‘No, indeed,’ confirmed the Spanish Ambassador, shaking his head sadly. ‘King Henry can’t afford to mislay another army.’
‘To the little mayde that danceth … £12/0s/0d’
‘A whole bloody army, boy,’ said the King to Slovo. ‘Vanished off the face of the Earth, so it did! By my leg of St George, it can’t go on!’
The Admiral had heard of this most prized of the King’s possessions and treated the oath with appropriate gravity.
‘Ahem!’ coughed De Peubla. ‘Your Majesty …’
King Henry VII and Admiral Slovo returned their attention to the little tot who had been dancing before them. Now disregarded by dint of their serious talk, she had stopped and was tottering on the precipice of tears. Henry, though slight of build, proved he could shift when he wanted and was instantly up and away across the table like a nobleman offered a crown.
‘There, there,’ he hissed, crouching down to the little girl. ‘Never you mind the silly big-people and their problems. There’s nice dancing it was, wasn’t it lads?’
A ragged chorus of oh yes and absolutely sprang from the assembled aristocracy and courtiers.
‘Off you go to your mumsy,’ suggested the King of England, ‘whilst we are so daft and preoccupied. And here’s a shiny farthing for you.’
The three-year-old, now on the up-stroke of her emotional see-saw, took the gift with a smile and retreated from the room, face front as she had been taught.
‘It’s funny,’ said Henry to Slovo as he returned to his seat by the slower but more dignified route. ‘I don’t mind the odd execution, not if it’s strictly necessary, it’s hurting people’s feelings I don’t like.’
‘Quite so,’ agreed the Admiral politely, recognizing that Kings must be allowed their eccentricities.
‘It’s in my pockets my feelings are, you see,’ Henry went on. ‘Not the best place for them to be, the Church would say – but rather there than in my pride or lustful impulses like some I know, that’s what I say.’
‘Indeed,’ answered Slovo.
‘And it’s in my pocket I’m being hurt, boy!’ said Henry, with real feeling. ‘Taxes, dues, levies, they’re all being lost – along with the taxmen in some cases.’
‘And now an army,’ offered the Admiral.
‘Ah yes. Ruinous expense: prepaid mercenaries, German landsknechtes, Venetian stradiots and English bowmen, all with my – their – advance wages in their nasty little purses. Horses, cannons, silk banners, all gone! Disgraceful, I tell you it is!’
Admiral Slovo covertly studied Henry’s jewel-encrusted doublet and reflected that times were not perhaps as bad as all that. Most impressively, the King didn’t miss a thing.
‘Oh yes,’ he said, patting the brooches and emblems covering his chest, ‘there’s still enough for the occasional treat. I risked my head for this country and if I should like a bit of shine and sparkle about my person, why shouldn’t I indulge myself? I deserve it!’
Slovo’s taste in princely attire ran more to the plain black of the fighting Borgias but he had long ago embraced the endless variety of mankind. He smiled and nodded tolerantly.
Meanwhile, his shot-across-the-bows delivered, Henry lapsed back into his previous lilt. ‘I’m an easy-going sort of King,’ he said, leaning back and surveying the window-view of the Tower through narrowed eyes, ‘just what this land needs. There’s been too much Civil War. A little is good for getting rid of bad blood but too much breeds poverty and other such nastiness. The English need a spot of peace and prosperity and I’m the boyo to give it ’em. It’s true I’m a Celt but I’m a desiccated Celt and that’s an important difference. All the nonsense has been wrung out of me by life. That means I can pass for English – at a distance – and makes me tolerable to them: for they’re a dry bunch of bastards, Admiral, I tell you that in confidence.’
‘Dry’ was not the term that would have surged into Slovo’s mind to describe the jolly-brutal, cudgel-wielding race he’d encountered en route from Pevensey Port to the Tower of London. From his fastidious perspective, the whole culture needed at least another five hundred years of development and suffering before polite judgement could be passed.
‘Mind you,’ Henry pressed on, ‘for bowmen and pragmatic traders, you couldn’t want for better – and there’s precious little tax to be had out of a Kingdom of poets. No, England’s what I always wanted and it’s what I got.’
‘The ancient prophecies, Your Majesty,’ mused de Peubla from beside them. ‘It was all the preordained will of God.’
Henry grunted dismissively. ‘Didn’t seem that way when the clothyard was flying down at Bosworth, boy,’ he said grimly, ‘and that big bastard Richard was hacking his way ever closer. “The Armes Prydain” sounded pretty damn thin then, I can tell you – not many!’
‘A versified Celtic vision, Admiral,’ explained de Peubla helpfully, ‘predicting the union of the scattered Celtic peoples to defeat their Saxon enemy.’
‘“The warriors will scatter the foreigners as far as Durham …”’ recited Henry. ‘“For the English there will be no returning … The Welsh will arise in a mighty fellowship … The English race will be called warriors no more …” and so on and on. A load of old bardic guff, if you ask me. It’s the same as all the King Arthur stuff …’
‘Ah yes,’ interrupted Admiral Slovo – who had only a passing, say, one-night-stand, relationship with modern literature, ‘your lost King and his Holy groin …’
‘Er … yes, in a manner of speaking,’ confirmed Henry, only momentarily disconcerted. ‘Well, I’ll use all this, you see; like I named my first born Arthur just to get the Cymru vote, but don’t expect me to believe in it, man – that or the “Prydain”. It’s for footsoldiers only, like all this national-consciousness business.’
Slovo signalled his agreement. This was getting pleasantly cynical.
‘I mean, you’ll hear it recited five times a day,’ Henry went on, ‘from the tribe of Cymru and Cornish nobles who have somehow ensconced themselves at court in my victorious wake. And all because their mother’s cousin’s friend lifted a blade on my behalf – or would have done if it hadn’t been so rainy that day. Ah! I’ve not much time for them, Admiral; they rub me up the wrong way, so they do. Besides, I know the English are mostly either ambitious or a bit slow, but if these idiots taunt them too much they’ll wake up! There’s six times as many of them as there are of us, even if every man-jack Celt combined – and who ever heard of that? We’d all get our throats slit that day and no mistake. No, as to these boasting Welsh boyos, I’ll disabuse them of their great expectations before too long, you wait and see.’
Admiral Slovo smiled in concurrence.
King Henry returned the favour with an appraising glance. ‘Come with me,’ he said eventually, as if some inner debate had been resolved. ‘I’ll show you what this is really all about.’
Admiral Slovo allowed himself to be guided around the table and to the nearby window.
‘There!’ said Henry triumphantly, indicating the courtyard bustle below. ‘The Tower of London! It has a ring to it, don’t you think? It means something in the counsels of the mighty. Now, that could not be said of, for instance, the “Tower of Llandaff” or the “Tower of Bangor”, could it?’