“You grew up with Warwick’s daughter, didn’t you, Dickon? At Middleham?”
The question was the most innocuous to come to his mind, seemed ideally suited to convey friendly interest. Yet he saw at once that his good intentions had somehow gone astray. Edward was, unaccountably, even more amused by his query, and Richard just as unaccountably seemed irked, although he replied politely enough, saying briefly that, yes, he’d been at Middleham with Anne Neville.
Illumination dawned for Will. Why, he wasn’t sure, but the subject of Warwick’s daughter seemed to be a sensitive one. He quickly asked Richard another question, this one concerning the coming campaign, and Richard responded with such immediate enthusiasm that Will saw his supposition had been correct—Richard was not comfortable talking about Anne Neville.
He was speculating on this when he happened to look at George. George was staring at his younger brother with such total absorption that Will found himself staring at George.
George had yet to take his gaze from Richard. He had the most arresting eyes Will had ever seen, a unique shade of purest blue-green, with golden lashes a woman might envy. They were measuring Richard with queer intensity, with a watchful stillness that put Will in mind of a cat suddenly on the scent of unseen prey.
Will looked to Richard, who was pointing out the closest Severn crossing on the map to John Howard, unaware of his brother’s unblinking scrutiny. But Will saw now that Edward was more observant than Richard. Edward, too, was watching George, and Will realized at once that Edward had the advantage of him, for Edward did understand the nature of George’s suspicions. Will had no doubt of that. All amusement had gone from Edward’s face and the eyes studying George were very clear, very cold.
“Ned?” Anthony Woodville spoke for the first time since the council began; he’d been markedly subdued in Edward’s presence since their quarrel at Baynard’s Castle eleven days past.
“Assuming, of course, that we do defeat Lancaster, what mean you to do with the Frenchwoman?”
“Draw her fangs,” Edward said grimly. “I do owe that lady a debt, Anthony, one long overdue.”
All eyes were on him now.
“Jesú, the blood that’s been spilled in her name, enough to run the Trent red from Nottingham to the sea,” John Howard said suddenly, and more than one man among them nodded in somber agreement.
“Would you send her to the block, Ned?” George asked, sounding more curious than vengeful.
“A woman? Jesus God, George!” Richard snapped, and George turned upon him with a hostility that seemed disproportionate, far beyond the resentment that Richard’s impatient tones might have been expected to spark.
“I wasn’t speaking to you, Dickon,” he said, so scathingly that Richard merely looked at him in surprise.
“He’s right, George,” Edward said, but not in rebuke; his voice was without emotion of any kind, very measured and even. “I’d not send a woman to the block. Not even Marguerite d’Anjou.”
He looked about him, at them all, a faint smile playing about his mouth; there was nothing of amusement in it.
“And I do believe that will, in time, come to be the bitterest of her regrets…that I wouldn’t.”
31
Tewkesbury
May 1471
Edward had encountered unexpected difficulty in bringing the Lancastrians to bay. He still thought Marguerite meant to head for Wales, but his scouts had yet to confirm it as certainty, and he’d proceeded with undue caution once they departed Windsor on the twenty-fourth. Five days later, they were not further west than Cirencester, for Edward was growing increasingly concerned lest Marguerite slip by him and swing back toward London. When on Wednesday, the first of May, his scouts reported the Lancastrian army was heading east toward Bath, his suspicions seemed to be confirmed. He hastened westward to intercept them, halting briefly at Malmesbury to await further intelligence reports.
The news, when it came, was not good. Marguerite had led him astray with artfully laid rumors, had never meant to face him at Bath. Instead, she’d suddenly swung north, had been welcomed into the city of Bristol, which lay in the path of the Severn River crossing.
Edward had reacted with a rare outburst of unbridled rage, cursing Marguerite for the success of her stratagem, cursing himself for having taken her bait, and the citizens of Bristol for opening the city gates to her. But his scouts soon redeemed themselves in his eyes, for on Thursday morn, they brought him as welcome news as he could have wished. Marguerite’s advance guard had been sighted at Sodbury, ten miles northeast of Bristol, and the battle preparations had been unmistakable. It seemed she planned at last to turn and fight. Edward roused his men to furious activity; they rode into Sodbury Thursday at midday and settled into position, to await the Lancastrian army.
