The White Queen: A Novel

by Philippa Gregory

  It bobs, the flame flickers as the wind blows it, but then it flares up. The swift current of the water takes it, and it turns and swirls away. For a moment we see it, flame on reflected flame, the curse and the mirror of the curse, paired together on the dark flood, and then they are whirled away by the rush of the river and we are looking into blackness, and Melusina has heard our words and taken our curse into her watery kingdom.

  “It’s done,” I say, and turn away from the river and hold the water gate open for her.

  “That’s all?” she asks as if she had expected me to sail down the river in a cockleshell.

  “That’s all. That’s all I can do, now that I am queen of nothing, with missing sons. All I can do now is ill-wishing. But God knows, I do that.”

  CHRISTMAS 1483

  I make merry for my girls. I send out Jemma to buy them new brocade and we sew new dresses, and they wear the last diamonds from the royal Treasury on their heads as crowns for Christmas Day. The defeated county of Kent sends us a handsome capon, wine, and bread for our Christmas feast. We are our own carolers, we are our own mummers, we are our own wassailers. When finally I put the girls to bed, they are happy, as if they had forgotten the York court at Christmas when every ambassador said he had never seen a richer court, and their father was King of England and their mother the most beautiful queen the country had ever seen.

  Elizabeth my daughter sits late with me before the fire, cracking nuts and throwing the shells into the red embers so they flare and spit.

  “Your uncle Thomas Grey writes to me that Henry Tudor was going to declare himself King of England and your betrothed in Rennes Cathedral today. I should congratulate you,” I say.

  She turns and gives me her merry smile. “I am a much married woman,” she says. “I was betrothed to Warwick’s nephew, and then to the heir of France, d’you remember? And you and Father called me La Dauphine, and I took extra lessons in French and thought myself very great. I was meant to be Queen of France, I was certain of it, and yet now look at me! So I think I shall wait till Henry Tudor has landed, fought his battle, crowned himself king, and asked me himself before I count myself a betrothed woman.”

  “Still, it is time you were married,” I say almost to myself, thinking of her rising blush when her uncle Richard said that she had grown so much he hardly knew her.

  “Nothing can happen while we are in here,” she says.

  “Henry Tudor is untested.” I am thinking aloud. “He has spent his life running away from our spies, he has never turned and fought. The only battle he ever saw was under the command of his guardian William Herbert, and then he fought for us! When he lands in England with you as his declared bride, then everyone who loves us will turn out for him. Everyone else will turn out for him for hatred of Richard, even though they hardly know Henry. Everyone who has been deprived of their places by the northerners whom Richard brought in will turn out for him. The rebellion has left a sour taste for too many people. Richard won that battle, but he has lost the trust of the people. He promises justice and freedom, but since the rebellion he puts in northern lords and he rules with his friends. Nobody will forgive him that. Your betrothed will have thousands of recruits, and he will come with an army from Brittany. But it will all depend on whether he is as brave in battle as Richard. Richard is battle-hardened. He fought all over England when he was a boy, under the command of your father. Henry is new to the field.”

  “If he wins, and if he honors his promise, then I will be Queen of England. I told you I would be Queen of England one day. I always knew it. It is my fate. But it was never my ambition.”

  “I know,” I say gently. “But if it is your destiny, you will have to do your duty. You will be a good queen, I know. And I will be there with you.”

  “I wanted to marry a man that I loved, as you did Father,” she says. “I wanted to marry a man for love, not a stranger on the word of his mother and mine.”

  “You were born a princess, and I was not,” I remind her. “And even so, I had to take my first husband on the say-so of my father. It was only when I was widowed that I could choose for myself. You will have to outlive Henry Tudor and then you can do as you please.”

  She giggles and her face lights up at the thought of it.

  “Your grandmother married her husband’s young squire the moment she was widowed,” I remind her. “Or think of King Henry’s mother, who married a Tudor nobody in secret. At least when I was a widow I had the sense to fall in love with the King of England.”

  She shrugs. “You are ambitious. I am not. You would never fall in love with someone who was not wealthy or great. But I don’t want to be Queen of England. I don’t want my poor brother’s throne. I have seen the price that one pays for a crown. Father never stopped fighting from the day he won it, and here we are—trapped in little better than prison—because you still hope we can gain the throne. You will have the throne even if it means I have to marry a runaway Lancastrian.”

  I shake my head. “When Richard sends me his proposals, we will come out,” I say. “I promise you. It is time. You won’t have another Christmas in hiding. I promise you, Elizabeth.”

  “We don’t have to come out to glory, you know,” she says plaintively. “We could just go to a pleasant house, and be an ordinary family.”

  “All right,” I say, as if I think we can ever be an ordinary family. We are Plantagenets. How could we be ordinary?

  JANUARY 1484

  I hear from my son Thomas Grey, in a letter which comes to me travel-stained from Henry Tudor’s ragamuffin court in Brittany, dated Christmas Day 1483.

