The Great Revolt by Paul Dowswell

Author:Paul Dowswell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

CHAPTER TWELVE

Back at the Tower the day had not gone well, although Richard had regained his kingly manner and his face was now a mask. The hysteria he had shown on witnessing the bridge crossing had gone but his anger was unmistakable. Guy de Clare had not seen him smile all day. Everything he said was terse, abrupt. Servants especially were being treated with withering contempt and petty violence. When one chamber boy came to him with the wrong shoes, Richard clouted the young lad so hard around the head he burst into tears. That annoyed the king even more and the boy was immediately dismissed from his household.

But what was especially interesting to Guy was the manner of the king’s chief advisors – Treasurer Hales and Chancellor Sudbury. Their usual haughtiness, lofty pronouncements and gestures had gone. Now, they circled the king like wary animal keepers, charged with the care and maintenance of an unpredictable lion. They spoke to each other occasionally in hushed whispers and everything Richard said they leaped on to assure him of their loyalty and duty to the crown.

Hales and Sudbury both had that pale doomed look about them. They breathed in shallow breaths, and they constantly seemed to be fighting off an attack of the hiccups, or bad indigestion. Guy knew what was going on. He had seen such behaviour in men due to be sentenced before a court for a capital offence. This was naked fear. And Guy could guess what was going through their minds. He knew the rustics had demanded the heads of the king’s advisors. And maybe those very same men knew full well what was going on in their monarch’s head. Were their lives a price he was prepared to pay to get these stinking, uneducated scum away from his capital city? Should he trade their lives in the hope that the mob would spare the life of their monarch? It would be a shrewd move, to be sure. The peasants had assured him that their loyalty still lay with their king. But they were seethingly angry at someone – and that someone was plain enough. It was reported they even chanted the names of the men they were certain were responsible for their unhappiness.

*

Sometime after their midday meal, a courier cried in alarm from atop the castle walls. ‘Fire by the river. Fire in the Strand.’

Richard stood up at the long dining table and ordered his advisors to stay seated. ‘De Clare, come with me,’ he snapped at Guy.

There were now several fires around London – they had seen the King’s Bench prison set ablaze not long after the peasants had first crossed the river that morning. But this one sounded even more alarming.

The two of them hurried up the winding stone staircase that led to the highest ramparts of the Tower. Looking along the length of the river, just before the great bend, they could see a plume of black snaking into the sky. Red and yellow flames flickered among the dense smoke.

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