The Red Queen

SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 1485

Henry waits as long as he dares, waits for Jasper to come back to him. While he waits, he orders the pikemen to practice their drill. It is a new procedure, introduced by the Swiss against the formidable Burgundian cavalry only nine years earlier, and taught by the Swiss officers to the unruly French conscripts; but by steady practice, they have perfected it.

Henry and a handful of his horsemen play the part of the charging enemy cavalry. “Take care,” Henry says to the Earl of Oxford, on his big horse, on his right. “Override them and they will spit you.”

De Vere laughs. “Then they have learned their task well.”

The half-dozen mounted men wheel and wait, and then, at the command “Charge,” they start forwards, first at the trot but then at the canter and then the full terrifying cavalry gallop.

What happens next has never been seen in England before. Previously a man on the ground, facing a cavalry charge, always slammed down the shaft of his pike into the ground and pointed it upwards, hoping to spear a horse in the belly, or he swung wildly at the rider, or he made a desperate upwards stab and a downwards dive, arms wrapped around his head, in one terrified movement. Usually, the greatest number of men simply dropped their weapons and fled. A well-marshaled cavalry charge always broke a line of soldiers. Few men could face such a terror; they could not bear to stand against it.

This time, the pikemen spread out, as usual, see the charge start to gather speed towards them, and obeying a loud yell from their officers, run back and form into a square-ten men by ten men on the outside, ten men by ten men inside them, another forty crammed inside them, barely room to move, let alone fight. The front rank drop to their knees, grounding the shaft of their pikes before them, pointing upwards and outwards. The middle rank hold them firm, leaning over their shoulders, their pikes pointing outwards, and the third rank stand, wedged together, with their pikes braced at shoulder height. The square is like a four-sided weapon, a block studded with spears, the men crammed against one another, holding on to each other, impenetrable.

They race into formation and are in place before the cavalry can get to them, and Henry wrenches the charge aside from the bristling deadly wall in a hail of mud and lumps of turf from the horses’ hooves, pulls up his horse, and then trots back.

“Well done,” he says to the Swiss officers. “Well done. And they will hold if the horses come straight at them? They will hold when it is for real?”

The Swiss commander grimly smiles. “That’s the beauty of it,” he says quietly, so the men cannot hear. “They cannot get away. The one rank holds the other, and even if they all die, their weapons are still held in place. We have made them into a weapon itself; they are no longer pikemen who can choose whether to fight or run.”

“So shall we march now?” Oxford asks, patting his horse’s neck. “Richard is on the move; we want to be out on Watling Street before him.”

Henry notes the sick feeling in his belly at the thought of giving the order without Jasper at his side. “Yes!” he says strongly. “Give the order to fall in-we march out.”

They bring the news to Richard that Henry Tudor’s little army is marching down Watling Street, perhaps looking for a battleground, perhaps hoping to make good speed down the road and get to London. The two armies of Sir William Stanley and Lord Thomas Stanley are trailing the Tudor-ready to harry him? ready to join him? Richard cannot know.

He gives the order for his troops to form up to march out of Leicester. Women swing open the upper windows of houses so they can see the royal army going by as if it were a midsummer-day parade. First go the cavalry, each knight with his page going before him, carrying his standard fluttering gaily, like a joust, and his men following behind him. The clatter of the horses’ hooves on the cobbles is deafening. The girls call out and throw down flowers. Next come the men-at-arms, marching in step with their weapons shouldered. The archers follow them with their longbows over their shoulders and their quivers of arrows strapped across their chests. The girls blow kisses-archers have a reputation of being generous lovers. Then there is a bellow of shouts and cheering, for there is the king himself, in full beautifully engraved armor, burnished white as silver, on a white horse, with the battle crown of gold fixed to his helmet. His standard of the white boar is carried proudly both before and behind him, with the red cross of St. George alongside, for this is an anointed King of England marching out to war to defend his own country. The drummers keep a steady beat, the trumpeters blast out a tune-it is like Christmas, it is better than Christmas. Leicester has never seen anything like it before.

