Dublin (86 page)

  Yet today, in Dublin's Christ Church Cathedral, gentlemen like himself were preparing to invade the English kingdom.

  "Look, Father." The cathedral doors were swinging open. Menatarms were coming out, pushing back the crowd.

  A broad pathway was being cleared. Figures were appearing, in glittering robes, in the doorway.

  Her father lifted her up and Margaret could see them clearly: three bishops with mitres on their heads led the procession; then came the abbots and priors.

  Next, in their robes of office, red and blue and gold, came the mayor and the aldermen of the city; behind them walked the Archbishop of Dublin with the Lord Deputy, the Earl of Kildare, head of the mighty Fitzgerald clan and the most powerful man in all Ireland. Next came the Lord Chancellor, and the Treasurer, followed by the major officeholders and nobility. And then came the boy.

  He was only a little fellow, hardly older than herself. For a crown, they had taken a circlet of gold, which had formed the halo over a statue of the Blessed Virgin, and placed it upon his head. And to make sure that this new boy king should be clearly seen, they had selected a gentleman from Fingal, one Darcy by name, a giant of a man who stood six and a half feet tall, and put the boy king to ride upon his shoulders.

  Bringing up the rear of the procession came two hundred German mercenary landknechts, sent from the Low Countries by the Duchess of Burgundy, carrying fearsome pikes and accompanied by fife and drum.

  For the boy, Edmund, Earl of Warwick, had just been crowned King of England, and was about to set forth to claim his rightful kingdom. But how had it come to pass that he should be crowned in Dublin?

  A generation ago, during a period when the royal house of York was in the ascendant over that of Lancaster, one of the princes of York had governed Ireland for a number of years and, uncommon for an Englishman, had made himself popular. Ever since, in many parts of the Irish community, and especially in Dublin, there had been a loyalty towards the Yorkist cause. But now the House of York had been defeated. Henry Tudor, who held the crown by right of conquest, had based his claim to royalty on the fact that his forebears, though only an upstart gentry family from Wales, had married into the House of Lancaster. As royalty goes, this was quite a shaky claim; and although the new Tudor king cleverly married a Yorkist princess to strengthen his royal position, he could not really sleep easy if there were other, more legitimate Plantagenet heirs still at large.

  And suddenly, some months ago, an heir had appeared, with a far more legitimate claim to the throne than Henry Tudor. He was Edmund, Earl of Warwick, a royal prince of the house of York.

  His appearance under the care of a priest had caused consternation at the Tudor court. King Henry had immediately called him an impostor. "His real name is Lambert Simnel," he declared, the son of an organ maker in Oxford-though the craftsman in question was conveniently dead. Then Henry produced another boy, whom he kept in the Tower of London, and announced that he was the real Edmund of Warwick.

  The trouble was that two of Edmund's Plantagenet relations-one of them was the Duchess of Burgundy, a Yorkist princess-having interviewed the two boys, both declared that the priest's boy was indeed Edmund, and that Henry's boy was a fake. For the boy's own safety, the priest had brought him across to Ireland. And today he was being crowned.

  Yet however much they preferred the House of York, why would the great men of the English community of Ireland choose to defy the Tudor king? Seen from a later century it may seem strange, yet in the year 1487, after decades of power shifting back and forth between York and Lancaster, there was no particular reason to suppose that the only half-royal Henry Tudor would be able to keep his crown. If many of the great nobles believed they would be better off under a Yorkist prince than a Lancastrian conqueror, the bishops, abbots, and royal officials would hardly have crowned the boy if they weren't honestly convinced that he was, indeed, the rightful heir.

  The procession had just started down the street when Margaret and her father were joined by a young man to whom her father remarked pleasantly, "Well, John, have you decided?"

