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In the first year of the reign of Richard II
(Thursday 8th September 1379)
—i—
It was a warm blustery autumn day this feast of the birth of the Virgin, and the Londoners and their cousins from nearby villages and towns thronged the streets and marketplaces of the city. Priests stood on the porches of London’s parish churches, shouting reminders that this day all good Christians should be in the cold deep shadows of their churches’ bellies, praying for forgiveness for their too-numerous transgressions and pleading with God, Jesus and every saint in heaven that they might have even the remotest chance of salvation.
The people ignored them. Sweet Jesu, this was a feast day, and no one was going to waste it mumbling unintelligible prayers inside a frigid church. The autumn markets and fairs were in full swing: stalls groaned with the fruits of the summer harvest, flocks of geese and pigs squawked and squealed from their pens, landless labourers stood on boxes and shouted their availability to any landlord looking for cheap hired hands, and pedlars and quacksalvers sung the praises of their wares and cure-alls.
Buy my physick! Buy my physick! ’Tis a most excellent and rare drink, pleasant and profitable for young and old, and of most benefit to the hysterical woman with child. Use day and night, without danger, as the occasion and level of hysteria demandeth. This most wonderful of potions will also purge the body, cleanse the kidneys of the stone and gravel, free the body from itch and scabbedness, as well as all chilblains. It shall abate the raging pain of the gout, and assuage the raging pains of the teeth. It will expel all wind and torment in the guts, noises in the head or ears, destroy all manner of worms, and free the body from the rickets and scurvy. And that is not all! Why, this most wondrous of physicks also increases the quantity and sweetness of milk in the breasts of nurses!
“I swear to sweet Jesu,” Bolingbroke muttered as they turned their horses south onto the Strand from the gates of the Savoy, “that if I thought that most wondrous of physicks would also purge England of its most vile king I would swoop down on that abominable quack and purchase his entire stock!”
Neville laughed, even though the matter was serious. “I am sure,” he murmured, kneeing his horse close to Bolingbroke’s so that only he might hear, “that most of the dungeon keepers in this fair land will know the ingredients of a swift and certain poison. I would counsel a purchase from them, my friend, rather than from that pedlar of honey-water.”
Bolingbroke shot Neville a speculative glance. “You would condone murder to rid us of this demon, Tom?”
Before Neville could answer the crowds of people swarming along the Strand towards Westminster caught sight of Bolingbroke and his escort.
“Prince Hal! Fair Prince Hal!”
“Hal! Hal!”
A cry that turned into a roar swept along the Strand.
Hal! Hal! Fair Prince Hal!
Neville reined in his horse to come alongside the eight men-at-arms who rode as escort, allowing Bolingbroke to ride ahead and receive the acclamation of the crowds.
Bolingbroke had left his silver-gilt hair bare to the sunshine, and his pale grey eyes sparkled in his beautiful face as he stood high in the stirrups and waved to the crowds. If his head was bare, then the rest of Bolingbroke was resplendent in sky-blue velvets, creamy linens and silks, and jewels of every hue. From his hips swung a great ceremonial sword and a baselard dagger, both similarly sheathed in gold- and jewel-banded scarlet leather scabbards. As the roar of the crowd intensified, Bolingbroke’s snowy war destrier snorted and plunged, but Bolingbroke held him easily, and the roar and adulation of the crowds increased yet further with every plunge forward of the stallion.
In pagan days he would have been worshipped as a god, Neville thought, unable to keep a smile of sheer joy and pride off his face. Now they merely adore him.
A woman with a child in her arms stumbled a little at the edge of the crowd, and Bolingbroke kneed his stallion closer to her. He leaned down, taking her arm so that she might catch her balance, and the crowd roared approvingly.
The woman, flush-faced with joy that Bolingbroke should so care for her safety, held up her child, a girl of perhaps two years age.
Bolingbroke dropped the reins of his stallion, controlling the beast with his knees and calves only, and gathered the child into his arms.
Neville thought it a pretty trick, something to further strengthen the crowd’s approval, but he caught a glimpse of Bolingbroke’s face—the man was staring at the child with such love that Neville instantly thought that the girl might actually be his get from some casual affair.
He looked to the woman again. No, surely not… she was plain, and approaching middle age. She was not a woman who would catch Bolingbroke’s eye or fancy.
