Authors: Fleur Adcock
There is no safety
there is no shelter
the dark dream
will drag us under.
*
I married a man of metal and fire,
quick as a cat, and wild:
Harry Percy the Hotspur,
the Earl of Northumberland’s child.
He rode to battle at fourteen years.
He won his prickly name.
His talking is a halting spate,
his temper a trembling flame.
He has three castles to his use,
north of the Roman Wall:
Alnwick, Berwick, Warkworth –
and bowers for me in them all.
I may dance and carol and sing;
I may go sweetly dressed
in silks that suit the lady I am;
I may lie on his breast;
and peace may perch like a hawk on my wrist
but can never come tame to hand,
wed as I am to a warrior
in a wild warring land.
*
High is his prowess
in works of chivalry,
noble his largesse,
franchyse and courtesy.
All this wilderness
owes him loyalty;
and deathly rashness
bears him company.
The Earl of Douglas clattered south
with Scottish lords and men at arms.
He smudged our tall Northumberland skies
black with the smoke of burning farms.
My Hotspur hurried to halt his course;
Newcastle was their meeting-place.
Douglas camped on the Castle Leazes;
they met in combat, face to face.
It was as fair as any fight,
but Douglas drew the lucky chance:
he hurled my husband from his saddle,
stunned on the earth, and snatched his lance.
I weep to think what Harry saw
as soon as he had strength to stand:
the silken pennon of the Percies
flaunted in a foreign hand.
‘Sir, I shall bear this token off
and set it high on my castle gate.’
‘Sir, you shall not pass the bounds
of the county till you meet your fate.’
The city held against the siege;
the Scots were tired and forced to turn.
They tramped away with all their gear
to wait my lord at Otterburn.
I sit with my ladies in the turret-room
late in the day, and watch them sewing.
Their fingers flicker over the linen;
mine lie idle with remembering.
Last night the moon travelled through cloud
growing and shrinking minute by minute,
one day from fullness, a pewter cup
of white milk with white froth on it.
These August days are long to pass.
I have watched the berries on the rowan
creeping from green towards vermilion,
slow as my own body to ripen.
I was eight years old when we married,
a child-bride for a boy warrior.
Eight more years dragged past before
they thought me fit for the bridal chamber.
Now I am a woman, and proved to be so:
I carry the tender crop of our future;
while he pursues what he cannot leave,
drawn to danger by his lion’s nature.
Daylight fades in the turret-slit;
my ladies lay aside their needles.
They murmur and yawn and fold away
the fine-worked linen to dress a cradle.
And I should rest before the harvest moon
rises to dazzle me. But now
I stitch and cannot think of sleep.
What should I be sewing for tomorrow?
It fell about the Lammastide –
the people put it in a song –
the famous fray at Otterburn,
fought by moonlight, hard and long.
The Percies wore the silver crescent;
the moon was a full moon overhead.
Harry and his brother were taken,
but first they’d left the Douglas dead.
Who was the victor on that field
the Scots and the English won’t agree;
but which force won as songs will tell it
matters little that I can see:
it surges on from year to year,
one more battle and still one more:
one in defence, one in aggression,
another to balance out the score.
*
Crows flap
fretting for blood.
The field of battle
is a ravening flood.
There is no safety
there is no shelter
the fell tide
will suck him under.
He did not fall at Otterburn;
he did not fall at Humbledowne;
he fell on the field at Shrewsbury,
a rebel against the crown.
He might have been a king himself;
he put one king upon the throne,
then turned against him, and sought to make
a king of my brother’s son.
Families undo families;
kings go up and kings go down.
My man fell; but they propped him up
dead in Shrewsbury Town.
They tied his corpse in the marketplace,
jammed for their jeers between two stones;
then hacked him apart: a heavy price
he paid for juggling with thrones.
Four fair cities received his limbs,
far apart as the four winds are,
and his head stared north from the walls of York
fixed on Micklegate Bar.
*
Now let forgetfulness wash over
his bones and the land’s bones,
the long snaky spine of the wall,
earthworks and standing stones,
rock and castle and tower and all.
*
There is no safety
there is no shelter
the fell flood
has drawn him under.
Henry Percy, known as Hotspur, eldest son of the first Earl of Northumberland, was born on 20 May 1364. The Percies were of Norman descent; they controlled the north of England with something like kingly power for several centuries, first as feudal lords and then as Barons of Alnwick and later Earls of
Northumberland
. They have been described as ‘the hereditary guardians of the north and the scourge of Scotland’.
Accounts of Hotspur’s life appear in the
Dictionary of National Biography
and the
Complete Peerage
and, in a fictionalised form, in Shakespeare’s
Richard II
and
Henry IV, Part I
. He was a valiant and precocious warrior, and soon became a favourite with the people. He held such positions as were consistent with his rank and descent – Governor of Berwick and Warden of the Marches – but his chief pleasures were warfare (against the Scots or the French or
anyone
else) and, as an incidental sideline to this, political intrigue. It proved his undoing. He was killed at the Battle of Shrewsbury on 12 July 1403 in an unsuccessful rebellion against Henry IV, whom he had conspired to put on the throne.
