “The more reason I should be there, too,” said Hotspur tartly, “for a man who can turn his coat once can turn it again as readily. I’ll take my wife home to Bamburgh, Hal, and go north to Berwick myself for part of the summer. If you need me, I’ll be in Chester within three days. But to say truth, I trust this border to you with a far lighter heart than I trust the east march to Dunbar.”

  He hungered for the north, too, the prince knew that. It was his country, and campaigning across those noble moors under the Cheviot was his true life, as natural to him as to the hawks hovering on languid, sinewy, expert wings above the heather. He did his work here well and thoroughly, but he hankered, every so often, for the rough grey seas and painted, cloud-dappled hills of Northumberland, and his children, and the soil that knew his step and warmed under the sole of his foot, like a caress.

  “I’m faced with this business of the Danish marriages,” the boy said without enthusiasm. “I shall have to go to London, perhaps in May, to appoint proctors. I suppose I must at least be civil to the Danish envoys, and offer them some entertainment. I shall not linger.”

  Hotspur forgot his preoccupations for a moment, and looked more closely and with quickening affection at his friend. To be thinking of marriage, at this age, to a girl he had never seen, who might be ugly, stupid and inert, where he was handsome, intelligent and almost excessively alive! He felt a wave of almost incredulous pity for princes. “Are you happy about this proposed match. Hal?”

  The boy shrugged, raising his brows with a mild affectation of surprise that it could be thought to be important; but the stillness of his face and the steadiness of his eyes on Hotspur went some way towards betraying him. The three northern countries had recently agreed by treaty to unite under one king, the fifteen-year-old Eric, and Eric had sent envoys to propose a marriage for him with King Henry’s second daughter, Philippa, and as an opportunist gesture by the way, a second match between Eric’s sister Catherine and the prince of Wales. The boy had lived through the negotiations, rather less sordid than most of their kind, for his sister Blanche’s marriage, and had got the tune of these affairs very well off by heart now. It was no shock to him that he should be marketed in his turn. And yet the Danish princess was no great catch for the heir to the English throne. He knew that, too. By this time there was very little he did not know about being a prince; and long before he came to it he would know more than most men born to it about being a king.

  “Why, it’s nothing yet but the beginning of talks. They’ll play with it for two or three years yet, and in the end very probably nothing will come of it. After all, Philippa is not yet eight years old. I was but an afterthought, and I doubt if they’re bidding high enough for me.”

  His voice was cool, even a little cruel, in its effort to be adult and civilised. For when it came to the point, he would probably do what was expected of him, whatever that might be. Marriages were an acknowledged part of the to-and-fro of barter and bargaining that royal children were born to. (But there was always the sudden stab at his heart when he reasoned thus, because he had not been born to it!) And that thought brought him sharply into collision with the one marriage that stuck most obstinately in his throat.

  He had not mentioned it in all this week that Hotspur had spent with him at the abbey, had asked no questions but the most current politenesses about his stay and his journey, and had shown no interest at all in the ceremony from which he had come. But now suddenly he came out with it violently, almost in the manner of Hotspur himself over-riding some constraint that tied his tongue:

  “Harry, what does my father hope for from this marriage of his?” And as Hotspur turned to face him, in mild but sympathetic surprise: “He cannot suppose that allying himself to the duchess of Brittany will either placate or frighten the French. It will not
even give him any power in Brittany, for if she comes here she loses whatever sway she has there. He neither gains an ally nor sweetens an enemy, and say she brings but a token household with her, yet it will cost him dear to keep them. And you know how willing the commons will be to grant an aid for a foreign queen! They starve him of funds even for paying his soldiers. No one knows it better than you—we’ve both pledged our own valuables before now to keep our archers from deserting. What does he want,” said the boy, pale and passionate in resentment, “with a new expense? What does he want with a queen? He’s lived content enough these eight years since my mother died.”

  He had put a finger too accurately on the true cause of his indignation, and flinched away from it hurriedly.

  “And if it is not some political advantage he is after, what else is there? Why, he can have seen the duchess no more than once, and that at least four or five years ago, when she was a wife.” Wife to an elderly duke, he could have added, and his third wife at that; it did occur to him fleetingly that she, perhaps, had something to gain, a brief recapture of life and youth before it was too late. “So what is it he hopes to get out of it?”

  True enough he’s seen her but once,” Hotspur said gently, “and by the same token he must have liked well what he saw, for he’s been in correspondence with her ever since he was crowned. And but that he had many things to occupy his mind, and she no less, I think something would have come of it before now.” It was hard to urge forbearance and sympathy with the father on the son, all the more in face of that bitter resentment that was all for poor Mary Bohun, mother of six young children and dead at twenty-four. More than likely his younger brothers and sisters would welcome a new mother, but he was too nearly a man to take kindly to any woman set with so little warning in his own mother’s place, especially when this new incumbent stood to gain a crown as well as a ring. The earl of Derby had never offered Mary a crown.

  “You must not think,” gently said the man who had married for love in his late twenties, “that the king has always reasons of cold policy for what he does. What does he hope for? A little happiness, perhaps, Hal, nothing stranger than that. A little happiness, while there’s still time.”

  4

  It was a grim summer that year. There were torrential rains, rivers burst their banks and flooded standing crops, churches were struck by lightning in heavy thunderstorms. After the first fair flush of spring, nothing went right. Like the weather, the fortunes of the time were soured. Nothing but bad news came in from every frontier.

