I began to worry about my future. The career prospects in convents are pretty limited. And once you’ve scrubbed one cloister floor, brother, you’ve scrubbed them all.
The Audley family are an obscure tribe. Few of us have made any mark at all on the pages of history, and if my father had had the wit to stay away from Blore Heath he would have been no exception to this rule. It may surprise you to learn that despite my insignificance I was a close kinswoman of King Edward. In fact, his grandfather and my grandmother were brother and sister, and you don’t get much closer to royalty than that without being royal yourself. I saw prospects in this, great prospects. In truth, it seemed to me that we, as a family, had fallen very nicely on our feet. My eldest half-brother, John, now Lord Audley, had changed sides at just the right time, and was now well established in Cousin Edward’s favour. Believe me when I say that one Yorkist half-brother on the King’s Council is worth a lot more than two Lancastrian full brothers begging their bread in exile.
John was like a second father to me. He was old enough to play the role convincingly, pushing along towards forty. He came to visit me in the convent.
‘Hibe dissided to put yew in Lhaddie Wawwick’s howseowd,’ he said. He had a very bad cold at the time. I thought at first that he was doing a rather poor impression of a Coventry alderman.
‘I’d much rather go to Court,’ I said, trying to be persuasive.
‘Tuff!’ he answered, giving me a brotherly smack across the mouth.
I picked myself off the floor. ‘All right, John. You’ve made your point. Lady Warwick’s it is. Where is she? Not at Warwick I suppose?’
‘Up at Middlumb. Und behabe byourself, or dere’ll be twouble.’
I don’t know what gave him the idea that I wouldn’t behave myself. I think he must have been talking to that Prioress. For some reason or other she had taken a real dislike to me.
It only took me about four weeks to get to Middleham, which for those of you who don’t know is right at the top end of Yorkshire, and a bit too close to bloody Scotland for comfort. By the time I got there I had the fleas of ten counties climbing all over me, fighting their battles in some very funny places as they argued about who had the right to suck my blood.
Lady Warwick was another of my cousins. (In fact, my mother and hers were half-sisters. You can paint my quarterings on a shield and they look good enough to go on anyone’s tomb.) She looked me up and down as if I was a large bag of horse-shit that some thoughtless groom had left on her carpet. I catch on quickly, and I already knew that life at Middleham was going to be one big barrel of laughs. She didn’t like my curtsey. Christ, she had me curtseying for a whole week until I got it right. Then we started on the kneeling, because she said it was a skill necessary for those who took part in Court ceremonial. There’s nothing more fun than kneeling for four or five hours at a stretch with your back straight. Yes, after that you really feel like dancing the night away.
You may think that I didn’t much take to Anne, Countess of Warwick and you’d be dead right. As for her husband, Richard Neville, the Kingmaker, what can I say of him that hasn’t already been said? He was tall, broad, and full of crap. To hear him talk you’d have thought that he, single-handed, had put King Edward on the throne, and that he, single-handed, was now running the country.
Things were still pretty lively in Yorkshire in those days. One of Margaret of Anjou’s bright ideas had been to give Berwick away to the Scots in return for their help. This help came in the form of many violent raids across our borders, in which they were aided by sundry villainous thieves of the Lancastrian persuasion. Every so often, in addition to this, some little group of Mad Harry’s followers would sneak into some poxy Northumbrian castle and hold on to it until Warwick and his brother, John, Lord Montagu, could get round to grabbing it back. They were great days for men who were tired of life.
You can see how I had come on in a short time. Instead of sitting in a Lancastrian castle worrying about falling into the hands of the Yorkists, I was sitting in a Yorkist castle worrying about falling into the hands of the Lancastrians. Yes, we were definitely building a better world.
After a couple of years the fighting began to ease off. We Yorkists had won.
There was already a new storm brewing. News came to us that the King had married, in secret, one Elizabeth Woodville.
Warwick was not a happy bunny when he heard of this. People often talk about someone dancing with rage, but this was the only time in my life that I saw a man actually do it, and that man was the Kingmaker. You see, as far as he was concerned, the King had no right to do anything at all without consulting the Earl of Warwick. Yet Edward had married himself to an obscure Lancastrian widow who was the best part of ten years his senior. A woman with no money, lots of greedy relatives, and no influence abroad. Boy, did Warwick dance. I don’t know where he learned the steps, but if he’d entered the competition at Masham Fair he’d have won by a mile and a half.
Everything was smoothed over for a time, but it didn’t take long for Warwick to find fresh grievances. He collected them as his main hobby, and always liked to have more than anyone else.
One day I was up on the battlements taking the air. (Middleham is a very good place to do that. There’s plenty of air. Plenty of sheep. Not much else.) I was minding my own business when along came young Rob Percy, one of Warwick’s numerous esquires.
‘Any chance of a poke?’ he asked.
‘A poke in the eye, you horrible brat,’ I snapped back. ‘For one thing, you’re a snotty little boy who couldn’t squeeze enough out to father a mouse. For another, I have every intention of keeping myself pure for my future husband. For a third, I’m wearing a clavette.’
He grinned. ‘No offence meant, Nell. I mean, you can’t blame me for trying can you? A man’s expected to try. Is it uncomfortable? The clavette?’
‘Oh, no,’ I answered, with a subtle hint of irony, ‘it’s just like a second skin. Every girl’s dream is to have about five pounds of steel padlocked around her middle. Didn’t you know?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, still grinning. He was one of those intensely irritating people you just cannot abash, no matter how much you try to embarrass them. He had bright red hair and a face full of freckles. ‘Listen, Nell, do you know that we’ve a newcomer in the household? Do you know who it is? Richard of Gloucester, the King’s brother.’
‘Am I supposed to be impressed?’ I asked.
‘Yes. You haven’t seen him yet. I have. He’s a dwarf with a hump on his back.’
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Everyone knows that King Edward is incredibly handsome. He’s six feet four inches tall, with the biggest biceps in Europe. How can his brother be a dwarf and a hunchback?’
‘I dunno,’ shrugged Robert, ‘but he is.’
However, when I saw Richard of Gloucester for myself I discovered that while he was indeed only a slightly built lad, with the traditional acne, there was no sign of any hunchback. I later learned that it was very much a matter of posture, what Lady Warwick called deportment. In certain lights, when he slouched, Richard appeared to have a hump on his back. But he didn’t really have one at all. That’s my theory, anyway, and you may do with it what you will.
The trouble with Richard was not that he was hunchbacked but that he had no sense of humour. I shall spell that out to save you from any doubts. NO SENSE OF HUMOUR AT ALL.
That Christmas we had a troupe of players up from York to entertain us. They were about as entertaining as toothache until one of them seemed to make a mistake, and set his costume alight with a torch. You should have seen the leaping that brought on! The hall rocked. Everyone was pissing himself, from Warwick down to the scullions peeping in from the kitchens. Alianore Audley, damosel, fell backwards off her bench, shattered her hennin, and knocked Rob Percy, esquire, off his feet, so that the wine he was carrying spilled everywhere. Even Warwick’s daughters, who always looked as if someone had just given them a very nasty shock, were giggling and gurgling like a pair of moorland streams. And Richard of Gloucester? What did he do? He picked up a cloak, which Lord Scrope of Bolton had left lying around, strode into the middle of the hall, and rolled the player in it, smothering the flames. That’s Richard summarised for you. It never even occurred to him that it might all be part of the act. I don’t think Scrope was too pleased when he got his sable cloak back with a bloody big hole burned through it, but as the King’s brother had done it I suppose he had to regard it as an honour.