The hours passed; night fell. When it was evident that there would be no battle this Thursday, Francis, exhausted from two days of hard riding, stumbled into the command tent that flew the Whyte Boar of Gloucester. Flinging himself down on a pallet, he fell at once into a fitful, uneasy sleep. He was awakened some time later by voices, recognized one as Richard’s and started sleepily to make his presence known when he heard a second voice say,
“There is something I did want to say to you, Dickon, and if, as I expect, we fight tomorrow, we’ll most likely not have another chance to talk alone.”
Instead of speaking then, Francis lay very still, his heart hammering, not wanting the King to think he’d been eavesdropping upon a private conversation. He opened his eyes, but the tent was dark; only a single candle glimmered. He heard Richard stumble against something, swear roundly.
“Where the Devil are my people? Let me send for torches, Ned; it’s blacker than Hades in here.”
“Don’t bother. Will and Jack and the others are awaiting us in my tent, so we can—Oh, Christ, I forgot to summon George myself! He’ll sulk for a good hour that I didn’t personally request he join us, the ass.”
“What’s been wrong with him lately? I haven’t gotten two civil words from him for more than a week now.”
“You have no idea, Dickon?”
“No, why should I? Oh, we did quarrel some at Windsor over whether you’d send the Frenchwoman to the block, but I cannot see that he’d bear a grudge over that, surely?”
“I see you truly don’t know. Strange, how after all you’ve been through, you manage to hold to a certain naïveté, even now, even with George.”
“I cannot agree with you, Ned. I don’t see that I’m naïve, not at all.”
“I should have remembered, shouldn’t I? At your age, that’s a mortal insult! Well, you’d best let it lie, Dickon. George is not one to suffer in silence, and if you’ve vexed him, you’ll know soon enough, I daresay.”
Francis was wishing fervently that he’d spoken out at first; surely that embarrassment would have been far less than to be discovered now. There was an unmistakable intimacy about this conversation; he did not think Richard would be any more pleased than the King to find him here.
“What did you want to say to me, Ned?”
“Just this…. I do believe we shall win tomorrow. But only a fool never considers the possibility of defeat. And if we should lose…Marguerite d’Anjou is not Warwick, Dickon. I think you do understand that, but I need to be certain. If we should lose, just be sure you do not let yourself be taken alive…the way Edmund was. You understand, lad?”
Francis was not surprised when Richard made no response; he could not imagine what one could possibly say to such a statement. He was scarcely breathing, so quietly did he lay, and he didn’t move until long after they had left the tent, too shaken by Edward’s words to sleep again.
As it happened, Edward was wrong; they would not fight the next day, after all. At 3:00 A.M. Edward was awakened with dismal tidings. Once again, Marguerite had outfoxed him. As soon as she was sure she’d succeeded in luring him to Sodbury, she’d abandoned further pretense of giving battle, and even as he encamped a
t Sodbury, she was racing north, toward Gloucester.
Edward was wild when he heard, for once she reached Gloucester, once she crossed the Severn, she could burn the bridge behind her to sabotage pursuit and then proceed at her leisure into Wales to join forces with Jasper Tudor.
Edward’s fury had been awesome, even to those who did know him best. While the military threat posed by such a retreat into Wales was real enough, it was his pride that had suffered the greatest hurt. That Marguerite should have twice made a fool of him was more than he could accept with equanimity, but he’d not long indulged his anger. Within the hour, his camp was astir and on the move, setting out in grim pursuit.
He was well aware that he couldn’t hope to overtake her before she reached Gloucester, but a Yorkist courier was soon whipping his mount north, bearing urgent orders for Richard Beauchamp, Governor of Gloucester Castle, commanding him to keep the city gates closed to the Lancastrians at all costs. And as his messenger galloped toward Gloucester, Edward took his army north, along the Cotswold ridge toward the next Severn crossing…the town of Tewkesbury.
