Within the Hollow Crown (5 page)

   "Quite," agreed Richard. "Though—as Robert remarked just now—the bowmen and people have to fight them too.
Without
plate armour
." He regarded the stallion's spiked panoply with aversion and turned back to his other cousin. "The trouble that first time, Tom, was that people didn't pay enough. I remember a lot of tedious old men discussing it for hours at my first Parliament. The tax didn't hit the common people too hard but unfortunately it brought in only about a third of the deficit. So now Uncle Thomas's Brittany campaign has to be liquidated by everybody paying a shilling instead of fourpence. Which means—if only they'd the sense to see it—that the tax is bound to be at least three times as unpopular. Hence all this unrest."

   "What did they say when you pointed that out to them?" asked Mowbray, with more enthusiasm than tact.

   Richard couldn't very well admit that they had said nothing at all. That they had, in fact, all been shouting too excitedly themselves to notice that he was trying to speak. "The only concession Burley and I could wring out of them was a raising of the assessment age limit from fourteen to fifteen," he reported, with a rather pitiful attempt at pomposity.

   De Vere hastened to relieve his friend's discomfiture. "The equality of payment need only be nominal," he pointed out. "I've told my stewards to help out all our workers and I'm sure any decent landowner will do the same."

   It didn't sound so bad put like that. In most cases amounts would be adjusted and probably the whole storm would blow over. "De la Pole is urging the same method of collection in the towns," Richard told them. "But I knew it would make a muddle if each mayor were left to divide the amount between his population as he thinks fit."

   He was glad when his half-brother arrived with an armed escort and they were able to set off for London at last. They rode for the most part in silence. The others were still inclined to be aggrieved about the tournament, but Richard himself felt relieved. And secretly ashamed of being relieved. But he had been tilting badly of late through over anxiety to do well. Only the accident of his high birth would have driven Bartholomew or anyone else into pretending that the opposition wasn't too strong. Had Richard been older or wiser, the measure of his relief might have warned him of the unfair strain.

   He would have been glad of a few weeks at Westminster to arrange his new books and train the young deerhound his Uncle John had sent him from Scotland. He had been looking forward, too, to visiting Mundina Danos, his nurse, in the new home he had bought for her wedding present and for the housing of his wardrobe when she had married his tailor. It would have been fun visiting an ordinary gabled house in Carter Lane. But if this silly unrest went on among the working classes he would probably have to attend a lot of dull debates instead.

   The prospect was as depressing as the clouds that were beginning to blot out all the summer blue. Council debates always seemed to be about money or war, or both; and in any case they meant wasting hours of sunshine sitting at the head of a table listening to the same men arguing about the same sort of things until he knew just what they were going to say, and could even see through the self-seeking speciousness of most of their arguments. There were brighter moments, of course, when some amusing old pirate like Sir Edward Dalyngrigge was called in to describe how he had driven out the French when they burned Rye and then raided their coasts in reprisal; or when the bishops got all worked up about some heretical rector called Wycliffe and the danger of his followers being allowed to preach without authority from Holy Church. Or when shrewd business men like Nicholas Brembre and Richard Whittington complained about the growing wealth of the Flemish wool merchants. Richard had inevitably absorbed a good deal of knowledge about government and often of late he had felt he would like to join in some of these domestic discussions—not bickeringly, like Gloucester and the testy Earl of Arundel, but pleasantly and constructively, considering both sides of each question, so that they might really arrive at fresh ideas. And
do something. Couldn'
t the bishops, for instance, be persuaded to curb the scandalous self-indulgence of some of their own friars before picking holes in the Lollard preachers? And instead of trying to tax away all those foreign ships which were pouring lovely, useful things into England, couldn't the jealous City Guilds build more ships of their own and compete in all the trading ports of the world? And not be too proud to improve their wares by sending their goldsmiths and weavers and dyers abroad to learn still more about their crafts? But whenever he offered suggestions his obdurate, old-fashioned Councillors would listen politely for a few minutes and then go on arguing with each other as if he hadn't opened his mouth. Treating him as if he were half-witted as well as young. So now he seldom bothered to speak, but just put his Great Seal to the papers they brought him, reserving to himself the rather spiteful satisfaction of knowing that they couldn't really pass any affairs of state without him.

   But there was a part of him that wasn't wholly content to leave it at that, and he knew that it wasn't just pique at being ignored. His mind was far too active and intelligent to register nothing but boredom or amusement. Richard often saw some of the Councillors' faces, close up and mouthing, in his sleep, and often he dwelt upon them with a kind of frustrated hatred during the daytime. He was thinking about them now, and disappointment about the tournament damped the morning's enthusiasm. So that it was not until they had come miles from Canterbury and Ralph Standish, his body squire, brought him his cloak that he noticed heavy, sluggish raindrops presaging the promised storm. He looked around and noticed for the first time that his party was approaching a village and that there were an extraordinary number of people abroad.

   "Is it a fair or a saint's day or something?" he asked, wondering what all the excitement was about. But before Standish could swing the crimson velvet across his shoulders Thomas Holland, who had been riding ahead with the captain of the escort, came cantering back with a military cloak on his arm. "Better put this on instead— at any rate until we're through this rabble," he said hurriedly.

   Richard opened his mouth to protest haughtily. He was very particular about clothes.

   "For Christ's sake, don't make a fuss!" besought Thomas.

   Richard noticed that the raindrops running down his halfbrother's face looked like beads of sweat, and that the lowering light cast a greenish hue over the tanned leather of his skin. And, roused to understanding of his urgency by an excited band of farm louts brandishing pitchforks who pushed rudely past them, he suffered the rough frieze to be draped about him.

