A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury

And his heir, Henry, only a year older, could he claim to understand him, too? So different in every way, even in looks, so grave and contained, so full of contrary ideas, and, sometimes, so blunt in uttering them, yet himself so perilously elusive. Deep as a well, and for all his strength and prowess—for he could hold his own with any boy of his age, afoot or on horseback, when he chose—looking and bearing himself like a clerk, and sometimes even like a clerk in orders. Not one easy to fathom, or comfort able to frequent. Though it hardly arose, for the boy was engrossed in his Welsh affairs, and came south as little as he could. He had put in an appearance, perforce, at the ceremony at the Tower, to appoint his proctors, but returned to Chester as soon as he decently could, and had not left it again to come to the council at his own manor of Kennington, sending only one of his esquires with a report on the situation—admittedly an admirably full and expert report—to lay before the assembly. He made no bones about stating his own views or criticising theirs. He was too free with his strictures, and too impatient with restraint. Because he was on the spot, and had established a surprising, and surely almost heretical, chain of friendships there on the border, he thought he knew better than these older and cooler heads in London.

  There were letters from the boy here in his closet, no more than a week old, cold-blooded enough in their analysis of the military situation since Grey’s loss, and ruthless enough in their acceptance of the necessity to deal in extremes in the last resort, but still arguing the advantage of restraint, even daring to suggest that Lord Grey’s capture made no substantial alteration in the case for negotiation, since he was the original party to the complaint which had never actually come to a judgment under law. There was something of the lawyer about Hal himself. Perhaps that was what he respected in Glendower.

  No denying the boy was dutiful and punctilious in all things, however opinionated he might be. But unsparing in his pressing of points he thought vital, and eternally urging the need for money. It was the same burden Northumberland was always singing in the north, and Hotspur from whichever front of his double responsibility was occupying his immediate attention. Always the money that had not arrived, always the arrears of pay causing disaffection, and even if they had been sent substantial tallies on regional treasuries or port taxation officers, still the endless complaint that the money simply was not there to meet the bills. What was the use of tallies that might, perhaps, be valid in theory, and even capable of being turned into cash in six months’ time, or a year, but were so much paper now, and no use to disgruntled archers and men-at-arms whose need was for coin that could be spent at once? As if he did not know all this for himself, and was not endlessly wrestling, valiantly and incredulously, with the problem of his own chronic poverty! He had had three treasurers of England already, good men every one, and two treasurers of his own household, and none of them had made ends meet yet. It was an unfathomable mystery how a once-wealthy magnate could become so poor merely by the act of assuming the crown.

  But penury, though exasperating enough, was not the whole of his distress. If only it had been! He looked back upon the month of May, and stood aghast at what he recalled, so far were these extremes from the whole habit of his mind. When had he taken any delight in killing? In defence of the faith, in defence of his crown, he had no choice but to stand rigidly upon the law, but every cutting off of the least citizen was a maiming of his own nation and his own body, and he found no remedy against the grief and horror into which his own procedures cast him. Where did they come from, those sudden rumours that ran about the country like little trails of fire spread underground in a dry summer? As fast as the council ordered the arrest of one carrier, the story ran to the opposite end of the land and broke out afresh. Ever since the proxy marriage it had been so. The king was about to sail for Brittany to marry the duchess, and in his absence from the realm Richard would come again with a great host, Richard who was not dead, but alive and in safe hiding in Scotland, and had never truly relinquished his own. In the middle of May they had imprisoned Sir Roger Clarendon, who was, so the common people said, natural son to the great Edward, the Black Prince, and half-brother to Richard the king. But the story could not be shut up with him, and before another week had passed they had been forced to commit to the Tower six more persons, four friars minor, Stephen Lene, parson, and the prior of the friars preachers of Winchelsea. The prior of the Austin canons of Launde, in Leicestershire, followed these into captivity, and shortly all of them had been put to death for treason. But no matter how many friars died, the story would not die. And only two years ago the common people had risen in anger, and themselves done to death the rebel earls and knights who had dared to take arms for Richard! They should have waited two years more, Henry thought bitterly, until the people had come to hate me even more than they hated Richard. How was such malignant hatred brought to birth, when he had meant nothing but good, and tried with all his soul to work no evil against them? Is to be a king the same thing as to be the object of universal hate?