The memory of that march would long stay with the men who made it. It had been fast, furious and frantic, for Edward was determined to stop Marguerite before she could link up with the waiting Welsh rebels. She was just as determined to cross the Severn to safety and thus postpone their day of reckoning, and Friday became a nightmare of dust, fatigue, and thirst for the men of both Lancaster and York.
Edward was renowned for the swiftness with which he could move an army; the speed of his campaigns had long been a byword. Now with so urgent a need, he pushed his men mercilessly. Although it was only early May, the heat soared upward as the sun climbed in the sky, until the soldiers sweltered under temperatures more common to midsummer than spring. They lacked more than sleep; they were short of water, as well, and the only brook within reach of the thirsty men was soon so churned and muddied by the horses of the vanguard that not even the most parched were willing to drink from it.
The Lancastrian army, too, had been on the march all night, and for them was reserved the bitterness of reaching Gloucester at 10:00 that Friday morning, eager for food and drink and the beckoning bridge that spanned the Severn, only to find the city gates tightly closed to them, by order of Governor Beauchamp. They knew by now of the pursuing Yorkists, and they dared not take the time to force the city gates for fear the Yorkist army would be upon them before they could subdue the recalcitrant citizenry. They had no choice but to press onward, toward the Tewkesbury crossing, every bit as thirsty and sleep-starved as the enemy that shadowed them, and for them there was an added cruel goad, the vexation of being the hunted, not the hunter.
Throughout the day, the two armies pushed north, toward Tewkesbury. Because of the punishing pace Edward had adopted upon learning of Marguerite’s deception, there was now no more than five miles between the armies, and as the race dragged on, the advance guard of the Yorkists and the rear guard of Lancaster were well within sight of each other.
At 4:00 P.M., the Lancastrian forces at last reached Tewkesbury, and here Yorkist sympathizers attempted to deny them the use of the abbey ferry. Marguerite gave orders to clear the way by force, but she alone had the stomach for such a bloody confrontation. Her exhausted men and horses were at the end of their endurance, and Somerset did not need to be told there was no conceivable way they could hope to quell opposition and ferry their army across the river with Edward of York less than five miles behind them and coming up fast. The battle commander countermanded the Queen. Somerset hastily scouted the terrain around Tewkesbury, and the weary Lancastrians prepared to make their stand, within sight of the River Severn they had tried so desperately to cross.
The Lancastrian army had been on the march for fully fifteen hours, had managed to cover twenty-four miles in that dash for the Severn. But Edward had done the impossible; in just twelve hours, he’d ridden an astonishing thirty-five miles. He was well content now to reward his men, and halted the Yorkist army at the village of Cheltenham, some nine miles south of Tewkesbury, for the first food and drink of the day. He then moved his divisions to within three miles of the Lancastrian lines, and with his battle captains, rode out to study what would on the morrow become the last battlefield of the war that had ravaged the Houses of Lancaster and York for nearly two decades.
Richard was not noted for either an excessive or an imaginative use of profanity, but what he said when he first saw the terrain that stretched between the Yorkist lines and the entrenched Lancastrian army won him looks of startled admiration from both Francis and Rob Percy. They heartily concurred with his scorching invective as they surveyed the battlefield before them.
The Lancastrians had drawn their battle lines on high ground south of the village of Tewkesbury, and thus gained a natural advantage over the Yorkists, who would be forced to fight uphill. To the Lancastrian left lay the stream known locally as Swillgate Brook; to their right, dense woods stretched from the Gloucester Road toward the crossing of the Severn and Avon rivers; while the ground that separated the armies, the ground over which the Yorkist vanguard would have to pass, was a soldier’s nightmare, a tangle of thick thorny underbrush and vines, crevices, uprooted trees, dikes, hedges that grew higher than a man’s head, sudden sinkholes sodden with brackish brown water of unknown depths.