With the king rides his trusted friend the Duke of Norfolk, and the doubtful Earl of Northumberland, one on the right hand, one on the left, as if they could both be relied on for defense. The people of Leicester, not knowing the king’s doubts, cheer for both noblemen and for the army that follows: men from all over England, obedient to their lords, following the king as he marches out to defend his realm. Behind them comes a great unruly train of wagons with weapons, armor, tents, cooking stoves, spare horses, like a town on the move; and behind them, straggling as if to demonstrate either weariness or unwillingness, the Earl of Northumberland’s footsore army.

They march all day, stopping for a meal at noon, spies and scurriers going ahead of them to learn the whereabouts of Tudor and the two Stanley armies, then in the evening Richard commands his army to halt, just outside the village of Atherstone. Richard is an experienced and confident commander. The odds on this battle could go either way. It depends on whether the two Stanley armies are for him, or against him; it depends whether Northumberland is going to advance when he is called for. But every battle Richard has ever experienced has always been on a knife-edge of uncertain loyalties. He is a commander forged in the fire of civil warfare; in no battle has he ever known for sure who is a friend and who an enemy. He has seen his brother George turn his coat. He has seen his brother King Edward win by witchcraft. He places his army carefully, spread out on high ground so that he can watch the old Roman road to London, Watling Street, and also command the plain. If Henry Tudor hopes to rush past at dawn and on to London, Richard will thunder down the hill and fall on him. If Tudor turns aside to give battle, Richard is well placed. He is here first, and he has chosen the ground.

He doesn’t have long to wait. As it gets dark they can see the Tudor army turn from the road and start to make camp. They see the campfires start to twinkle. There is no attempt to hide; Henry Tudor can see the royal army on the rising ground to the right of him, and they can see him down below. Richard finds himself oddly nostalgic for the days when he was under the command of his brother and they once marched up under the shelter of night, and burned campfires half a mile behind their own silent troops and so confused the enemy that in the morning they were upon them in moments. Or another time when they marched in under cover of fog and mist, and nobody knew where anybody was. But those were battles under Edward, who had the help of a wife who could call up bad weather. These are more prosaic days, and Tudor marches his army off the road, through the standing wheat, in full sight, and bids them make their little campfires and be ready for the morning.

Richard sends to Lord Stanley and commands him to bring up his army to array with the royal army, but the messenger comes back with only a promise that they will arrive later, well before dawn. Lord George Strange glances nervously at the Duke of Norfolk, who would behead him at a word, and says that he is certain his father will come up at first light. Richard nods.

They dine well. Richard orders that the men be fed and the horses supplied with hay and water. He does not fear a surprise attack from the young Tudor, but he puts out watchmen anyway. He goes to his tent to sleep. He doesn’t dream; he pulls the blanket over his head and sleeps well, as he always does before a battle. To allow himself to do anything else would be folly. Richard is no fool, and he has been in worse places, on worse battlefields, facing a more redoubtable enemy than this novice with his mongrel army.

On the other side of the Redmore Plain, Henry Tudor paces around his camp, restless as a young lion, until it grows too dark to see his way. He is waiting for Jasper; he knows without a doubt that Jasper will be riding through the darkness to come to him, splashing through inky streams, cutting across darkened moors, making all the speed he can. He never doubts the loyalty and love of his uncle. But he cannot face the thought of a battle in the morning with Jasper not at his side.

He is waiting for word from Lord Stanley. The earl had said that he would arrive with his massive force as soon as the battle lines were drawn up, but now comes a messenger to say that Stanley is not going to come till dawn-he has made his own camp, his men are settled for the night, and it would be foolish to disturb them in the darkness. In the morning he will come, at first light; when battle is joined he will be there, Henry can be assured of it.

