The King's Daughter (Rose of York)

by Worth, Sandra

  “Lucy, I believe we honor those we love by remembering them, though the memory brings us sorrow rather than joy in the speaking of it.”

  She must have accepted my words, for after a pause, she said in a hushed tone. “I remember the last time they ever saw one another before Barnet . . . They each knew they were bidding farewell forever. They tried to be brave and to pretend that it would come out all right, but my mother broke at the last moment and threw herself against my father’s armor—” She bit her lip and averted her gaze. “And he stood stiff as a lance, gazing out over her head.”

  Anguish engulfed me as I listened. In my mind’s eye, I saw Richard’s face in that small room at Westminster before I left for Sheriff Hutton. I too remember the last time I saw Richard on this earth. We both knew it was final and forever.

  I gave Lucy’s hand a squeeze, and closed my eyes against the sorrow. We think the wounds of the past are scars, long since forgotten, but one scratch, and they bleed.

  That night, I dreamt of Richard. He came to me out of the mist, carrying a red rose in his hand.

  I RETURNED TO SHEEN IN EARLY NOVEMBER. THE pilgrimage to Walsingham had not lifted my despondency, for Lizbeth’s loss was too keenly felt. But God, in His grace, had bestowed new life on us, and every week my belly grew larger, reminding me that amid sorrow came blessing.

  Many times during these weeks, I sought refuge in memories. Alone in my chamber, I unlocked my coffer with the key I kept around my neck and drew out Richard’s book, Tristan.

  You said I’d forget you, Richard, I said, gazing at his likeness. But I haven’t. I never will.

  By late November unsettling omens arrived to give us notice that Fortune was not done with us, for London was visited by a mysterious sickness and a storm of hailstones as large as plates. There was heavy thunder in the night and strange winds. As Yuletide approached, we learned from Margaret Beaufort that she had separated from her husband, Thomas Stanley, and taken the vow of chastity. Now she donned the black and white attire of a nun, with the lower part of her headgear well up to her chin. It was a fashion that did nothing to flatter her, but it was one that her ordinance forbade to anyone below the rank of baroness. Beneath her garments she wore a hair shirt. With her time, she took up scholarly pursuits at Oxford and Cambridge and devoted herself to the education of “brilliant Harry” and “tempestuous Margaret,” the grandchildren she adored. She had also taken to washing the feet of the poor and comforting the dying.

  “I hope to learn from them how to die well.”

  She is fifty-two now, and trembles to meet her Maker, I thought, crossing myself.

  Arthur came for Yule and brightened up the weeks until he left again. The terrible year of 1495 that had carried off my little Lizbeth finally died away.

  When I was close to my confinement, Margaret Beaufort returned from her estate in Woking to prepare my birthing chamber at Sheen. On the bed she laid feather pillows and a rich coverlet of scarlet velvet, furred with ermine and embroidered with gold crowns and roses. The room was dark, for all the windows had been covered with tapestries, according to her ordinances, and only floral scenes were permitted, for she believed representations of human figures would adversely affect the newborn child. I smiled vaguely to myself; Margaret’s ordinances would be the death of me yet.

  Outside, the wind howled and whipped about the palace. The Thames churned and tossed its boats, and the screams of sea birds pitched against the chilling rain. The day of the birth drew near. I knew the signs well. Had I not been with child for half my married life? Five births in ten years. On the eighteenth of March, I took to my bed as Margaret Beaufort fussed around me. After many hours of hard labor, the pains finally ceased and the cry of a child pierced the fog that engulfed me.

  “ ’Tis a girl,” whispered Margaret Beaufort. “A beautiful girl-child.” She held her up to me. She was a lovely babe with fair hair and well-defined little features. As Lizbeth had been.

  I nodded, closed my lids. A tear trickled from the corner of my eye.

  At my request, she was named Mary, for my beloved sister who had died in May of 1482.

