A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury

  Once thus entangled, all perspective was lost, for it was close cut and thrust, and nothing to see, and no time to see anything, but the enemy at grips. After the first impact the king’s greater numbers told; and even the initial success of the assault created its own perils, for the knights of Henry’s escort closed in on either side the wedge of their opponents, and set to work with grim determination to cut it into small, isolated groups which could be demolished separately. The knights of Cheshire broadened their line and drove in on either flank to enlarge the gap, and avert the danger that their leaders might be cut off. For some time the two armies were locked in one confused mass, and recognition of coat-armour became a game of life and death. The rider flung suddenly against a man in the press might be friend or enemy; only a quick eye and a good memory could determine and strike in time.

  Hotspur’s lance had shivered in that first thrust. Here in this tangle it was in any case useless to him; he hurled it from him, forward over the heads of those nearest, to fall among the royal guard and entangle the feet of the horses, and took to the sword instead. He rose in his stirrups to lengthen his already formidable reach, with great sweeps to right and left enlarging the alley he had cut in his enemies; and having stamped out room to look round him for an instant, fixed his eyes upon the standard, now being hastily withdrawn to a slight rise where the king’s knights could rally to it in force, and having found it, never let it out of his sight again. Where it went, he pursued it implacably, and his division drove in doggedly after him. “Espérance Percy!” bellowed at his back, treading on his heels all the way.

  On his right, though he had no time to observe it, Douglas’s charge had swept the prince’s knights out into the open field, leaving only a knot of stragglers fighting confusedly in the flattened pease. Douglas, finding himself with room to draw breath and muster afresh, gathered a small company of his closest companions and abandoned the prince, to set out after the quarry he most desired. Two columns converged ferociously upon the standard, and swept to its very foot.

  The gold and scarlet and blue heaved and dipped in the air, and suddenly folded upon itself, its stem slashed through, and disappeared among the struggling bodies of men and horses. A great cry of triumph and delight went up at its fall, and a wild shout of dismay from its defenders. Douglas had felled it, Hotspur grasped a corner of it as it dropped, but it was torn out of his hold, leaving some ravelled threads of gold in his steel fingers. Desperate bodies closed in between to save it, at the sacrifice of their own lives. Sir Walter Blount went down before Hotspur’s sword, and died among the hooves of the horses, so pressed together about the standard that they could not avoid trampling him. The standard-bearer himself fell dead beneath his broken banner, his head half-sheared from his body by Douglas. What hands snatched the silk away they never detected. It was passed back and back from them and vanished out of their sight, and with it, for a time, the focus of their quest.

  They had enough to do, at this moment, keeping themselves alive and their followers still welded into a tight, indestructible wedge, for they had penetrated far into the royal ranks, and their contact with their own main body was tenuous. Hotspur and Douglas found themselves fighting elbow to elbow in the press, and edging their way out by cautious degrees, each keeping the other’s flank and back as they extricated themselves. Only by fleeting, sidelong glances had they recognised and acknowledged each other, and yet there was delight in this harmony of feeling and temperament, the joyous trust they shared, and the absolute security that at every need the other would tread right and strike truly, as though they had been two bodies animated by a single soul, or twin brothers with a more than human understanding between them. When they drew out successfully at last from the circle of their enemies, and wheeled with slashing hooves to enlarge their ground, they ended face to face in laughter and love. Knee to knee they trotted aside, and breathed their horses for a few borrowed moments. There were no words, not yet. None would have been heard, nor was there leisure to raise a visor and let in clean air, or let out any word but the battle-cry that was a rallying-point at need.

  Hotspur took a moment to view the field, and look for the close knot that marked where Henry was. He counted the picked men he had close about him, and made the number thirty. He lifted his visor, and gulped the cool, sweet air greedily.

  “Archie, are you with me? There goes Lancaster untouched!”

  “At your side, Harry! Where you go, I’ll match you!

  He waved them after him round an arc of open ground, clear of the roar and tangle of the fight, choosing a vulnerable blister in the circle where he could best break in. The archers, swarming lower among the wreckage of crops wherever there was cover, followed his movements, and hung upon the bowstring lovingly, ready to open a way for him.

  The king’s arms glimmered in the air again, a standard improvised by lashing the broken remnant to a lance. They fixed their sights upon it, dressing their ranks into an arrow-head, and at the raising of Hotspur’s hand broke into measured motion, a trot, a canter, a gallop. Wandering wounded marked them and got out of their way in haste. Scattered members of the royal forces, washed aside by the shifting tides of battle, avoided as discreetly, seeing the blue lion fluttering over this advancing company. A few from the north, also cast up by the wash of war, girded themselves and joined the rear ranks. With clear ground still before them, Hotspur shook the reins and drove in the spur, and they leaped into the charge.

  “Espérance Percy!”

  “St. George! St. George!”

