Rebellion (15 page)

The girl was looking with open mouth from
Edward to his mother.

‘Yes,' my aunt said, with bitter pleasure.
‘He is married. Has been, in fact, for four months. And how pregnant are you?'

The girl looked at the king, but he could
not return her gaze. ‘Edward?' she faltered.

‘Go on, ask him,' his mother urged.

‘That's enough, Mother,' Edward said in a
low voice, but she ignored him.

‘He must have tired of you quite quickly,
don't you think? Made a whore of you and passed on. Yet he does not think he will tire
of this other woman in the same way.'

‘Who – who is it?' the girl managed to
say.

‘Edward?' said his mother. ‘Your lady friend
wants to know for whom you have deserted her.'

Edward shot his mother a look of pure hatred
but did not speak.

‘No?' she said. ‘My nephew then – he can
explain. My Lord of Warwick – tell her who exactly has replaced her.'

I expelled a long breath. I had little
stomach for this scene, but I looked directly into the girl's eyes. ‘His majesty the
king has married one Elizabeth Woodville, or Grey.'

The girl shook her head,
not understanding, perhaps.

‘Surely you recognize the illustrious name,'
my aunt said.

‘Stop it, Mother,' said the king. But the
girl began to walk towards him, quite slowly, looking at him all the time, and when she
reached him she put her hand on his arm.

‘Is it true?' she said.

‘Tell her it isn't true, Edward,' his mother
said.

For the first time Edward looked fully at
his former mistress, and spoke with weary gentleness.

‘Everything my mother says is true. I am
married.'

The girl gave a little frightened cry.

‘I did not offer to marry you because I
could not – being already contracted to marry another,' he said. ‘I am sorry if you
understood differently. You will be treated well – with all honour – and your child –
our child – will be well provided for.'

A kind of shudder ran through the girl. For
a moment I thought she would faint and looked around swiftly for a chair. But she
straightened and turned to face us both. She was very pale; in her eyes there was the
universal look of the betrayed.

‘Is your business with me done?' she asked,
and from our faces she saw that it was. ‘Then I think that I would like to leave.'

She swayed a little and held her side, so
for fear that she would miscarry there and then I ran to help her and escorted her from
the room.

When I returned, Cecily was standing in
front of her son.

‘I would never have believed,' she was
saying, ‘that you could do more damage to this nation than the last king. Did it never
occur to you that if that sorry man had married differently he might still have his
throne?'

He was angry, very angry, but he restrained
his tone. ‘I have not given away half of France, nor taken up arms against my own lords.
All I have done is marry the woman I love.'

Cecily Neville made a sound part way between
disgust and despair. ‘Then there is nothing more to say,' she said.

‘No, Mother,' he answered,
very cold. ‘You have done your work here.'

Cecily walked towards me and towards the
door, but I was not finished yet. ‘Might I ask,' I said, ‘whether you are going to
present your new wife to us at some point?'

He looked at me in that same frozen
manner.

‘She will be presented to you all,' he said,
‘on Michaelmas Day, in the Abbey.'

I bowed.

There were other things I might have said –
about the French – who would break the news to them. And to the people. But the
interview had gone on long enough. My aunt took my arm, and we left. But I remember
thinking as we turned our backs on the king that he would forgive none of us for
this.

And shortly after, he had her
solemnly crowned queen. This the nobility and chief men of the kingdom took amiss,
seeing that he had with such immoderate haste promoted a person sprung from a
comparatively humble lineage, to share the throne with him …

Crowland Chronicle

As for Edward's brothers, of whom two
were then living, although both were sorely displeased at the marriage, yet one, who
was next in age to Edward and called Duke of Clarence, vented his wrath more
conspicuously by his bitter and public denunciation of Elizabeth's obscure family
and by proclaiming that the king, who ought to have married a virgin wife, had
married a widow in violation of established custom …

Dominic Mancini

Then were the children of Lord Rivers
hugely exalted and set in great honour, his eldest son made Lord Scales and the
others to sundry great promotions …

Annales Rerum Anglicarum

Thus kindled the
spark of envy which … grew to so great a blaze and flame of fire that it
flamed not only through England but also into Flanders and France …

Great Chronicle of London

The queen, wife of King Henry, has
written to King Louis that she is advised that King Edward and the Earl of Warwick
have come to very great division and war together. She begs the king to give her
help to recover her kingdom. The king remarked, look how proudly she writes
…

Milanese State Papers: Newsletters from Burgundy and France, Axieto, February
1465

After the horrid and ungrateful
rebellion of his subjects had continued a long time … [King Henry] fled at
last with a few followers to a secret place prepared for him by those that were
faithful to him and as he lay hid there for some time [after the Battle of Hexham]
an audible voice sounded in his ears … telling him how he should be delivered
up by treachery and brought to London without all honour like a thief or an outlaw
… and should endure many evils … all of which he was informed by
revelation from the Blessed Virgin Mary and saints John Baptist, Dunstan and Anselm
…

John Blacman

John the Baptist came first, in his cloak of
thorns, his tunic of camel hair. He ran towards the king roaring, so that it was hard to
hear the words.

‘I cannot tell what you are saying,' the
king said.

John the Baptist stopped and looked at the
king as if he had only just noticed he was there. Then he lifted his skeletal arms and
said,
He maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of
men.