Neville gazed back at Bolingbroke, now planting a kiss in the child’s hair, and remembered how he enjoyed playing with Rosalind. Perhaps he merely loves children, Neville thought. Well, Mary shall give him some soon enough, pray God.
Bolingbroke now hefted the child, showing her to the crowd. “Is she not beautiful?” he cried. “Has she not the face of England?”
Now that was pure showmanship, Neville thought, grinning wryly.
Again the crowd roared and clapped, and Bolingbroke, with apparent reluctance, handed the girl back to her mother and took up the reins of his stallion, urging the horse into a slow, prancing trot down the street.
“Whither goest thou?” shouted a man in a rich country burr, and the question—and the burr—was taken up by the throng.
Whither goest thou, fair Prince Hal?
Bolingbroke waved for silence, and the close-pressing crowd consented to dull its adoration to a low rumble.
“I go to Westminster,” shouted Bolingbroke, “to receive the surrender of the French bastard king!”
The crowd erupted, and Neville burst into admiring laughter. Why, Hal would have them believe that he alone had taken King John on the battlefield, and then negotiated a treaty to see all of France quiver on its knees before even the lowliest of English peasants!
Bolingbroke swivelled in his saddle, sending Neville a quick grin, then he turned forward again, and spurred his stallion through the crowds who parted for him as if he were Moses.
Neville eventually managed to ride to Bolingbroke’s side as they cantered past Charing Cross and Westminster rose before their eyes.
“They would have you king!” he shouted above the continuing roar.
“Do you believe so?” Bolingbroke said, his eyes fixed on Neville. “Should we indeed reach for that vial of poison, Tom?”
And then he was gone again, spurring forward and waving to the crowds. Neville was left staring after him and wondering, as others already had, how high Bolingbroke’s ambition leapt.
If they did manage to destroy Richard—and wasn’t that what they truly planned?—then who else could take the throne? Who else? Who else was there to lead England to safety but Bolingbroke?
Richard had caused a table to be set under the clear skies beyond the porch leading into Westminster Hall. The Hall was closed, undergoing renovations to its roof (Richard would have a greater roof put on, so he might be the more gloriously framed), and so the treaty would be signed in the courtyard, where not only the noblest peers of the realm could witness, but also (suitably restrained behind barriers) the commons themselves of England.
Bolingbroke and Neville dismounted when they reached the courtyard’s perimeter, and monks from Westminster Abbey led them to their places in the ranks to the right of the table. Here stood the greatest of nobles and their closest of confidants, and Bolingbroke led Neville directly to his father’s side.
“My Lord of Lancaster,” Bolingbroke said formally, greeting his father with an equally formal bow. Katherine, Lancaster’s duchess, was not present: no wives were here, only the holders of titles and the wielders of power.
Neville also murmured Lancaster a greeting, bowing even deeper than Bolingbroke, but Lancaster gave him only a cursory glance before turning to his son.
“I wish Richard had taken my advice and had this cursed treaty signed under roof.” Lancaster, who looked even more tired and grey in the noonday sun than he had in the candlelit dimness of the Savoy, gestured at the table several paces away: it was strewn with damasks and weighted down with gold and silver candlesticks and a great golden salt cellar. “If the crowd doesn’t become unruly and upset everything, then no doubt a raven will fly overhead and shit on the treaty. John is being difficult enough about the signing … if his pen must perforce thread its way through a pile of bird shit then doubtless he will call the odoriferous mess a bad omen and refuse to sign.”
“At least a treaty is to be signed,” Bolingbroke said.
Lancaster sighed, his eyes still on the table. “Aye. But a treaty declaring Charles a bastard and Richard the heir to the French throne is worth even less than a pile of bird shit in real terms.”
“How so, my lord?” Neville said.
Lancaster turned and gave Neville the full benefit of his cold grey stare. “Do you think that even with this treaty in Richard’s possession the French will lie down and surrender a thousand years of proud history into his hands? Richard can wave it about all he likes, but unless he can enforce it with sword and spilled French blood then it becomes worthless in practical terms.”
“No Frenchman will accept it unless he be forced to do so,” Bolingbroke said.
“Aye,” said a new voice behind them, “and do not think, my bright young Lord of Hereford, that English swords will not force French pride to its knees in the near future.”
All three men turned and stared at the newcomer.
“My Lord of Oxford,” Lancaster said, with no bow and no respect in his voice, “how pleasing to see you here. But also how passing strange, for I thought that surely you would have been at Richard’s side.”
Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford, lifted a corner of his mouth in a well-practised sneer. He was a man of some twenty-five or twenty-six years, of the broad chested and shouldered physique that often softened to fat in later years. His face, however, did not suit his body: it was narrow and suspicious, with a sallow complexion and scarred along cheeks and nose by a childhood pox. Yet this was an arresting face, for his dark eyes and full-lipped mouth were of startling beauty, and invariably made any who met him for the first time wonder if perhaps he had stolen both eyes and mouth from some poor beauteous corpse and somehow incorporated them into his otherwise fox-like features.
“And will you lead our fine English knights and archers to so humiliate the French?” Bolingbroke said.
De Vere simpered, the expression challenging rather than coquettish. “Why, dear Hal, I much prefer the comforts of home fires and the sweet meat of our home-bred wenches. Perhaps,” and his face suddenly, violently, darkened into outright threat, “you might like to lead the charge? Unless your father cannot bear the thought of you spitted on some French count’s lance, of course. Well? What say you, oh brave one?”
Neville suddenly realised that the crowd’s cheers for Bolingbroke must surely have been heard by de Vere … as most surely also by Richard, and he wondered if the same thoughts had occurred to them as had to him.
How high did Bolingbroke’s ambition fly?
And how much danger did that place Bolingbroke in?
“Richard must surely be pleased that the treaty is finally to be signed,” Neville said, succeeding in deflecting de Vere’s attention from Bolingbroke to himself.
“Ah … Neville, is it not?” Some of the threat died from de Vere’s face. “I have heard from Richard that you have recently gained yourself a most beautiful and alluring wife. She has brought you no dowry or riches, to be sure, but then,” now nastiness filled de Vere’s face, “sometimes the heat of the bedsport can compensate for almost anything, is it not true?”
“Enough!” Lancaster said. “De Vere, you speak with the utmost vileness on occasion, thinking yourself high above those who outrank you both in birth and in manners. You have favour only because you are Richard’s current pet. Be wary you do not discover a dagger in your back the day that favour dies!”
“And you,” de Vere said, “should watch out for the dagger in your back, for I think it not long in the coming!”
And with that he was gone, shoving his way through the assembled nobles as they found their way to their seats.
“Father!” Bolingbroke said, making as if to go after the Earl of Oxford.
“No!” Lancaster grabbed his son’s arm. “Leave him! He is obnoxious, but of no account.”
“How can you say that?” Bolingbroke said. “How dare he so threaten you!”
Lancaster smiled sadly. “The world has changed,” he said. “My father and brother are dead, and nothing is as once it was. Perhaps we should just accept it.”
Bolingbroke opened his mouth again, but Lancaster waved it shut. “No. Say it not, Hal. Not today, for I am too weary. Come, let us find our seats … Tom, I believe there is a place for you to stand behind us. Come, come, leave de Vere’s unpleasantness behind us.”
Once the nobles were seated, their retainers and men-at-arms ranked behind them, and the crowds who had rumbled out of London to witness the public humiliation of the French restrained as best could be behind wooden barriers and sharp spears and pikes, a clarion of trumpets sounded, and the monarchs of England and France appeared in magnificent procession from behind a row of screens masking the entrance to the palace complex.
Or, rather, Richard, with Isabeau de Bavière on his arm, proceeded in magnificent procession. King John of France sulked and shuffled his way towards the table, his eyes occasionally darting to the sky, almost as if he were waiting for a sympathetic raven to deposit an excuse not to sign the treaty now spread out on the table before them.
The crowd roared and every bird atop the spires of Westminster Hall, Abbey and Palace fled into the sun to finally alight far away on the banks of the Thames.
John descended into a black fugue; his last chance to avoid signing the treaty was fluttering away.
Traitor birds!
If John had slipped further towards his dotage, then Richard had moved from youth to man in the few months since Neville had seen him last.
Kingship sat upon him well. He still affected his cloth of green, almost as if he never wanted (or wanted no one else) to forget that gay May Day of his coronation, but now it had been augmented with enough jewels and chains of gold that he seemed to outrival the sun itself for power and glory. His face was more mature, harder … more knowing and far more cunning, if that were possible.
Every step of his green-clad legs radiated confidence, every slight movement of his crown-topped head bespoke the power that he commanded.
Richard was king, and no one would ever be allowed to forget it.
