The Rose of York: Love & War

by Sandra Worth

  ~*~

  Richard did not take long to give the Countess an answer. Anne must live. Without Anne, there was no light, no air, no warmth in the world. Without Anne, he could not go on. The night passed. Richard did not sleep. Day broke; rain fell; nothing changed. The hours passed in wretched anguish for Anne and the babe who would not be born. He rose from the altar in the chapel where he had knelt all afternoon and went to the window. A storm had blown in and rain pelted from the dark skies, drenching the castle grounds. Lightning struck nearby, and a moment later, the crash of thunder rattled the windowpanes. Church bells tolled: he counted five. Almost a full day had passed since the evening in the solar. It seemed so long ago. He wandered through the passageways of the Keep and took the bridge to the birthing chamber in the Round Tower.

  Cries still drifted from the room, though weaker than before, and the greyfriar still waited, though now he drooped on a stool. The lady-in-waiting was the first to notice Richard. She curtsied. The physician rose. “My lord, I have instructed root of peony be crushed and mixed with oil of roses. The mixture applied to my lady’s stomach eases pain,” he explained gravely.

  “How much longer?” demanded Richard.

  The physician shook his head. “There is no knowing. Sometimes the birthing takes days.”

  “Days?”

  The greyfriar omitted to add that in such cases where the birth dragged on for more than thirty hours, the babe was born dead. Longer than that, and infection was bound to set in and claim the mother. He looked at the Duke with pity, for many a beloved wife had faded out of this world with her babe just so, and physician though he was, and learned in the ways of medicines, potions, unguents, and the stars, often he had naught to do but sit outside their room until it was time to grant extreme unction.

  “I must do something!” Richard cried.

  “There is prayer, my lord,” the friar replied.

  As if to mark his words, church bells clanged nearby and were echoed across the distance. Aye, all over the North prayers were being said. All that could be done was being done.

  “My Lord Duke, if it be solace, I have consulted the stars and they are not ill-omened. Saturn is in dangerous alignment, but Jupiter is favourable to her moon.”

  Richard inclined his head in a gesture of thanks. Anne had said that Heaven was against them. She was wrong. That, at least, was comfort.

  ~*~

  Richard spent much of the evening in Anne’s chamber, on his knees at her prie-dieu. At last sleep stole on his bleary eyes. He fell into bed and tossed by the dimness of a candle, seized by dreams that sent him bolt upright in his sleep. There was Ludlow, lit by burning crosses and grinning fiends who danced in their flames… There was George, his blue eyes contemptuous, tossing his flaxen curls, sneering, Thou art not our father’s son; thou art the son of an archer… And there was the pale doomed face of Henry VI, holding up his silver crucifix, which grew until it blotted out all light behind it, while Henry smiled a secret smile. Darkness will fall upon thee; I shall be avenged.

  “No!” Richard panted, twisting his head from side to side. “No!”

  “My lord, my lord…”

  Someone was shaking him. Richard opened his eyes and sat up dizzily. His gaze focused slowly. The face that bent over him was blurred and he could not tell whose it was.

  “My lord,” said his new squire, John Nesfield. “The Countess has sent me for you. ’Tis time.”

  Richard leapt from the bed, his heart in his throat. “What hour is it?” he mumbled thickly, pushing his hair back from his brow. He must have slept more soundly than he realised; he had heard no church bells.

  “Almost daybreak, my lord,” Nesfield replied.

  Richard panicked. “My lady…?”

  Nesfield shook his head. “I know nothing, my lord. A maidservant sent by the Countess bade me make haste and fetch you.”

  Richard leaned over the silver ewer on the sideboard. Nesfield picked up a pitcher of water and poured. The frigid water stung. Richard grabbed the towel Nesfield offered and briskly dried his head and neck. He felt much better, except for his legs, which refused to carry him and moved as unsteadily as a drunkard’s. He grabbed Nesfield’s shoulder, indicated he should lead the way, and stumbled after him. They reached the anteroom of Anne’s birthing chamber. Her mother was waiting. Richard let go of Nesfield’s shoulder and practically fell on the Countess. He searched her face, his heart in his throat.

  “My lord Richard,” she said. And smiled.

