After Flodden Read online

  AFTER FLODDEN

  This ebook edition published in 2013 by

  Birlinn Limited

  West Newington House

  Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.birlinn.co.uk

  www.polygonbooks.co.uk

  Copyright © Rosemary Goring, 2013

  The moral right of Rosemary Goring to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-1-84967-272-0

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-575-8

  Version 1.0

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  For Alan

  Characters

  THE SCOTTISH COURT, FAMILY AND FOLLOWERS

  James IV

  Margaret Tudor, his wife, and sister of Henry VIII

  James, Duke of Rothesay, James’s toddler son and only surviving legitimate child, later James V

  Alexander Stewart, Archbishop of St Andrews, James’s eldest illegitimate child (he had eight, by four mistresses)

  Patrick Paniter, James’s secretary and right-hand man

  Goodwife Black, Paniter’s housekeeper and more

  Gabriel, Viscount Torrance of Blaneford and Mountjoy, a young courtier and advisor to Paniter

  Robert Borthwick, master meltar

  NOBLES WITH JAMES IV AT FLODDEN

  Alexander Hume, Lord Home, led disastrous plundering foray into England in August 1513, called the ill-raid. Was in charge of vanguard at Flodden, with Huntly

  George Gordon, Earl of Huntly, in charge of vanguard at Flodden, with Home

  Lieutenant General Archibald Campbell, Earl of Argyll

  Patrick Lindsay, Lord Lindsay

  Andrew Herries, Lord Herries of Terregles

  Matthew Stewart, Earl of Lennox

  William Hay, Earl of Erroll

  John Lindsay, Earl of Crawford

  William Graham, Earl of Montrose

  John Douglas, Earl of Morton

  THE LEITH HOUSEHOLD

  Davy Turnbull, head of the house, a sea merchant and brigand, father of Louise Brenier

  Madame Brenier, his dissatisfied French wife

  Benoit Brenier, her eldest child, by her first husband

  Marguerite Brenier, her elder daughter, by her first husband

  Louise Brenier, her third child, by Davy Turnbull

  Vincent, tenant, shipwright and family friend

  John and Andrew Barton, Davy Turnbull’s cousins, sea-traders and adventurers

  The vixen, the family mongrel

  THE CROZIERS

  Adam Crozier, head of the clan, whose stronghold is in the Scottish Borders, near Selkirk

  Tom Crozier, his younger brother

  Nat Crozier, their reckless father, now dead

  Old Crozier, Adam and Tom’s grandfather

  Martha Crozier, Adam and Tom’s mother

  Bella, her sister, who lives in Berwick-upon-Tweed

  Oliver, her husband

  Wat the Wanderer, Adam’s cousin and henchman

  Murdo Montgomery, Adam’s cousin and henchman

  Bertie Main, cousin, in charge of the clan’s scouts

  OTHER

  Hob, an East Lothian boy, orphaned at Flodden

  Ella Aylewood, a silversmith’s daughter

  THE ENGLISH COURT AND ITS FOLLOWERS

  Henry VIII

  Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, Henry’s lieutenant-general in the north of England

  Thomas, Baron Dacre, Lord-Warden of the English Marches

  Thomas Ruthall, Bishop of Durham, Henry’s secretary and a privy councillor

  Beecham, Henry’s clerk of records

  THE AMBASSADORS

  Monsieur De La Mothe, French ambassador from the court of Louis XII

  Dr Nicholas West, English ambassador

  O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!

  The lights burn blue; it is now dead midnight.

  Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.

  What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by . . .

  Richard III, Act 5, Scene 3, 180–184

  SHAKESPEARE

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER ONE

  18 September 1513

  There was a knock at the door, and then another. It was early morning and the sound of a small fist on oak would have been lost in the rumble of carts if Patrick Paniter had not been at his window. He had been standing there since daybreak, peering into the street from behind a half-closed shutter, dreading the return of his visitor the way some men fear the day of judgement.

  In the years he had lived here these doors had been battered with cudgels and struck by swords, but he had not felt this kind of shiver at any previous summons. It was as if the hand was hammering straight onto his bones.

  The hand was small, little larger than a child’s, but it brought with it memories Paniter could not bear to revisit. The young woman at his door looked nothing like her sister, whose warm-eyed lustre carried the scent of vineyards to this cold coast. No, this woman had a boy’s figure, and a boy’s rude insistence. He knew what she wanted: money, more than already had been thrown at her.

  He did not entirely blame her. Had Marguerite lived, had the king, there would have been a steady flow of riches into her family’s coffers. But the sister was dead. It was an unfortunate and untimely end, Paniter would not deny that, but for her mother to lay the blame for Marguerite’s death at the king’s feet was the madness of grief. The pretty little thing had done as she wanted, and with the mother’s blessing. The consequences were regrettable, but not unusual.

