V
The Princess Rohtraut of Croy, Tuillinghem and Sluijs, Duchess of Muijden and Lady Dacre, dowager of the North, was a vociferous old German woman who passed for being ill to deal with. She would cry at the top of her voice orders that it was very difficult to understand, and, when her servants did not swiftly carry these out, she would strike at them with the black stick that she leaned upon when she hobbled from place to place. This she did so swiftly that it was a marvel; for she was short and stout. She could not move without groans and wheezing and catching at the corners of tables and the backs of chairs. Nevertheless she would so strike with her stick at her servants, her stewards, the gentlemen attendant upon her son, the Lord Dacre, or even at knights, lawyers, or lords that frequented her son. She had told the King, Richard III, that he would come to no good end; she had told the Queen, Elizabeth Woodville, that she was an idle fool, and King Henry VII that his face was as sour as his wine. For that King, being a niggard, served very sour wine to his guests. Richard III had laughed at her; the Queen Elizabeth Woodville had gone crying with rage to King Edward IV. King Henry VII had affected not to hear her, which was the more prudent way. For her father, the Duke of Croy, who still lived, though a very ancient man of more than ninety, was yet a very potent and sovereign lord in Flanders, Almain, and towards Burgundy. Seventy thousand troops of all arms he could put into the field either against or for the French King, and eighty armed vessels upon the sea. The Emperor of Rome was afraid of him, for he was very malicious and had great weight with all the Electors from Westphalia to Brunswick and the Rhine. Moreover, though he himself rode no longer afield, his son, the brother of the Princess Rohtraut, was a very cunning, determined, and hardy commander. And that was to say nothing of the powers of the Dacres in England.
So those Kings and Queens did what they could least to mark the outrageous demeanour of this Princess. They did no more than as if she had been a court jester, and affected to wonder that she had once been a beautiful and young Princess, for love of whom her husband, then a simple esquire, had languished longer than need be in prison in Almain. Yet so it was.
This Princess spent the winter of most years, latterly, in London for the benefit of the climate. The summers until lately she had been accustomed to spend in Bothal Castle or Cockley Park Tower, which she hired of Sir Robert Ogle, who had lately been made Lord Ogle of Ogle. Upon the death of her husband she had inherited much land near Morpeth and she considered that she would have had much more had not the Lord Lovell, lately dead, seized so much of it by reason of his marriage with the Lady Rohtraut, the Princess's daughter. The lawsuits about these lands were not yet concluded, and it was these that the knights of Cullerford and Haltwhistle were seeking to force from the Lady Rohtraut by keeping her imprisoned. The Princess had, however, by no means abandoned her claim to these lands and it was to prosecute her lawsuits that, each summer, she came to the North. She was otherwise a very rich woman, having many coronets, chains with great pearls, rubies, ferezets, silks, hangings, furniture and much gold. Moreover, she was for ever trafficking in parcels of land with the Ogles, the Bartrams, the Mitfords and other families round the town of Morpeth. In that way she had both occupation and profit, and she harried the leisure of the several receivers of her son, the Lord Dacre whom the King kept in London.
Now, upon a day, being the second day in July of the year 1486, this lady sat upon a chair resembling a high throne upon three stone steps covered with a carpet. She had behind her yet another carpet that mounted the wall and came forward over her head in the manner of a dais. This old lady inclined always to the oldest fashions.
Thus, upon her round, old head she had an immense structure that bent her face forward as if it had been that of our Father at Rome beneath the triple tiara. It was made of two pillows of scarlet velvet, covered with a net of fine gold chains uniting large pearls. Such a thing had not been seen in England for two or three score years, but the ladies at her father's court had worn them when she had been a girl. For the rest of her, she was dressed in black wool with a girdle, from which there hung ten or a dozen keys of silver, steel, or gold inlaid with steel.
The room was fair in size, but all of stone and very dark because of the smallness of the windows. The roof went up into a peak. All painted the stone walls were, with woods and leaves, with fowlers among trees setting their nets, and maidens shaking down fruits, and men and women bathing in pools, and the vaults of the ceiling showed the history of the coffin of St. Cuthbert. Each history was divided from the other by ribs of stone painted fairly in scarlet with green scrolls. There you might see how the good monks set out from Holy Island, or how the coffin floated of itself, or how the women called one to the other about the Dun Cow. This room without doubt had formerly been some council chamber or judgment room of the Prince Bishop's in old days. But its purpose was by now forgotten, and the Lord Dacre had bought the house lately, for he considered the practice of living always in castles to be barbarous and uncomfortable. It was his purpose to pull down this old stone house and build there a fair palace where he might dwell in comfort. But, for the time being, it suited his mother well enough to dwell there.
She was sitting in the chair like a throne, leaning forward and perusing a great book of accounts held up to her by an old fellow who knelt before her in black cloths with the badge of the Dacres upon one shoulder and the silver portcullis of Croy upon the other. The old lady puzzled over this tale of capons, pence, eggs, bolls of wheat, oats and the rest that her tenants owed her. She thought it was not enough. And consequently messengers came in from the Prince Bishop, from the Dean, from the Chapter, down to the sacristan, to ask how it was with her health after her long journey from London city to Durham. She had come there the night before. And one brought her the offering of a deer, another of two fat geese, a third a salmon, a fourth a basket of strawberries grown beneath a southern wall. And, as each of these things was brought before her, she would lean forward and look upon it, and so she would lose her place in the book of accounts and scold perpetually at the old man that held it up for her.
In one of the deep, narrow window spaces stood a notable man of forty, stout and grave, with a brown beard cut squarely, and wearing a very rich blue cloak and blue round hat with a great white plume. He said nothing at all, but pared his finger-nails with a little knife. He looked between whiles out upon the high, wooded banks of the Wear that confronted his gaze across the river, and were all ablaze with the sunlight: once the Princess Rohtraut turned her head stiffly to have sight of him. But he was standing too far in the depth of the window, her chair being between one window and the other. So she cried out in a rough voice that was at once insulting and indulgent:
"This is very easy spying for King Henry." Then she chuckled and added, "Do you hear me, Sir Bertram of Lyonesse? This is very easy spying for King Henry."