   Evidently they had run into the very kind of demonstration Walworth and Burley had feared. Even in his wildest dreams of promotion, the young captain could scarcely have desired the responsibility so suddenly thrust upon him. He warned his charges to keep close together and cover up their jewels. But the highspirited sprigs of nobility were tense with excitement. "Who are all those ragged wretches over there by the pond, Sir Thomas?" asked Mowbray, agog to see all that was to be seen.

   Holland didn't answer. He was reconnoitring the layout of the village in case of trouble and biting angrily at his clipped moustache. But young Mowbray's voice had a piercing quality, and a verminous beggar, sheltering under the hedgerow, was only too glad to volunteer the information. "Thieves and felons they be, young sir—freed by the breakin' open o' the gaols," he chuckled through toothless gums. "And the Lord o' the Manor, he can't do nothin' about it." The wretched man couldn't go and help in the lawless work because he'd lost both his legs at Crécy, but probably nothing half so exciting had happened to him since.

   The gilded youth of England averted their gaze hurriedly from the pitiful spectacle of his helpless torso. In their fathers' heyday he would have been a hero. But since Poitiers and Limoges and Najera there were so many maimed men begging about the country that they had become merely a nuisance. They tossed him a groat or two and looked with all the more interest towards the village green where scores of idle labourers augmented by the toughs with pitchforks were clustered round the bewildered prisoners they had released. One of these gaolbirds had clambered onto the steps of the, pillory and began haranguing the rest. His shrill, penetrating voice carried across the green above the rumbling thunder and the exciting jostling of his audience. "Good people, things cannot go well in England until everything shall be in common, till there be neither vassal nor lord, and until all shall be equal." Although without grace of any kind, the man had book learning of sorts; and his experience in swaying a crowd suggested that he might be some sort of unfrocked priest.

   "One of those mad Lollards probably," shrugged de Vere, pulling up the high collar of his riding cloak to protect the cherished pink velvet.

   Yet it seemed to Richard that there was a certain sanity about his plaint. Perhaps it was only because it was so disconcertingly new that it sounded mad. "Why are they, whom we call lords, more masters than we? What have they done to deserve it?" the man demanded, obliged to shout still louder against the annoying hoofbeats of the company jogging nearer along the road to London. "If we came from the same parents, Adam and Eve, what reason can they give why they should be more masters than you and I?"

   "He looks like the wall paintings of John the Baptist," tittered a perky page, more aptly than he knew. And his companions laughed gustily.

   Better to dismiss such ranters with concerted raillery than to let their words sink into each personal consciousness and have time to remind one of the words of Christ. And he
was like John th
e Baptist. They had drawn almost level with him now and could see him clearly. His emaciated body glistening wetly through the rents in his rough brown soutane, his wild hair and prophetic gestures, and the burning intensity of his eyes. Perhaps one had to be all burnt up with zeal like that before one really cared about some cause—enough, anyway, to start doing something about it that nobody had done before! If so, thought young Richard Plantagenet, how few men ever really cared about anything…

   "They make us toil that they may spend," the Lollard ranted on, inciting the illiterate crowd so that they began to cheer and press closer. "They are clothed in velvets and fur, while we are in rags. They have wines, spices and good bread and we"—he swept a gaunt arm in a telling gesture towards his fellows from the gaol— "we have only rye and refuse and straw, and water to drink. They have manors and palaces and we have nothing but the toil and the work, the wind and the rain in the fields."

   They certainly had the rain in the fields. A rising fury in his voice and an even fiercer deluge of rain coloured the eloquence he had culled from the pages of Holy Writ as yet withheld from ordinary laymen. In the common tongue encouraged by Chaucer he was putting into words comprehensible both to them and to their masters the inarticulate, smouldering resentments that had lived so long in their hearts. Showing them what it was that made their lives drudgery instead of joy, and whom it was they really hated. Setting light to the straw. Trained in the art of cheap oratory, he used every passing symbol to press home his point. "It is from us and our labour that they get their wealth," he cried, pointing with lean accusing finger at the cavalcade of valuable horses and rich men's sons so that his audience turned and stared dangerously as their oppressors trotted past, and saw in the trappings of each horse enough wealth to keep their hungry families for a year.

   They saw an armed guard, too, before whom—in twos and threes—they would normally have cringed. Soldiers who might at any other time have dispersed them with a single threatening motion of their pikes, or answered any show of resistance by sweeping them into their own duckpond. Actually, the captain had halted them with some such intention. But the peasants' mood was ugly. They seemed to close together, crouching a little; and the eyes of all of them were fixed warily on the men-at-arms. And presently they began to sing, taking up the theme of the agitator's

   An exultant note crept into the doggerel words until they became a chanted challenge. Without having the least idea who the wealthy travellers were, they began to sing
at
them.

   The captain had enough sense to change his tactics, contenting himself with putting his men like a shield between Richard and the staring crowd. "It's only a popular song," he apologized, red to the neck that the King's ears should be so shocked while in his care.

   "Oh, I've heard it before, Beverly," Richard assured him cheerfully. "He's culled it from one of those interminable sermons I have to endure at Paul's Cross. The Bishop of Rochester, on humility, I think. He always saves up some crushing couplet like that for Lent, doesn't he, Henry? Specially when your father comes riding up from the Savoy with so many retainers they get stuck under Ludgate."

   Somehow his easy allusion to ordinary happenings made his elder's anxiety look faintly ridiculous. They were not sure whether he realized the danger or not. But at any rate, it seemed easiest to adopt his insouciant attitude and hope for the best. "Let's push on quickly. I'll be glad to get into some dry clothes," muttered Holland rather shamefacedly.