  Now the king was gone. Most of the country’s soldiers too. After what he had witnessed of his sovereign’s final throes, he would call Marguerite’s deathbed gentle. Enviable, even. Tormented by what he had seen, it was as if Paniter’s mind had been flayed. Even a whisper from happier days, a reminder of all he had lost, was like brine dripped into a wound. He could not deal with the Brenier girl, and her ill-timed greed. She came from a past that was now as lifeless and bruising as stone. The present was every bit as unforgiving. Worse, perhaps, because it promised nothing but pain.

  There was a scratch at his door. Paniter kept his eyes on the street, where his unwelcome visitor’s horse was tethered. The housekeeper came in, her face flushed. ‘It’s her again, sir, the Brenier lass, and she says she won’t leave until you speak to her.’ She hesitated, then ignored Paniter’s hand, which was waving as if to drive off his thoughts as well as the young woman below stairs. ‘She means it, master. She’s taken a seat in the hall, and her dog growls like he’s seen a rat whenever I try to make her go.’

  A sound escaped Paniter that in a weaker man would be described as a moan. His hand covered his eyes, and he sag
ged against the wall, as if he had no strength to reach a chair. Goodwife Black was at his side before he could fall, and with an arm around his waist helped him to a seat. He began to sob. This man who, when he stood up to speak in council rose above his peers like a mainsail mast, whose voice on a calm day could reach across the Forth into Fife, began to splutter and girn as if he were a child, clutching the housekeeper’s sleeve so wildly his nails grazed her arm. His tears fell, dampening his lap, until she drew his head down onto her neck and began to rock him, to quieten his grief.

  Goodwife Black closed her eyes, or else she too would have cried. Paniter had not slept since he had come home, a week past, and neither had she. The night he walked back into the house his face was so grim she had clapped a hand to her mouth. He looked like a stranger, and when he told her a little of what had befallen, and when she heard what others in the city were saying, she doubted the man she had once known so well would ever pass this way again.

  Worn out by seven days of misery, of refusing all food and company, Patrick Paniter finally found comfort in his mistress’s arms. He had lain there often enough before, his hands roving over her abundant form. Today, though, no whisper of lust disturbed the relief he found in her touch. For a few minutes the ceaseless roar in his head retreated. The ache behind his eyes did not fade, but its sharpness was dulled. Images he thought had been chiselled into his eye lost a little of their vividness, as did the sounds that came with them. The smells? Well, they would be with him for the rest of his life. Never again would he eat succulent roast beef or relish a plate of sheep’s lungs. The butchery he had witnessed had cured him of his taste for meat.

  Downstairs Mistress Brenier scuffed her feet in the hallway. Her hound sat at her side. This house was dim as a forest, no tallow wasted for the ease of guests. Its windows were shuttered, and the grate in the entrance was unlit. The girl shivered. It was not the chill of the hall, or of the housekeeper’s reception that made her tremble, but the grim business that brought her here.

  Eighty miles south of Paniter’s house lay the worst devastation of living memory, a blight more fearsome than plague or famine. The name ‘Flodden’ was already spreading like pestilence through city and country, a word so tainted with misery and anger it tasted bitter in the mouth. Some spat when they uttered it. A month before, only a handful of Borderers knew the place existed. Now, even before the last body had been stripped of coins and spurs, and flung into the village pit, it was a stain on the country’s spirit as dark as the quarts of hot blood that flowed onto the hillside and seeped into the bog. Spring would bring fresh weeds and flowers, a new spurt of growth in the sturdy Borders trees, but who would be able to watch their nodding leaves and buds without thinking of the iron water they fed upon?

  Paniter’s young visitor had not seen the battlefield, nor could she imagine it. But like everyone in Edinburgh she knew the fate of their army. At first, like many others, she thought the rumours were part myth, the scare stories of those who have escaped with their lives and wish to be seen as heroes, survivors of terror and carnage, not the flotsam of some skirmish where skill played no part and pure luck carried the day. A week after the battle, though, and it was evident that the worst tales had yet to be told. Most of the returning soldiers would not speak; some could not.

  Only one tale interested this girl. Though just nineteen, she would not be brushed off without hearing it. Her brother had ridden out to battle, and had not been heard of since. There was little chance he was alive, she knew, but until she was told he had been killed, or died, she had to keep looking. The dead king’s secretary was the only man in a position to know what had happened. As Mme Brenier had said, when Louise turned her horse towards the town, the court certainly owed their family help.

  ‘And if he offers money as well, don’t you dare turn it down,’ she called after her daughter. ‘We need all we can get.’ Louise kicked the horse into a trot, and did not turn around.

  * * *

  There had been no thought of defeat when James and his army set out. Even the foot soldiers, eking out their month’s store of salt meat and biscuit and ignoring the rumble of their stomachs, had glory in their sights; glory and – God willing – riches to repay their effort.

  James rode at the head of his men, the amethyst in his bonnet flashing in the late summer sun. Its rosy glint mirrored the wood-smoke sky above the hills as they marched out of Edinburgh towards the Lammermuir hills. The old drove roads were flattened and scored, heather and bracken ground to dust beneath hooves and carts. Days earlier, four hundred oxen had plodded across this route, the castle’s guns at their backs. Their yokes creaked as the cannons were hauled across earth, grass, stone and mud. Boys ran ahead of the teams, digging out the drays whenever the mud tried to swallow them whole. Cracking whips, hollering oxen, barking dogs made a fierce sort of music as the beasts and their drivers picked their way south in the melting harvest light.

