The White Rose murders srs-1 Read online

  The Sweating Sickness took my father; at least, that's what my mother said. Someone else claimed his weaving trade collapsed and he ran away to be a soldier in the Low Countries. Perhaps the sight of me frightened him! I was the ugliest of children and, remembering my fair-haired mother, must have owed my looks to Father. You see, I was born a month late, my head covered in bumps, one of my eyes slightly askew from the rough handling of the midwife's instruments. Oh, Lord, I was so ugly! People came up to my cot ready to smile and chuckle, they took one look and walked away mumbling condolences to my poor parents. As I grew older and learnt to stagger about, free of my swaddling clothes, the loud-mouthed traders along the wharves used to call out to my mother:

  'Here, Mistress, here! A cup of wine for yourself and some fruit for your monkey!'

  Well, when Father went, Mother moved on, back to her own family in the rich but boring town of Ipswich. She assumed widow's weeds though I often wondered if my father did flee, swift as a greyhound from the slips as Master Shakespeare would put it. (Oh, yes, I have patronised Will and given him what assistance I could in the writing and the staging of his plays.) Anyway, when I was seven, Mother became friendly with a local vintner and married him in the parish church – a lovely day.

  Mother wore a gown of russet over a kirtle of fine worsted and I, in silk-satins, carried the bridal cup before her with a sprig of rosemary in it. I was later very sick after stealing some wine and gnawing voraciously at the almond-packed bridal cake.

  My step-father was a kindly man – he must have been to tolerate me. He sent me off to the local grammar school where I learnt Maths, Astronomy, Latin, Greek, and read the Chronicles of Fabyan, as well as being lashed, nipped, pinched, caned and strapped along with the other boys. Nevertheless, I was good at my studies and, after Mass on Sundays, the master would give my mother such a glowing report that I would be rewarded with a silver plate of comfits. I would sit and solemnly eat these whilst plotting fresh mischief against my teacher.

  One student who was not drawn into these pranks and feats of malice was my future master, Benjamin Daunbey: quiet, studious and bookish to a fault. One day I and the other imps of Hell turned against him, placing a pitcher upon a door and crowing with delight when its contents, rich brown horse's piss, soaked him to the skin. He wiped his face and came over to me.

  'Did you enjoy that, Roger?' he asked softly. 'Did you really? Does it give you pleasure to see pain in the eyes of others?'

  He was not angry. His eyes were curious: clear, childlike in their innocence. I just stammered and turned away. The master came in, cloak billowing like bat wings around him. He seized Benjamin by the nape of the neck, roaring at him while he got his switch of birch down, ready to give the unfortunate a severe lashing. Benjamin did not utter a word but went like a lamb to the slaughter. I felt sorry then, and didn't know why. My motto has always been: 'Do unto yourself what should be done to your neighbour.' I have rarely been brave and always believed that volunteers never live to pay day. Perhaps it was the meek way Benjamin walked, the cowardly silence of my comrades…

  I stepped forward.

  'Master,' I declared, 'Benjamin Daunbey is not to blame!'

  'Then who is?' the beast roared back.

  I licked my lips nervously and held out my hand.

  'He is!' I said, turning to the smallest of my coven. 'He placed the pitcher over the door!'

  Benjamin was saved, someone else got a beating, and I congratulated myself on my own innate cunning. Well, I went from bad to worse. At night I would not go to bed. In the morning I would not get up. I did not wash my hands or study my hornbook; instead I ran wild. My mother, sickening from a strange humour, just gazed speechlessly at me, hollow-eyed, whilst my step-father's hands beat the air like the wings of some tired, feckless bird. I mocked their advice like the arrogant young fool I was. My backside became hardened to the master's cane and I began to play truant in the fields and apple-laden orchards outside the town. Once the master cornered me, asking where I had been.

  'Master,' I replied, 'I have been milking the ducks.'

