But Harry could not be swayed. He would train to be a knight, like his father. He dreamed of coming home laden with favours from battle, bringing wealth and ease to his mother, to his manor and his name. More lands. Rich silks. Jewels and coin. Glory and honour. Lady Joan would kiss his forehead and whisper that his father had said the same thing, and then her eyes would grow distant and sad.
Harry was happy to take the gamble that knighthood offered. So was young Rabbie Ufford, just across the moor, who cheerfully announced on his eighth birthday that he was going into service with Baron Montagu, a powerful West Country lord. Rabbie’s father had fallen right beside Harry’s at the Scottish victory in 1314, and it seemed bitterly unfair to Harry that Rabbie, two years older than him and spoilt to boot, would be page to the great William Montagu. It seemed doubly unfair when Baron Montagu became the favourite of the young King.
Finally, Lady Joan acquiesced. There was no use fighting the delusions of youth, she said, there was only the hope that Harry would outlive them. But he went to no great landed household. Instead, Lady Joan had written to Sir Simon de Attwood, a modest but well-respected Wiltshire knight she had known in her days at court. Attwood was a man of great education and honour, but of little social cachet, and Harry at first resented the knight’s small stone hall and meagre trappings on the unfashionable side of Salisbury.
But the knight had three books, which was more than Harry thought even the King might have, and he taught Harry to read from his psalter as he drilled him in the rules of chivalry and the ways of the broadsword. And when Harry half-closed his eyes, the high, lonely fields of Salisbury at the edge of Sir Simon’s hall felt almost like the moors of home, too.
Once Harry was old enough to understand politics, he became profoundly grateful to be holed away in a minor hall while England writhed against itself. Edward of Carnarvon ignored Isabella, his French queen, spending his days with a chain of pretty young men: Gaveston, d’Amory, the younger Despenser. And much as the gossips chattered of the sins Edward committed with those favourites, it was not lust that undid them all in the end, but greed. The barons rose against the grasping favourites, the King sided with his lovers, and the country slid into civil war.
There were no tournaments in those years. The unpopular King was wary of encouraging too many armed nobles to assemble in one place.
He was right to worry. The furious barons rallied around Isabella, Edward’s abandoned queen, and her lover Lord Mortimer, a powerful Marcher lord whose lands Edward’s newest favourite had tried to steal. Isabella and Mortimer forced the King into abdication, imprisonment and death, while they ruled England in the name of Isabella’s son, the young Edward of Windsor, a boy not much older than Harry himself.
England prayed for rest and a time to heal, but Mortimer proved as bad as Edward of Carnarvon’s favourites, using his position to plunder lands and money from the noble families. And so, while Harry had been learning Latin and competing in the squires’ sections of local tournaments, history repeated itself.
Baron Montagu and his squire Rabbie had broken into Nottingham Castle and arrested Mortimer, sending him on the road south to London and the gallows. The act made them England’s heroes, and Edward of Windsor’s right-hand men.
Edward took the throne in 1327. His mother, Queen Isabella, was cowed back into the shadows where she belonged. Glory returned to England, and tournaments, and chances for a young squire to make his name and fortune as Rabbie Ufford had.
And Harry, six feet tall by the time he was sixteen years old, could only writhe in his rural exile, never with the right people, never where events were happening. Sir Simon, who fought under the first Edward, would only shake his head at Harry’s restlessness. ‘The friendship of kings and princes is a double-edged blade,’ the old country knight would sigh. ‘Do you truly wish you were Baron Montagu’s squire?’
Harry would not answer. It wasn’t Baron Montagu and his coterie, so much, that Harry wanted to befriend. Baron Montagu was just a means to an end. It was the King.
He began to chafe under Sir Simon’s tutelage, embarrassed by the man’s cautious ways, ashamed to be seen next to Sir Simon’s outdated suit of mail when the fashionable young knights and squires protected shins and joints with bright plate. He wanted more than anything else to prove himself in front of that golden crowd, to be accepted by them. When the summons came for the war against the Scots, Harry was sure it was finally his time. If only his mother hadn’t—
—Harry blinks and shakes his head. Those thoughts are ones no good Christian could entertain. He rakes his hands through his dirty hair as he steps out of the tent’s darkness into the bright midday light, and tries to figure out what to do next.
Pack up Sir Simon’s things. Head back to the West Country, to manage his paltry estate. Leave Berwick and its triumphant throng as soon as possible. The bright glory here belongs to other people, not to him. Never to him.
Harry becomes aware that a voice is calling his name; has perhaps been calling him for a while.