  The council had done its best, formulating a writ to all sheriffs to issue proclamations forbidding the spreading of lying rumours that Richard was alive, and committing to prison all culprits on whom they could lay hands. But the secret wandering singers from Wales and the itinerant preaching friars still went their ways, and the prodigy still washed like a wave before them, whispering treason. There is no way of stopping the seeping of water, by every valley and hollow it still finds its way.

  Strange, he thought, aggrieved, that the friars should be so implacably his enemies, and stranger that by becoming his enemies they should regain a little of the credit they had lost among common men. As though he had not tried always to be God’s knight, and do the church clean service. He had been a crusader in the north, he had made devout pilgrimage to Jerusalem, a soothsayer had promised him he should die there when his hour came upon him. What clearer mark of grace could a man have? But still they slandered him and conspired against him, not only the Welsh Minorites of Llanfaes, whose house he had burned last year, but the Franciscans everywhere, in Norfolk, in Leicester, in Kent. First he had forborne them, and then he had punished, but still there was no amend.

  But this was self-pity, to which he had never been addicted, and he must shake it off at all costs. Everything would be magically changed when Joan came to England. She had her difficulties, too, or she would have been with him by this; but she was as much the prisoner of circumstances as he, and could not well take ship until she had established a firm and safe regime for her young son. But she would come, and surely bring sunlight and a blessing with her, to his great hope and help. He clung to the thought as to a talisman, or a reliquary of supernatural power.

  He had seen her only once, and that briefly, no more than a few days, when she had come to Richard’s court on a state visit with her ancient husband; but he had never forgotten her, and after the duke’s death, which by some dispensation of providence had taken place shortly after Henry’s coronation, he had taken advantage of every courier to France to send her devout greetings. And she had replied warmly and kindly, and at last sent him her picture. Though he needed no picture to see her very clearly, a tall, fair, calm lady with a high forehead and blonde hair, her features regular, smooth and serene, not beautiful, but possessed of such a quality of gentleness and repose. Everything his heart needed, even dreamless sleep, she would be able to give him.

  The rain had stopped; even the wind seemed to have eased, and the banner-pole no longer creaked so eerily above the roof of his chamber, as though the calming thought of her had its benign influence even on the elements. The king sighed and stirred in his chair, and reached out a hand to ring the small silver bell on his table for his chamberlain.

  Strange, even when he looked at his eldest son, whom he knew to resemble her, he could not remember Mary’s face.

  * * *

  Owen Glendower, lord of Glyndyfrdwy and Cynllaith, and master of most of North Wales, came south that June into central Wa
les, his raiding parties materialising like shapes of flashing, thundery sunlight out of the rains and mists of the hills, and eating at the borders of the Mortimer lordships in Radnorshire. When least expected, they struck, plundered, and withdrew. Reach for them, and they were mist between your fingers. Every castle mustered its defences and stood by to repel the normal sharp and brief attack; for only when they were insolently sure of their supremacy did the Welsh assay a siege. Their strength was in their mobility, and in the contemptuous austerity with which they could discard their meagre establishments and take to the hills with their real possessions, their liberty, their horses and cattle, their tribal loyalty and their weapons. Much had changed in Wales in the two hundred years since Llewelyn ap Iorwerth the Great; but this was not changed.

  The earldom of March was in the king’s ward; for Roger Mortimer, earl of March, had died in action in Ireland, leaving a six-year-old son to inherit. But Roger’s younger brother Edmund, twenty-six years old, high-spirited and impetuous, was at large about his border lordships, and very much inclined to resent the incursions of his Welsh neighbours. He mustered from his family’s many garrisons a substantial army, and went out to patrol his borders and look for his enemy.