  He grabbed me by the ear but I hit him hard under the chin and ran off like a whippet. I didn't go home – well, not to see my parents. I stole some money, packed a linen cloth full of food, and it was down to London where the streets are paved with gold. London I loved with its narrow alleyways, teeming Cheapside, many taverns, and, of course, well-stocked brothels. I will skirt over my many adventures but, eventually, I joined the household of old Mother Nightbird who ran one of the costliest brothels near the Bishop of Winchester's inn at Stewside close to the bridge in Southwark. I found out more about women in a month than some men would in a dozen lifetimes. I became a bully-boy, one of the roaring lads who drank deeply, and paraded the streets in a shirt of fine cambric linen, multi-coloured hose, high-stepping riding boots and a monstrous codpiece. I swaggered about, armed with hammer and dirk which I prayed I would never use.

  I fell in with bad company, one especially, a lank-haired, cunning-eyed weasel of a man called Jack Hogg. We took to breaking into houses, taking the costly silks and precious objects back to Mother Nightbird who would always find a seller. Naturally, it was not long before we were caught. Two nights in Newgate and up before the Justices at the Guildhall. We were condemned to hang but the principal justice of the bench recognised me. I knew a little about him and made it obvious that if his sexual exploits were not to be part of my last confession, I should be given a second chance. Hogg died, swinging at Elms. I was given the opportunity of either joining him or enlisting in the King's Army now being gathered in the fields north of Cripplegate to march against the Scots.

  Strange, isn't it, that even then the great mysteries of Flodden Field came south, like a mist, and changed my life? I didn't know it then. All I knew was that while King Henry VIII was in France, James IV of Scotland had sent his herald RougeCroix south with an insulting challenge to battle. Henry's Queen, the sallow-faced, lanky Catherine of Aragon, pining for her husband and longing to provide him with a lusty heir, accepted the challenge and sent insolent-eyed Surrey north with a huge army. Now old Surrey was a bastard. He drank so much the gout stopped him walking and he rode like a farmer in a cart, his orders being taken by outriders and scouts. A vicious man, Surrey, but a good general. You know, as a young man, he and his father Jack, the 'Jockey of Norfolk', fought for the Usurper Richard at Bosworth. Old Norfolk was killed and Surrey taken prisoner before Henry Tudor.

  'You fought against your King!' the Welshman shouted.

  Surrey pointed to a fence post.

  'If Parliament crowned that fence King, I'd fight for it!' he bellowed back.

  The Tudor prince seemed to relish this. Surrey went to the Tower for a while but was soon released because of his qualities as a general. He kept good discipline on that march to Flodden: he built a huge cart which carried a thirty-foot-high gallows, loudly declaring that if anyone committed a breach of camp discipline he would dance at the end of it.

  Anyway I went north to meet my destiny. The dust of our great baggage train, stirred up by wheels, feet and hooves, hung above our forest of lances, almost obscuring the late summer's sun which struck bright sparks from halberd, sword and shield. In the front, old Surrey in his cart, his yellow hair now white, his ageing body held straight in its cuirass of steel. Behind him, my goodself among the bowmen in deerskin jacket and iron helmet.

  Most of us were pressed men: gaol birds, night hawks, roaring boys. I have never seen so many evil-looking villains together in one place. We were armed with white bows six feet long, cunningly made from yew, ash or elm and strung with hemp, flax or silk. We had deep quivers full of cloth-yard arrows of oak, tipped with burnished steel and ringed with feathers of goose and swan. During the day the air was thick with the hum of flies and sour with the stench of marching men. At night we froze or shivered in our rough bothies of hay and wood and we cursed the Scots, Surrey and our hard-mouthed captains who urged us on.

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sp; We reached the Scottish Marches and crossed into a land rich in fish, wildfowl, deer, dark woods and great flocks of sheep grazing on bottle-green pastures which ringed shimmering lochs. (I won't keep you long.) Old Surrey met James at Flodden Field on Thursday, 8 September. We deployed our cavalry, massed in squadrons of shining helms and hauberks. I remember the creaking harness of our great war horses, the bannered lances and emblazoned shields. James, of course, wanted a set piece battle but Surrey's reply was sharp and caustic.

  'I have brought you to the ring, dance if you can!'