  Cry and counter-cry came in time to help open the way in for them, for the confused personal combats weaving about the fringes of the fight gave way hurriedly before Hotspur’s onslaught. For the second time their tight formation drove deep into the quick of Henry’s army, and hurtled towards the broken standard. The entire mass of horse-flesh and man-flesh shook with their impact, and was carried bodily forward; and before the single, straining eye of the Douglas blazed suddenly the lions and lilies of the king’s shield. He rose in his stirrups with a bellow of exultation, and struck a great, ranging blow with the mace which was his favourite weapon, caving in tardily-lifted shield, helmet and head together. The bulky body was swept sidewise out of the saddle, to hang a moment by one foot before the stirrup-leather tore free and dropped him like a flung sack into the trampled grass.

  Douglas leaned in the saddle, arched over his fallen foe, and uttered a yell of triumph that sheared even through the babel of steel and terror.

  “Here’s your king! Here lies Lancaster dead!”

  Hotspur looked down from the other side. The force of the blow had burst the joints of the helmet, and before his eyes the body, trodden by a frantic horse, rolled over, and the shattered remnants of visor and gorget fell away. Half the face remained unbroken, still with the colour of life in it; but it was not Henry’s face.

  “Not he! A counterfeit!—This is Sir John Calverley, I know him!”

  Douglas heard the shouted words, and turned from his prey like a disgusted hound that has coursed a stag and cornered only a rat, to look ahead for more kings. It was no new device, where the survival of a leader meant life or death to many of his followers, but it was not in Henry’s style, whatever might be said of him, to hide his own golden branch in a forest of gilding. Dunbar’s counsel? Dunbar had everything to lose if he lost Lancaster, life, living, freedom, family, everything he had. There might be more such pseudo-kings before they brought the one they hunted to bay.

  Grimly knee to knee, hewing their way by laborious inches deeper into the royal host, they pursued the standard and its master. They were part of one unwieldy mass that reeled now east, now west as the weight and the impetus of struggle carried it; and in one lurching movement the ranks before them broke apart, and opened an alley towards a second royal shield. This time Hotspur knew the very bearing, the seat in the saddle, the manner of sword-play; this one was no counterfeit. There was room for only one to drive into the gap that opene
d before them; and Douglas had also seen the quarry, and was before him into the narrow lane. The two horses were flung together and reared breast to breast with lashing hooves, but Douglas wheeled his mount aside on its hind legs, and struck hard as he drew clear. Down went the king’s horse on its crupper, and his rider was thrown clear and lay half-stunned on the ground.

  A great cry of anger and dismay burst about them, and a surge of devoted bodies hid the fallen king as though a curtain had been drawn over him. Now they would die where they stood rather than let an enemy come so near to him again. A trumpet blared alarm, and from half a mile around the stragglers rallied to make a wall of men about King Henry and withdraw him out of danger.

  * * *

  Dunbar had dragged, persuaded, and hustled him some way towards the rear while he was still dazed from his fall, and Hal had sent him a young knight with a fresh horse for his use. As soon as his head cleared he turned again towards the thickest press of men and horses, so tightly interlaced now that men might as easily die of suffocation in there as from wounds, and horses were going crazy with terror. Dunbar’s hand was urgent upon his bridle, trying still to lead him away, and hide him in a place of comparative safety.

  “My liege, think on your worth to us all, and take some count of your life! If you’re lost, we’ve lost more than a man! Take thought for your own son’s crown, and be ruled. We may give our lives, you may not!”

  It was true, and he knew it; if he went courting his death he lost everything he was fighting to protect, and lost it for his children’s children no less than for himself. He had not only to win his battle, but to survive it.

  Knights and squires made passage for him out of the press, and closed their ranks after his passing. Here the lines held firm, a channel of something approaching calm gave him room to raise his visor for a few moments, and gulp in air. His breastplate was dinted and stained, but not with his own blood. He looked at the prince, who rode for these few yards between his father and harm. The boy had also uncovered his face, which was streaked with sweat and grime.

  “You’re hurt! Your cheek bleeds!”

  The boy put up a hand in surprise, and felt at his right cheek, astonished to find a jagged slash and a constant trickle of blood there, “It’s nothing! A narrow…I knew the plate was pierced, but not that I was grazed.”

  It was more than a graze; the steel, driven inward by the shaft, had marked him with two irregular scratches beaded with blood, and let the point of the arrow drive in between.

  “Go back to the rear camp, and let them dress it. You’ve done enough!”

  The boy looked over his shoulder. The force of Hotspur’s attack suddenly swept the centre towards them afresh. He saw the familiar plume rise tall above the mêlée as Harry stood up in his stirrups to search for his enemy.

  “No!” said the prince flatly. “I turn not my back at this pass. I have taken the field, and I will not quit it.”

  * * *

  Over the tossing sea of heads and fumbling arms and flailing weapons, Hotspur marked the slight swirl of movement that was the only orderly thing in sight, the parting and closing in again of the lines as someone withdrew from him. He followed its course and found its reason.

