The White Princess (Cousins' War)

by Philippa Gregory

  I raise my hand to say farewell, but I am choked, and can’t repeat my blessing, and Henry wheels his horse around and leads his army out, east to where his spies tell him the great York army has taken up their position, just beyond Newark.

  KENILWORTH CASTLE, WARWICKSHIRE, 17 JUNE 1487

  The ladies gather in my chamber to wait for news without the king’s mother, who is on her knees in the beautiful Kenilworth chapel. We can hear a horseman on the road, and then the grinding noise of the portcullis going up and the drawbridge coming down to admit him. Cecily flies to the window and cranes her neck to look out. “A messenger,” she says. “The king’s messenger.”

  I rise to my feet to wait for him, then I realize that My Lady will intercept him before he gets to me, so I say, “Wait here!” to my ladies and slip from the room and down the stairs to the stable yard. Just as I thought, My Lady is there in her black gown striding across the yard, as the messenger swings down from the saddle.

  “I was told to report to you and to Her Grace the Queen,” he is saying.

  “The king’s wife,” she corrects him. “She is not yet crowned. You can tell me everything, I will pass on the news to her.”

  “I’m here,” I say quickly. “I’ll hear him myself. What’s the news?”

  He turns to me. “It started badly,” he says. “They recruited as they marched. They marched fast, faster than we thought they could have gone. The Irishmen are lightly armed, they carry almost nothing, the German soldiers are unstoppable.”

  My Lady the King’s Mother blanches white and totters slightly, as if she will faint. But I have received messengers from battles before. “Never mind all that,” I say sharply. “Tell me the end of the message, not the beginning. Is the king alive or dead?”

  “Alive,” he says.

  “Did he win?”

  “His commanders won.”

  I disregard this too. “Are the Irish and the German mercenaries defeated?”

  He nods.

  “John de la Pole?”

  “Dead.”

  I take a breath at the death of my cousin.

  “And Francis Lovell?” My Lady interrupts eagerly.

  “Run away. Probably drowned in the river.”

  “Now, you can tell me how it was,” I say.

  This is the speech he has prepared. “They marched fast,” he says. “Past York, had a few running battles, but drew up at a village called East Stoke, outside Newark. People came out to support them, and they were recruiting right up to the last moment before the battle.”

  “How many were they?” My Lady demands.

  “We thought about eight thousand.”

  “How many men did the king have by then?”

  “We were twice their number. We should have felt safe. But we did not.” He shakes his head at the memory of their fear. “We did not.

  “Anyway, they charged early, down from the hill, almost as soon as the battle began, and so all of them came against the Earl of Oxford who was commanding about six thousand men. He took the brunt of the fighting and his men held firm. They pushed back, and forced the Irish into a valley, and they couldn’t get out.”

  “They were trapped?” I ask.

  “We think they decided to fight to the death. They call the valley the Red Gutter now. It was very bad.”

  I turn my head from the thought of it. “Where was the king during this massacre?”

  “Safely in the rear of his army.” The messenger nods to his mother, who sees no shame in this. “But they brought the pretender to him when it was over.”

  “He’s safe?” My Lady confirms. “You are certain that the king is safe?”

  “Safe as ever.”

  I swallow an exclamation. “And who is the pretender?” I ask as calmly as possible.

  The man looks at me curiously. I realize I am gritting my teeth, and I try to breathe normally. “Is he a poor imposter as my lord thought?”

  “Lambert Simnel: a lad trained to do the bidding of others, a schoolboy from Oxford, a handsome boy. His Grace has him under arrest, and the schoolmaster who taught him, and many of the other leaders.”

  “And Francis Lovell?” My Lady demands, her voice hard. “Did anyone see him drown?”

  He shakes his head. “His horse plunged into the river with him and they were swept away together.”

  I cross myself. My Lady Mother makes the sign but her face is dark. “We had to capture him,” she says. “We had to take him and John de la Pole alive. We had to know what they planned. It was essential. We had to have them so that we could know what they know.”

  “The heat of the battle . . .” The man shrugs. “It’s harder to capture a man than to kill him. It was a close thing. Even though we outnumbered them by so many, it was a very close thing. They fought like men possessed. They were ready to die for their cause and we were—”

  “You were what?” I ask curiously.

  “We did as we were ordered,” he says carefully. “We did enough. We did the job.”

  I pause at that. I have heard reports from many battles, though none in which the victory was described so calmly. But then I have never heard a report from a battle where the chief commander, the king himself, sat at the rear of his army, an army twice the size of his enemy, and refused to parlay with defeated men but let them be slaughtered like dumb cattle.

  “But they’re dead,” My Lady says to comfort herself. “And my son is alive.”

  “He’s well. Not a scratch on him. How could they touch him? He was so far back they couldn’t see him!”