  The bloody dance began on Friday morning with the Scots massing on Flodden Ridge. All day we stood to arms. I was terrified. We saw thick smoke as the Scots burnt their camp refuse and a stormy wind blew the smoke down on us. James used this haze as a screen to launch his attack two hours before sunset. First, a steady flow of lowered spears down the slope which soon became a landslide of barefoot men across the rain-soaked grass. Thankfully, I was on the wings for the centre became a bloody slaughter house. The Scottish squadrons floundered in the marshy ground, mowed down by arrows which dropped upon them like rattling rain until the grassy slope became russet and strewn with quilled bodies. The screaming and the shouting was too much for me, especially as a squadron of Scottish cavalry, maddened to fury, charged our position. I suddenly remembered valour has its own day, dropped my bow and fled. I hid beneath a wagon until the slaughter had finished and came out with the rest of the English Army to claim a great victory.

  God, it was a shambles! Scots dead carpeted the entire field. We heard that James IV was killed. Indeed, Catherine of Aragon sent the corpse's bloody surcoat to her husband in France as proof of her great victory. She should never have done that! Bluff King Hal saw himself as a new Agamemnon and did not relish his wife reaping victories whilst he charged like an ass around Tournai. Men say Catherine of Aragon lost her husband because of the dark eyes and sweet duckies of Anne Boleyn. I know different. Catherine lost Henry when she won the victory at Flodden Field – but that was in the future, mine as well as hers. Little did I know, as we marched back to London, how the ghosts of Flodden Field would follow me south.

  The army was disbanded and, after tasting the delights of London, I decided to return to Ipswich. I came home, a Hector from the wars. I even nicked my face with a knife to give myself a martial air. This brought me many a meal and rich frothing tankards of ale but they all tasted sour for my mother was dead. She had gone the previous summer – silently, as in life, without much fuss. I went to the cemetery, through the old wicket gate, down to where she would sleep for all eternity beneath the overhanging sombre yew trees. I knelt by her grave and, on one of those rare occasions in my life, let the hot tears run scalding down my cheeks as I begged for her forgiveness and cursed my own villainy.

  My step-father was a mere wisp of what he had been, broken in spirit, shuffling and stumbling round his house like a ghost. He told me the truth: how mother had been ill of some abscess in her stomach which had bled, turning malignant, but there had been hope. Hope, he sighed, his eyes pink-rimmed, the tears pouring down his sagging cheeks; hope which died when the physician, John Scawsby, arrived on the scene. Now Scawsby was a well-known doctor and a man of repute. In fact, he was a charlatan, responsible for more deaths than the town's headsman. He had concocted some rare potions and strange elixirs for my mother but the situation had worsened and within weeks she was dead. A wise woman, a herbalist who dressed her corpse, said the malignancy had not killed her but Scawsby's elixirs had. My stepfather could do nothing but I lurked in the taprooms of Ipswich, plotting my revenge.

  I studied Scawsby most closely: his great black-and-white-timbered mansion which stood on the edge of town; his stables full of plump-haunched horses; his silken sarcenet robes; his ostentatious wealth and sloe-eyed, honey-mouthed, tight-waisted young wife. One day I struck, plunging for Scawsby as sure and as certain as a hawk on its prey. Scawsby used to like to dine at the Golden Turk, a great tavern which fronts the cobbled market square in Ipswich. He was a lean, sour-faced, avaricious man who liked to gobble his food and slurp his wines. He had not read his Chaucer or remembered the Pardoner's words, 'Avarice is the root of all evil', and I played on this. I dressed in my finest: a shirt of sheer lawn with embroidered bands at neck and cuffs, a doublet of rich red samite, dark velvet hose and a cloak of pure red wool. I also borrowed from my step-father a costly bracelet encrusted with precious stones very similar to one Scawsby wore.