  He found him, or was found by him, on the 22nd of June, in the valley of the river Lugg, near Pilleth, where the steep slopes of Bryn Glas hurtled down to the track on one hand, and the flats and meadows of the river hemmed it on the other. In the wet, wild June the grass was tall and lush, and the heather on the hills stood high and bristling like wire. Beyond the river, which was wide and hasty in spate, Llan-fawr soared into cloud. And out of the bracken and the thin, fine rain the Welsh boiled like foam out of a hound’s jaws, to confront the English in the narrows under the hill.

  Edmund Mortimer kept his head, deployed his archers in what cover there was, massed his knights and men-at-arms on firm ground clear of the marsh meadows, and stood to receive the attack, braced to hold back his horsed companies until the bowmen had had the chance to loose from cover three or four volleys, and reduce the odds. He withheld the signal until the range was close enough to be deadly, and the stocky Welsh ponies were stretching their frenzied necks and rigid nostrils for the impact, and then flung up his arm, and waited for the tremendous thrumming in the air, that maddening, intoxicating sound like a thousand wild geese all taking flight at once.

  It did not come. The volley of arrows was thin and broken, its unevenness jangling in his nerves even before his senses recorded it. He turned, incredulous, to stare, and saw half his array of bowmen, the Welsh-born half, standing mute and grim with bows on shoulders, some slowly raising them, some fitting the shafts; and he knew, by their faces and their movements, where those shafts were bound. He uttered a great cry of anger and shame, without words, and then the words came following, so hotly that they burned in his throat:

  “Traitors—traitors! You’ve eaten my salt and taken my pay…!”

  But they were Welsh! He should have foreseen it. Mercenary soldiers are mercenary only skin-deep, they still have blood, and the blood can out-argue the indentures and the oaths of fealty sworn for pay. In his heart, even as the first shaft sliced into the flesh of his left arm, he did not really blame them. But now there was only one thing left for him to do, and that he did, before the shock of Glendower’s assault sheared deep into his ranks, hardly slowed by the few casualties caused by the English archers. He wheeled his horse, and roared his own knights round upon their bowmen; and the loyal among the marksmen set up an answering howl, and fell out as best they could, leaping sidelong into the bushes and up the heathery slope, to stand clear of the slaughter and find a vantage-point again from which they could play their part. Edmund rode with slashing spurs and flailing sword into the ranks of the mutinous archers, his knights hard after him. Before that killing was over, the vanguard of the Welsh charge struck them in side and rear, and swept the whole mêlée two hundred yards down-river in a tangle of steel and blood and shrieking horses, inextricably mingled.

  A few of the rearmost fled down the river valley towards Whitton, and made good their escape, but most stood their ground as soon as the hurtling, heaving mass lost impetus and came to a seething stay. The loyal archers climbed into the wet furze-tangles of the hillside, and did what they could to pick off the outliers among the attackers, and those in the rear, where they were less inextricably tangled with the English. But Owen’s bowmen were swarming along the higher shoulders of Bryn Glas and shooting down upon them, and upon the struggling men-at-arms; and they had the advantage of better positions and better sighting, and skill and marksmanship at least equal. Most of the loyal archers died where they fought, picked off at leisure from above. A few, when the field was plainly already lost, crept away into cover as best they could, and lay hidden in the valley of the brook beyond Graig Hill until nightfall, to make their way home in the dark.

  In the meadows by the Lugg, driven by its own weight ever closer to the edge of the water, and trapped by its own trampling ever deeper into the quaking marshy turf, the mass of struggling, hampered men and horses wallowed like a bogged ox. In the heart of the press one or two died of suffocation, and many were ridden down and crushed to death under the horses’ feet. There were horsemen snared in the vortex who died unable to free an arm to defend themselves. One or two, their horses killed under them, were held for a time unable to fall, and others slithered into the river, its shore by now churned into slime, and drowned there in their harness.

