The Bishop did not look much like a bishop. More like a waste of space. He had about twenty-seven chins, and by the size of his belly had been living off the fat of the land all his life. After breaking off for a huge belch he picked up his pasty in his fingers, and munched away, blissfully unaware that it was dribbling gravy and sauce all over his shabby gown.
‘Strikes me as a regular genius,’ I snorted.
‘Appearances can be deceptive. You should know that, you empty-headed waiting-woman. He’s a top man in his field. Canon Law and such stuff. Don’t know how anyone can get interested in tedious tripe like that, but I suppose the answer is it pays well. You don’t get a right lot of arrows shot at you, either. Not like my line of trade.’
The claret was getting to me. I think I must have been sickening for something, as I’d only shifted about a pint. I let out a great yawn.
‘I wonder how good he is on the validity of marriages?’ I pondered. ‘We might have room on board for him after all. I’ll check out his security file this afternoon, and then have a word with the head-hunters.’
‘You’re going back to work? On Saturday afternoon?’
‘With this rush job on I don’t have much choice. Sorry, Roger, I gather you had something else in mind?’
‘Dead right. And it wasn’t sword practice, either.’
I hated to disappoint him, but it was his own fault, after all, for getting me my job in the first place.
‘After all this is sorted,’ I promised, ‘I’m going to resign. I don’t mind staying on in Anne’s service, if she wants me, but the intelligence side is going right out the door and no messing. I’m sick to the back teeth with all this independent career nonsense. I am going to be an ordinary knight’s lady if it kills me.’
The more I read about Bishop Stillington the more fascinated I became. He had four children by assorted mistresses and, more unusually for a bishop, had done time in the Tower after the fall of Clarence, and for no explicit reason. Here was another man who liked his juice, apt to say things under its influence that he later regretted. There were many references to scandalous remarks, touching the King’s honour, although no specific quotations to justify the accusations.
But what was really interesting was that several pages had been torn from the file, none too carefully, leaving shreds of ripped parchment clinging to the binding. Security files are rarely weeded. Every irrelevant detail may one day become important, or at least useful. You rip out whole pages only when you want to hide inconvenient truth from your successors. It was an untidy, hasty piece of editing. I guessed that it had been done by someone senior, Hastings perhaps, or even the King himself, unconcerned by the prospect of detection. An Intelligence clerk would have made a much neater job of it.
I examined the torn stubs with care, but only the odd word survived. I was only able to find one that had any significance at all. The name ‘Eleanor’.
There are plenty of women in England carrying that name, including some who spell it more attractively, but fortunately only a small minority of them justified a security file at Westminster. The cross-referencing system was up to the task, and after a couple of hours I turned up what I was looking for, another file that had been put on a reducing diet. In point of fact the file had been thinned out to the point where it might just as well have been thrown away. Its subject, Lady Eleanor Talbot, one of the daughters of the old Earl of Shrewsbury, had her marriage to Sir Thomas Butler recorded, her subsequent retiral to obscurity in Norfolk, where she took religious vows, and her death, but that was about all. Believe me, no one that ordinary ever has a file opened on them. It’s too much hassle for the clerks.
It was then that I was hit by an inspiration. There were twenty-six files on Clarence, and I sent for the last of them. It had not been touched for years, and not a page was missing. There was report after report of George’s drunken ravings, of his dealings with Stanley, and Oxford, and other dubious punters. And then there it was. A copy of a letter from George to Stillington, asking the Bishop to visit Warwick Castle, and to bring with him the proofs of the espousal of King Edward and Dame Eleanor Butler.
On its own I’d have put this down as one of George’s delusions. But coupled with those edited files, and with the mystery that surrounded Clarence’s death, it seemed to me that we had a runner.
‘You really think that I should see this guy?’ asked Richard, as he scanned through my written report.
‘I do, Your Grace. Moreover, Francis agrees with me.’
Lovell nodded. ‘It’s certainly worth wheeling him in and asking a few questions. Even if the story doesn’t stand up, we can be pretty sure that he isn’t pro-Woodville. They had him stuck in the Tower for years. We could cope with an extra brace of reliable bishops about the place.’
I could see even then that Gloucester was uncomfortable. Perhaps he didn’t want to know the truth. Perhaps it just seemed to him that the truth was a shade too convenient to be really true.
‘This letter from George doesn’t prove a thing in itself,’ he objected. ‘In any event, it’s only a copy, not an original. It could be a forgery.’
‘The Bishop will be able to give you the full show of betting,’ Lovell pointed out, ‘and, if Edward was precontracted to this Butler dame, then his children by Lizzie Woodville are bastards and you are the rightful King.’
‘There’s George’s boy,’ Richard reminded him.
‘A half-wit! Only Lancastrians crown those! In any event, he’s debarred by his father’s attainder.’
‘All right, Francis. Let’s give him the once over.’
Stillington looked as worried as a flea in a lion’s mouth. I think he had visions of spending several more years on Tower porridge.
Richard put on a very serious expression. The sort you select if you’re about to declare war, or sentence someone to death.
‘Right, Bishop,’ he said briskly. ‘I want to hear everything you know about Dame Eleanor Butler, down to her shoe size. And no lark-tongue pies, either, if you please.’
(Richard was much sharper than people realised. He’d only been in London for a few weeks and he’d already picked up the local rhyming slang.)
The Bishop wrung his hands. I thought for a minute that he was going to cry. ‘But, Your Grace, I’ve been trying to get an appointment to see you for days. I don’t know how you’ve come to hear of Eleanor Butler, because it was a close secret, but it’s all horribly true. I saw them married. Truly it was so.’
‘You saw Eleanor Butler married to Sir Thomas Butler? Is that the big secret?’
The Bishop shook his chins. ‘I witnessed her marriage to your brother, King Edward. Long before he’d even heard of Elizabeth Woodville. That’s the point I’m trying to make.’
Richard seemed to slump in his chair, and he rested his head in his hands. You’d have thought that he’d just lost everything, not gained it.
‘So it’s true,’ he said, very quietly. ‘Now I understand why it was that my brother, Clarence, had to die. He had learned of this.’
‘Yes, Your Grace. And he was all too apt to talk of it while under the influence of alcoholic beverages. Of course, Eleanor Butler died some years ago, but that does not make King Edward’s children legitimate, even those born after her demise.’
He went on to explain why this was, but it was all very complex and boring, to do with the doctrines of Canon Law, and I’ve long since forgotten the full details. In fact I forgot them before I heard them. It was, however, quite clear that Richard was our lawful King. We had, as they say in archery circles, struck gold.
The big mistake was to put the publicity job into Buckingham’s hands. He made a complete hash of it, engaging some chap called Dr. Ralph Shaa to preach on the subject at Paul’s Cross the Sunday following. Either Shaa was given an inadequate brief or he didn’t bother to read it. Instead of sticking to the simple story of Eleanor Talbot-Butler, he rambled on for hours about the dubious legitimacy of King Edward IV, the silly fable that we had dumped back at first base. This was a disgraceful insult to Richard’s mother, and didn’t exactly show Richard himself up in a good light, since everyone naturally assumed that he had authorised the script. Half the folk had gone home by the time Shaa got around to telling them the bit that he should have told them in the first place, and it probably didn’t sink in with the other half, who were now more interested in their dinner than in matters of politics.