The Queen of Last Hopes (15 page)

Much as I liked King Henry, being a young man at his court had never been easy. He took pride in resisting the temptations of the flesh (of course, it helped that he himself had the most beautiful woman in England to supply his fleshly needs for him) and could never understand why the rest of us in the household were not so restrained. Even his scholars at Eton, mere boys that they were, had been known to roll their eyes behind the king’s back when told by Henry about the moral cesspool that the court could be.

So as often as I could, I sneaked off to Eastcheap to find the sort of company I at nineteen quite naturally craved. Not a whore, mind you, but Joan Hill, a confectioner’s widow who was a few years older than myself. Shortly before the king lost his wits, the delicious smell that had wafted through Joan’s shop had attracted me off the street, whereupon I discovered that Joan (plump, but not too plump) looked nearly as delicious as the wafers she cooked. For some time after that I had busied myself with trying to get her into bed, satisfying my sweet tooth almost daily in the process, but it took my father’s imprisonment for me to at last succeed in my task. There is nothing, it seems, as successful as having a father in the Tower to win feminine sympathy.

And yet when my father was released, Joan remained my mistress. I would have to marry sooner or later, I knew—now that Father was out of prison, it was just a matter of time before he found me a suitable bride, who certainly couldn’t be Joan Hill—but that seemed a long ways off. All in all, then, it was a pleasing state of affairs that day in May 1455. I was to head to the king’s great council in Leicester (my first), where the Duke of York would finally be given to understand once and for all that the kingdom was not his to run any longer. Perhaps my father might send me to Calais as his deputy, who knew? Maybe I could even take Joan with me. “Do you perchance happen to speak French?” I asked her as she curled closer to me to ward off the slight chill of the morning.

“That’s an odd question to ask a lady first thing in the morning.”

“Well, do you?”

“Not a bit, love. Though I do make some French pastries.”

“That’ll do. Everyone in Calais will be speaking English anyway.”

Joan was about to question me further, as well she might, when a knock sounded. “My lord?”

I frowned, recognizing the voice of one of my servants. What did he want with me so early in the day? “Come in. What is it?”

“Your lord father. He wishes you to come to Westminster immediately. There is disturbing news about the Duke of York.”

“There’s always disturbing news about the Duke of York,” I said to Joan, who shook her head sympathetically, and I hoped regretfully, as my servant helped me into my clothes and she concealed her splendid figure beneath a sheet. It was at daybreak when she was most avid for me, though I was eager for her at any time. “The whoreson.”

“Why all of you cousins just can’t get along together is beyond me,” said Joan.

I noted with approval that the little genealogical lesson I’d given Joan the other night, in which I had laboriously explained the common descent that most of the nobility in England had from the prolific Edward III, had not been wasted. “It’s precisely because we’re all cousins that we can’t get along. We all can picture ourselves on the throne through some descent or the other, if we sit back and think about it hard. Edward III would have done well to take a vow of chastity after the fourth or fifth child or so.”

Joan blew a kiss to me as I made my reluctant exit. “Well, cousin or not, I’ll say this for the Duke of York: he certainly knows how to spoil a morning.”

***

“At your service,” I said airily when I arrived at Westminster. “The Duke of York is causing trouble?”

“He’s raising troops,” said Father in a tone that suggested further airiness on my part would be unwelcome. “So are the Earl of Salisbury and the Earl of Warwick.”

“Ah, yes, the Triumvirate.” Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick, was Salisbury’s oldest son and the nephew of the Duchess of York. Lately, the Nevilles had been sticking close to the Duke of York. Warwick, then six-and-twenty, happened to be my uncle by marriage—his wife was my mother’s half sister—but our families had never been close. Aside from the fact that nearly everyone disliked my father, my mother and her sisters, not to mention their husbands, had been quarreling over their father’s inheritance even before the man was cold. “But why are they raising troops?”

“Why do you think? To force the king to bend to their will. So we need to raise forces of our own to bring to Leicester.” He stared disapprovingly at me. “We need you to help us, instead of gadding about London, drinking and gaming and God knows what else. Why, you’re still in yesterday’s clothes.”

“I wasn’t drinking and gaming,” I said. This was true: Joan and I had spent a very decorous evening at her house before retiring to bed and behaving rather less decorously.

Father did not overlook my reminiscent smile. “I suppose that means you’ve a trollop, then, but you’ll have to give her up for the next little bit. We’ve got business to take care of before we go to Leicester.”

It wasn’t like my father to be this brusque and stern with me; if anything, he’d been overindulgent toward his offspring, especially me, in the years since he had surrendered Rouen. I had so much pocket money, I was one of the few young men I knew who had no debts. “They want you, don’t they?” I said suddenly. “York and his cronies want the king to hand you over to them.”

“Quite possibly,” conceded my father. “Now get busy.”

***

Getting busy meant writing to my father’s retainers, demanding that they send men to St. Albans, where they were to join us on our journey to Leicester. As a clerk put the finishing touches to a letter I’d dictated, I sat with my chin in my hand, remembering a day six years before.

I was thirteen on November 4, 1449, the day my family left Rouen, which my father had agreed a few days before to surrender. Under the terms, we could take our possessions with us, and all of my coffers had long since been hauled down to the carts by our servants, who carried out their task as silently as if they were disbanding our household after a funeral. So when my half brother Thomas, Lord Ros, came looking for me, he found me in a bare room huddled in a window seat. “Hal, it’s time to go.”

“I don’t want to go! They can’t make me.”

“Can’t make you? King Charles himself will be here in a few days. Do you think he’s going to adopt you as his heir?” Tom, two-and-twenty, sat beside me. “It’s time, Hal. Your staying here isn’t going to change a thing.”

