The White Queen: A Novel

by Philippa Gregory

  I tilt back my head and look at him under my eyelashes. “You think to bed me for love and not for children? Isn’t that sin?”

  His arm comes around my waist and his palm cups my breast. “I shall make sure that it feels richly sinful,” he promises me.

  APRIL 1483

  The weather is cold and unseasonal and the rivers run high. We are at Westminster for the feast of Easter, and I look from my window at the fullness and the fast flow of the river and think of my son Edward, beyond the great waters of the Severn River, far away from me. It is as if England is a country of intersecting waterways, lakes and streams and rivers. Melusina must be everywhere; this is a country made in her element.

  My husband Edward, a man of the land, has a whim to go fishing and takes himself out for the day and comes home soaking wet and merry. He insists that we eat the salmon that he caught in the river for our dinner, and it is borne into the dining room at shoulder height with a fanfare: a royal catch.

  That night he is feverish and I scold him for getting wet and cold, as if he were still a boy and could take such risks with his health. The next day he is worse and he gets up for a little while but then goes back to bed: he is too tired. The next day the physician says that he should be bled, and Edward swears that they may not touch him. I tell the doctors that it shall be as the king insists, but I go to his room when he is sleeping and I look at his flushed face to reassure myself that this is nothing more than a passing illness. This is not the plague or a serious fever. He is a strong man in good health. He can take a chill and throw it off within a week.

  He gets no better. And now he starts to complain of gripping pains in the belly and a terrible flush of heat. Within a week the court is in fear, and I am in a state of silent terror. The doctors are useless: they don’t even know what is wrong with him; they don’t know what has caused his fever; they don’t know what will cure it. He can keep nothing down. He vomits everything he eats, and he is fighting the pain in his belly as if it were a new war. I keep a vigil in his room, my daughter Elizabeth beside me, nursing him with two wise women whom I trust. Hastings, the friend of his boyhood and his partner in every enterprise including the stupid, stupid fishing trip, keeps his vigil in the outer room. The Shore whore has taken to living on her knees at the altar in Westminster Abbey, they tell me, in an agony of fear for the man she loves.

  “Let me see him,” William Hastings implores me.

  I turn a cold face to him. “No. He is sick. He needs no companion for whoring or drinking or gambling. So he has no need of you. His health has been ruined by you, and all them like you. I will nurse him to health now, and, if I have my way, when he is well he will not see you again.”

  “Let me see him,” he says. He does not even defend himself against my anger. “All I want is to see him. I can’t bear not to see him.”

  “Wait like a dog out here,” I say cruelly. “Or go back to the Shore whore and tell her that she can service you now, for the king has finished with you both.”

  “I’ll wait,” he says. “He will ask for me. He will want to see me. He knows I am here waiting to see him. He knows I am out here.”

  I walk past him to the king’s bedchamber, and I close the door so he cannot even glimpse the man he loves, fighting for breath in the big four-poster bed.

  Edward looks up when I come in. “Elizabeth.”

  I go to him and hold his hand. “Yes, love.”

  “You remember I came home to you and told you I had been afraid?”

  “I remember.”

  “I am afraid again.”

  “You will get well,” I whisper urgently. “You will get well, my husband.”

  He nods and his eyes close for a moment. “Is Hastings outside?”

  “No,” I say.

  He smiles. “I want to see him.”

  “Not now,” I say. I stroke his head. It is burning hot. I take up a towel and soak it with lavender water and gently bathe his face. “You are not strong enough to see anyone now.”

  “Elizabeth, fetch him, and fetch every one of my Privy Council who is in the palace. Send for Richard my brother.”

  For a moment I think I have caught his sickness, as my belly turns over with such a pain; then I realize this is fear. “You don’t need to see them, Edward. All you need to do is rest and grow strong.”

  “Fetch them,” he says.

