The White Queen: A Novel

by Philippa Gregory

  For no reason at all, I shiver.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing, I don’t know. A shiver of cold: nothing. I know he will make a wonderful king. He’s a real York and a real son of the House of Rivers. There could be no better start for a boy.”

  DECEMBER 1476

  Christmas comes, and my darling son Prince Edward comes home to Westminster for the feast. Everyone marvels at how he has grown. He is seven next year, and a straight-standing, handsome, fair-headed boy with a quickness of understanding and an education that is all from Anthony, and the promise of good looks and charm that is all his father’s.

  Anthony brings both my sons to me, Richard Grey and Prince Edward, for my blessing and then releases them to find their brothers and sisters.

  “I miss you all three. So much,” I say.

  “And I you,” he says, smiling at me. “But you look well, Elizabeth.”

  I make a face. “For a woman who is sick every morning.”

  He is delighted. “You are expecting a baby again?”

  “Again, and given the sickness, they all think it will be a boy.”

  “Edward must be delighted.”

  “I assume so. He shows his delight by flirting with every woman within a hundred miles.”

  Anthony laughs. “That’s Edward.”

  My brother is happy. I can tell at once, from the easy set of his shoulders and the relaxed lines around his eyes. “And what about you? Do you still like Ludlow?”

  “Young Edward and Richard and I have things just as we want them,” he says. “We are a court devoted to scholarship, chivalry, jousting, and hunting. It is a perfect life for all three of us.”

  “He studies?”

  “As I report to you. He is a clever boy and a thoughtful one.”

  “And you don’t let him take risks hunting?”

  He grins at me. “Of course I do! Did you want me to raise a coward for Edward’s throne? He has to test his courage in the hunting field and in the jousting arena. He has to know fear and look it in the face and ride towards it. He has to be a brave king, not a fearful one. I would serve you both very ill if I steered him away from any risk and taught him to fear danger.”

  “I know, I know,” I say. “It is just that he is so precious—”

  “We are all precious,” Anthony declares. “And we all have to live a life with risk. I am teaching him to ride any horse in the stable and to face a fight without a tremble. That will keep him safer than trying to keep him on safe horses and away from the jousting arena. Now, to far more important things. What have you got me for Christmas? And are you going to name your baby for me, if you have a boy?”

  The court prepares for the Christmas feast with its usual extravagance, and Edward orders new clothes for all the children and ourselves as part of the pageant that the world expects from England’s handsome royal family. I spend some time every day with the little Prince Edward. I love to sit beside him when he sleeps, and listen to his prayers as he goes to bed, and summon him to my rooms for breakfast every day. He is a serious little boy, thoughtful, and he offers to read to me in Latin, Greek, or French until I have to confess that his learning far surpasses my own.

  He is patient with his little brother Richard, who idolizes him, following him everywhere at a determined trot, and he is tender to baby Anne, hanging over her cradle and marveling at her little hands. Every day we compose a play or a masque, every day we go hunting, every day we have a great ceremonial dinner and dancing and an entertainment. People say that the Yorks have an enchanted court, an enchanted life, and I cannot deny it.

  There is only one thing that casts a shadow on the days before Christmas: George the Duke of Dissatisfaction.

  “I do think your brother grows more peculiar every day,” I complain to Edward when he comes to my rooms in Whitehall Palace to escort me to dinner.

  “Which one?” he asks lazily. “For you know I can do nothing right in the eyes of either. You would think they would be glad to have a York on the throne and peace in Christendom, and one of the finest Christmas feasts we have ever arranged; but no: Richard is leaving court to go back north as soon as the feast is over, to demonstrate his outrage that we are not slogging away in a battle with the French, and George is simply bad tempered.”

  “It is George’s bad temper which is troubling me.”

  “Why, what has he done now?” he asks.

  “He has told his server that he will not eat anything sent to him from our table,” I say. “He has told him he will only eat privately, in his own room, after the rest of us have had dinner. When we send him a dish down the room to him as a gesture of courtesy for him to taste, he will refuse it. I hear he plans to send it back to us as an open insult. He will sit at the dinner table in company with an empty plate before him. He will not drink either. Edward, you will have to speak to him.”

  “If he is refusing drink, it is more than an insult, it is a miracle!” Edward smiles. “George cannot refuse a glass of wine, not if it came from the devil himself.”

  “It is no laughing matter if he uses our dinner table to insult us.”

  “Yes, I know. I have spoken to him.” He turns to the retinue of lords and ladies who are forming a line behind us. “Give us a moment,” he says and draws me off to a window bay where he can talk without being overheard. “Actually, it’s worse than you know, Elizabeth. I think he is spreading rumors against us.”

  “Saying what?” I ask. George’s resentment of his older brother was not satisfied by his failed rebellion and forgiveness. I had hoped he would settle into being one of the two greatest dukes in England. I had thought he would be happy with his wife, the whey-faced Isabel, and her enormous fortune, even though he lost control of his sister-in-law Anne when she married Richard. But like any mean, ambitious man, he counts his losses more than his gains. He begrudged Richard his wife, little Anne Neville. He begrudged Richard the fortune that she brought him. He cannot forgive Edward for giving Richard permission to marry her, and he watches every grant that Edward makes to my family and kinsmen, every acre of land Edward gives to Richard. You would think England was a tiny field that he feared losing a row of peas, such is his anxious suspicion. “What can he say against us? You have been ceaselessly generous to him.”

