Succession (37 page)

The blood of the slain mingling with the snow which at this time covered the whole surface of the earth, afterwards ran down in the furrows and ditches along with the melted snow for a distance of two or three miles.

Crowland Chronicle

 

He could smell blood on himself.

The wind was blowing his own stench back to him, which was the stench of blood and mud and sweat. He had scrubbed the blood from his face, but it still stained his arms, his clothing. And he felt bruised, as though he had been kicked all over. His ribs hurt, and his sternum, though to the best of his knowledge he had not been injured there. But he could feel each breath he drew; it was slow and painful.

But it was his breath. He was alive.

The battle was over. He was king.

‘I am king,’ he said quietly, to himself or to his father, he was not sure.

Forty years of King Henry’s hapless reign were over. The House of Lancaster was crushed. A new England could begin.

It began like this, with death.

He had sent his men out to gain some idea of the numbers of the fallen, and to cut the throats of any of those still living. He had commanded that no quarter was to be given, nor any prisoners taken; even the common soldiers would be killed.

Then he had walked out to see the battlefield for himself.

After yesterday’s whirling storm and frenzied fighting it seemed
preternaturally calm. A light breeze blew with only a few flakes of snow caught up in it, but many of the bodies were partially covered by the snow that had already fallen, and he was glad of this; he did not want to see the expressions on the faces of the dead, the way they looked up with their emptied eyes; and he did not want to find anyone who was not yet dead, whose sufferings he would be forced to end.

A powerful sense of strangeness afflicted him, as though he walked with both the living and the dead.

It was commonplace after battle, an eerie feeling, as though you were in some way still bound to those you had killed. But there was another sensation that was new to him, like a vast solemnity. As though only now had he seen what it meant to be king.

He had been proclaimed king already, of course, but nothing had brought it home to him like this, the battlefield thick with corpses, the air that reeked of death.

Warwick came towards him, limping badly but cheerful as he ever was, following great slaughter.

‘Well, cousin,’ he said. ‘You have made your mark.’

The new king smiled affably enough, though he felt as though his face had stiffened. When he said nothing, Warwick indicated the bloodied snow. ‘Red flowers on white,’ he said, and the king nodded, and they embraced.

‘This is the greatest battle ever fought on English soil,’ Warwick said. ‘In centuries to come soldiers will sing of it – they will teach warfare by the lessons of this day.’

He went on to talk about Norfolk’s men, and the rout, and the other glories of that day. He did not mention his own achievement, though it was great. He had been wounded in the first battle, when his troops had been ambushed by Lord Clifford’s men and seemed likely to flee. Undaunted, he had got down from his horse, hacking off its head before all his men in order to rally them to him.
I will live or die with you this day!
he had cried.

‘You are very quiet, cousin,’ he said. ‘Are you thinking about the old king? He is as good as dead. Our men will find him, never fear.’

The new king smiled. ‘I was thinking about my mother,’ he said.

‘Ah, she should have been here,’ his cousin said.

The first herald returned to say that it was not possible to count all the dead – they were strewn all the way along the road to York, in a broad pathway some nine miles long and three miles across. The new king nodded slowly, and prodded a corpse with his foot.

‘And we have the problem of burying them all,’ he said.

‘Is that all?’ said Warwick. ‘There are men enough left for that. That is a happy problem for a victorious king.’

King Edward ordered the herald to find enough men to dig the graves.

‘Pay them extra,’ he said, for many great pits would have to be dug.

Then he turned to his cousin. ‘We should go to York,’ he said, but Warwick replied that it might be as well to wait. For there was no one in that city who would not have lost a father, brother or a son, and the usual cries and lamentations would have to be got over with.

But the new king clasped his cousin’s shoulders as if he would embrace him again, forcing the older man, who was at least half a foot shorter than the king, to look up at him.

‘I will write to my mother,’ he said, ‘then I must go to York. I must take the heads down from the gate.’

Warwick did not ask which heads, or say that that task could be done by one of the king’s lieutenants; he could see that this was a matter on which the king would not be moved.

And so they set off that day, riding along the corpse road to York.

And King Edward tarried in the north a great while and made great inquiry of the rebellion against his father and took down his father’s head from the wall of York, and made all the county swear allegiance to him and to his laws …

Gregory’s Chronicle

 

She had to sit down to read it; her steward guided her to a chair.

She sat in the great hall of Baynard’s Castle while all her household gathered round her.

She broke the seal on the letter awkwardly, her hands trembling. The trembling was new. It was as though, in the weeks since her husband’s death, she had grown suddenly old.

And then she couldn’t read it; her eyes blurred, then cleared, then blurred again.

But it was her son’s writing. He was alive at least on 30 March, when the letter had been written.