  Her eldest brother, John. Like Margaret, he had inherited red hair from their mother's family, for she had been a Harold. But where Margaret's was dark, almost auburn, John's was light and rose like a carrot-coloured flame from his head. Twenty years old, tall, athletic, to Margaret he had always been a hero. And never more so than today. For the last week he and his father had been discussing whether he should join the coming expedition. Now he announced: "I have, Father. I'm going with them."

  "Very well." Her father nodded. "I've been talking to a man who knows Thomas Fitzgerald. That's the brother of Kildare himself, you know," he explained to Margaret. "We'll not have you going as a common foot soldier. I should hope that my son," he added rather grandly, "would be shown some consideration."

  "Thank you, Father." Her brother smiled affectionately. He had a beautiful smile.

  "You are going to England?" Margaret asked him excitedly. "To fight for the boy?"

  He nodded.

  "You're right to go, John," her father said. "Do well, and there could be rewards."

  "Let's follow the procession," her brother cried, and scooping Margaret up, he placed her on his shoulders and started to stride along the street with his father walking in a dignified manner beside him. And how happy and proud Margaret felt, to be riding on her brother's shoulders, just like the boy king ahead of them, on that sunny morning in May.

  They went down the street between the high-gabled houses, with the fifes and drums sounding cheerfully in front; out through the eastern gateway known as Dame's Gate, and across to Hoggen Green and the ancient Thingmount.

  Having made the circuit of that, the procession, still followed by a large crowd, made its way back to the city before finally disappearing through the gateway into Dublin Castle where there was to be a banquet given in the boy king's honour.

  "Are you going to the banquet, Father," Margaret asked, as her brother put her down.

  "No," he replied, then smiled confidently. "But many of the great lords in there would be your kinsmen. Always remember this day, Margaret," he went on firmly, "for it will go down in history. Remember you were here, with your brave brother and your father."

  It was not only her father who was so confident. Within days, the Parliament of Ireland had met and the English gentlemen and Church representatives had enthusiastically ratified the crowning. They had issued a proclamation of his kingship. They had even caused new coins-groats and half-groats-to be struck with the boy's head depicted on them. As well as the German landknechts, Thomas Fitzgerald had collected Irish mercenaries and young enthusiasts like John so that before the end of May he could tell his brother, Lord Kildare, "We're ready to go. And we should strike at once." Indeed, only one discordant note was sounded in those heady days.

  It might have been expected. If the two mighty earldoms of the Fitzgerald clan-Kildare stretching out from the centre of the Pale, and Desmond to the south-were the most powerful lordships in the land, the third great lordship, the Butler family's earldom of Ormond, was still an impressive power to be reckoned with. Sometimes the Butlers and the Fitzgeralds were on good terms, but more often they were not; and it was hardly surprising if the Butlers were jealous of the Fitzgerald domination. So when Henry Tudor had taken the throne from the House of York, to which the Fitzgeralds were known to be so friendly, the Butlers had been quick to let Henry know that they were glad to support his Lancastrian cause.

  And now, just after the Parliament in Dublin had declared for him, a messenger came from the Earl of Ormond, the head of the Butlers. "Lord Ormond refuses to do homage to this boy pretender," he announced, "and declares all these proceedings to be illegal."

  The Fitzgerald reaction was swift. Lord Kildare had the messenger taken straight down to the Thingmount on Hoggen Green, and hanged.

  "That is harsh," Margaret's father declared with a shake of his head. "He was only the messenger." But Margaret could hear the tone of sneaking admiration in his voice. Two days after that, Kildare's brother Thomas and his little army set sail for England, taking her brother John with them.

  The boy king's expedition landed in England on the fourth day of June. Making their way towards York, they were joined by some of the Yorkist lords and their retinues; soon their numbers had swelled to six and a half thousand men. Then they turned south.