  “He is saying again that my mother betrayed my father and that I am a bastard,” he says, his mouth to my ear.

  “For shame! That old story!” I exclaim.

  “And he is claiming that he made an agreement with Warwick and Margaret of Anjou which said that at Henry’s death he should be king. So that he is rightful king now, as Henry’s appointed heir.”

  “But he killed Henry himself!” I exclaim.

  “Hush, hush. Nothing of that.”

  I shake my head and the veil from my headdress dances in my agitation. “No. You must not be mealymouthed about that now, not between the two of us in private. You said at the time that his heart gave out, and that was good enough for everyone. But George cannot pretend that he is the man’s chosen and named heir when he was his murderer.”

  “He says worse,” my husband warns.

  “Of me?” guess.

  He nods. “He says that you—” He breaks off and looks round to see that no one is in earshot. “He says that you are a w…” His voice is so low he cannot speak the word.

  I shrug my shoulders. “A witch?”

  He nods.

  “He is not the first to say so. I suppose he will not be the last. While you are King of England he cannot hurt me.”

  “I don’t like it being said about you. Not just for your reputation but for your safety. It is a dangerous name to attach to a woman, whoever her husband might be. And besides, everyone always goes on to say that our marriage was an enchantment. And that leads them to say that there was no true marriage at all.”

  I give a little hiss like an angry cat. I care less about my own reputation: my mother taught me that a powerful woman will always attract slander
; but those who say that I am not truly married would make bastards of my sons. This is to disinherit them.

  “You will have to silence him.”

  “I have spoken to him, I have warned him. But I imagine that, despite it all, he is making a cause against me. He has followers, more every day, and I think he may be in touch with Louis of France.”

  “We have a peace treaty with King Louis.”

  “Doesn’t stop his meddling. I think nothing will ever stop his meddling. And George is fool enough to take his money and cause me trouble.”

  I look around. The court is waiting for us. “We have to go in to dinner,” I say. “What are you going to do?”

  “I shall speak to him again. But in the meantime, don’t send him any dishes from our table. I don’t want him making a show of refusing them.”

  I shake my head. “Dishes go to favorites,” I say. “He is no favorite of mine.”

  The king laughs and kisses my hand. “Don’t turn him into a toad either, my little witch,” he says in a whisper.

  “I don’t need to. He’s that in his heart already.”

  Edward does not tell me what he says to this, his most difficult brother, and not for the first time I wish my mother was still with me: I need her advice. After a few weeks of sulking and refusing to dine with us, stalking around the palace as if he were afraid to sit down, drawing away from me as if my very gaze might turn him to stone, George announces that Isabel, in the last months of her pregnancy, is ill: sickened by the air, he announces pointedly, and he is taking her from court.

  “Perhaps it’s for the best,” my brother Anthony says to me hopefully one morning as we walk back to my rooms after Mass. My ladies are behind me, except for Lady Margaret Stanley, who is still on her knees in chapel, bless her. She prays like a woman who has sinned against the Holy Ghost itself, but I know for a fact that she is innocent of everything. She does not even bed her husband; I think she is quite without desire. My guess is that nothing stirs that celibate Lancastrian heart but ambition.

  “He has everyone asking what Edward has done to anger him, and he is insulting to both of you. He’s got people talking about whether Prince Edward resembles his father, and how anyone can know if he is your true-born son, since he was born in sanctuary without proper witnesses. I asked Edward for permission to challenge him to a joust. He cannot be allowed to speak of you as he does. I want to defend your name.”

  “What did Edward say?”

  “He said better to ignore him than give any support to his lies by challenging them. But I don’t like it. And he abuses you and our family, our mother too.”

  “It’s nothing to what he does to his own,” I remark. “He calls our mother a witch, but his own he names as a whore. He is not a man who is afraid to slander. I am surprised his mother does not order his silence.”

  “I think she has done so, and Edward has reprimanded him in private, but nothing will stop him. He is beside himself with spite.”

  “At least if he is away from court he will not be forever whispering in corners and refusing to dance.”

  “As long as he does not plot against us. Once he is far away in his house surrounded by his retainers, Edward will know nothing of who he is summoning, till he has men in the field again, and Edward has a rebellion on his hands.”

  “Oh, Edward will know,” I say shrewdly. “He will have men watching George. Even I have a paid servant in his house. Edward will have dozens. I will know what he is doing before he does it.”

  “Who is your man?” Anthony asks.

  I smile. “It does not have to be a man to watch and understand and report. I have a woman in his household, and she tells me everything.”

  My spy, Ankarette, sends me weekly reports, and she tells me that George is indeed receiving letters from France, our enemy. Then just before Christmas Day she writes of the failing health of his wife, Isabel. The little duchess gives birth to another child, her fourth, but does not recover her strength, and only weeks after her confinement she gives up the struggle to live, turns her face away from the world, and dies.