  As he promised, he swore to his betrothal to your daughter Elizabeth in the cathedral in Rennes. He also claimed the title of King of England and was acclaimed king by all of us. He received our homage and oaths of loyalty, mine among the others. I heard one man ask him how he could claim to be heir, when the young King Edward might be living for all we know. He said something interesting…he said that he had certain proof that the young King Edward is dead, and that his heart is sore for it, and that we should have revenge on his murderer—the usurper Richard. I asked him what proof he had, and reminded him of your pain without a son to bury, nor any knowledge of him; and he said that he knew for a fact that Richard’s men had killed your boys. He said they had pressed them under their bedding as they slept, and then buried them under the stair in the Tower.

  I took him to one side and said that at the very least we could place servants or suborn those who are there and order them to find the bodies if he would only tell me where they are, which stair in the Tower. I said that if we found the bodies as his invasion of England began, we could accuse Richard of murder, and the whole country would be on our side. “Which stair?” I asked. “Where are the bodies? Who told you of the murder?”

  Lady Mother, I lack your skills of seeing into the dark hearts of men, but there was something about him that I couldn’t like. He looked away, and said it was no good, he had thought of it already, but a priest had lifted their bodies and taken them away in a chest to give them a Christian burial, and buried them in the deepest waters of the river, never to be found. I asked him the name of the priest but he did not know it. I asked him how the priest knew where they were buried and why he put them in the river instead of taking the bodies to you. I asked him if it was to be a Christian burial then why put them in the water? I asked him which part of the river and he said he did not know. I asked him who told him all this, and he said it was his mother Lady Margaret, and that he would trust her with his life. It will be just as she has told him; he knows this for a fact.

  I don’t know what you make of this.

  It stinks to me.

  I take Thomas’s letter and put it into the flames of the fire that burns in the hall. I take up a pen to reply to him, trim the nib, nibble the feather at the top, and then write.

  I agree. Henry Tudor and his allies must have had a hand in the death of my son. How else would he know they
were dead and how it was done? Richard is to release us this month. Get away from the Tudor pretender and come home. Richard will pardon you and we can be together. Whatever vows Henry takes in church and however many men show him homage, Elizabeth will never marry the murderer of her brothers, and if he is indeed the killer, then he carries my curse to his son and his grandson. No Tudor boy will live to manhood if Henry had a hand in the death of my son.

  The end of the twelve days of Christmas and the return of the Parliament to London brings me the unwelcome news that Parliament has obliged King Richard and ruled that my marriage was invalid, that my children are bastards and that I myself am a whore. Richard had declared this before, and no one had argued with him. Now it is law and the Parliament, like so many moppets, nods it through.

  I don’t make any objection to the Parliament, and I don’t command any friends of mine to object for us. It is the first step in freeing us from our hiding place that has become our prison. It is the first step in turning us into what Elizabeth calls “ordinary people.” If the law of the land says that I am nothing more than the widow of Sir Richard Grey, and the former king’s former lover, if the law of the land says that my children are merely girls born out of wedlock, then we are of little value alive or dead, imprisoned or free. It does not matter to anyone where we are, or what we are doing. This, on its own, sets us free.

  More importantly, I think, but I do not say, not even to Elizabeth, that once we are living in a private house quietly, my boy Richard might be able to join us. As we are stripped of our royalty my son might be with me again. When he is no longer a prince, I might get him back. He has been Peter, a boy living with a poor family in Tournai. He could be Peter, a visitor to my house at Grafton, my favorite page boy, my constant companion, my heart, my joy.

  MARCH 1484

  I receive a message from Lady Margaret. I had been wondering when I would hear again from this my dearest friend and ally. The storming of the Tower that she planned failed miserably. Her son tells the world that my sons are dead, and says that his mother alone knows the details of their death and burial. The rebellion that she masterminded ended in defeat and my suspicions. Still her husband is high in favor with King Richard, though her part in the rebellion is well known. For sure, she is an unreliable friend and a doubtful ally. She seems to know everything, she seems to do nothing, and she is never punished.

  She explains she has not been able to write, and that she cannot visit me herself, for she is cruelly imprisoned by her husband Lord Stanley, who was Richard’s true friend, standing by him in the recent uprising. It turns out now that Stanley’s son Lord Strange raised a small army in support of King Richard; and that all the whispers that he was marching to support Henry Tudor were mistaken. His loyalty was never in doubt. But there were enough men to testify that Lady Margaret’s agents had gone back and forth to Brittany to summon her son Henry Tudor to claim the throne for himself. There were spies who could confirm that her great counselor and friend Bishop Morton persuaded the Duke of Buckingham to turn against his lord Richard. And there were even men who could swear that she had made a pact with me, that my daughter should marry her son, and the proof of that was Christmas Day in Rennes Cathedral when Henry Tudor declared that he would be Elizabeth’s husband and swore that he would be King of England; and all his entourage, my son Thomas Grey among them, knelt and swore fealty to him as King of England.