  Joy exploded in his breast. “Anne!” He seized the Countess by the shoulders. “Anne will live!”

  “It looks well for them. For them both…” Her smile widened, then slowly dimmed. “Only…”

  Richard’s heart began the fearful pounding again.

  “She will be unable to bear more children, my lord.”

  So that was all! Richard’s face split into a smile from ear to ear. “What more need I, when I have Anne and the babe?”

  Beaming, the Countess thrust open the chamber door. Richard’s eyes flew to Anne. She lay propped on a pile of satin pillows, a smile on her pale lips, a bundle of white cloth in her arms. “Anne!” He ran to her. Though she was pale and wan, she was smiling and her violet eyes looked up at him, wide and clear.

  “Richard, behold your son,” she whispered with pride. He followed the movement of her hand to the bundle in her arms.

  He stood staring. Anne spoke again, but he barely heard her words, so awe-struck was he with the child. The babe made little sleeping movements with its tiny, crinkly red face. It had dark hair. He reached out and touched it gently, oh so gently, with the tip of a finger. It opened its eyes. They were dark, but whether blue or grey, he could not tell. The eyes stared at him with an unfocused sleepy depth in them. He fell to his knees and threw his arms across the two treasures of his life, feeling as though he floated in a golden light.

  And indeed he did, for the sun had come up at that moment to fill the new day with glittering dawn. Doves, which had flown up from the dovecote, sat on the windowsill, cooing gently amid the ivy, and through the window thrown open to the garden drifted the fragrant scent of roses. Aware, yet unaware, Richard felt their touch, each and every one. As the notes of lute, lyre, harp, and rebec in the hands of genius combine into music of a nearly celestial order, so the notes of the morning fell on his heart, which was swept with almost holy bliss. Doubts, uncertainties, foul dreams fled, banished by love; a love augmented, holding twice its promise, flinging open its doors ever wider into a world blazing with hope and joy. Ignorant and blind sinner that he was, somehow he had managed to lose the darkness of the past and stumble into radiant light.

  Anne’s words filtered into his consciousness at last. There won’t be any more babes. Forgive me, my dearest love… Richard gazed at her tenderly. “We may have only one child, but we will give him the love of ten, beloved Anne.”

  Anne turned to gaze at the babe in her arms, and as she did so, a flutter on the windowsill drew her attention to the departure of the doves. A raven stood on the sill they had abandoned, staring at her with hard yellow eyes, his ebony bulk blotting out the light. As abruptly as he had appeared, he flew off with a flap of his large black wings. A shadow passed across the room.

  Her arms tightened around the infant she held. “And we shall keep him safe, Richard, won’t we?” she whispered.

  “With God’s help,” Richard replied, “we shall keep him safe.”

  ~ * * * ~

  — End of Book One —

  Author’s Note

  Much has been written about Richard III, and many readers are familiar with Shakespeare’s portrayal of him as England’s most reviled and villainous monarch. What is not as widely known is that Richard III gave us a body of laws that forms the foundation of modern Western society. His legacy includes bail, the presumption of innocence, protections in the jury system against bribery and tainted verdicts, and “Blind Justice”—the concept that all men should be seen a
s equal in the eyes of the law. He was the first king to proclaim his laws in English so that poor men could know their rights, and the first to raise a Jew to England’s knighthood.

  Such ideas were revolutionary in the fifteenth century. They alienated many in the nobility and the Church and played no small part in Richard’s ultimate fate. Two hundred years later, when it was safe to do so, men questioned the traditional view of Richard bequeathed to them by the Tudors and found themselves unable to reconcile the justician with the villain, the man with the myth.

  Two of Richard’s most well known modern-day critics, Alison Weir and Desmond Seward, subscribe to Shakespeare’s depiction of him as a hunchbacked serial killer. In his book Royal Blood: Richard III and the Mystery of the Princes, Bertram Fields, a prominent U.S. attorney and author, examines the school of thought represented by Weir and exposes the inconsistencies and deficiencies of the traditional view.

