Lion Heart
For Clementine, Isaac and Buzz,
dear to my heart
Contents
36 The Death of Richard the Lionheart
Also available by Justin Cartwright
Fiction:
1. Literature in the form of prose, especially novels, that describes imaginary events and people;
2. something that is invented or untrue;
3. belief or statement which is false, but is often held to be true because it is expedient to do so.
Oxford English Dictionary
If we view ourselves from a great height it is frightening to realise how little we know about our species, our purpose and our end.
W. G. Sebald
From Richard, King of England, Duke of Normandy, Duke of Aquitaine, Count of Poitou – to Saladin, Righteousness of the Faith:
I shall not break my word to my brother and my friend. I am to salute you and tell you that the Muslims and the Franks are bleeding to death, the country is utterly ruined and goods and lives have been sacrificed on both sides. The time has come to stop this. The points at issue are Jerusalem, the cross, and the land. Jerusalem is for us an object of worship that we would not give up even if there were only one of us left. The land from here to the other side of the Jordan must be consigned to us. The cross, which for you is simply a piece of wood with no value, is for us of enormous importance. If you will return it to us, we shall be able to make peace and rest from this endless labour.
From Saladin, Righteousness of the Faith, to Malik al-Inkitar, Richard, King of England, Duke of Normandy, Duke of Aquitaine, Count of Poitou:
Jerusalem is as much ours as yours. Indeed it is even more sacred to us than it is to you, for it is the place from which our Prophet made his ascent into heaven and the place where our community will gather on the Day of Judgement. Do not imagine that we can renounce it. The land also was originally ours whereas you are recent arrivals and were able to take it over only as a result of the weakness of the Muslims living there at the time. As for the cross, its possession is a good card in our hand and could not be surrendered except in exchange for something of outstanding benefit to Islam.
1
One afternoon, about
six months ago, Emily and I walked down to the Globe Theatre. It was an astonishing day, the sort of day that dispels memories of rain and impenetrable cloud and lip-chapping cold. In winter when the winds blow up from the estuary, it can be bitter here. The view back across the river to St Paul’s, serene and unmoved, the cheerful throngs around the theatre, the busy traffic on the dense river (almost at high tide), the sense of a teeming history – all these things filled me with eager anticipation for
Richard III
with Mark Rylance as Richard. It felt that day as if we were in a city right at the epicentre of all that mattered, and that there was nowhere on earth I would rather be.
Emily and I were groundlings. From where we were standing, with our elbows on the stage, on the left, in line with one of the marbled pillars, we could see back stage as the actors, in full pleated skirts, stockings, hats (some of these hats looked like flowerpots) and those ballooning and rather comic trunk hose, were preparing to go on. They had an intensity about them; they were looking silently into the distance. They may have been trying to remember their lines, or they may have been looking to find their cores. This core is important for actors, a sort of mythical state of mind. Their task, I thought, was difficult and maybe impossible – to make us believe that a play written in about 1591 concerning events which took place a hundred years earlier could grasp us and move us. (Plays arouse questions in me about the nature of reality.)
I now see that I was already beginning to be irritated by Emily, although I didn’t acknowledge it. Also, I was still constantly surprised by her sexual avidity. She was staring intently at the actors, lending them support, as if she had a special relationship with them, not necessarily shared by me. I thought that she had a tendency to look at the world to see what aspects of it she could appropriate for her collection of useful spiritual truths. I notice that women have this habit – certainly the women I know do. It is often accompanied by a kind of manifesto, sometimes shared earnestly with friends in public. The friends, too, have their own gripes, but they nod sympathetically until their turn comes. These manifestos seem to contain goals and objectives, many of which, I think secretly, are unfeasible. Maybe even meaningless.
In the gallery above the stage I could see only one member of the orchestra, a young woman wearing a plant-pot hat and black-rimmed glasses; she was playing a kind of oboe I would have guessed. But I could also see the slides of three brass instruments – possibly sackbuts – but not their operators. Suddenly, unseen, these sackbuts blared out a fanfare. Their imperious harshness suggested a state occasion. Instead, Mark Rylance shambled onto the stage. He was not grossly disfigured, although one leg trailed. His hair was straggly.
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York . . .
I felt a deep and pleasurable tremor run through me: in all of Shakespeare there are no more potent phrases.
But I – that am not shap’d for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty,
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deform’d, unfinish’d, sent before my time . . .
Rylance played this great speech as broad comedy. He involved us, the audience. We laughed uneasily, in the knowledge of what was to come: we knew that this vicious bitter little man, with stringy hair, was a psychopath. Emily was in tears before Richard’s innocent brother, Clarence, entered, under guard on his way to the Tower. As he was led away, Richard said:
Simple, plain Clarence! I do love thee so;
That I will shortly send thy soul to heaven . . .
It was funny, but chilling.
The shoes of the players, en route for the Tower, passed inches from my face. These shoes were square-toed, like old-fashioned children’s shoes. I was enjoying this ground-up vantage point.
Three blissful hours went by in a flash. The sense that time has flown unnoticed provides an inkling of what eternity might be.
Richard III was the last Plantagenet king, killed in 1485 on Bosworth Field in battle against rebels and he was also the last English king to be killed in battle. His helmet was struck with such force that it was driven right into his skull. Recently his skeleton was found underneath a supermarket car park in Leicester. The skeleton suggested that its owner suffered from curvature of the spine, though nothing so serious that could be described as a hunchback, and the skull had an injury to the head. Now DNA evidence has proved that it is the body of Richard.
Emily and I walked along the turbulent river, hand in hand, heading for a cheap Italian restaurant near Borough Market. We were dying to discuss the play. Our verdicts on plays and books were full of self-importance. I knew that the moment the waiter had taken our order there was going to be a personal skirmish, dressed up as a reasonable conversation.
‘Now, what are you going to eat?’
I sounded a little stilted, even to my ears. For a provincial, there’s always tension when you are ordering in a restaurant; there’s the fear of not pronouncing the Italian or French properly; there’s the fear of spending too much money; there’s the fear that your friends are going to order a second bottle of wine and – God forbid – mineral water in a blue bottle. Maybe I am especially aware of these things because life with my aunt Phoebe on Deeside was always tense; she was terrified she might give offence. She was also poor: she scanned shops to save a few pennies and kept sheaves of special offers cut from the local newspaper. Her nervousness was understandable: she was scared that she could be turned out of the lodge at any time. And a light down was spreading on her face, as a biblical punishment.
I ordered
penne arrabiata
, and Emily chose
spaghetti luganica
. She had a glass of white and I had a glass of red.
I wanted to make comparisons with Richard I – I wanted to say what a pity it was that Shakespeare didn’t write a play about him – and I wanted to talk about what Shakespeare was signalling: the end of the unlovable Plantagenets and a new order, which, by God’s will, had ushered in the Tudors. Emily spoke first – her deposition was bound to be a little feminist: she said the male actors playing the women – they were taller than Mark Rylance – were clearly supposed to suggest that the women were being used as a sort of ironic echo of the men, by repeating their words at the end of each sentence.
‘Interesting, but do you really think this is the most important thing about the play?’