Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [138]
There was a moment, at the height of the battle, when Grey of Wilton lurched from his chair and thrusting to the top of the ramparts stood there, exposed in fevered despair and crazily wishing of God that some shot from the bulwark would take him.
It was a common soldier beside him who pulled him down by his scarf, but already his longstanding disciplines had asserted themselves. Calling the rest to follow, he led his remaining suite and their men to the Keep. As the bulwark fell, the men in the base court, Wheathill’s Bulwark and the garden rampart abandoned their posts also and fled. Soon all that was left of the defenders of Guînes were together, in the ultimate stronghold. Lord Grey saw the last man inside, and gave orders to ram up the portals.
Many years later the records were to tell how the Duke de Guise’s trumpeter, offering parley, came to the moatside that evening; how Lord Grey’s men, crowding about him, begged him with tears in their eyes to save their lives by compounding; how, after reading them a homily, he bade them return to their posts, which they did, before his lordship finally sent word that he was prepared to hear the Duke’s message.
In fact, there were almost no English left with Lord Grey: they had been cut to pieces defending the bastions. And the Burgundians in the stronghold at Guînes were in no two minds about what they wanted done. The gates were rammed shut. The French advanced and began to lay fuses under them. And Lord Grey’s men turned on Lord Grey and threatened to throw him over the walls unless he surrendered.
So that night a single clerk, unaccompanied, was let out at Harry Norwich’s Bulwark and waded his way with a pole over the spiked boards which filled the moat round the fortress. He had to plead his own cause on the other side, for Lord Grey’s drum had been shot in the leg and his trumpeter killed as he blew for parley. But they took him at length to the tent of M. de Guise and his brothers, and he spoke up with his offer: to yield the castle, if the garrison might be allowed to march out with bag and baggage and six pieces of ordnance, their ensign flying.
He was sent back to the fort with a refusal, and the soldiers in Guînes threatened to cut his throat unless he returned to the French and made them accept their surrender, no matter what fate befell Grey and his captains. They pushed him out through a hole in the wall, and he, who had been kicked and pummelled by his own side, was kicked and pummelled again by the enemy’s Germans before M. de Guise saw him again, and spoke kindly, and took him back to the fort on horseback, laying about his own men with a truncheon.
The clerk’s share in the business was finished. Next, the Duke de Guise’s own trumpeter sounded below the walls of the fortress, and proposed to Lord Grey a truce, with hostages; and a meeting in the French camp next morning.
Lord Grey agreed. He had no alternative. His chosen hostages, Arthur and Lewis, were sent for at first light. To leave the fort, they had to walk on the naked and newly slain cramming the bulwark, some stirring and groaning yet under the flinching steps of their boot-soles.
In their place, he received the Duke de Guise’s two gentlemen. One, tall as a tree, was Jean d’Estrée, Grand Master of the French Artillery, whose guns, the best fashioned and the best directed in the world, had just won the fortress. And the other was the architect of his downfall: the King’s new chevalier, Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny.
One does not destroy the dignity of the dead with light words on the eve of surrender. William Grey, thirteenth Baron Grey of Wilton, stood erect, his hand on a chair, his person groomed free of mud and stone dust and powder, and greeted his hostages, his sleep-starved skin lined and as unyielding as horn. ‘My salutations, gentlemen. I could have brought my brave English to face no better opponents.’
It