  He dropped back into his saddle just in time to escape the arrow loosed at him by one of the prince’s archers, who had found himself a vantage-point in a clump of low trees on one of the headlands, and for the past hour had been waiting and hoping for a clear shot at the king’s arch-enemy. But always there were king’s men screening him, or so entwined with him that the marksman had held his hand, for fear of killing a friend rather than a foe. Others he had already picked off successfully, but a man who was always at the tip of a lance probing deep among the king’s defenders was a hopeless target. That reckless moment of standing clear above his neighbours had provided the first real chance. But Hotspur dropped back too soon, having found his own mark. The hand that gripped the reins shook them out and knuckled his charger’s streaming neck, his knees urged, and the horse answered.

  “Espérance Percy!”

  They roared it back to him, and came plunging after. He set his course straight for the place where the little whirlpool of motion conveyed his enemy steadily away out of his reach, and turned aside for nothing. Horseman after horseman barred his way and was cut down, ridden over or swept aside. Some reined out of his path and ran from him, for the terror his presence inspired had swollen into a superstition, and the manifest madness of his proceedings confirmed some in suspecting him to be a demon and not a man like other men, with the sensible fear of death in him.

  He was gaining, yard by yard; the same dread that opened a way for him now confused and paralysed those who stood inadvertently in Henry’s way. And thrusting hard behind came Douglas, and a dozen knights from Scotland and the north.

  “Espérance Percy! Espérance Percy!”

  And louder still, sudden and shrill as lightning, came a single brazen north-country voice behind the leaders, hallooing jubilantly: “Henry Percy, king!”

  It sprang from nowhere, unprompted, unprophesied, and it was taken up in a huge shout of acclamation: “Henry Percy, king! Henry Percy, king!”

  Hotspur heard but never understood it. It was a sweet thunder in his ears, like horns at a hunt, but nothing more. He saw nothing but the figure of Henry of Lancaster on his fresh horse, urged away by Dunbar, urged back to the fight by his own conscience and will, torn every way, and looking back over his shoulder towards this nemesis that bored through men and horses to reach him, shieldless now, with a stained and dinted sword in its hand.

  All the shouting had fallen behind him; he hacked and spurred his way forward through a private silence. For if this was his death-field, then he was resolved that it should be a double death, for there was no other just ending. He did not know, nor would he have cared, that he had outdistanced all his companions, that even Douglas was cut off from him, and he stormed through the royal ranks alone.

  Not ten yards between them now—barely seven! Henry was thrusting off Dunbar, and turning, sword in hand, to face his end.

  The mindless currents of movement that convulsed the battlefield cast up a violent wave at that moment, and sent a succession of men and coat-armour reeling across Hotspur’s path. When the wave receded, marvellously baring some yards of open turf, a single figure was flung into his way, face to face at sword-point in the middle of this accidental arena. A slender, light body—the big horse carried him as daintily as a lady; but a fine seat, and a practised grip on the hilt and the reins. There was a deep, jagged dint in the right side of his visor, and blood on his gorget beneath the tear. But he spurred eagerly forward, freeing his right arm for combat, and leaned with alacrity to the encounter, all the more proudly for knowing whom he faced.

  Hotspur in mid-career checked abruptly, and leaning hard back, wheeled aside from the meeting, dropping his sword-arm so suddenly and resolutely that it was like a salute in passing. He had swung to the left, and for that one moment there was no obstacle between him and the archer among the thorn trees, who had followed his progress with so much patience and persistence.

  The passage of the arrow was like the flight of a bird, a strong vibration of wings and a vehement alighting. It pierced dinted breastplate and fine mail hauberk under, and drove clean into the heart he had deliberately exposed to assault. The sword slipped almost silently out of his relaxing hand, while he still sat erect and immovable, turned away from the combat he would not accept upon any terms. Then slowly, as it seemed, he leaned backwards towards the crupper of his horse, stiffly and solidly as a tree falls, and heeling to the right, perhaps drawn by the mere remaining impulse of the weight of his fallen sword, crashed from his saddle at the prince’s feet.

  The shifting tide of battle, ungovernable as the sea, had hung in balance only for an instant. It swayed again strongly, casting men lurching one against another. It caught up the king’s raw, exultant shout of: “Henry Percy, slain! Henry Percy, sl
ain!” and flung it echoing across the twilit, long-shadowed field, to be taken up and echoed as far as Haughmond hill, for a warning to all rebels:

  “Henry Percy, slain! Henry Percy, slain!”

  And it caught up in its ebb Henry, prince of Wales, nearly sixteen years old, sword in hand and poised and ready to take or give death without quarter or grudge, and swept him helplessly away into the meaningless aftermath of slaughter, though he struggled and fought to get back to the fallen hero, weeping like a heartbroken child within the privacy of his helmet, blinded and choked with blood and tears.

  17

  When he was dead, without whom there could be no victory, they fought on dourly into the fall of the night, and into the darkness, driven and scattered as they were across three square miles of the plain, and hunted like hares; fought to kill, as long as there was anything within their reach to kill, but not to save, for now there was nothing to be saved. Hotspur had died in the belief that they, like himself, were fighting for a right and for a rightful king, temporarily and shamefully dispossessed, and for the rights and dignities of the king’s magnates under him and in despite of him. But those who followed him knew that they were fighting for Hotspur, and for no other man, nor king, nor child, nor right that existed in this realm, and if he was lost to them, all was lost.