“Why hasn’t Father come to get me? Is he afraid to face even me?” I turned my face, which was embarrassingly tear-stained, toward my brother. “He wasn’t man enough to stand up to the French. Why should I think he’s man enough to stand up to me?”

“Hal, don’t speak like that of your father.”

“Why not? I can speak any way I please about him. He’s not your father.”

“He’s been good to me since Mother married him, and I respect him.”

“How can you do that after what happened? He caved in to them, Tom! He caved in! He’s a damned coward, and you know it!”

Tom dealt me a stinging blow across the cheek. As I blinked at him, he said calmly, “Your father’s no coward. I don’t like what happened here any more than you do, especially since I’m to be a hostage.”

“Yes, and that’s so unfair—”

“Shut your mouth. Things aren’t always as simple as they seem when you’re thirteen, Hal. The duke’s been under immense strain; he’s had others to think of besides himself. How long could he have withstood a siege here? Just because we’ve given up Rouen doesn’t mean it’s the end of Normandy for us.”

“You know it is.”

“Not necessarily.” Tom’s eyes did not match his words. Quietly, he said, “Hal, it will take a lot of courage for your father to face down the anger that’s going to greet him when this gets back to England.”

I nodded. “Yes, it is. And that’s why Father’s not going straight to England. He’s going to Caen first.”

“How did you know that?”

“Eavesdropping. How else? I heard him talking to Mother.” I was silent for a few moments. “He was crying about it, Tom.”

Tom put his arm around my shoulders. “Hal, you know what happened to his older brother when he had a reversal like this.”

I nodded; what had happened to John Beaufort, the first Duke of Somerset, after a blundering military campaign in France was the shame of the family. “He made away with himself. You don’t think that Father—”

“No. He’s too strong, and he’d never give his enemies the satisfaction. And that’s why you should be supporting him instead of sulking in your chamber.” He looked around. “Besides, where the hell are you going to sleep tonight, with your bed gone? Come with me, Hal.”

I let Tom lead me from my chamber to Rouen Castle’s great hall, where my parents and my brothers and sisters stood, plainly having been waiting on me. They said nothing, however, and my father merely nodded at Tom in thanks as he took his place among the men who were to stand hostage for the terms of the agreement my father had made. “Ready, son?” he said softly.

“Yes.” I managed to look my father in the eye, though I really didn’t want to.

Father patted me on my shoulder. “Someday I’ll make this up to you,” he said, so low only he and I could hear.

Instead, eight months later, he had surrendered Caen, though at least that time he’d resisted as long as he could.

“My lord? My lord? Are you ready to dictate another letter?”

“Yes,” I said. “Sorry. I was daydreaming.”

***

On May 21, we left Westminster, anticipating the arrival of our reinforcements at St. Albans. We needed them: without them, we were ready only for a council, not for a battle. Whether we were going to be faced with one was something we didn’t know: the king demanded that York and the Nevilles disband their armies, but whether they would obey the order was something about which we were all pessimistic.

Where York’s men were, I don’t know, but one thing was clear: they had pen and ink with them. Before we even got within spitting distance of St. Albans, the Triumvirate (my own term; sadly, I couldn’t get anyone else to adopt the usage) had sent us two letters. They laid it on thick. After calling for the excommunication of the enemies about the king—that is, of course, my father—and terming themselves King Henry’s true and humble liegemen, they protested, in injured tones, against the mistrust of them and hoped that they would be cleared of it. How they expected to be trusted, while at the same time they were raising troops, was a matter about which they were less clear.

Having encamped at Watford for the night, we pressed on toward St. Albans, only to hear just minutes after we had begun moving that York’s men were already just outside the city, with over a thousand more men than we had. And many of those with us were not fighting men, but clerks.

“We should stay here,” Father said to the king. “Stay here, and fight when they arrive. The reinforcements—”

“We should negotiate,” the Duke of Buckingham said flatly. “They’re traveling quickly; what if the reinforcements don’t reach us in time? It’s a battle we could lose. And—” He hesitated. I knew he was thinking that some of our number might throw in their lot with York were battle to be joined, but he could hardly say it aloud. Instead, he repeated. “Negotiate, your grace. York may have a genuine misapprehension of your intentions. Perhaps he fears arrest, like the Duke of Gloucester so many years ago. If so, he can be reassured that your grace’s only intent is to see to the greater security of the realm.”

“York can’t be trusted,” Father said. “Negotiation with him is a waste of time.”

The king hesitated. Finally, he said softly, “Peace is always to be desired over war, my lords. Buckingham, I appoint you Constable of England.”

My father, who held that office, began to sputter. The king cut him off. “The constable is the best person to conduct the negotiations, and you, Somerset, being the person York wishes me to give up, are hardly suited to enter into them yourself. Come. Let us move on.”

Father opened his mouth, closed it again, and shook his head. Buckingham’s son, the Earl of Stafford, who was married to my sister Meg, saw the expression on my face. Too softly to be overheard by our fathers or by the king, he said, “Hal, don’t worry. If anyone can make York see reason, my father can.”

I did not like the sound of that qualifier.

***

If—speaking of which word—this had been a normal journey, the king would have lodged himself at St. Albans Abbey and no doubt been treated to a discourse by Abbot Whethamstede on the myriad virtues of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the abbey’s greatest patron. But this was no normal journey; York’s men were already encamped in Key Field. So instead, Henry set up his headquarters near St. Peter’s Street, in the home of a citizen who could not have looked less excited by the prospect of a royal guest. Lord Clifford and his men went out to bar the roads that led across Tonman Ditch into the town, while Buckingham and York negotiated through heralds—a three-hour process that was hopeless from the start, for all the high-flown words came down to one point: York wanted my father turned over to him, supposedly for trial, and the king refused to give him over.