  For the king’s army following in their wake, evidence of this violent passage littered the way: broken-boned oxen heaved off the road, throats cut to shorten their suffering; splintered drays; a gun nose-deep in glaur, so sunken it was not considered worth the effort of retrieving.

  The sight of the gun grieved Paniter. It was as valuable as a score of men. They might as well have slain their own infantry before setting out as abandon these weapons. But when he edged his horse alongside the king’s, and brought the gun to his attention, James shrugged. He kept his eyes on the horizon. ‘The first casualty,’ he said. ‘There will be worse. You are too squeamish, Paddy. You must learn to steel your heart. If you are to survive this game, it should be as merciless as a blade.’

  Paniter felt the first chill wind of a deadly autumn. James’s teasing smile invited his secretary to raise his sights, and his spirits, but for the first time in their years of friendship, he saw a guarded admission of fear. What they were doing was audacious, and audacity takes courage. Courage is the shadow to fear’s blaze, growing shorter and rarer as the fire strengthens, but never – with God’s help – entirely absent. What lay ahead was daunting enough to make even the battle-seasoned James waver, and Paniter felt a new measure of respect for his king. Were blame ever to be levelled for what lay ahead, it would fall on James’s head, and he was bracing himself. Their horses trotted neck to neck. The men did not talk. Behind them wound the steel river of their army, the clink of bridles, spurs and spears rattling like coins in a gambler’s hand.

  For years, James, Paniter and the inner circle of court had been stealthily preparing for war. They did not know who they would face, whether it would be their quarrelsome English neighbour, their French allies or some new pieces on the board. The only certainty was that conflict was on its way. And now they were heading into its mouth. This march out of the city and into England was the result of half a lifetime’s preparation: diplomatic visits, parliamentary councils, and enough letters to drain a sea of ink. Not to mention the smelting of iron and hammering of weapons at the master meltar’s furnaces, and the frenzy of work in James’s shipyards along the Firth of Forth.

  All were to vanish in a single afternoon that took with it not only James but James’s son, a boy as dear to Paniter as his own child. The best part of Scotland’s aristocracy fell that day, but it was the loss of James and young Alexander that brought Paniter to his knees. Which is where he rested, wrapped in his housekeeper’s arms and sleeping, open-mouthed as a babe, for the first time since he fled the battlefield. Downstairs Mistress Brenier found a chair, and put an arm around her dog for warmth.

  Soldiers started sneaking home days after the army left the city. Those first deserters crawled back quietly, under cover of night. Within a month, however, their numbers were swelling, and this new wave of soldiers burned not with shame but anger and resentment. Their first destination was the alehouse for beer to wash the grit of the road from their mouth. Bakeries did well out of them, oven boys staring as these filthied, hard-talking men shovelled bread into their
mouths, their packs lying on the street for anyone to steal while they closed their eyes and ate, as if life could offer no greater delight than freshly baked dough. Later, though, some would be reminding themselves of even sweeter ecstasy, the flour-white attractions of the pox-house doing a trade almost as brisk as the brewer’s and baker’s.

  ‘Hey, soldier,’ cried one baker’s boy to a Highlander, whose hand sat on his sword even as he ate. ‘Hey, man, did ye get a fight?’ The boy danced out onto the street, brandishing an invisible sword over an invisible enemy, running him through with a roar.

  ‘Naw, son. Nae fight.’

  ‘So why’re you back then?’

  The Highlander looked skywards, chewing. ‘We’d done our 40 days,’ he finally said. ‘Owed the bastards nothin mair.’

  He picked up his pack, and left.

  The Highlander and all the others who had served their time were half-starved. Their rations had run out on the march south, and still they had seen no action. Many would call them deserters, but to their minds they had done their duty. If the king wanted them for a long campaign, he would have to pay them. Foolishly, James had made it plain that he had nothing to offer until they had trounced the English, but he called on their loyalty to their country to give him several more weeks’ service. ‘You will be home by the end of September,’ he promised. But for those with land to hoe for winter planting, or boats that had not seen a day’s catch since the summer, a call on their conscience and the promise of booty was not enough. Late in September, though, when their comrades returned from the field – and many more did not – they were not then quite so easy in their minds as they’d have liked, or let on.

  The first soldiers back from the field at Flodden reached Edinburgh on horseback two days after battle, so torn in clothes and body they were more like crow bogies than men of arms. No-one could mistake them for soldiers who had slipped their leash. Even those unharmed smelled of steel and blood. As news spread of the Scottish army’s rout, of the king’s death and the devastation of Scotland’s troops, fear licked through the city. The king is dead! The English are coming! Word spread fast. Church bells were set ringing, a heart-stopping knell that seemed to mark every one of Flodden’s dead.