PLYMOUTH, AUTUMN 1450–1451

One whole year we live between Grafton, London and Plymouth. One long year while we struggle with the burghers of Plymouth, trying to persuade them to house and equip an invasion fleet. One whole year while my husband assembles a fleet from the privately owned ships of merchants, traders, and the few great lords who keep their own vessels. By mid-winter, months after we were supposed to sail, he has more than eighty boats tied up at the quaysides of Plymouth, Dartmouth, Kingsbridge, and more than three thousand men d. I ded in inns and rooms, cottages and farms, all round Devon and Cornwall: waiting.

That’s all we do; from autumn, through winter to spring, we wait. First we wait for the men who have been promised by their lords to march to Plymouth, ready to embark. Richard rides out to meet them and bring them in, finds them quarters, finds them food, promises them wages. Then we wait for the ships that have been requisitioned to come in; Richard rides all around the West Country, buying up little sailing ships in their home ports, demanding that the greater merchants make their contribution. Then we wait for the stores to arrive; Richard rides to Somerset, even into Dorset, to get grain, then we wait for the lords who will sail with the invasion to finish the merry days of Christmas and come to Plymouth, then we wait for the king’s command that we should finally set sail, then we wait for the spring northerlies to die down, and always, always, always, we wait for the ship which will bring the money from London so that we can pay the harbourside merchants, the ship owners, the sailors, the men themselves. Always we wait: and the money never comes when it should.

Sometimes it comes late, and Richard and I have to send to Grafton and our friends at court to lend us money so that we can at least feed the army before they march out into the farms around the port, and steal to feed themselves. Sometimes it comes; but in such small amounts that we can only pay the outstanding debts and offer the men just a quarter of their pay. Sometimes it comes as tally sticks that we take to the king’s custom houses and they say, regretfully, ‘Yes, it’s good, my lord; I grant your right to be paid. But I have no money to pay you with. Come again next month.’ Sometimes it is promised and never comes at all. I watch Richard, riding to the little towns of Devon, trying to appease the local landlords who are furious at having this hungry horde quartered upon them. I watch him pursue roving bands of the men who were supposed to be his army and are becoming brigands. I watch Richard begging the ship-masters to keep their vessels ready to sail in case the order for the invasion comes tomorrow, the next day, or the day after. And I watch Richard when the news comes from France that the French king has advanced on Bergerac and Bazas and taken them. In spring we hear his forces are advancing on English lands on either side of the Gironde, he sets siege to Fronsac on the Dordogne, and the townspeople wait behind its great walls, swearing they will not give up, certain that our army is coming to relieve them. Our army is on the quayside, where the ships are bobbing, when we hear that Fronsac has surrendered. The English settlers are appealing for help, they vow that they will fight, that they will resist, that they are Englishmen and count themselves as Englishmen born and bred, they stake their lives on their faith in us, they swear that their countrymen will come to their aid. I watch Richard trying to hold his army together, trying to hold his fleet together, sending message after message to London, pleading with the court to send him the order to sail. Nothing comes.

Richard starts to say that when he gets the order to sail he will leave me behind, he dare not take me to Bordeaux if the place is going to come under siege. I walk along the protective wall of the harbour and look south to the lands of France that my first husband used to command, and wish that we were both safely home in Grafton. I write to the queen myself, I tell her that we are ready to go to the rescue of Gascony but we can do nothing without money to pay the soldiers, and that while they kick their heels in the farms and villages they complain of their treatment by us, their masters and lords, and the working men and women of Devon see how badly the soldiers and sailors are treated and say that this e suingdom where a man is not rewarded for doing his duty. They mutter that the men of Kent had it right – that this is a king who cannot hold his own lands here or abroad, that he is badly advised. They whisper that Jack Cade called for Richard, Duke of York, to be admitted to the king’s councils and that Jack Cade was right, and died for his belief. They even say – though I never tell her this – that she is a French woman squandering the money that should go to the army so that her own country can seize the land of Gascony, and England be left with nothing in France at all. I beg her to tell her husband to send the order for his fleet to set sail.

Nothing comes.

In July we hear that Bordeaux has fallen to the French. In September the first refugees from Bayonne start to arrive in tattered craft and say that the whole of the duchy of Gascony has been captured by the French while the expedition to save them, commanded by my unhappy husband, waited in the dock at Plymouth, eating the stores and waiting for orders.

We have been living in a little house overlooking the harbour for all of this long year. Richard uses the first-floor room as his headquarters. I go up the narrow stairs, to find him at the small-paned window, looking out at the blue sea, where the wind is blowing briskly towards the coast of France, good sailing weather; but all his fleet is tied up at the quayside.

‘It’s over,’ he says bluntly to me as I quietly stand beside him. I put my hand on his shoulder; there is nothing I can say to comfort him in this, his moment of shame and failure. ‘It is all over, and I did nothing. I am seneschal of nothing. You have been the wife firstly of John Duke of Bedford, a mighty lord, the regent of all of France, and secondly to the seneschal of nothing.’

‘You did all that you were commanded to do,’ I say softly. ‘You held the fleet and the army together, and you were ready to sail. If they had sent the money and the order you would have gone. If they had sent the order alone, you would have gone without the money to pay them. I know that. Everyone knows that. You would have fought unpaid, and the men would have followed you. I don’t doubt that you would have saved Gascony. You had to wait for your orders; that was all. It was not your fault.’

‘Oh,’ he laughs bitterly. ‘But I have my orders now.’

I wait, my heart sinking.

‘I am to take a force to defend Calais.’

‘Calais?’ I stumble. ‘But surely the King of France is at Bordeaux?’

‘They think that the Duke of Burgundy is massing to attack Calais.’

‘My kinsman.’

‘I know, I am sorry, Jacquetta.’

‘Who will go with you?’

‘The king has appointed Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, as Captain of Calais. I am to go and support him as soon as I have dismissed the ships and sailors and the army from here.’

‘Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset?’ I repeat, disbelievingly. This is the man who lost us Normandy. Why would he be trusted with Calais, but for the king’s unswerving belief in his kinsman and the queen’s misplaced affection?

‘Please God he has learned how to soldier through defeat,’ my husband says grimly.

I lean my cheek against his arm. ‘At least you can save Calais for the English,’ I say. ‘They will call you a hero if you can hold the castle and the town.’

‘I will be commanded by the man who gave away Normandy,’ he says gloomily. ‘I will be in service to a man that Richard, Duke of York has named as a traitor. If they don’t send us men and money there either then I don’t know that we can hold it.’