  WINTER PASSED. THE LAND SHRUGGED OFF ITS SHADES of dismal gray for the bright palette of spring, and Kate gave birth to her second son, named Edward. We moved to Greenwich, that castle on the banks of the Thames that had always been a symbol of joy to me through my childhood. There, we indulged in our games, our horses, and the hunt. Young Harry displayed his talent for sports by shooting at the crossbow and let out glad whoops of joy to learn he would accompany our guests fowling after dark with nets and lights. Summer faded into the golden wheat fields of August. Then followed September, and inevitable autumn.

  Henry, in fearful dread of being ousted from his kingdom by the pretender, took no chances and did not stop mobilizing for war with Scotland. The occasion offered him an excuse to levy enormous taxes on the people. He collected three hundred thousand pounds and readied nearly fifty thousand men for a spring march north on Scotland.

  “James can have war if he wishes,” Henry said to me as we played cards together in the quiet of my bedchamber. “Or he can give up the feigned lad and have peace.”

  “Surely there are other ways to resolve the situation?” I asked. “It doesn’t always have to be war.” Maybe, if given a chance, the pretender—Dickon?—would choose to retire with his love into peaceful seclusion, someplace in the world that wasn’t England.

  Henry wrote James Ramsey, Lord Bothwell, his chief spy in Scotland, asking how he could avoid war.

  “James is set against you,” his spy wrote. “There is naught you can do, no means you can employ, either by persuasion or gold, to separate him from the pretender. King James is firmly on his side.”

  Henry even prepared a plot to murder the “feigned boy,” Perkin Warbeck, but his Scottish spy advised him against it. “It would only inflame James with more determination to avenge himself on England,” the man wrote back.

  While James spent a fortune on guns, cannonballs, arrows, and armor and continued to busy himself on the border, checking his forts and preparing his men, Henry paced in confusion and dread, listening to the reports his spies sent. James wants war with England; James doesn’t want war with England. The guns are good, can shoot straight; the guns are a jest and nothing need be feared from them.

  Henry’s spies were thorough. They even wrote that James had paid one hundred and ten pounds for a new cloak in his favorite velvet, lined and embroidered with crimson satin to wear to war, and sent him details that could be known only to the most intimate counselors of King James and the pretender. Camped in a pavilion on the border of England on a dewy, cold morning, after sleeping on pallet beds, between trips to the outdoor privy across a field of snow, King James and Richard the pretender had hammered out the terms of their agreement. James demanded Berwick castle, several sheriffdoms, certain lands, and seventy thousand pounds for services rendered. The pretender refused these terms. They argued long into the night. In the end, the pretender agreed only to half the terms that James wanted.

  “He acts like a man who cares for England,” wrote Henry’s spy.

  The embroidery that busied my hands blurred before my eyes. I raised a hand to my aching head. Could this “boy,” as Henry called him, truly be who he said he was? My brother, Richard of England, the rightful king?

  No, he is not, I told myself. Dickon is dead.

  AS I EMBROIDERED A SILK BANNER FOR ARTHUR IN Henry’s privy chamber, a messenger came with the pretender’s latest proclamation, shouted by common criers at the gates of a handful of English border towns. He cleared his throat nervously and read:

  “Whereas we in our tender age escaped by God’s might out of the Tower of London and were secretly conveyed across the sea into other diverse lands there remaining as a stranger, while Henry Tudor, son to Edmund Tudor of low birth in the country of Wales—” The man’s voice shook, for there was danger in displeasing a monarch.

  The pretender
went on to accuse Henry of manifold treasons, abominable murders, manslaughters, robberies, extortions, and daily pillaging of the people by taxes. Henry grabbed the proclamation from the messenger and scanned it. He swallowed visibly. “He signed his proclamations Ricardus Rex.”

  The words knocked the breath from my lungs. I pushed myself to my feet. “Henry, forgive me, I feel unwell of a sudden.”

  He nodded, and I fled the chamber.

  The invasion soon followed.

  Henry greeted me in his chamber with a rare smile. “The people of Northumberland did not rise to join the feigned boy.” He nodded to the messenger as I took a seat on the settle.

