Gloucester gave a wry smile. “As we have all heard of this miraculous Joan of Arc, now known far and wide as the Maid of France, so too has Limoges. Egged on by their bishop, the city has changed its collective mind and declared its loyalty to Charles and France, not to …
well, not to the accursed English. Hotspur is marching north to ‘deal’ with the problem, as his communication to Richard said.”
“And Richard?” Bolingbroke said.
“Richard is thrilled. He thinks that Limoges is a small enough target not to give Hotspur any trouble and large enough to give everyone a good deal of satisfaction when it is appropriately
‘dealt with.'”
“This is perhaps mildly irritating, no more,” Lancaster said, “especially if Hotspur does manage to deal effectively with the city.”
“Unless either Richard or Hotspur has thoughts beyond Limoges,” Neville said quietly.
There was a silence. Where to from Limoges? Everyone remembered what Arundel had said that night deep in the Savoy: Richard has no intentions of confining Hotspur’s field of action to Catalonia. He intends to launch a new drive into the heart of France.
“There is more,” Gloucester said eventually. “And closer to home. For the moment France must be the least of our troubles.” “Aye?” Lancaster said.
“Richard has heaped yet more titles upon his pet.”
“De Vere?” Lancaster said.
“Aye. Perhaps not ‘titles,’ but one in particular.”
“Yes?” said Lancaster.
Gloucester paused. “King of Ireland.”
There was a stunned silence about the table. There had been rumor of this … but to hear rumor spoken of as fact was a harsh thing indeed.
“The Irish will never stand for it,” Raby said eventually.
“I have heard,” Gloucester said, “that Richard thinks he might command an army to invade Ireland and damn well force the Irish to accept it. Richard does not mean his lover to be heaped with pretty but useless titles. Ireland is de Vere’s.”
“If he does that then Richard will destroy England,” Neville said. “Our war with France has not been closed out, and if Richard commits the English army to Ireland instead of France …”
“Then we are likely to find ourselves invaded by one effeminate Dauphin and his virginal saint,” Raby finished for him. “We have all heard how northern France rallies to her cause, and Richard of all people cannot afford to ignore it.”
“And then there are the taxes Richard will need to levy to invade Ireland,” Boling-broke said.
“Perhaps that might work in our favor. We’ll be so damn poor the French might decide we’re not worth the effort of an invasion!”
No one smiled, and again there was a silence about die table.
“Richard has called Parliament for January,” Gloucester said. “He is committed to his poll tax, and will need Parliament’s consent to raise it.”
Lancaster, as he had earlier, looked deliberately at each man about the table.
“Then I think it is time we thought about returning to London,” he said.
CHAPTER V
The Feast of the Epiphany of Our Lord
In the first year of the reign of Richard II
(Friday 6th January 1380)
THE COMMONS of the southeastern counties of England had not experienced the same degree of Christmas comfort and cheer enjoyed by the Lancastrian household. Bitter frosts settled over home and fields on the morning of the fourth Sunday in Advent, and had lasted well into the week after Christmas. Not even village elders could remember a winter this cold, or this hard. Ravens dropped frozen from the sky; starving wild boars attacked children and lambs; men and women found themselves sharing their inadequate bedding with rats seeking the warmth of human flesh. In those areas where the lords had limited the autumn gathering of wood to a ridiculous amount each, peasants found themselves forced to burn old thatch for warmth, or to slaughter their breeding stock for sheepskin.
It was a time when entire villages gathered around one or two fires, conserving wood at the same time as they stole extra warmth from the close-pressed bodies of their neighbors. While they huddled, they talked. They remembered the smoke rising from the halls of their lords, and thought how warm it might be inside the manor houses and castles of their betters. They discussed how best to ration the remaining sacks of moldy grains and legumes from the long-ago summer harvest, and wished that their lords might distribute some of the fine white bread from their well-stocked pantries. They discussed how they would find enough able-bodied men to begin the late-winter plowing and harrowing of the village fields when their lord demanded that they work his land instead.
They thought how they went to church on Sundays to hear a mumbled Latin mass of which they understood not a word, and saw that their priests looked remarkably well-fed and comfortable in their furs and velvets … purchased with their parishioners’ hard-earned tithes.
As they huddled all the tighter about their fires and their hostile words, the peasants wondered how they would survive the coming year when they needed to eat the seed stock and breeding livestock in order to survive the winter. Would it be better to starve now, or next autumn when there was no harvest, because there had been no grain to sow, and no meat, because there were no cattle to slaughter?
And more than once, and in many more than just one village, a man or a woman muttered the words that John Ball had screamed as he was dragged off to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s prison: “When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?”
Across the frozen, resentful wastes of southeastern England, eyes turned to the homes and comforts of the nobles, and minds wondered: What right do they have to call themselves lords, and to eat fine food, and to bask before the warmth of roaring fires, when we all sprang from the same stock? When we are as much sons and daughters of Adam and Eve as they?
Why are we not able to control our own destiny, to choose where we will work, and for whom, when once we were all free men together?
On the day that the frosts finally relented, and men and women could breathe without feeling slivers of ice tear through their lungs, word of a possible poll tax filtered through to the villages.
In a world where survival depended on whether a family could afford that one extra sack of gram to see them through the winter months, the rumor of an added tax—to fight a foreign war, for sweet Jesu’s sake!—was enough to twist resentful thoughts into the mutinous.
Then, as the ice slowly melted from the narrow country laneways and roads, Wycliffe’s Lollard priests and Wat Tyler’s revolutionaries moved once more into the fertile fields of peasant bitterness. The English peasantry had suffered through generations with hardly a complaint; they had deferred to their lords, and they had paid their tithes to lord and priest alike.
Now, as they listened to the soft-spoken men who moved among them, they realized they’d
had enough. Indeed, they should have protested years ago.
If the nobles looked to Parliament to resolve their complaints, then the English commons looked to their axes, and waited for the warmer weather.
No one wanted to start a revolution while it was still cold outside.
CHAPTER VI
Plough Monday
In the first year of the reign of Richard II
(9th January 1380)
PRIOR GENERAL RICHARD THORSEBY glanced down at his bandaged feet, and once again wondered if his decision to travel north to Nuremberg would prove to be worth the frostbite in his toes.
The journey from Rome had been horrendous. Thorseby had joined with a party of pilgrims and merchants, but whatever illusion of safety the group gave him was destroyed when bandits savagely attacked them on three separate occasions. Four pilgrims and one of the mercenaries attached to the merchants had died in the bandit attacks, while the journey through the frozen Brenner Pass claimed a further five lives. Only merciful God Himself had enabled Thorseby to survive. On the second day’s journey through the pass Thorseby’s mule had slipped, tumbling into the abyss to its death and leaving Thorseby desperately gripping an icy rock at the very edge of the precipice. He had screamed for help from his fellow travelers, but they had been concentrating so intently on their own survival they ignored his cries, and Thorseby had been forced to plead with God to send him the strength and fortitude to crawl back onto the track.
He had managed it, just, but at the expense of the skin on his fingers and the loss of his sandals. The final half day’s stumbling, barefooted journey through the Brenner along the ice-coated footpaths, and with winter sleet beating down, had caused Thorseby’s feet to turn black.
He had prayed long and hard to God in the days since then that his traveling companions be called to a hellish account for their uncharitable refusal to allow him to claim one of their mounts to ride. That they had ridden and lie, a Dominican, had been forced to walk until he could purchase a new mount the other side of the pass … unbelievable!