Westminster Palace, Winter 1441
Westminster Palace, Winter
ARCHBISHOP CHICHELE RETURNS to speak the sentence now that the difficult work has been done by others.
He sits in the centre of the table with Cardinal Beaufort on one side and Cardinal Kemp on the other.
I cannot complain of insufficient judges: every bishop in England is present and most of the lords as well.
I look for my husband Duke Humphrey, but he is still absent, and there is no place left for him.
Pointless to wish he were not such a coward.
If he had made his presence felt earlier, I might have got away with a guilty sentence for witchcraft – and that only love-magic – and nobody would have blamed me for Bolingbroke’s necromancy at all.
They might have burned Margery since it was her second offence, but Bolingbroke would have been dismissed, Southwell and Home with him.
Instead, thanks to my craven husband, everyone but me will die.
The bishops solemnly find me guilty of two charges – witchcraft and necromancy – and they are about to set the penance when the archbishop holds up his trembling old hand.
I am instantly alert, hoping for a pardon.
He must have come to bring it. Perhaps I have wronged Humphrey, and he has spoken to the archbishop and to the king and perhaps written to the pope, and I am going to get a pardon the equal of Owen Tudor’s – a lifetime pardon for everything I have ever done.
That would be justice; that would be typical of the young king.
‘And in the matter of the marriage,’ the old man says, his head nodding underneath the weight of the enormous mitre, his voice quavering with old age.
My head jerks up to glare at him: what marriage? What is he talking about?
But he is not looking at me; he is speaking to the ceiling, as if addressing God: ‘As for the matter of the marriage between the Duke of Gloucester and Dame Eleanor Cobham, and the matrimony made between the two, this court does uphold the charge that Dame Eleanor Cobham did coerce the duke into marrying her by means of sorcery and attempted to conceive a child against the will of God by witchcraft and necromancy.’
‘What?’ I mouth at Adam Moleyns, who is suddenly blind and deaf to me, his gaze fixed unblinkingly on the old fool of an archbishop, who continues: ‘And that therefore this court finds the marriage null and void from the beginning, and we hereby divorce and depart the Duke of Gloucester and Dame Eleanor Cobham one from another forever.’
I am as stunned as a pole-axed heifer going to slaughter.
I stare at Henry Chichele, who has dined a hundred times at my table, who has blessed me as a daughter of the Church, who now – from nowhere!
– declares that I am not a wife, nor – what is far more important – a duchess, nor beloved royal aunt to the king.
I am Eleanor Cobham again – disgraced, I am no more than Eleanor Cobham, and when I have done my penance, I will have nowhere to go, neither Baynard’s Castle nor my palace at Greenwich.
I will only get back to Sterborough Castle if my father will admit me, or Sterborough Abbey if not, and in either place, a lifetime of regret and disgrace.
‘There is no such charge,’ I say loudly. ‘No such charge of coercion. None was made, no evidence was brought, and no decision given.’
Adam Moleyns looks at me, and I have never in all my life had a man look at me as he does: not the look of a dazzled young man or a doting old one. He looks at me as if he is sorry for me, as if he would stop me from making a disaster even worse.
‘You have to be penitent now,’ he says quietly, ‘to save your immortal soul. The trial is over; the archbishop has spoken.You are to do your penance.You are to walk on three market days to London churches in three parishes, in your shift, barefoot, and carrying a lighted taper.’
‘In my shift?’ I demand, quite horrified.
In a shift – when I have a wardrobe of robes, a fortune of brocades and silks and velvets and fine woollen cloaks trimmed with fur?
‘Barefoot?’ When I have a chest full of embroidered leather shoes dyed every colour to match my gowns, riding boots of softest leather, suede boots, calfskin boots, little sealskin boots for snow, and cured whale-skin boots for rain. ‘Barefoot?’
Moleyns nods, his face a mask. ‘Three days,’ is all he says quietly to me. He raises his head and speaks clearly to the guard. ‘Take the penitent from court.’
They form up around me. I can find no words.
Someone should speak for me, but no one is going to.
My friends who worked with me to make my great state a greater one are going to die for this.
Margery is already ashes in the air and grease in the gutter, Southwell bent like a dead twig in the rictus of poison, Bolingbroke will be hanged and disembowelled, his head and arms and legs sent to all quarters of the kingdom, Home drooling mad in the confessional.
My husband has slipped his leash; my father will be praying for me in his chapel far away in Surrey.
All these men seated before me as I tremblingly stand, have eaten off silver plates at my table and drunk from my cellar and been fawningly glad of a smile. None of them meet my eyes. This is my ruin.
THE WALKS ARE nothing to me. They are like the reverse of the parades I loved, when I was high on a fine horse with a guard around me, wearing a jewel-encrusted gown under a fur robe on the finest destrier that my master of horse could buy.
Before me marched my household guard in their fine livery, keeping back the thousands of people who cheered for me; behind me, my steward of the household would throw coins so that there was a roar of applause and gratitude everywhere I went.
These penances are the shame version of the parades of my glory.
I walk on bare feet, alone, wearing nothing but a linen shift – not even one of my own shifts of finest linen embroidered with white-work flowers and hemmed exactly to my heels.
Now, I have to wear commoners’ clothes, bought from an ordinary seamstress, baggy at waist and breast, rough where the linen rubs against my skin on the shoulder straps.
The hem is uneven and too short. My feet, white and tender, shrink from the cold of the dirty cobbles.
There is ice in the gutters and slush in the streets.
I carry a taper, and in its flickering yellow halo, I can see my breath like a cloud in the cold air.
My rounded white arms are poxed with goosebumps from the cold; my fingers are white, my fingertips blue.
I feel strangely light without a coronet on my head, jewels in my ears or bracelets on my arms. My fingers are thin and weak without my precious rings.
My hair lies slack down my back in a heavy plait; I cannot toss it forwards to veil me from the stares of the common people.
I am allowed nothing to enhance my appearance.
I cannot shine in this moment; there is no trick to make this walk anything other than the worst humiliation in the world for a woman who rose on her beauty.
For the first time in my life, I am not beautiful.
I have no looking-glass to see my shivering reflection; but I can see in the jeering faces, I can hear in the hateful shouts, that there is no admiration: only disgust, and – what is worse – pity.
The guards before me are the archbishop’s men; a drummer goes before them, and his regular rattle on his drum tells the streets that we are coming as loudly as the tolling bells at my destinations.
Every day for three days, I am loaded like cargo from Westminster Palace stairs and rowed to St Paul’s pier, to Swan pier to Queenhithe Stairs to walk to the parish churches, where I go inside and pray at the altar for an hour.
Anyone can come into the church to see me, prone on the chancel steps, icy skin to icy stone, arms outspread as if crucified.
Anyone can stop in the streets to watch me hobble past on my bruised feet, to catcall or throw dirt or just laugh at the show as I limp by, the lit taper in my hand and always some damned mongrel from the streets trotting behind me like my familiar spirit.
‘Drive that dog away,’ I say sharply to the guard behind me, the first day.
His stupid face turns back and then looks again at me. ‘There’s no dog I can see.’