Henry cannot be assured of it, but there is nothing he can do. Reluctantly, he looks west once more in case there is the bobbing torch of Jasper against the darkness, and then he goes to his own tent. He is a young man; this is his first battle on his own account. He hardly sleeps at all.

He is plagued with terrible dreams. He dreams that his mother comes to him and tells him that she has made a mistake, that Richard is the true king, and that the invasion, the battle lines, the camp, everything, is a sin against the order of the kingdom and the rule of God. Her pale face is stern, and she curses him for being a pretender and attempting to unseat a true king, a rebel against the natural order of things, a heretic against the divine laws of God. Richard is an ordained king, he has taken the holy oil on his breast. How can Tudor raise a sword against him? He turns, and wakes, and then dozes and dreams that Jasper is sailing back to France without him, weeping for his death on the battlefield. Then he dreams that Elizabeth, Princess of York, the young woman promised to marry him, whom he has never seen, comes to him and says that she loves another man, that she will never willingly be his wife, that he will look a fool before everyone. She looks at him with her beautiful gray eyes filled with cold regret and tells him that everyone will know that she took another man as her lover and still longs only for him. She says that her lover is a strong man, and handsome, and that she despises Henry as a runaway boy. He dreams that the battle has started and he has overslept and he leaps from his bed in a terror, bangs his head on the tent pole, and finds himself, naked and shivering, shaken awake by his own fear-and it is still hours from dawn.

He kicks his page awake anyway, and sends him for hot water and a priest to say Mass. But it is too early: the campfires are not yet lit, there is no hot water, there is no bread baked yet, there is no meat to be had. They can’t find the priest, and when they do, he is still asleep and has to prepare himself; he cannot come at once and pray with Henry Tudor. He does not have the Host ready, and the crucifix is to be set up at dawn, not now, in the darkness. The vestments are in the baggage train; they have been on the march for so long he will have to find them. Henry has to huddle into his clothes, smelling his own nervous cold sweat, and wait for dawn and for the rest of the world to get to their feet leisurely, as if today were not the day when everything is to be decided, as if today were not the day that might be the day of his death.

In Richard’s camp the king is undertaking a ceremony to declare the seriousness of the battle, and to renew the oaths of loyalty from his coronation. This event happens only at moments of gravest crisis, and when a king needs to renew his oaths with his people. No one here has ever done it before, and their faces are bright with the solemnity of the occasion. First come the priests and a choir of singers, making a measured progress before the men; then come the lords and the great men of the realm, dressed for battle with their standards before them; then comes the king, dressed in his heavy engraved battle armor, bare-headed in the warm dawn light. He looks, at this moment of his claiming his throne again, far younger than his thirty-two years. He looks hopeful, as if victory this day will bring peace to his kingdom, the chance to marry again, to conceive an heir, to establish the Yorks on the throne of England forever. This is a new beginning, for Richard and for England.

He kneels before the priest, who lifts the sacred crown of Edward the Confessor and rests it gently on the king’s dark head. He feels the weight of it as heavy as guilt, and then feels the weight lifted: he is redeemed of all sin. He rises to his feet and faces his men. “God save the king!” comes the shout from a thousand voices. “God save the king!”

Richard smiles at the shout that he has heard for his brother, that he has heard for himself. This is more than a renewing of his coronation oath to serve his countrymen and his kingdom, this is a rededication of himself. Whatever has been done to get them to this point has been forgiven. What comes next will be the basis for his judgment. And now he knows that he is in the right, an ordained and crowned king, riding out against an upstart, a pretender, whose cause was lost in the last reign, whose affinity have stayed at home, whose support depends on foreign convicts and mercenaries, and who has attracted only the most disloyal and time-serving lords to his side-and possibly not even them.

Richard raises his hand to his army and smiles at their roar of applause. He turns to one side and gently puts off the sacred crown and shows them his battle helmet with the helmet crown fixed lightly to the poll. He will go into battle crowned; he will fight under his royal standard. If Henry Tudor has the courage to challenge him in person, he will not have to hunt for him. Richard will be as visible on the field of battle as when the three suns of York were the emblem of the three York brothers. He will ride out in person and kill the Tudor boy in single combat. This is a king militant; this is the champion of England’s peace.