On his arm Isabeau de Bavière walked straight-backed and proud. She was aging now, but Neville thought he had never seen a more beautiful or desirable woman. She was grey-haired and wrinkled, and her delicate form very slightly stooped, but her eyes were of the clearest sapphire, sparkling in the light, and her face … her face was so exquisitely fragile that Neville thought a man would lust to bed her simply so he could prove to himself (as to his fellows) that he could do so without breaking every bone in her body.
The English crowd, both men and women, instinctively loathed her on sight. Women catcalled, and men roared lusty words, exposing themselves until guards struck them where it was most likely to sting and forced them to cover up again.
Isabeau cared not. She had endured insults all her life and yet none had touched her. Men and women both had scorned her, yet she had lived out her days manipulating kings and popes alike. She was a woman of her own mind, and free to indulge her ambitions with the wealth of a husband she had managed to drive beyond the bounds of sanity (Isabeau had never been slow to recognise the potential of the well-trained-and-aimed lust of a peacock). Isabeau de Bavière was a woman both beyond and out of her time.
She lifted her free hand and elegantly waved to the spitting, roaring crowd.
Lancaster groaned, and cast his eyes heavenward.
Only a few paces away now, Isabeau de Bavière turned her eyes to Lancaster and sent him a swift, conniving look that had Neville wondering if Lancaster himself had ever succumbed to her charms. Why was it that Lancaster had called off the proposed marriage between Catherine of France and Bolingbroke … had Isabeau sent him a carefully worded warning about possible incestuous complications?
Suddenly Neville had to repress a laugh. He had an image of all the highest nobles and princes of Europe furtively counting dates on their fingers and wondering if they were possibly responsible for Charles or Catherine.
Had all Europe shared in the making of King John’s soon-to-be-declared-bastard heir?
The laugh finally escaped, and of all who shot Neville looks, Isabeau de Bavière’s was the only one that included a glint of amusement.
And so, with the sun shining, the wind gusting and the crowd roaring, Isabeau de Bavière leaned over the creamy parchment that contained the words which made the Treaty of Westminster and signed away her son’s self-respect.
Then she leaned back, held out the quill for the frowning, pouting King John, and laughed for sheer joy at the beauty of life.
VIII (#ulink_7bf49093-3003-5e6e-ab70-31e66632fff6)
Compline, the Feast of the Nativity
of the Blessed Virgin Mary
In the first year of the reign of Richard II
(evening Thursday 8th September 1379)
—ii—
In the evening, Richard hosted a celebratory banquet in the Painted Chamber to which all the nobles who had witnessed the signing of the treaty were invited together with their womenfolk who had been excluded from the more serious business.
Neville and Margaret both attended the evening, not as invited guests, but in their capacity as attendants to great nobles.
The evening was a splendid affair: Richard proved the most generous of hosts, de Vere behaved with the utmost gentility, Isabeau de Bavière shone with the brilliance of the evening star at Richard’s side, and no one minded that King John had refused to attend.
The talk among the guests was of many things, although most topics were generally concerned with the treaty and the current situation in France. Could Richard enforce the treaty? And what was the now-formally-declared-bastard Charles doing? The latest intelligence had him still ensconced in la Roche-Guyon, dithering about what to do and how to take advantage of the sudden deaths of Edward III and the Black Prince. Once the Black Prince had abandoned Chauvigny, Philip the Bad had left Chatellerault and rejoined Charles at la Roche-Guyon, no doubt to keep a closer eye on the Dauphin and see what advantage he could wrest from the situation. Rumour also spoke of this Joan of Arc, and her spine-strengthening effect on the Dauphin. What if Charles did rally the French behind his banner, and. did manage to retake all English holdings in France? Would Richard counter such a move, or sit fuming on his throne in Westminster waving about his useless scrap of a treaty?
The Abbot of Westminster had been sharing Bolingbroke’s plate and cup during the banquet, but when the dishes were removed, he excused himself saying he had matters within the abbey to attend to.
As soon as he’d gone, Bolingbroke waved Neville to take his place.
Bolingbroke checked to make sure that the man seated to his left was engaged in conversation elsewhere, then leaned close to Neville and spoke quietly.
“Richard is to send Isabeau de Bavière to Charles with a copy of the treaty. It is a good plan, for it may further demoralise Charles … and Isabeau’s black witchcraft may act to counter this saintly—” Bolingbroke spoke the word with utter loathing—“Joan we hear so much prattle of.”