His character was not entirely admirable, to modern eyes: he had a tendency to change sides and to choose his allies according to their usefulness, disregarding former loyalties; and he was as brutal as any of his opponents when he chose: his fate of being quartered after his death was one which he had himself ordered to be performed on a defeated enemy. However, his personal courage and his even then slightly anachronistic devotion to the ideals of chivalry made him a natural focus for the legends which have clung to his name.
The ballad is sung in the person of his wife Elizabeth Mortimer (not Kate, as Shakespeare calls her). She was born at Usk on 12 February 1371 and was the daughter of the Earl of March and the granddaughter, through her mother, of Edward III. She married Hotspur in 1379 and they had a daughter (whose date of birth is not recorded) and a son, born in 1393 and named after his father.
A halting spate
: Hotspur was said to have some kind of impediment in his speech, which at times delayed his fiery utterances.
High is his prowess
: This section quotes the traditional elements of the ideal of chivalry.
Castle Leazes
: The pasture-lands north of the city wall.
‘Sir, I shall bear this token off…’
: The two speeches are taken from the version quoted by Froissart.
Otterburn
: The battle was probably fought on the night of 19 August 1388, by moonlight.
Silver crescent
: This was the cap-badge of the Percies; their coat of arms bore a blue lion rampant.
His brother
: Ralph Percy.
Humbledowne
(or Humbleton, or Homildon Hill): The battle fought here on 13 September 1402 was Hotspur’s revenge for Otterburn. The English won, capturing the 3rd Earl of Douglas (Archibald, successor to James, the 2nd Earl, who fell at Otterburn) and many other Scots.
He might have been a king himself
: Not by legal succession; but if Elizabeth’s nephew, the young Earl of March, had been set on the throne, Hotspur would very probably have been regent. In any case his popularity was such that the people could well have seen him as a possible king.
Four fair cities
: After his body had been displayed in the marketplace at
Shrewsbury
it was buried; but a rumour arose that he was still alive, and his corpse was therefore disinterred and dismembered, and the four limbs sent to London, Bristol, Chester and Newcastle to be shown as evidence of his death.
(1986)
Caterpillars are falling on the Writers’ Union.
The writers are indifferent to the caterpillars.
They sit over their wine at the metal tables
wearing animated expressions and eating fried eggs
with pickled gherkins, or (the dish of the day),
extremely small sausages: two each.
Meanwhile here and there an inch of grey bristles,
a miniature bottle-brush, twitches along a sleeve
or clings to a shoulder. The stone-paved courtyard
is dappled with desperate clumps of whiskers,
launched from the sunlit mulberry trees
to take their chance among literary furniture.
A poet ignores a fluffy intruder
in his bread-basket (the bread’s all finished)
but flicks another from the velvet hat
(which surely she must have designed herself –
such elegance never appears in the shop-windows)
of his pretty companion, who looks like an actress.
The writers are talking more and more rapidly.
Not all are writers. One is a painter;
many are translators. Even those who are not
are adaptable and resourceful linguists.
‘Pardon!’ says one to the foreign visitor.
‘Permit me! You have a worm on your back.’
Coming out with your clutch of postcards
in a Tate Gallery bag and another clutch
of images packed into your head you pause
on the steps to look across the river
and there’s a new one: light bright buildings,
a streak of brown water, and such a sky
you wonder who painted it – Constable? No:
too brilliant. Crome? No: too ecstatic –
a madly pure Pre-Raphaelite sky,
perhaps, sheer blue apart from the white plumes
rushing up it (today, that is,
April. Another day would be different
but it wouldn’t matter. All skies work.)
Cut to the lower right for a detail:
seagulls pecking on mud, below
two office blocks and a Georgian terrace.
Now swing to the left, and take in plane trees
bobbled with seeds, and that brick building,
and a red bus…Cut it off just there,
by the lamp-post. Leave the scaffolding in.
That’s your next one. Curious how
these outdoor pictures didn’t exist
before you’d looked at the indoor pictures,
the ones on the walls. But here they are now,
marching out of their panorama
and queuing up for the viewfinder
your eye’s become. You can isolate them
by holding your optic muscles still.
You can zoom in on figure studies
(that boy with the rucksack), or still lives,
abstracts, townscapes. No one made them.
The light painted them. You’re in charge
of the hanging committee. Put what space
you like around the ones you fix on,
and gloat. Art multiplies itself.
Art’s whatever you choose to frame.
A small dazzle of stained glass which
I did not choose but might have, hanging
in front of the branches of a pine tree
which I do not own but covet; beyond them
a view of crinkly hills which I do not
etc and did not etc but might have
in another life, or the same life earlier.
The cat is fed, the plants are watered,
the milkman will call; the pine tree smells like
childhood. I am pretending to live here.
Out beyond the coloured glass and
the window-glass and the gully tall with
pine trees I dive back to wherever
I got my appetite for hills from.