The trumpeters sound the call to arms, and now all the troops are arming, taking one last swig of small ale, checking their axes, their swords, their spears, twanging lightly on their bowstrings. It is time. The king is forgiven all his sins. He has rededicated himself to sacred kingship. He is crowned and armed. It is time.

In the Tudor camp they hear the trumpets, and they are already saddling their horses and tightening their breastplates. Henry Tudor is everywhere: among the officers, demanding that they are ready, confirming that they have their battle plan. He does not look for Jasper; he will not allow himself a moment of anxiety or doubt. He has to think now of nothing but the coming battle. He sends one message only to Lord Stanley. Are you coming now? He gets no reply.

He receives one letter from his mother, put into his hand by her messenger as he stands, arms outspread, as they strap on his breastplate.

My son.

God is with you, you cannot fail. I think of nothing and no one but you in my prayers. Our Lady will hear me when I pray for my boy.

I know the will of God, and it is for you.

Your mother,

Margaret Stanley

He reads the familiar handwriting, and he folds it and puts it in his breastplate, over his heart, as if it could block the thrust of a sword. His mother’s vision of his future has dominated his life; his mother’s belief in her rights has brought him to this place. Since his boyhood, when he saw his York guardian that she hated, dragged off the battlefield to a shameful death, he has never doubted her vision. He has never doubted her House of Lancaster. Now, her faith in him and her belief that he will win is his only certainty. He calls for his horse, and they bring him saddled and ready.

The two armies form lines and march slowly towards collision. Richard’s guns set on the higher ground are trained on Henry’s right wing, and Henry’s officers order the men to shift slightly to the left, so that they can come around Richard and avoid the line of fire. The morning sun beats on their backs; the wind is behind them too, as if to blow them forwards. To Richard’s army they come, with a dazzle on their raised pikes that makes them look more than they are. Henry’s men break into a stumbling run, and Tudor checks his horse to see the field. He looks back. There is no sign of Jasper. He looks to his left. The Stanley army, twice the size of his own, is drawn up in battle array, precisely halfway between king and challenger. Stanley could sweep down between them and if he turned to the left he would attack Richard and be at the head of Henry’s men. If he turned to the right he would destroy Henry’s army. Henry speaks to his page. “Go to Lord Stanley and tell him if he comes not now, I shall know what to think,” he says tersely.

Then he looks back at his own troops. Obedient to the yells of their officers, they have started a run, they are rushing forwards to the royal army and there is a terrific crash as the two sides meet. At once there is the chaos of the battle, the terrible noise of slaughter, and the absolute confusion of fighting. A royal cavalryman rides down the line, sweeping his battle-axe like a man scything nettles, leaving a train of men staggering and dying behind him. Then a pikeman from the Tudor army steps out and with one lucky thrust gets his sharp pike upwards and into the rider’s armpit, flings him from his horse and down to the soldiers, who fall on him like snarling dogs and tear him apart.

The royal guns tear into the Tudor mercenaries, and they fall back, regroup, and swing to the left again; their officers cannot make them march against the fire. Cannonballs whistle towards them and plunge into the ranks like rocks into a stream, only instead of a splash there is the scream of men and the wild neighing of horses. Richard, crown glowing on his helmet like a halo, is in the middle of the fighting on his white horse, his standard before him, his knights around him. He glances back at the little hill behind him, and there are Northumberland’s men, as still as the Stanleys over to his left. He gives a bitter shout of laughter at the thought that there are more men standing watching than there are fighting, and lays about him with his great mace, knocking the heads off armed men, and breaking shoulders, necks, backs, as if they were dolls standing around him.

The break in the battle comes naturally, when men are too exhausted to do more. They stagger back and rest on their weapons; they gasp for breath. They look, uneasily, at the still ranks of Stanley and Northumberland, and some of them whoop for air or retch blood from their throats.