  “King James,” the man said,“furious at the betrayal of the English, laid waste the fields, pillaged the houses, and burnt the villages. Those who resisted, he killed. The pretender, in tears, begged James to stop savaging his country and his people. Lordship was worth nothing to him, he said, if it was obtained by so piteously spilling the blood and destroying the land of his fathers. ‘How can my heart not be moved by the destruction of my people?’ he demanded. To this King James replied,‘But they are not your people. And though you call England your country, far from recognizing you as king, they don’t even recognize you as an Englishman!’”

  Henry laughed as merrily as I’d ever seen him do, but I could not smile.

  “They have done great violence to the border region,” he added. “After all, they are Scots.”

  This was the news that Henry commanded be proclaimed all over the land. The border was sparsely populated, and I knew the “great violence” was on a tiny scale. Yet it was more than enough to turn the pretender’s stomach.

  “He seems a gentle man,” whispered Kate to me when we were alone in the solar. “He was shocked by the blood he saw. Shocked into pity.”

  I picked up the sketch of the pretender’s likeness that had been sent to Henry by one of his spies, and which he had forgotten on the scrivener’s desk.

  “How handsome he is,” Kate murmured over my shoulder.

  “He has the mark of the Plantagenets in his left eye that Dickon had. What if he is truly our brother, Kate?”

  Kate embraced me, and we held one another close for a long moment.

  “Come,” said Kate, taking my hand. “We need to pray.”

  ARTHUR CAME FOR YULE, BRINGING WITH HIM A TUMULT of rejoicing to my heart, and left after Twelfth Night, taking the sun with him, as the year of 1496 gave way to 1497. The explorer John Cabot returned. His voyage had been successful, and he brought back gold and many wonders. At the banquet Henry threw for him, he presented to me three strange men in animal skins who tore their raw meat and relished its gore, and who spoke no language ever heard before. I marveled at the men, and at Cabot’s courage.

  “They are Indian, the native people of the New Land,” he said. “Finding the waters open, I would have sailed farther, but my sailors grew afraid.”

  But once more, the pretender banished our joy. In my privy chamber at Sheen, Henry paced to and fro as dusk settled on the day.

  “I need money for war, and the men of Cornwall refuse to pay! They rose up against me the day after I dispatched my chamberlain, Lord Daubeny, north with the army to fight the Scots!”

  I sighed heavily. Henry had disregarded my warning that there might be trouble collecting the additional heavy taxes. “The Cornishmen are poor, Henry. They scratch out a living mining tin, and fishing, and farming. They have no money to give you.”

  “The devil take their souls, they will pay! I’ll send Morton and Bray to collect it. That shall put the fear of God in them!”

  I shut my eyes on a breath. When it came to money, Henry was like a man crazed.

  Not long after their departure, Morton and Bray scurried back to report that the measures they’d taken had only infuriated the people, and now a mob of eighteen thousand men was marching on London. Inexplicably, the nobleman John Touchet, Lord Audley, had joined their cause.

  “Let them come,” Henry told Morton. “They will tire themselves marching, and we’ll make short shrift of them. Meanwhile, send to Lord Daubeny to return from the Scots border. I myself shall take a force to Woodstock to block the rebels’ path to London.”

  The next morning, Henry entered my chamber before the cock’s crow. I saw that he hadn’t slept. I threw back the covers and leapt from bed, instantly awake. Gathering my night robe around me, I searched his face. “Henry, what is it?”

  “For your safety and the safety of the children, I am sending you to the Tower.”

  “The Tower?” I echoed in bewilderment. My mother had been sent to the Tower when Warwick’s cousin Lord Fauconberg attacked London after Barnet. I had been five years old then, and never had I forgotten those frightening days. Conveyed secretly by barge with my sister Mary, I was hustled up the water stairs and through the gates of the Tower to hide in terror for days while the gun battle raged between Fauconberg and my uncle Anthony Woodville. Now the nightmare was repeating itself, and I would be retracing my steps there with my own children.

  The pretender is marching into the land to seize the throne from Henry, and if Henry, then Arthur. I felt nauseated. Reaching for a chair, I fell into it. With difficulty, I lifted my eyes to Henry’s face. He had been right.

  Now I was indeed one of them.

  AT THE TOWER, WE ANXIOUSLY ALIGHTED AT THE river entrance. Darkness and evil seemed to hover there, and I gave a sigh of relief when we emerged into the sunshine of the courtyard.