  And Henry Tudor, caught by surprise, might even have lost his kingdom if several of the English magnates, who owed him loyalty and who reckoned that he offered the best chance of order, hadn't rallied to him at once with unexpectedly large contingents of troops. On the morning of June 16, near a village called East Stoke in the Midlands, the boy king's army found itself confronted by fifteen thousand well-equipped and trained fighting men. Though the Germans had deadly crossbows, Henry Tudor's Welsh and English longbowmen could loose continuous volleys of arrows that fell like a hailstorm. Against the half-trained and mostly unarmoured contingents from Ireland, Henry had trained pikemen and armoured knights.

  The Irish army was smashed. The boy king was captured; and having secured him, Henry Tudor gave no quarter. At the place where they fought, there was a ditch which from that day onwards was to be known as Red Gutter since, it was said, by the end of the morning it was filled with blood. For they hacked the Germans and Irish to pieces, almost every one.

  Fortunately, Margaret only ever knew that her brother had been slain.

  But Henry Tudor was more than ruthless; he was also clever. Having got the boy Edmund alive, he did not kill him or even put him in prison. Still insisting that he was only an impostor called Lambert Simnel, he set him to work in the royal kitchens from which he would cheerfully summon him sometimes to serve the guests at feasts. During Henry's reign, and for centuries to come, hardly anybody believed the boy to be the royal prince that, quite possibly, he really was.

  Yet the lessons which Margaret learned from these events had little to do with the boy king himself.

  In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, she knew only a numbing sense of grief. And though she had been brought up proud that she was English, the unconscious thought formed in her mind that England itself was somehow an alien and threatening place. How was it, she asked herself, if there was a God in heaven, that the English king could take her brother from her like this? But as she grew older and pondered the events that had led to his death, a new and more perceptive question occurred to her.

  "How was it, Father, that John was killed, but that the Fitzgeralds were not punished?" It was a question that went to the root of Ireland's political situation.

  For when the boy king was crowned in Dublin, it was Kildare himself, head of the Fitzgeralds and, as Lord Deputy, King Henry Tudors own representative and governor on the island, who had led the treasonable business. The Butlers, on the other hand, had stayed loyal. Yet Henry had forgiven Kildare, while the Butlers had received no great reward for their pains.

  "The Fitzgeralds have the most territory. They're intermarried with so many gentry families, andwiththe greatest Irish princes as well, that they can call on more men and more favours than any other clan," her father told her. "Moreover," he explained, "though the Butlers' power is huge as well, their territory lies between the two Fitzgerald earldoms-Kildare on their northern flank and Desmond in the south. If the Fitzgeralds want to, they can squeeze the Butlers," he made a gesture with his two hands,

  "like a pincer. So you see, Margaret, of the two great English lordships, Fitzgerald is the natural one to govern. And if the English king tries to ignore them both and send his own man to govern, they would soon make life so difficult for him that he gives up."

  And during the rest of her childhood, this was exactly the political pattern that Margaret was to see.

  Even when Henry sent over his trusted deputy Poynings-who bluntly told the Irish Parliament they could no longer pass any laws without the Tudor king's approval, and even arrested Kildare, who was sent to London-the Fitzgeralds made it so difficult for him to govern that before long even Poynings gave up. And back in England, when he was told, "All Ireland cannot govern Kildare and his Fitzgeralds," Henry Tudor, that supreme realist, calmly observed,

  "If all Ireland cannot govern Kildare, then Kildare had better govern Ireland," and sent the head of the Fitzgeralds back as his Lord Deputy again.

  "It's Kildare who rules in Ireland,

  Margaret," her father told her, "and always will be."

  Margaret was thirteen when she learned that her father had been cheated. It happened quite by chance.

  It had promised to be an uneventful morning at Oxmantown. Her father had been at the house with no particular business to do that day, when a neighbour had come by to ask if he was going across the river to watch the fun. "Did you not hear," he explained, "that a group of Butler's and Fitzgerald's men are having a fight over by Saint Patrick's?"

  "What about?" her father asked.

  "Who knows? Because they're Butlers and

  Fitzgeralds."