Baynard’s Castle, London, Winter 1425
Baynard’s Castle, London, Winter
MORE THAN A thousand men sail for Hainault in a great navy of ships.
Duke Humphrey and I will follow with the second army and the heavy artillery.
The first ships are at sea, on their way into the Holland port of Rotterdam, when terribly, unexpectedly, Philip of Burgundy’s fleet appears from nowhere and captures three English ships, killing our soldiers and crew at sea.
Philip himself, in an incredible gesture of personal malice, is on board his own flagship.
No great duke has ever taken naval command, but Philip commands his own fleet and chases the rest of the English ships into port and sets a blockade.
Our men are trapped in port by his fleet and held by an inshore wind, as if the weather itself is on his side.
Philip drives the ships against the harbour wall, then sails in to attack them at their moorings.
Helpless against Philip’s fleet, our soldiers scramble to the quayside and set up the cannon on shore.
Immediately, the Burgundian ships unload as well, and while they are vulnerable, protected only by bowmen, the English soldiers push forward and a deadly volley from the English longbows – the weapon that won Agincourt – strikes the Burgundians down on the quayside and drives their gunners back to their ships.
The Englishmen cheer, certain of victory, but not even English archery can cover all the Burgundian ships, and the enemy cavalry get their horses unloaded and mount up.
The armoured knights ride a brutal charge against the English soldiers, who are forced backwards and backwards until the very land betrays them, crumbling beneath their feet on the side of a dyke, and they fall down or jump down for safety and cannot get up the other side, flailing in the marshy water.
In London, far from this disaster, Duke Humphrey is sick with anguish that the army sent to relieve his wife has been defeated before they even unloaded, and his enemy, Philip himself – the jouster who did not fight, the lawyer who did not argue – was on board his own flagship commanding the high seas while Humphrey was safe at home.
Now, the duke cannot even command his own force to support his wife, as his friends on the privy council say he may not leave England until Duke John has arrived from France.
Humphrey is beside himself with frustration and rage when someone – a Beaufort man of course – whispers to him that it was John, Humphrey’s own brother, who warned Philip of Burgundy that the English armada had set sail.
Duke Humphrey has been betrayed by his uncle in London and by his brother on the high seas. Everyone is against him.
He collapses against the malice that his own family show to him and his wife.
His doctor, Gilbert Kymer, says his loyal heart cannot bear the strain and warns that he will die unless he calms his pulsing anger.
Desperate for a second opinion for such a sensitive patient, Dr Kymer calls in the great philosopher Dr Roger Bolingbroke to read the duke’s horoscope and consult together.
The quiet, dark-eyed man, famous throughout Christendom as the greatest scholar and astronomer, sits quietly beside Duke Humphrey’s bed and listens to his ravings.
He takes his five pulses and draws, freehand, an astrological chart of Duke Humphrey’s body, marking the planets that rule each frantically beating organ.
‘You draw all this from memory?’ I ask him, looking at the exquisite drawings.
‘I have read so much so often.’ Dr Bolingbroke sounds almost apologetic for his skills.
‘I didn’t want to call for books and bright candles.
I didn’t want to make a fuss; I want him to be at peace.
And I have learned – too deeply to forget – the organs of the body and the planets that rule them.
They are very clear with Duke Humphrey. He is in grave danger. ’
‘Can nothing be done? His brother died of a fever when he had survived dozens of battles.’
‘I know the history,’ he reassures me. ‘It is written on his body and in his stars. The Plantagenets have a strong, fiery constitution. I have sent to the witch at Eye for the ingredients I need.’
‘Margery Jourdemayne?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I forgot she is well known at court too. At her home of Eye – Ebury – she’s well known for the strength of her herbs and the purity of her distillations. If anyone can make me an oil to unknot his throat and a drench to cool his bile, she can.’
BAYNARD’S CASTLE HAS become a fortress under siege; the gates which used to be generously open are barred.
Duke Humphrey, from his sickbed, gives the orders to double and redouble the guards on the street entrances and to keep watch over the river.
His nightmare is that his enemies will unite: Beaufort’s men will attack from the streets and Philip of Burgundy will sail his victorious fleet up the River Thames.
Humphrey cannot sleep; he cannot eat; he certainly cannot command a counter-attack.
There is no safety for Duke Humphrey while his uncle seeks revenge, the strongest army in Europe is mustering against his wife, and his own brother supports them.
‘How could he?’ he asks me, his eyes red, his face flushed with fever.
I shake my head.
‘We were four brothers – four bound by brotherly love. And now the best two are dead and my last brother turns against me.’
‘I am so sorry.’
He waves me away. ‘And I cannot go to her!’ His voice is a thread. ‘I don’t even know if she is alive!’