The king recognized the verse, of course,
from Revelation, but he did not understand, as he had not understood so much of what his
teachers had tried to tell him. He shook his head humbly
but this made
the saint angry. He smote his staff on a rock and all the kingdom of England was turned
into a desert.

That was plain enough. The king woke with
tears on his face.

Dunstan was calmer, holding his book and
pointing with his knife to words that the king could not read. But he was standing in
the ruins of a great church, branches and vines growing through the windows.

Then Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury,
holding his crozier and addressing the king in Latin:
Nam et hoc credo, quia nisi
credidero, non intelligam.
Unless I first believe I shall not understand.

‘But I do believe,' the king told him, ‘and
I do not understand.' And St Anselm seemed displeased by this; he shook his head and
disappeared.

The Virgin was kinder, as he might expect.
There was a soft halo of light around her face as she bent over him.

‘Sleep,' she told him, ‘eat and sleep. You
will need all your strength for what is to come.'

‘What is to come?' asked the king, but she
only fed the great babe at her breast until he fell asleep.

‘They are just dreams, sire,' Richard
Tunstall told him. He spoke quietly, intent on the matter at hand. ‘We will sleep
tonight at Waddington Hall, and you will be able to eat well and rest. You will feel
better there.'

The king thought this was probably true, for
they had spent two nights in Clitheroe Forest, and the cries of night birds, the bark of
foxes, the rustlings and movements in the dense trees, were enough to give anyone bad
dreams. But it was hard to tell if he was dreaming, exactly, when he saw the saints. He
felt permanently as though he was stumbling through some dark dream.

Richard Tunstall tugged the king's robes
forward over his bony shoulders and pulled the hood over his head so that he could
hardly see. ‘We are about to leave the forest, sire – you must keep your hood up,' he
said. ‘We can stay as guests of Sir John for
several days while you
rest. But he asks that you remain in disguise, since he will have other guests at the
same time.'

The king said nothing to this; there seemed
to be nothing to say.

‘You will not need to speak, sire,' Richard
Tunstall said. ‘These are Carthusian robes, and the Carthusians do not speak. No one
will know who you are, if you do not speak. Apart from Sir John, of course.'

The king could detect a note of anxiety in
his voice; that he would, in fact, speak; say something startling that would make people
wonder, and give them all away. He did not always know when he had spoken aloud.

Richard Tunstall but straightened the king's
robes again. They were too big for him since he had lost so much weight, and inclined to
slip.

‘There,' he said, with a small smile. ‘Now
you are Brother Henry.'

Brother Henry followed Richard Tunstall
humbly along the path that led out of the forest, immersed in his own thoughts.

He wondered why the saints did not
communicate with him directly, but in the language of signs and symbols. It was hard
enough interpreting the world he was in, without being given glimpses of another one he
could not decipher.

He thought he could understand the order in
which they appeared. St John the Baptist had forsaken human society and gone into the
wilderness, where he'd eaten wild honey and locusts. He had lived as a hermit, as the
king had often longed to do, free from the trappings of Church and state. St Dunstan,
however, had been minister and advisor to several kings. And abbot of Glastonbury, the
great church which the king hoped was not the desolate ruin of his vision. But Dunstan
had been the first to insist on the unity of Church and state. He had altered the
coronation ceremony to emphasize the indissoluble bond between them, and,
it was said, designed the coronation crown with its spiritual
significance.

Anselm, of course, had fallen out with his
king, William Rufus, over that king's refusal to accept the authority of the Church. The
rift had been so severe that Anselm had gone into exile, while William Rufus, son of the
Conqueror, had continued to plunder the church to fund his wars.

It seemed to King Henry that the visions
pointed to some coming rift or schism between Church and state. But also they told the
story of man, from spiritual purity to decline, and the rise of temporal power.

He had done everything he could to prevent
that; to embody in his own being the union of temporal and spiritual authority. He did
not know where he had gone so wrong.

He stumbled, and Richard Tunstall said, ‘It
will not be long now, sire.'

He had tried, more than any other king since
Edward the Confessor, to bring Christ's rule to his people. In the long line of kings
since the Confessor, who was his model, he would be the one to see that rule
disintegrate. That was his role, his part in the great pattern of kingship, and he would
not be spared the pain of seeing everything he believed in destroyed.
Mea culpa, mea
maxima culpa
,
he thought.

They could see the grey stone frontage now
of Waddington Hall, which they would approach on foot, like monks. But Richard Tunstall
explained that he had sent a man ahead of them, and there would be horses for them
there.

Sir John and his wife greeted them at the
door. He could tell that they were overwhelmed; his wife did not know whether or not to
curtsy.

‘You will be safe here,' Sir John said to
him. ‘Monks are our most frequent visitors.'

The king started to thank them, to
acknowledge the great risk they were taking, then remembering his instructions, tailed
off,
leaving Richard Tunstall to thank them for their hospitality
towards poor monks.

Sir John's wife, Alice, led them up a
winding stone stair to a room which had an oak floor, a large window and thick walls.
‘It is a plain room,' she began. ‘We did not have much time …' but Richard
Tunstall said it was a fine room, and exactly what was needed. Obviously they did not
want to announce their presence to the other guests. His own room was smaller, leading
from it.