  This lasted but a little while, for those on the fringes, both forward and aft, drew off as soon as they had room and control, and sought firmer ground and more elbow-room. The swords which had been clubbed or shortened into daggers for want of space to use them, now came into more orthodox play; and the Welsh archers above on the hills were able to select their targets again without killing their own comrades, and worked with supercilious skill as long as there was light to slay by, and an Englishman still alive.

  Edmund Mortimer, with blood running down inside the plates of his armour, heaved his mount out of the mire and up to firm ground, and wheeled to take his first brief survey of the field, and locate the main body of the Welsh cavalry, for only in hand-to-hand combat with them was there any respite from the steady and murderous attentions of the bowmen above. They would not dare risk a shot at anyone within a sword’s reach of their prince and his guard. He found the raking black horse that stood a head above the tough mountain ponies—Owen was a long-legged man, and liked a tall mount—and the knot of unmistakable knighthood around it. He saw the flaunting, rosy feather in the prince’s helmet, and the golden dragon outlined on the white surcoat. Edmund rose in his stirrups, and bellowed against the uproar all round him:

  “Mortimer! Á moi! Mortimer!” And those who could dragged themselves clear to re-form and charge with him.

  They presented a target thus for only a matter of seconds, though three of them fell in that time; then they were hand-to-hand and at blows with the prince’s bodyguard and this was battle as it had formerly been understood between knights, and the hovering archers were crippled and out of the fight. And yet this field was like every other since the archers had become the terrible force they were; their part was done first, but nonetheless at the end it was seen to be the determining part. There were so few left active to sustain the burden afterwards.

  The lord of Glyndyfrdwy had been as well-tutored in arms as in law, and as apt a pupil; he had, moreover, all the experience that Edmund lacked. It was all one to him whether he directed a battle or a raid from his headquarters and left the action to others, or himself went to work with lance or sword in the centre of the din; they were merely complementary skills in the same comprehensive expertise. He unhorsed Edmund, knowing very well whom he held at his lance’s point, with economy and address, and without damaging the horse, for of fine horses there can never be too many. When the boy rose at him on foot, none too steadily but with grim gallantry, and dripping blood from the finger-ends of hi
s mail gauntlet, Owen vaulted promptly out of the saddle to match him, and waved off his companions, who would have borne the young man down by sheer weight. No one wanted to kill him, no one wanted to spoil him; he was too precious for that, and already too securely theirs, for hardly a whole man was left to back him. Owen drew on him, and let him attack as he would, approving the pointless but touching valour with which he came on. He had lost much blood, his helm was notably dinted, and the head inside it already dazed and misty as the dusk coming down on the hills. He wavered and lurched as he came. Owen measured his distance, and as he swung, struck the sword with well-judged force out of his failing hand, and clubbed him senseless with the flat of his blade. The boy dropped at his feet, in a single, total fall without a movement after, like a stone.

  “This one,” said Owen generously, looking down at him, “may not be over-valued at the price. I’d as lief have him on my side as against me.”

  He looked round him, upon the desolation of the field between Bryn Glas and the river, littered and faintly heaving still with bodies and cast arms, and groaning with the last convulsions of struggle and pain. The dusk was coming down fast. Horses threshed feebly, pounding the earth in a frenzy to get to their feet, and falling back again. The men lay more quietly; some, not a doubt of it, still alive, some even lying mort until it should be safe to rise and go. Let them go who could. The Welsh wanted none but valuable prisoners, and had no interest in killing the others, since they would surely leave this place more nimbly and rapidly than the English survivors, and be as inaccessible as the stars by the time another force looked for them.

  “My lord, there are three knights live and yielded. Shall we bring them, too?”

  “Can they ride?” For the company would move fast this night, lie but briefly, and double again; and even the prisoners must stand the pace.

  “Yes. And the horses are blown but sound.”