The Midsummer Crown

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Everything was very hot and very still. Sunlight splashed across the walls of the farmhouse making them tremble in the afternoon heat. The courtyard was an empty, glimmering shell, and the tantalizing smell of early honeysuckle mingled with the more elusive scent of newly scythed grass. May, that most capricious of months, had today decided she would play at being August. Tomorrow, doubtless, she would again be as tearful as Niobe, alternating sunshine and showers with a chilly wind better suited to April weather.

I was five or six miles distant from London which I had quit early that morning, just after sun-up, passing through the New Gate and the fields around Holborn to join the Bristol road. I had left behind me a city fretful and uneasy, searching for the answers to questions, but uncertain exactly what those questions were.

It was just over five weeks since the sudden death of King Edward IV and the accession of his twelve-year-old son as Edward V, provoking a general sense of misgiving at the prospect of another minority reign. More than once recently I had heard Ecclesiastes quoted: ‘Woe unto thee, O land, when thy ruler is a child.’ Older people remembered, and younger people knew of, the chaos that had prevailed for so many years after Henry VI had been proclaimed king at nine months old; the jockeying for position by his various uncles, the barons’ struggle for power. And today, everyone was fully aware of the enmity between Queen Elizabeth — Dowager Queen as she now was — and her vast family of brothers, sisters and first-marriage sons and the rest of the nobility. Particularly keen was the dislike between the Woodvilles and the man who was at present the most important personage in the kingdom after the king: Richard, Duke of Gloucester.

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