  I imagine that Margaret Beaufort’s husband Stanley must have had to talk fast and persuasively to convince his anxious monarch that, though his wife is a rebel and a plotter, he himself had never for a moment thought of the advantages that might come to him if his stepson took the throne. But he seems to have done it. Stanley “Sans Changer” remains in favor with the usurper, and Margaret his wife is banished to her own house, forbidden her usual servants, banned from writing or sending messages to anyone—especially her son—and robbed of her lands and wealth and inheritance. But they are all given to her husband on the condition that he keeps her under control.

  For a powerful woman she does not seem much disheartened by her husband taking all her wealth and all her lands into his own hands, and imprisoning her in her house, swearing that she shall never write another letter and never stir another plot. She is clearly right not to be too disheartened, for here she is, writing to me and plotting again. From this I think I can assume that Stanley “Sans Changer” is faithfully and loyally following his own best interests as perhaps he has always done—promising fealty to the king on one hand, letting his wife plot with rebels on the other.

  Your Grace, dear sister—for so I should call you who is mother to the girl who will be my daughter, and who will be mother to my son, she starts. She is flowery in style and emotional in life. There is a smudge on the letter as if she has overflowed with tears of joy at the thought of the wedding of our children. I look at it with distaste. Even if I did not suspect her of the wickedest of betrayals, I would not warm to this.

  I am much concerned to hear from my son that your son Thomas Grey thought to leave his court and had to be persuaded to return to them. Your Grace, dear sister, what can be the matter with your boy? Can you assure him that the interests of your family and mine are the same and that he is a beloved companion to my son Henry? Please, I beg of you, command him as a loving mother to endure the troubles that they have in exile to make certain of the rewards when they triumph. If he has heard anything, or fears anything, he should speak to my son Henry Tudor, who can put his mind at rest. The world is full of gossips and Thomas would not want to appear a turncoat or fainthearted now.

  I hear nothing, locked away as I am, but I understand that the tyrant Richard is planning to have your older girls at his court. I do beg you not to allow them to go. Henry would not like his betrothed to be at the court of his enemy, exposed to every temptation, and I know you as a mother would feel such revulsion to have your daughter in the hands of the man who murdered your two sons. Think of putting your girls in the power of the man who murdered their brothers! They themselves must be unable to bear the sight of him. Better to stay in sanctuary than force them to kiss his hand and live under the command of his wife. I know you will feel this as I do: it is impossible.

  For your own sake at least, command your girls to stay with you quietly in the country if Richard will release them, or peacefully in sanctuary if he will not, until that Happy Day when Elizabeth shall be queen of her own court and my beloved daughter as well as yours.

  Your truest friend in all the world, imprisoned just as you are, Lady Margaret Stanley

  I take the letter to my Elizabeth and watch her smile broaden until she laughs outright. “Oh my God, what a crone!” she exclaims.

  “Elizabeth! This is your mother-in-law to be!”

  “Yes, on that Happy Day. Why does she not want us to go to court? Why do we have to be protected from temptation?”

  I take back the letter and reread it. “Richard will know that you are betrothed to Henry Tudor. Tudor announced it so that everybody knows. Richard knows that will put the Rivers affinity on Tudor’s side. The House of York follows you now. You are our only heir. It would be in his interest to take all you girls to court and marry you well within his own family and friends. That way Tudor is isolated once more, and you York heiresses are married to commoners. The last thing Lady Margaret wants is you dancing off with some handsome lord, leaving her Henry looking like a fool, without his bride and without your supporters.”

  She shrugs. “As long as we get out of here, I am happy to live with you in the country, Lady Mother.”

  “I know,” I say. “But Richard wants you older girls at court, where people can see you are safe in his keeping. You and Cecily and Anne shall go, and Bridget and Catherine will stay with me. He will want people to know that I allowed you be with him, that I consider you safe in his care. And I would rather you were out in the world than cooped up at home.”

  “Why?” she asks, turning her gray gaze on me. “Tell
me. I don’t like the sound of this. You will be plotting something, Lady Mother, and I don’t want to be in the center of plots anymore.”

  “You are the heir to the House of York,” I say simply. “You will always be at the center of plots.”

  “But where will you go? Why won’t you come to court with us?”

  I shake my head. “I couldn’t bear to see that skinny stick Anne Neville in my place, wearing my gowns cut down to her size with my jewels around her scrawny neck. I couldn’t curtsey to her as Queen of England. I couldn’t do it, Elizabeth, not to save my life. And Richard will never be a king to me. I have seen a true king and loved him. I have been a true queen. These are mere imposters to me—I cannot bear them.

  “I am to be put in the charge of John Nesfield, who has guarded us here. I will live at his manor of Heytesbury, and I think it will suit me very well. You can go to court and you girls can get a little court training. It is time you were away from your mother and out in the world.”

  She comes to me like a little girl, and kisses me. “I shall like it better than being a prisoner,” she says. “Though it will be so strange to be away from you. I have never been away from you in all my life.” Then she pauses. “But will you not be lonely? Won’t you miss us too much?”

  I shake my head and draw her close to whisper, “I won’t be lonely, for I hope that Richard will come home. I hope to see my boy again.”