  Richard III caught my imagination when I saw his portrait at the National Gallery, London. Then I read Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time. This compelling mystery inspired me to consume whatever I could find on Richard and to make several research trips to England in search of the true Richard. It was in Paul Murray Kendall’s Richard the Third that I finally found him. Kendall, a professor of English Literature and Shakespearean scholar, provides a most convincing and illuminating portrayal of Richard and his times, and it is his interpretation of events that is reflected in this book.

  While Shakespeare was a great dramatist, he never claimed to be an historian. In an age of torture and beheadings, he wrote to please the Tudors. The authority Shakespeare drew on was Sir Thomas More’s History of King Richard III, a derisive account that More never finished, of the last Plantagenet king. An enduring mystery is why More broke off in mid-sentence and mid-dialogue to hide his manuscript. Fifteen years after his death, it was found by his nephew, translated from the Latin, and published. Had Sir Thomas More discovered the dangerous truth that the true villain was not Richard III but the first of the Tudors, Henry VII?

  The question remains, and the debate continues.

  For those who wish to know more about Richard’s story as I have presented it, here are some brief notes.

  It may come as a surprise to many readers that there were, indeed, vegetarians in the fifteenth century. This fact is documented by John Stowe in Stowe’s Survey of London, which has been regarded as the prime authority on the history of London from its initial publication in 1598.1 Richard’s deformity appears to be a Tudor invention since history makes no mention of a hump, but does record that the Countess of Desmond, who danced with Richard at a banquet, commented on his good looks.

  The window that Richard installed and embossed with his Boar insignia still stands at Barnard’s Castle, gazing out over the magnificent view that may have changed little since Richard’s day. Anne did disappear during the family feud between Richard and George, and she was disguised as a kitchen maid, although in whose kitchen has not been recorded. It is my cherished theory that perhaps this most romantic episode in their lives inspired Charles Perrault’s Cinderella centuries later.

  While it is commonly thought that Richard wed Anne in the Hall of Rufus, in view of the strained relationship with George and the fact that they were married without a papal dispensation, a formal state wedding seems unlikely. For that reason, I have taken Swallow’s suggestion that they were married by Archbishop Neville in his manor.2 No information exists, however, on the identity of the woman, or women, who might have borne Richard’s two illegitimate children, and I have taken Rosemary Horrox’s suggestion that it was Katherine Haute.3

  I wish to correct a regrettable omission in early printings regarding John Neville’s letter of farewell to his wife. This letter, written on the eve of battle, draws heavily from one written on July 14, 1861, during the American Civil War by Major Sullivan Ballou to his wife, Sarah. Major Ballou was killed at the first battle of Bull Run. Four hundred years separate John Neville and Major Ballou, but history repeats itself, and never more poignantly than here. My intent, for those who recognize the famous letter, is to underscore this tragic point.

  Regarding the Prologue, it is no doubt clear to all readers that this scene derives from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. No one can be sure where Shakespeare found his inspiration, or even whether he himself wrote the plays we credit to him. The prologue is intended to highlight the curious similarity to Richard’s own love affair with Anne Neville.

  The reader may also be interested to know that Senor de Gruthuyse’s palace has survived in Bruges and is now a museum, and that the celebrations that marked Margaret of York’s wedding to Charles the Bold in 1468 are re-enacted every summer between April and October in that charming medieval city.

  In closing, I wish to acknowledge that Francis Lovell is not known to have had a club foot, but several clues seem to suggest a disability of some kind. Here I beg the reader’s indulgence, since a full explanation of my thesis cannot be provided until the third and last book of this series, The Rose of York: Fall From Grace.

  ENDNOTES

  1. Stowe’s Survey of London, (Introduction by H.E. Wheatley); Everyman’s Library, Dutton, New York; p. 415

  2. Henry Swallow, The House of Neville, p.221. According to Swallow, Archbishop Neville officiated at the marriage of Anne to Richard. Had the marriage been a state wedding held in the Hall of Rufus, the Archbishop of Canterbury would have officiated.

  3. Rosemary Horrox, Richard III: A Study of Service; Cambridge University Press, 1989; p.81

  Table of Contents

  Title page

  Imprint page

  What reviewers are saying

  Praise for Sandra Worth

  Books by Sandra Worth

  Foreword

  Characters

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Author’s note