  “Is Edward, Earl of Warwick, the true king of England?” demanded Harry as we rushed hand in hand past the Beauchamp Tower, where Edward was imprisoned.

  I ignored his question, and so did Kate.

  “Which room is he in?” Harry insisted.

  “I know not,” I replied to my son, exchanging a glance with Kate.

  “You do indeed! You send him sweets and books to read!” Harry shot back.

  My breath froze. He must have heard me instructing Patch. Then Henry knows, too. He must have decided it did no harm, since he had not spoken to me about it. Foolish of me, to think I could hide anything from him and his spies. I halted in my steps. “Harry, you must not ask about your cousin of Warwick. ’Tis not a matter for discussion, understood?”

  He nodded. I tightened my hold of his hand and resumed my steps, but he craned his neck back toward Beauchamp as we rushed along.

  The Cornishmen arrived on the thirteenth of June and pitched camp at Black Heath, four miles away. In the capital there was great fear. The gates were closed and guarded; the walls were fortified with timber, manned, and armed; and buckets of water were distributed around the city, to quench both thirst and fire.

  “What will happen to me if Father dies?” Maggie asked. “Will they kill me, too?”

  “No, my sweet,” I said, drawing her close. “They won’t harm you.”

  “Will they set up Edward, Earl of Warwick, as king, if they win?” she pressed.

  “If they win, they will,” Harry replied before I could answer Maggie. “But they’re not going to win, are they, Mother?”

  I hesitated. Life was full of uncertainties. Who could be sure of anything? Looking into my children’s anxious eyes, I said,“Have no fear. Your father will prevail.”

  I tried to provide a normal life for Harry and Maggie by keeping them at their studies during the day. In the evenings Patch entertained us. We played cards with Kate, and I had the children read aloud to me and practice their musical instruments of lute and harp. Sometimes we watched the high-sided sailing ships passing up and down the Thames, and I’d explain to Harry about trade.

  “See that painted ship coming in? It carries silks from Italy and Saracen carpets from Turkey.”

  “And spices, monkeys, and parrots from China!” chimed Harry. “The ones leaving carry our good English wool to their lands and make us rich.”

  “You are quite right, Harry. Master Giles has taught you well. Now, would you care for some dancing?”

&
nbsp; Harry scrambled down with a cry of delight. Maggie relinquished her mirror to take the floor with Harry, but Harry said, “May I dance with you, Mother? I’m tired of dancing with Maggie.”

  Red in the face, Maggie stomped her foot. “What’s wrong with dancing with me? I’m a good dancer, aren’t I, Mother?”

  “You are, Maggie, and I like you well enough,” Harry said before I could reply. “But I always dance with you, and I never have a chance to dance with Mother.” He turned his angelic face to me. “I pray you, Mother, just once? Then I’ll dance with Maggie without complaint.”

  I fought to keep a straight face. “Very well, Harry. Aunt Kate can play the lute for us.”

  We took our positions on the floor and Kate broke into a popular French tune that had been sweeping court, “L’Amour de Mai.” We took the tiny steps of the danse, first bending our knees, then rising on our toes, transferring weight from one foot to the other while dancing slowly side by side across the room.

  The tune ended. I clapped for Harry. “Well done, my young prince! You have mastered the basse danse. We shall have to arrange for you—and Maggie—” I added hastily, “to give us a display at court.”

  Harry rewarded me with a smile and a courtly bow from the waist.

  As I filled the hours of waiting, I tried to push back the specters and shadows of the past that crowded my own mind. But I could not forget the Beauchamp Tower, and my gaze often strayed there.

  “Patch, did you never find out what else I can send Edward of Warwick?” I asked him softly one day.

  Patch hung his head. “My queen, no one returns with his reply. I can never get the same person to go there twice.”

  I regarded him closely. Everyone is terrified of offending Henry. “Patch, it seems my lord king knows I have been sending him marchpane, and does not mind. Would you be willing to go to the young earl for me?”

  He nodded.

  “Here, take this letter to his guard,” I said, scribbling a few words on a piece of paper. “They will give you his answer.”