  The king withdrew in great weariness and exasperation of mind from his son’s manor of Kennington, where he had presided over an anxious council on Wales, and took refuge in mid-June in his castle of Berkhamsted, with only his intimate household about him. Strange how wide a gulf he found between these old retainers of Lancaster and the full council of the realm, let alone the unpredictable vagaries of parliament. Nothing could shake the steadiness of such men as Hugh Waterton or John Norbury, who had been in his service from the time when he had been merely Henry of Bolingbroke, earl of Derby, and even that title borrowed by courtesy from his father. On these, on the Leventhorpes and Rempstons and Erpynghams, he could lean when he would, and they would not let him fall. But the council of England turned in his hand. Parliament crossed him, always with the greatest respect but implacably, criticised his use of the council to levy an aid for the marriage of his elder daughter without consulting them, doubted if there was a precedent recent enough to justify the aid, and periodically and obstinately restated to him the principle that the king should live “of his own,” without demanding that parliament should raise money by taxes for his expenses. Had not John of Gaunt been reckoned the richest man in the kingdom? And so might his son have been and remained, with only a duchy to administer, but a kingdom was a different thing. How different, he had never dreamed until he made the assay.

  They had declared at his accession, they had repeated often since, that they desired him to reign upon the selfsame terms as his predecessors; and yet they made him aware, whenever it was needful to ask for a grant of money, that in fact he stood upon ground subtly changed, and must ask as a favour what had been Richard’s unquestioned right. But there were never any open words expressing the inflection, never anything to which he could raise objection. Only the feeling of mute resistance, the chill sense of acquiescence so grudging as to give pain. It was, perhaps, partly his own fault. In that first parliament of his, immediately after his coronation, he had refrained from asking for money, had even prided himself on his princely forbearance, and believed it had won him friends and trust. Fool, he should have known that that was his one chance to strike, and make known his mettle, and assert his right once for all. It would have been time to win them with clemency later, when they knew his power and will to dominate, and could be stunned into love by the unexpected mercy. Now it was too late. They had his measure.

  But was this indeed his measure? He knew he was no such man! What had gone awry, that he should have been led to this pass, and even now he felt himself following, perforce, the twists of his fortune, headlong as a fall, when he should have been steering his own course and bearing them strongly with him?

  He had been king for two and a half years, and he was aged by ten. When he peered into his mirror he saw himself already a little stooped in the shoulders, a little heavy in the body, the full cheeks beginning to hang, their old ruddy colour grown muddy and pale, strands of grey in the short, forked beard and at the high temples, and above all, that permanent, aching double pleat between the long, thin brows, scored a little deeper every day. He was thirty-six years old, and his youth was gone, and even his prime was passing.

  He came from hearing vespers in his chapel, and shut himself early into his private chamber. The wind tugged at the banner-pole that carried his standard, outside at the turret, and made a dolorous creaking sound that accompanied his steps along the chilly corridor, and whined faintly in his ears even after he had closed the door and shut out the sound of the rain.

  Such a night for a ten-year-old child to be out on the North Sea, as by now she must be, if contrary winds had not driven the ship back into port. Blanche, born an ordinary little noblewoman, and now a princess, and bound for Cologne to meet her bridegroom there, Louis, son of Rupert, king of the Romans, duke of Bavaria and Count Palatine. She was small and fair like her name, shy like her mother, and his favourite child, dearer even than Thomas, for daughters are more fragile and vulnerable than sons, and she was his first daughter. And though she had been excited and proud about all the frantic arrangements for her state departure, when it came to the point she had been frightened, and sad at going, though she would not complain. He prayed that the boy might be fine and gentle and kind, and take good care of her. At least she had her uncle Somerset to watch over her on the journey, and the countess of Salisbury to be a mother to her until she was handed over at Cologne to Louis.

  Even this, in its way a successful transaction, had done no better than limp lamely to its achievement. He flushed with anger when he remembered how the legal aid he had levied to furnish her to her wedding had brought in only miserable trickles of money on the date appointed, and how he had been forced to send out letters to all and sundry requesting loans to help to pay for her clothes and dowry, and even to borrow abjectly from the City of London and some of its richest citizens, with all the members of his council pledging themselves for repayment, so low was his own credit fallen. Even so, only a negligible part of Blanche’s forty-thousand-noble dower left England with her. Even her departure had been delayed for weeks for want of the funds necessary to fit out her ship and escort.

  And had there been any real need to send the child away to her bridal so soon? True, Rupert had proposed the match, and sent envoys a full year previously to treat for Blanche’s hand, and the alliance was not one to be despised. But had he not fallen in with it too readily and too rapidly simply because it was a testimony to his secure tenure, a dec
laration before the world that he was a king indeed, and his progeny fit mates for the royalty of Europe? Was he clutching too eagerly at every such evidence? To flourish before whom? Charles and his quarrelsome relatives in France? King Robert and his dangerous regent Albany in Scotland? Or Henry of Lancaster, here solitary and discouraged in Berkhamsted? Did he need Rupert’s reassurance to prove to him that he was indeed king of England? And was he to be as abjectly grateful for proffers even from young Eric in the north lands? For only a month ago he had seen his eldest son and his younger daughter appoint proctors to treat in the matter of their proposed Danish marriages. And the little one, Philippa, barely eight years old!

  He was not committed, of course. The discussions would move languidly enough, the parties being so young, and there was time to extricate either of them, or both, at whatever stage he found it desirable. Yet the first step had been taken, and an inexpressible sadness closed in upon him, as if he had stripped himself wantonly of the children who were his own flesh. He saw himself, ten years on, a querulous old man complaining in self-pity: What company have my children ever been to me?—and forgetting that he had sent them so lightly away from him, Blanche across the sea to Heidelberg, to a husband she had never seen; Philippa, possibly, to remote Denmark; Thomas, only this Spring, to be titular governor and keep his court in Ireland, and try to make good the wrack and ruin of castles and garrisons there. A good boy, Thomas, keen and ambitious and full of filial zeal. He understood Thomas.