Richard scans the field beyond the immediate line of battle, holds in his horse, and pats its sweaty neck. He looks across at the Tudor forces and sees that behind the Tudor line, slightly adrift from his troops, is the red dragon standard, and the Beaufort portcullis badge. Henry has become separated from his army; he is standing back with his household guards around him; his army has pushed ahead, away from him. Inexperienced on the battlefield, he has let himself be separated from his troops.

For a moment Richard cannot believe the opportunity that he sees before him, then he gives a harsh laugh. He sees his chance, battlefield luck, given to him by Henry’s momentary pause that has separated him from his army and left him terribly vulnerable. Richard stands up in his stirrups and draws his sword. “York!” he bellows, as if he would summon his brother and his father from their graves. “York! To me!”

His household cavalry leap forwards at the call. They ride in close formation, thundering over the ground, sometimes jumping corpses, sometimes plowing on through them. An outrider gets pulled down, but the main battle, tightly grouped, shoots like an arrow around the back of the Tudor army, who see the danger, and stagger and try to turn, but can do nothing but watch the galloping charge towards their leader. The York horses are flying at Henry Tudor, unstoppable, swords out, lances down, faceless in their sharply pointed helmets, terrifying in their thunderous speed. The Tudor pikemen, seeing the charge, break from their ranks and run backwards, and Richard, seeing them on the run, thinks they are fleeing and bellows again, “York! And England!”

Tudor is down from his horse in a moment-why would he do that, Richard thinks, his breath coming fast, leaning over his horse’s mane, why dismount? – Tudor is running forwards to his pikemen, who dash back to meet him. His sword is drawn, his standard-bearer beside him. Henry is beyond thought, beyond even fear, in this, his first adult battle. He can feel the ground shake as the horses come towards him, they come like a high wave, and he is like a child facing a storm on a beach. He can see Richard bending low in the saddle, his lance out before him, the gleam of the gold circlet on the silver helmet. Henry’s breath comes fast with fear and excitement, and he shouts to the French pikemen, “Now! À moi! À moi!”

They dash back towards Henry and then they turn and drop to their knees and point their pikes upwards. The second rank lean their pikes on their comrades’ shoulders, the third rank, boxed inside, like a human shield for Henry Tudor, point their pikes straight forwards like a wall of daggers at the oncoming horses.

Richard’s cavalry have never seen such a thing done before. No one has ever seen such a thing before in England. They cannot pull up the charge, they cannot turn it. One or two in the center wrench their horses aside, but they just foul the oncoming dash of their neighbors and go down in a chaos of tumbling and screaming and broken bones under the hooves of their own horses. The others plow on, too fast to stop, and fling themselves onto the merciless blades, and the pikemen stagger under the impact, but wedged so tightly: they stay steady.

Richard’s own horse stumbles on a dead man and goes down to its knees. Richard is thrown over its head, staggers to his feet, pulling out his sword. The other knights fling themselves to the ground to attack the pikemen, and the clash of sword on wooden haft, of thrusted blade and broken pike is like hammering at a forge. Richard’s trusted men gather round him in battle order, aiming at the very heart of the battle square, and gradually they start to gain ground. The pikemen in the first rank cannot struggle to their feet with the weight of the others bearing down on them; they are cut down where they kneel. The middle rank fall back against the ferocious attack, they cannot help but give ground; and Henry Tudor, in the center, becomes more and more exposed.

Richard, his sword red with blood, comes nearer and nearer, knowing the battle will be over with Tudor’s death. The two standards are only yards apart, and Richard is gaining ground, fighting his way through a wall of men to Tudor himself. In the corner of his eye he sees the red of the dragon and, furious, he slashes at it and the standard-bearer, William Brandon, in one huge thrust. The standard looks about to fall, and one of Henry’s bodyguard dives forwards, grabs the broken haft, and holds it aloft. Sir John Cheney, a giant of a man, throws himself between Henry and Richard, and Richard slashes out at him too a vicious wound to the throat, and the Tudor knight goes down, knowing that they are defeated, calling, “Fly, sire! Get yourself to safety!” to Henry, as his last words are choked on his own blood.

