Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [282]
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