  I pray for her soul with genuine feeling. She was a terribly unlucky girl. Her father Warwick adored her and thought he would make her a duchess, and then thought he could make her husband a king. But instead of a handsome York king, her husband was a sulky younger son who turned his coat not once but twice. After she lost her first baby in the wild seas in the witches’ wind off Calais she had two more children, Margaret and Edward. Now they will have to manage without her. Margaret is a bright clever girl, but Edward is slow in understanding, perhaps even simple. God help both of them with George as their only parent. I send a letter expressing my sorrow, and the court wears mourning for her—the daughter of a great earl, and the wife of a royal duke.

  JANUARY 1477

  We mourn for her, but George has barely buried her, barely blown out the candles, before he comes strutting back to court, full of plans for a new wife, and this time he is aiming high. Charles of Burgundy, the husband of our Margaret of York, has died in battle and his daughter Mary is a duchess and heiress of one of the wealthiest duchies in Christendom.

  Margaret, always a Yorkist, and fatally blind to the faults of her family, suggests that her brother George, so fortunately free, should marry her stepdaughter—thereby consulting the needs of her York brother more than her Burgundy ward; or so I think. George, of course, is at once on fire with ambition. He announces to Edward that he will take either the Duchess of Burgundy or the Princess of Scotland.

  “Impossible,” Edward says. “He is faithless enough when he has a duke’s income paid by me. If he were as rich as a prince with an independent fortune, none of us would be safe. Think of the trouble he would cause for us in Scotland! Dear God, think of him bullying our sister Margaret in Burgundy! She’s only just widowed, her stepdaughter newly orphaned. I would as willingly send a wolf to the two of them as George.”

  SPRING 1477

  George broods over his brother’s refusal and then we hear outrageous news, news so extraordinary that we start by thinking it must be an exaggerated rumor: it cannot be true. George suddenly declares that Isabel died not of childbed fever, but of poisoning, and bundles the poisoner into jail.

  “Never!” I exclaim to Edward. “Has he run mad? Who would have hurt Isabel? Who has he arrested? Why?”

  “It is worse than arrest,” he says. He looks quite stunned by the letter in his hand. “He must be crazed. He has rushed this woman servant before a jury and ordered them to find her guilty of murder, and he has had her beheaded. She is dead already. Dead on George’s word, as if there were no law of the land. As if he were a greater power than the law, greater than the king. He is ruling my kingdom as if I had allowed tyranny.”

  “Who is she? Who was she?” I demand. “The poor serving girl?”

  “Ankarette Twynho,” he says, reading the name from the letter of complaint. “The jury says he threatened them with violence and made them bring in a verdict of guilty, though there was no evidence against her but his oath. They say they did not dare refuse him, and that he forced them to send an innocent woman to her death. He accused her of poison and witchcraft, and of serving a great witch.” He raises his eyes from the letter and sees my white face. “A great witch? Do you know anything of this, Elizabeth?”

  “She was my spy in his household,” I confess quickly. “But that is all. I had no need to poison poor little Isabel. What would I gain from it? And witchcraft is nonsense. Why would I cast a spell on her? I didn’t like her, nor her sister, but I wouldn’t ill-wish them.”

  He nods. “I know. Of course you didn’t have Isabel poisoned. But did George know that the woman he accused was in your pay?”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps. Why else would he accuse her? What else could she have done to offend him? Does he mean to warn me? To threaten us?”

  Edward throws down the letter on the table. “God knows! What does he hope to gain by murdering a servant woman but to cau
se more trouble and gossip? I shall have to act on this, Elizabeth. I can’t let it go.”

  “What will you do?”

  “He has a little group of his own advisors: dangerous, dissatisfied men. One of them is certainly a practicing fortune-teller, if not worse. I shall arrest them. I shall bring them to trial. I shall do to his men what he has done to your servant. It can serve as a warning for him. He cannot challenge us or our servants without risk to himself. I only hope he has the sense to see it.”

  I nod. “They cannot hurt us?” I ask. “These men?”

  “Only if you believe, as George seems to think, that they can cast a spell against us.”

  I smile in the hope of hiding my fear. Of course I believe that they can cast a spell against us. Of course I fear that they have already done so.

  I am right to be troubled. Edward arrests the notorious sorcerer Thomas Burdett, and two others, and they are put to question and a farrago of stories of black arts and threats and enchantments starts to spill out.

  My brother Anthony finds me leaning my heavy belly on the river wall and staring into the water at Whitehall Palace on a sunny May afternoon. Behind me, in the gardens, the children are playing a game of bat and ball. By the outraged cries of cheating, I guess that my son Edward is losing and taking advantage of his status as Prince of Wales to change the score. “What are you doing here?” Anthony asks.

  “I am wishing this river was a moat that could keep me and mine safe from enemies without.”

  “Does Melusina come when you call her from the waters of the Thames?” he asks with a skeptical smile.

  “If she did, I would have her hang George, Duke of Clarence, alongside his wizard. And I would have her do that to them both at once, without more words.”