“Why not?”
“On a Sunday?”
“My brother marched out on an Easter Sunday, and God smiled on his battle. Yes, tomorrow.”
The earl holds out his hands for the server to pour water over his fingers and pat them dry with a towel. Then he breaks some manchet bread and pulls the white soft crumb inside the crunchy crust. “I am sorry, my lord; it has taken me too long to bring my men. They will not be ready to march tomorrow. I had to bring them fast, down hard roads; they are exhausted and are in no state to fight for you.”
Richard gives him a long, slow look from under his dark eyebrows. “You have come all this way to stand to one side and watch?”
“No, my lord. I am sworn to join you when you march out. But if it is to be so soon, tomorrow, I will have to volunteer my men for the rear guard. They cannot lead. They are exhausted.”
Richard smiles as if he knows for a fact that Henry Percy has already promised Henry Tudor that he will sit behind the king and do nothing.
“You shall take up the rear then,” Richard says. “And I shall know myself safe with you there. So.” The king speaks generally to the room, and the heads come up. “Tomorrow morning then, my lords,” Richard says, his voice and his hands quite steady. “Tomorrow morning we will march out and crush this boy.”
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