  I turn and say a sharp word to the nurse, and she runs to the door and tells the guard. At once, the message goes out all through the court that the king has summoned his advisors, and everyone knows that he must be dying. I go to the window and stand with my back to the view of the river. I don’t want to see the water; I don’t want to see the glimmer of a mermaid’s tail; I don’t want to hear Melusina singing to warn of a death. The lords file into the room, Stanley, Norfolk, Hastings, Cardinal Thomas Bourchier, my brothers, my cousins, my brothers-in-law, half a dozen others: all the great men of the kingdom, men who have been with my husband from the days of his earliest challenge, or men like Stanley, who are always perfectly aligned to the winning side. I look at them stony-faced, and they bow to me: grim-faced.

  The women have propped Edward up so he can see the council. Hastings’s eyes are filled with tears, his face twisted with pain. Edward reaches out a hand to him, and they grip each other as if Hastings would hold him to life.

  “I fear I have not long,” Edward says. His voice is a rasping whisper.

  “No,” whispers Hastings. “Don’t say it. No.”

  Edward turns his head and speaks to them all. “I leave a young son. I had hoped to see him grow to a man. I had hoped to leave you with a man for king. Instead, I have to trust you to care for my boy.”

  I have my fist to my mouth to stop myself from crying out. “No,” I say.

  “Hastings,” Edward says.

  “Lord.”

  “And all of you, and Elizabeth my queen.”

  I step to his bedside and he takes my hand in his, joins it with Hastings’s, as if he were making us wed. “You have to work together. All of you have to forget your enmities, your rivalries, your hatreds. You all have scores to settle; you all have wrongs you can’t forget. But you have to forget. You have to be as one to keep my son safe and see him to the throne. I ask you this, I demand this of you, from my deathbed. Will you do it?”

  I think of all the years that I have hated Hastings, Edward’s dearest friend and companion, the partner for all his drinking and whoring bouts, the friend at his side in battle. I remember how Sir William Hastings, from the very first moment, despised and looked down on me from his high horse when I stood at the roadside, how he opposed the rise of my family and always and again urged the king to listen to other advisors and employ other friends. I see him look at me and, even though tears are pouring down his face, his eyes are hard. He thinks I stood at the roadside and cast a spell on a young boy for his ruin. He will never understand what happened that day between a young man and a young woman. There was a magic: and the name of it was love.

  “I will work with Hastings for my son’s safety,” I say. “I will work with all of you and forget all wrongs, to put my son safely on the throne.”

  “I too,” says Hastings, and then they all say, one after another. “And I.”

  “And I’

  “And I.”

  “My brother Richard is to be his guardian,” Edward says. I flinch and would pull my hand away, but Hastings has it in a tight grip. “As you wish, Sire,” he says, looking hard at me. He knows that I resent Richard, and the power of the north that he can command.

  “Anthony, my brother,” I say in a whisper, prompting the king.

  “No,” Edward says stubbornly. “Richard, Duke of Gloucester, is to be his guardian and Protector of the Realm till Prince Edward takes his throne.”

  “No,” I whisper. If I could only get the king alone, I could tell him that, with Anthony as protector, we Riverses could hold the country safe. I don’t want my power threatened by Ri
chard. I want my son surrounded by my family. I don’t want any one of the York affinity in the new government that I will make around my son. I want this to be a Rivers boy on England’s throne.

  “Do you so swear?” Edward says.

  “I do,” they all say.

  Hastings looks at me. “Do you swear?” he asks. “Do you swear that, just as we promise to put your son on the throne, you promise to accept Richard, Duke of Gloucester, as protector?”

  Of course I do not. Richard is no friend of mine, and he commands half of England already. Why would I trust him to put my son on the throne, when he is a York prince himself? Why would he not take the chance to seize the throne for himself? And he has a son, a boy by little Anne Neville, a boy who could be Prince of Wales in place of my own prince. Why would Richard, who has fought half a dozen battles for Edward, not fight one more for himself?

  Edward’s face is gray with fatigue. “Swear it, Elizabeth,” he whispers. “For my sake. For Edward’s sake.”