IT IS A long winter of heartbreak: for Duke Humphrey, forcing himself to get up and walk to the window every dawn, dreading the arrival of an armada flying the Burgundian flag; for the Londoners, longing for peace between their warring lords; and especially for me, as far from Owen as if I had gone to war, since the queen keeps him at Windsor, and no one is allowed to leave the castle.
‘Spring will come, you know,’ Roger Bolingbroke says gently as he meets me in the cold wet garden that runs down to the cold grey water, flood-high and spilling over the quay and lapping at the foot of the garden. ‘Spring will come, and you are a young woman for the season.’
I make a face. ‘I know it will,’ I say, ‘but these are cold dawns and short days, and I feel more like a prisoner than a young woman in springtime.’
He looks at me with sudden attention, as if I have said something that reminds him of something else. ‘You feel like a prisoner?’
‘All my life, I have wanted to be somewhere else . . .’ I break off. ‘I am proud to be in service to Countess Jacqueline, of course.’
He nods, as if he hears the uncertainty in my voice but is too kind to press me. ‘You know that the days are only short because the earth is leaning away from the sun, like a dancer, and just like a dance, will lean back again?’
‘What?’
He picks up a fallen apple, brown from winter frost, forgotten in the long grass. ‘Say this is the sun,’ he says. He snaps a rose hip from a bush. ‘Say this is earth.’
I nod. I am watching over his shoulder for the ships on the river; I have caught Duke Humphrey’s fear of the Burgundian fleet.
He moves the apple in a circle around the rose hip. ‘When the sun circles the north of our world, we have heat and summer and long days,’ he says, raising the apple above the fat hip. ‘When the sun sinks downwards, we have darkness and cold days and long nights.’
I know that he is a brilliant man, but this makes no sense to me at all. ‘It’s all moving?’ I ask him. ‘I thought it was all fixed?’
‘Everything is moving, tipping upwards and downwards, and we, on earth, see the changes but don’t know why.’
‘How do you know it’s not just winter and summer,’ I ask, ‘that it is not just hot and cold because that is how it is?’
He smiles. ‘I don’t know,’ he says, with emphasis, as if knowledge cannot be owned.
‘But Ptolemy, a Greek philosopher, thought that the whole heavens tilted one way for winter and one way for summer. I find it helps me: to think that here am I – a flea on a rose hip – complaining of cold when the celestial world is shifting around me.’
‘So what is this?’ I circle my hand in the air above rose hip and apple. ‘What is all this all around the sun and the earth?’
‘What do you think?’ he asks, as if he is genuinely interested in my ignorance.
‘Is it sky?’
He laughs. ‘Yes! In a way. Yes, it is.’
I look at him blankly. ‘I know nothing about any of this,’ I tell him.
He smiles, as gentle as a priest. ‘We all know nothing about any of this,’ he says. ‘We are all fleas on a rose hip.’
WE HAVE TO wait for news of Jacqueline, and then a trading ship comes and says that she is continuing to fight – even without our reinforcements – waging a running war of raids and disappearances, attacks and well-planned retreats.
She does not fight a pitched battle with an unwieldy army as men commanders do; she has become Philip of Burgundy’s nightmare: a force that does not obey the rules of war but appears and disappears, winning a town, taking a bridge, capturing his artillery, and disappearing into the woods.
She is fighting like a Scotsman against the English: striking hard and then disappearing.
This is not knightly warfare. I think that Jacqueline has lost her faith in chivalry and is fighting like an angry woman, with any weapon that comes to hand.
All I can do to help her is collect her fees and rents in England and guard her treasure room and pray for her in the chapel with Dr Bolingbroke, Gilbert Kymer, and the duke’s chaplain Canon Thomas Southwell, I know that wherever Jacqueline is, she will never stop till she has won, and she will go on in her running battle until her husband can bring her the force that she needs to reclaim her lands, all of them: Hainault, Zeeland, and Holland.
On that day she will have won, just as she said she would: with no commander but herself and no power but her own iron will.
THE CITY OF London is so angry with Bishop Beaufort for his plotting against Duke Humphrey that parliament refuses to meet in the rebellious capital.
Instead, the lords and the commons will meet at Leicester, and they impose special rules for attendance.
The lords are only allowed a limited number of guards, and no one is allowed weapons at all.
Outwardly obedient, the bishop’s men leave their swords and daggers at home but arm themselves with sharpened staves, flails, and clubs, which they carry over their shoulders or strapped to their belts, ready for a fight.
Duke Humphrey rises from his sickbed to greet his brother John who soothes his fears and promises brotherly loyalty.
They will go together to Leicester to take part in the parliament, and Duke Humphrey sends me, with a guard of his men, each of them armed with a cudgel, to visit the queen and discover what I can about her sympathies – whether she will side with the bishop or him.