Richard spurred his stallion forward for a closer scrutiny. The more he looked, the more appalled he became. From time to time, he murmured, “Jesus God Above,” more to himself than to anyone else. As Francis reined in beside him, he gestured off to his left.
“Take a look there, Francis. That wooded knoll…. Can you imagine better cover for an ambush than that? And it will border right on the flank of my battle, Christ keep us!”
Now that Richard had called his attention to the wooded rise of ground, Francis could indeed see the potential danger it posed. But he was somewhat confused by his friend’s last remark. The vanguard always took up position on the right; yet Richard had just named the left battle as his.
“You do mean Hastings’s battle, don’t you, Dickon? The vanguard does fight to the right of the King’s battle, does it not?”
“Not tomorrow,” Richard said tersely. “Tomorrow we do align our men here.”
Suddenly the impassable terrain before them took on a new and very personal significance to Francis. “You mean we have to cross those dikes and undergrowth? Good God, Dickon, why?”
“My brother has learned that Somerset is to lead the Lancastrian vanguard.” Richard hesitated, but there was no tactful way to say it. “He does not want Will Hastings to be facing Somerset. And so, tomorrow the vanguard does fight on the left.”
Francis drew a long whistling breath. That, he thought, was a two-edged sword, in truth—as much a slap at Hastings as it was a compliment to Dickon. He wondered how Hastings had taken it, opened his mouth to ask when the evening air was suddenly athrob with the shimmering sounds of chiming church bells. He stared toward the north, as the echoes faded: The Abbey of St Mary the Virgin, which lay just a half-mile to the rear of the Lancastrian lines, was ringing in Vespers. Just as the monks did every evening, just as if two armies totaling eleven thousand men were not spread out below in battle formation, with only three miles and a night’s wait between them.
Richard was turning his mount; men were approaching. With battle looming within hours, Edward was astride a destrier rather than a more docile palfrey, and those who rode with him took care to give the white stallion space. While battles were generally fought on foot, battle commanders still had need of horses of superior strength and spirit for those times when mounts were called for, to enable them to give pursuit, to regroup forces, to rally ranks, and if need be, to retreat. To satisfy this need, the destrier had been developed, bred and trained solely for warfare, able to carry a fully armed knight with ease, and of such fiery temperament that a knight’s warhorse was itself a weapon of no small significance. Francis had heard battle tales told of men wh
o died not from sword thrusts but from being savaged by a knight’s destrier. Rarely ridden except to war, they required an alert rider, a steady hand, and but moments before, Edward’s stallion had raked viciously at a rider imprudent enough to venture within striking range of those blunt yellowed teeth; only Edward’s vigilance had spared the man an ugly injury.
Now Francis held his own horse well back, watching as Richard guided his stallion forward to meet his brother. He saw Richard gesture toward the left, toward the wooded knoll, and he moved his mount closer, to hear Edward laugh and turn to Will Hastings.
“You do owe me, Will! I wagered Will fifty marks that you’d spot the danger straightaway in that hillock.”
“I was well lessoned by Richard Neville, may God assoil him,” Richard said, almost absently, and Francis saw he was staring beyond his brother, at that rough rocky ground that lay between them and the Lancastrian lines.
As if reading his thoughts, Edward said, “You’ll have your work cut out for you tomorrow, lad, taking the van across that terrain to go up against Somerset. But you may make yourself easy as to yonder knoll. I’ve seen to it.”
He glanced about him then, at the twilight sky, now a darkening greenish-blue, and at last said the words Francis was hoping to hear.
“We can do no more here. We’d best get back to camp. It’ll be dawn all too soon…. It always is.”
Lights were burning low in the command tent of Lancaster. Shadows wavered, retreated before the sudden flaring of wind-gusted candles, flickered over the tense tired faces of the five people within, hunched over the trestle table that had been set up for their deliberations, for untouched food. Their scouts had long since relayed the enemy positions. They knew that York’s young brother Gloucester was to face Somerset, knew that Will Hastings would oppose Devon, that York himself would lead his center against John Wenlock and their Prince. For Marguerite would be the hardest task of all: she could only wait.