  “Do you think it will make Edward safe?”

  He nods. “It is the only way. He will be safe if you and the lords agree, if Richard agrees.”

  I am trapped. “I swear it,” I say.

  Edward releases his hard grip on our hands and falls back on his pillows. Hastings howls like a dog and puts his face down in the cover and Edward’s hand finds its way blindly to touch his old friend’s head as in a blessing. The others file out, Hastings and I are left on either side of the bed, and the king dying between us.

  I have no time for grief, no time to measure my loss. Inside, my heart is breaking for the man I love, the only man whom I ever loved in all my life, the only man whom I will ever love. Edward, the boy who rode up to me when I waited for him. My beloved. I have no time to think about this when my son’s future and my family’s prospects depend on my being hard of will and dry-eyed. That night I write to my brother Anthony.

  The king is dead. Bring the new King Edward to London at all possible speed. Bring as many men as you can command as a royal guard—we will need them. Edward foolishly named Richard, Duke of Gloucester, as protector. Richard hates you and me equally for the king’s love and our own power.We must crown Edward at once and defend against the duke, who will never give up the protectorate without a fight. Recruit men as you march, and collect the weapons that are stored in hiding on the way. Prepare yourself for battle, to defend our heir. I will delay announcing the death as long as I can, so Richard, who is still in the north, does not know what is happening yet. So hurry. Elizabeth

  What I don’t know is that Hastings is writing to Richard, blotting the page with his tears, but legible enough, to say that the Rivers family are arming around their prince and that, if Richard wants to take up his role as protector, if he wants to guard the young Prince Edward against the boy’s own rapacious family, he had better come at once, with as many men from his heartlands of the north as he can muster, before the prince is kidnapped by his own kin. He writes:

  The king left all under your protection—goods, heir, realm. Secure the person of our sovereign Lord Edward V and get you to London before the Riverses flood us out.

  What I don’t know, and what I don’t allow myself to think, is that, having learned to fear the constant wars for the throne of England, I am just starting one on my own account, and that at stake this time is the inheritance and even the life of my beloved son.

  He kidnaps him.

  Richard moves faster and is better armed and more determined than any of us could have imagined. He moves as fast and as decisively as Edward would have done—and he is as ruthless. He waylays my son on his journey to London, dismisses the men from Wales who were loyal to him and to me, arrests my brother Anthony, my son Richard Grey, and our cousin Thomas Vaughan, and takes Edward into his so-called safekeeping. My boy is not quite thirteen, in God’s name. My boy is still a boy of only twelve. His voice is still fluting, his chin is smooth as a girl’s, he has the softest fair down on his upper lip that you can only see when his face is in profile, against the light. And when Richard sends his loyal servants away, his uncle whom he idolizes, the half brother he loves, he defends them with a little quaver in his voice. He says that he is certain that his father would have placed only good men about him, and that he wants to keep them in his service.

  He is only a boy. He has to stand up to a battle-hardened man who is determined to do wrong. When Richard says that my own brother Anthony, who has been my boy’s friend and guardian and protector for all his life, and my youngest Grey son Richard, must leave his side, my little boy tries to defend them. He says that he is certain that his uncle Anthony is a good man and a fine guardian. He says his half brother Richard has been a kinsman and a comrade to him, that he knows that his uncle Anthony has never done anything but that suits the great knight, the chivalrous knight that he is. But Duke Richard tells him that all will be resolved and in the meantime he and the Duke of Buckingham, my former ward, whom I married against his will to my sister Katherine, and who now turns up in this surprising company, will be the prince’s companions to London.

  He is only a little boy. He has always been gently guarded. He does not know how to stand up to his uncle Richard, dressed in black and with a face like thunder, two thousand men in his train and ready to fight. So he lets his uncle Anthony go; he lets his brother Richard go. How could he save them? He cries bitterly. They tell me that. He cries like a child when no one will obey him, but he lets them go.