Desperately she focussed her vision on the first line of his writing.

The field is won. England is won.

The paper drooped over her hand. She looked around at all the faces waiting anxiously, fearful, expectant. For a moment she couldn’t catch her breath. Then she said, ‘The Lord be praised,’ and a great shout went up from the assembled crowd. For several moments she could not have been heard even if she had been able to speak.

Her steward leaned over her, asking her if she would take a little wine. Mutely she shook her head, then handed the letter to him. As the noise subsided he read aloud for her; all the details of her son’s victory, how long he had fought, how many men had been killed.

She listened but could not take in the words; she could not believe it was true.

It
was
true. Everything they had believed in, had fought for,
everything her husband and son and brother had died fighting for, had come true.

She had thought they had lost, but they had won. Her son had won. Tears started to her eyes. She closed them quickly. And then she felt it, her husband’s kiss on her forehead. She moved her lips soundlessly.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

Those who helped to inter the bodies, piled up in pits and trenches prepared for the purpose, bare witness that 8 and 30,000 warriors fell on that day, besides those who drowned in the river …

Crowland Chronicle

 

The burying of the dead went on for many weeks, well into the sowing season. Then the corpses had to be left as they were, rotting in the fields, because there would be no harvest unless the fields were tilled.

There were fewer, far fewer men to till the fields.

And so much damage had been done.

After a summer of rains and an autumn of floods, then snow that went on into spring and slowly melted, the land was drenched. Fields turned into marshland, rivers burst their banks, streams flowed where there had been no streams before. Then there was the damage done by man; one great army after another trampling the roads to mire, destroying bridges, hacking down woodland, burning or plundering the crops.

It was hard to recognize the land. Those parts of it that had not been destroyed stood barren. Brown pools stippled the fields and reflected a sullen sky.

So many men who might have worked the land for last year’s harvests had been conscripted into the queen’s army or had joined the great train of men following the king. So few of them had returned. Small hamlets stood deserted, farms abandoned, doors hanging from their hinges and clattering in the wind. Crops had
rotted in the soaked earth, diseases spread among cattle and sheep, so that famine seemed likely to follow war.

Corpses were left in open pits, staring sightlessly at the sky, while men returned to do what they could: digging ditches to drain the land, repairing bridges and roads sunk under the weight of wagons, mending fences, tending the sick beasts and the wounded men.

Those who still had homes repaired them and battened down the doors against those who had not, who grew feral in their homelessness. Those who had to travel on deserted roads armed themselves as well as they could. The homeless crept into abandoned barns or cottages for shelter, or banded together into armed groups, attacking anyone who passed.

Then one or two of the markets reopened. People gathered to sell what they could, to lament the weather and the rising prices, or to talk about the new king. As though by common consent, no one mentioned the old king, or the numbers of the dead. Like a wife well beaten, teeth knocked out, ribs broken, who will pick herself up as soon as she can, adjusting her headdress to cover the bald patches where her hair has been torn out or to shade the bruised eye, the people did not discuss their injuries or the possibility of it happening again, but focussed as though with shortened vision on the task at hand; the journey on broken roads, the difficulty of finding a carpenter or a blacksmith.

Still, there was a new king, and the people turned their faces towards him as though towards the sun. And put away despair and nursed what hope there was, for a new England had begun.

Later she would be called the most beautiful woman in all England, though this was difficult to ascertain, and not everyone agreed. However, they did agree that Elizabeth Woodville had the capacity to make people believe she was beautiful, with a smile or a sidelong glance. She had gilt-blonde hair that fell almost to her knees, and heavy-lidded eyes of an indeterminate colour. Those who disliked her said that they were dragon’s eyes; but at a certain angle and in a certain light, they looked languorous rather than snake-like.

She had met the new king on several occasions before he was king. She remembered him before all the wars began, as a young boy at court, when she had been in the service of Queen Margaret. He had been perhaps ten or eleven years old, she seventeen, but she had seen the look in the eyes of that great overgrown boy even then. It was on that look that she was pinning her hopes now.

For her husband had died a few weeks ago, at St Albans, leading a cavalry charge against the Earl of Warwick. Her brother, Anthony, was in the Tower, and her entire family under the shadow of attainder, having fought for generations on the Lancastrian side. All the lands that had been given to her on her marriage were in dispute, her sharkish mother-in-law having put in a claim for them as soon as her son had died. And then, in that month of May, the new king had ordered the confiscation of all the property and possessions belonging to her father, Earl Rivers.

Deprived, that was how she felt in the wake of her husband’s death; a response more primitive, more atavistic, than simple grief.
She had taken her two young sons and moved back to her father’s manor at Grafton, where she had grown up.