  At noon on the appointed day, I entered the Golden Turk, and espied Scawsby and a friend sitting beneath the open window conversing deeply, as men full of their own self-importance are wont to do. I went over, my clean-shaven face wreathed in a smile of flattery, and with kind words and honeyed phrases gazed round-eyed at the great physician Scawsby. My flattery soon won a place in his heart and at his table and, raising my hand, I ordered the taverner to bring his best, the costliest wine and the most succulent meat of roasted capon. I played Scawsby like a trout, sitting open-mouthed before stories of his great medical triumphs. At last, when our cups were empty and our bellies full, I admired the bracelet on his wrist. I compared it to the one I wore, cursing how the clasp had broken and saying I wished a goldsmith would fit mine with a similar lock to his. Of course, Scawsby seized the bait. I placed ten pounds of silver on the table as guarantee while I borrowed his bracelet to take to a nearby goldsmith so he could copy from it when he mended mine. I also gave a ring as surety and, pleading I had no horse, asked if I could borrow his from the stable. The old fool promptly agreed and off I went, begging him to stay until I returned.

  I mounted his horse and rode like the devil to Scawsby's great mansion on the road out of town. His hot-lipped, full-bosomed wife was at home and I explained my errand: her husband wished for three hundred pounds in silver to be given to me so I could take it back to him in town. Of course, the saucy wench demurred so I plucked out her husband's bracelet which I said was his guarantee of my good faith, as well as pointing out the horse which a groom was now taking round to the stable. After that it was as easy as kicking a pig's bladder. I was taken up to her privy chamber, and given the money in clinking sacks whilst all the time I flattered and teased her. To cut a long but merry story short, I soon had her in her shift and we indulged in the most riotous romp on the great four-poster bed. After that, a cup of claret and back to the Golden Turk where Doctor Scawsby was even deeper in his cups. I returned his bracelet, took back my pledge and walked out of the tavern a much richer and more contented man.

  I had extracted my revenge and what could the old fool say? If he issued a bill of indictment against me he would become a laughing stock – which, of course, he did when I passed the story round the taverns and ale houses of Ipswich. I didn't give a damn. I still grieved for my mother and felt the anger boiling in my heart at Scawsby's ineptitude and my own neglect of her. I thought of my mother more often then; her brown, friendly face, her eyes soft as the breeze on the most beautiful summer day. Why is it, I wonder, that the women I have loved I always lose?

  Naturally, I went back to my evil ways. I spent my ill-gotten gains and turned to poaching. I had forgotten Scawsby and I made the mistake of thinking he had forgotten me. In March 1515 I was out on one of my nocturnal excursions, helping myself to good fresh meat during the lambing season. I was stopped just after midnight by the bailiff of the local squire who asked to see what I was carrying under my cloak. In spite of my indignant reply he found a young lamb. He accused me of stealing and ignored my explanation that I had found it wandering by itself and was now looking for its mother. I was thrown in gaol and appeared before the local magistrates. I thought I would just be fined but in the gallery I saw Sir John Scawsby's evil mug and a similar face sitting behind the great bench in the Sessions House. Oh, God, I prayed and whimpered.

  Scawsby's brother was the principal justice and the full force of the law came to bear on me. I was declared guilty and almost fainted when he placed the black cap on his
head and ordered me to be hanged. Lord, I screamed, but Justice Scawsby just glared back, his skull-like face an impassive mask of hatred.

  'You are to be hanged!' he roared. He grinned evilly and looked round the court. 'Unless someone here can stand maintenance for you?'

  Of course, his words were greeted with a deadly hush. My step-father was now sickly, doddering and senile; and who would bail old Shallot and risk the massed fury of the Scawsbys? I gulped and gagged as if the rough hempen necktie was already round my throat. Suddenly the Clerk to the Justices, a tall stooped figure dressed in a dark russet gown, rose and addressed the bench.

  'I will, My Lord!' he announced. 'I will place my bond 'as surety for Shallot!'

  Old Scawsby nearly exploded with apoplexy, so surprised he fixed the bond much lower than his own malice should have allowed: a hundred pounds, to be redeemed by the following Martinmas. I gripped the iron rail and stared in utter disbelief at my saviour: his long solemn face, hooked nose and calm grey eyes. Benjamin Daunbey had saved me from a hanging.

  It's hard to define our relationship. Master and servant, close bosom friends, rivals and allies… do you know, after seventy years I still can't describe it. All I remember was that I was saved and walked free from the Sessions House. Other felons, not so lucky as I, were put in the stocks, tied to the triangle for a whipping or placed in the pillory, their ears nailed to the block until they either tore themself free or plucked up enough courage to cut them off.