Henry hears the warning and knows he must turn and run. It is all over for him. And then they hear it. Both Richard and Henry’s heads go up, at the deep, loud rumble of an army at full gallop as the Stanleys’ armies come charging towards them, lances down, pikes out, swords ready, fresh horses tearing towards them as if themselves eager for blood; and as they hit, Richard’s standard-bearer has his legs sliced off from underneath him by a swing from a battle-axe, and Richard wheels around, his sword arm failing him, suddenly fatally weak, in that one moment as he sees four thousand men coming against him, and then he goes down under a flurry of anonymous blows. “Treason!” he shouts. “Treason!”

“A horse!” somebody screams desperately for him. “A horse! A horse! Get the king a horse!”

But the king is already gone.

Sir William Stanley pulls the helmet from Richard’s lolling head, notes that the king’s dark hair is still damp with warm sweat, and leaves the rest of the looting of his fine armor to others. With a pike head he prizes off the golden circlet of kinghood and strides towards Henry Tudor, kneels in the mud, and offers him the crown of England.

Henry Tudor, staggering from the shock, takes it from him with bloodied hands and puts it on his own head.

“God save the king!” bellows Stanley to his army, coming up fresh and untouched, some of them laughing at the battle that they have won in such decisive glory without dirtying their swords. He is the first Englishman to say this to the crowned Henry Tudor, and he will make sure the king remembers it. Lord Thomas Stanley dismounts from his panting horse at the head of his army, which swung the battle, at the last, the very last moment, and smiles at his stepson. “I said I would come.”

“You will be rewarded,” Henry says. He is gray with shock, his face shiny with cold sweat and with someone else’s blood. He looks, but hardly sees, as they strip King Richard’s fine armor and then even his linen and throw his naked body over the back of his limping horse, which hangs its head as if ashamed. “You will all be richly rewarded, who fought with me today.”

They bring the news to me where I am praying, on my knees, in my chapel. I hear the bang of the door and the footsteps on the stone floor, but I don’t turn my head. I open my eyes and keep them fixed on the statue of the crucified Christ, and I wonder if I am about to enter my own agony. “What is the news?” I ask.

Christ looks down at me; I look up at Him. “Give me good news,” I say as much to Him as to the lady who stands behind me.

“Your son has won a great battle,” my lady-in-waiting says tremulously. “He is King of England, acclaimed on the battlefield.”

I gasp for breath. “And Richard the usurper?”

“Dead.”

I meet the eyes of Christ the Lord, and I all but wink at Him. “Thanks be to God,” I say, as if to nod at a fellow plotter. He has done His part. Now I will do mine. I rise to my feet, and she holds out a letter to me, a scrap of paper, from Jasper.

Our boy has won his throne; we can enter our kingdom. We will come to you at once.

I read it again. I have the strange sensation that I have won my heart’s desire and that from this date everything will be different. Everything will be commanded by me.

“We must prepare rooms for my son; he will come to visit me at once,” I say coolly.

The lady-in-waiting is all flushed; she was hoping that we would fall into each other’s arms and dance about in victory. “You have won!” she exclaims. She is hoping I will weep with her.

“I have come into my own,” I correct her. “I have fulfilled my destiny. It is the will of God.”

“It is a glorious day for your house!”

“Nothing but our deserts.”

She bobs a shallow curtsey. “Yes, my lady.”

“Yes, Your Grace,” I correct her. “I am My Lady, the King’s Mother, now, and you shall curtsey to me, as low as to a queen of royal blood. This was my destiny: to put my son on the throne of England, and those who laughed at my visions and doubted my vocation will call me My Lady, the King’s Mother, and I shall sign myself Margaret Regina: Margaret R.”