She knew that King Edward had left York after the feast of Easter and was now progressing towards London to prepare for his coronation. She knew that he was stopping at several stages along the way to celebrate his great victory. She knew, this well-informed young woman, that he would be passing within a mile of her father’s manor, and would stay at the hunting lodge at Stony Stratford, where he would take advantage of the vast parks and forest to ride out on the chase.

Her father had told her that she was wasting her time, and treading on dangerous ground. He had encountered the new king before. A little more than a year ago, he and her brother had been captured by Warwick and taken to Calais, where they had been roundly insulted by the earl and by his father, Salisbury (who was dead now), and by the young man who was now king. She could expect nothing from him, he told her. It would be better to lie low until the worst of the storm had passed.
Don’t tempt fate
, he had said.

Her mother had told her to show a little bosom but not too much, and had given her an emerald necklace that brought out the greenish lights in her eyes. She had adjusted her daughter’s hood so that some of the flaxen hair could be seen.

Be proud
, she had said,
but not too proud.

Elizabeth Woodville had promised that she would not be too proud. If necessary she would remind the new king that both their fathers had been knighted at the same time by the infant King Henry VI; that her mother was the daughter of the counts of Luxembourg, and King Edward was anxious to secure friendly relations with that country. However, it was on the look that he had given her so long ago that she was counting.

Accordingly she had dressed herself with particular care. Even as a child she had taken meticulous care of her clothing and possessions, only flying into one of her rare rages if one of her younger siblings had interfered with them in any way.

She made sure that her two flaxen-haired sons were as handsomely dressed as she before getting into her carriage. She knew the course that the hunt would take, the grassy plots where a feast could be laid out, and it was to one of these that she directed her driver now.

Her little boys wanted to know where they were going and when they would get there, but she ignored them, preoccupied as she was with the nature of her plea.

Soon the carriage drew to a halt and she dismounted, telling the driver to wait. She walked a little way from it with her sons, looking for a likely spot. The older one, Thomas, slashed at the grass with his short sword; the younger one, Richard, stopped to pick up pebbles. And both of them wanted to know when they would eat.

‘This is no picnic,’ she told them, taking hold of their hands. ‘Keep your peace and wait.’

They went on complaining, of course, but being well acquainted with the resistant wall of their mother’s will, the outward composure that only rarely flickered into rage, they did not press her too far.

The oak tree stood to one side of a clearing, spreading its great boughs more than halfway across. Its leaves stippled the ground with light and shade.

Here
, she thought, pulling her sons towards it.

‘Why?’ said one, and ‘I want to go home,’ said the other, but their mother told them sternly that they were there to wait. It would not be long, she said.

And, in fact, it was not long. Her sense of timing, one of the gifts of the orderly, did not let her down. After a short while they could sense tiny tremors in the earth through the soles of their feet, then hear the drumming of horses’ hooves.

Swiftly she adjusted her hood with jewelled fingers before taking hold of Thomas’s hand again, in order to appear maternal, and also to prevent him from running away.

Then she stood still, outwardly languorous, inwardly coiled like a spring. Something of her tension must have communicated itself to
her sons for they stopped their squirming protests and the three of them stood silent and watchful, staring out from the dappled shade with identical blue-green eyes.

The ground trembled as the noise from the hunt grew louder, and laughter and shouting could be heard.

Then the first riders appeared.

Still she did not move. She had admirably calculated both the distance and the angle of their approach, and they could not see her at first. Only when several riders had already passed did she step forward from the shade of the tree, putting back her hood at the last moment so that when he turned he would see her hair and her eyes. Then she called out in a clear voice, ‘Your majesty!’

Several riders turned.

If the king did not turn round she would not call out again.

She lowered her eyes, sank in a deep curtsy to the ground, then raised her eyes again.

And the young king checked his horse, and turned.

This poor lady made humble suit unto the king that she might be restored unto such small lands as her late husband had given her in jointure. Whom the king beheld and heard her speak, as she was both fair and of a good favour, moderate of stature and very wise, he not only pitied her but also waxed enamoured of her. And taking her afterward secretly aside, began to enter into talking more familiarly …

Thomas More

 

And certainly, whatever conversation they had, it worked in spectacular fashion, for that June the king in his great clemency allowed all Elizabeth Woodville’s lands and property to revert to her by writ of the Privy Seal. Her brother was released from the Tower, her father’s offences were pardoned, and all the property confiscated from her family was officially restored, so that people wondered what charms and persuasions she could possibly have used.

When the king first fell in love with her beauty of person and charm of manner he could not corrupt her virtue by [either] gifts or menaces. Whose appetite when she perceived she virtuously denied him. But yet did she so wisely and with so good manner that she rather kindled his desire than quenched it.

Dominic Mancini