  MAY 1483

  Elizabeth, my seventeen-year-old daughter, comes running through the shouting and the chaos of Westminster Palace. “Mother! Lady Mother! What’s happening?”

  “We’re going into sanctuary,” I snap. “Hurry. Get everything you want and all the clothes for the children. And make sure they bring the carpets out of the royal rooms and the tapestries. Get all that taken into Westminster Abbey—we are going into sanctuary again. And your jewelry box, and your furs. And then go through the royal apartments and make sure they are stripping them of everything of value.”

  “Why?” she asks, her pale mouth trembling. “What has happened now? What about Baby?”

  “Your brother the king has been taken by his uncle the lord protector,” I say. My words are like knives and I see them strike her. She admires her uncle Richard; she always has done. She was hoping he would care for all of us—protect us in truth. “Your father’s will has put my enemy in charge of my son. We will see what kind of a lord protector he makes. But we had better see it from safety. We go into sanctuary today, right this minute.”

  “Mother.” She dances on the spot with fear. “Should we not wait, should we not consult the Privy Council? Should we not wait here for Baby? What if Duke Richard is just bringing Baby safely to us? What if he is doing as he should, as lord protector? Protecting Baby?”

  “He is King Edward to you, not Baby anymore,” I say fiercely. “And even to me. And let me tell you, child, that only fools wait when their enemies are coming, to see if they may prove to be friends. We will be as safe as I can make us. In sanctuary. And we will take your brother Prince Richard and keep him safe too. And when the lord protector comes to London with his private army, he can persuade me that it is safe to come out.”

  I speak bravely to my brave girl, now a young woman with her own life blighted by this sudden fall from being a princess of England to a girl in hiding; but in truth we are at a very low ebb when we barricade the door of St. Margaret’s crypt at Westminster and we are alone—my brother Lionel, Bishop of Salisbury, my grown son Thomas Grey, my little son Richard, and my girls: Elizabeth, Cecily, Anne, Catherine, and Bridget. When we were last here I was big with my first boy, with every reason to hope that he would lay claim to the throne of England one day. My mother was alive, and was my companion and my greatest friend. And nobody could be afraid for long when my mother was scheming for them, and making her spells and laughing at her own ambition. My husband was alive in exile, planning his return. I never doubted
that he would come. I never doubted that he would be victorious. I always knew that he never lost a battle. I knew he would come, I knew he would win, I knew he would rescue us. I knew they were bad days but I hoped for better.

  Now we are here again, but this time it is hard to hope. In this season of early summer, which has always before been my favorite, filled with picnics and jousts and parties. The shade of the crypt is oppressive. It is like being buried alive. In truth, there is not much cause for hope. My boy is in enemy hands, my mother is long gone, and my husband is dead. No handsome tall man is going to hammer on the door and block the light as he comes in, calling my name. My son who was a baby then is a young boy of twelve now, and in the hands of our enemy. My girl Elizabeth, who played then so sweetly with her sisters when we were last confined, is now seventeen. She turns her pale face to me and asks what we are going to do. Last time we waited secure in the knowledge that, if we could just survive, we would be rescued. This time there are no certainties.

  For nearly a week I listen at the tiny window set into the front door. From dawn till dusk I am peering through the grille, straining my ears to hear what people are doing, for the sound of the streets. When I turn from the door, I go to the river and look out on the boats passing by, watching for the royal barge, listening for Melusina.

  Every day I send out messengers for news of my brother and my son, and to speak to the lords who should be rising to defend us, whose liveries should be arming for us. And on the fifth day I hear it: a rising swell of noise, the cheering of the apprentice lads, and another sound beneath it, a deeper sound, a booing. I can hear the rattle of harness and the sound of many horses’ hooves. It is the army of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, my husband’s brother, the man he trusted with our safety, entering my husband’s capital city to a mixed reception. When I look out of the window at the river, there is a chain of his boats around Westminster Palace: a floating barricade, holding us captive. Nobody can come in or out.