  “You can dine in the hall,” My Lady rules, “and this is for you.” I see a piece of gold pass from her hand to his. She must be grateful for the good news to pay so highly for it. She turns to me. “So it is over.”

  “Praise be to God,” I say devoutly.

  She nods. “His will be done,” she says, and I know that this victory will make her more certain than ever that her son was born to be king.

  LINCOLN CASTLE, LINCOLN, JULY 1487

  The king commands that we meet him at Lincoln and he and I go hand in hand into the great cathedral for a service of thanksgiving. Behind us, half a step behind, wearing a coronal, like a queen herself, comes My Lady the King’s Mother and either side of her are the king’s commanders, his uncle Jasper Tudor, who planned the battle, and his most loyal friend, John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, whose men took the brunt of the fighting.

  The archbishop, John Morton, is trembling at the nearness of the escape, his face flushed, his hands shaking as he distributes the Host. My Lady is in floods of tears of joy. Henry himself is profoundly moved, as if this is his first victory, fought all over again. Winning this means more to him than winning at Bosworth; it doubles his confidence.

  “I am relieved,” he says to me when we are in our private room at the end of the day. “I cannot easily say how deeply I am relieved.”

  “Because you won?” I ask. I am sitting at the window, looking east where the high spires of the cathedral pierce the low cloudy skies, but as he comes in my room I turn and look at his flushed complexion.

  “Not just that,” he says. “Once I knew that we outnumbered them I thought we were almost certain to win, and the Irish were practically unarmed—when they turned and faced us they were all but naked. I knew they couldn’t stand against archery—they had no shields, they had no padded jackets, nobody had chain mail, poor fools—no, what made it so wonderful was capturing the boy.”

  “The boy they said was my cousin Teddy?”

  “Yes, because now I can show him. Now everyone can see that he is no heir to York. He’s a schoolboy, a lad of ten years old, name of Lambert Simnel, nothing special about him but his looks . . .” He glances at me. “Handsome, charming, like all the Yorks.”

  I nod as if this is a reasonable complaint against us.

  “And better than that.” He smiles to himself, he is all but hugging himself with joy. “No one else landed, no one else came. Even though they ma
rched all the way across England, there was no one anchored off the east coast, there was no one waiting for them at Newark.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  He gets to his feet and stretches himself as if he would spread his arms to hug all of the kingdom. “If they had a pretender, a better likeness than the little schoolboy, they would have had him nearby, waiting. So that when they claimed victory they could produce him, exchange him for the little lad, and take him to London for a second coronation.”

  I wait.

  “Like with players!” He is almost laughing with joy. “When they make a switch in a play. Like the Easter play—there’s the body in the tomb, someone flicks a cape and there’s the risen Lord. You have to have your switch ready, you have to have your player in the wings. But when they didn’t have a boy waiting to take the place of the Simnel lad—that’s when I knew that they were defeated. They don’t have anyone!” He cracks into a laugh. “See? They don’t have anyone. Nobody was landed to meet them at Newark. Nobody came in from Flanders, nobody sailed up the Thames and arrived in London to wait for the triumphant procession. Nobody arrived in Wales, nobody came down from Scotland. Don’t you see?” He laughs in my face. “All they have is an impersonator, the schoolboy. They don’t have the real thing.”

  “The real thing?”

  In his relief he speaks his fear clearly for the first time. “They don’t have one of your brothers. They don’t have Edward Prince of Wales, they don’t have Richard Duke of York, his brother and heir. If they had either one of them, they would have had him ready, standing by to take the throne as soon as the battle was won. If either one of your brothers was alive they would have had him, ready to claim the throne, as soon as I was dead. But they don’t! They don’t!

  “It’s all been gossip, and rumors, and false sightings and lying reports. They did all this for a bluff. They fooled me—I don’t mind telling you that they frightened me—but it was a May game, a nothing. They made rumors about a boy in Portugal, they whispered about a boy who got out of the Tower alive; but it was all nothing. I have had men hunting all over Christendom for a boy and now I see he is nothing more than a dream. I am content now, that it was all nothing.”

  I register the color in his cheeks and the brightness of his eyes and realize that I am seeing my husband for the first time without his constant burden of fear. I smile at him; his relief is so powerful that I feel it myself. “We’re safe,” I say.

  “We Tudors are safe at last,” he responds. He puts out his hand to me and I understand that he will stay in my bed tonight. I rise to my feet but I am not eager, I feel no desire. I am not unwilling, I am a faithful wife and my husband is safe home from a terrible battle, happier than I have ever seen him, and I cannot help but be glad that he is safe. I welcome him home, I even welcome him to my bed.

  Gently, he unties the laces under my chin and takes off my nightcap. He turns me around and pulls my hair from the plait, unties the belt at my waist and the little ties at my shoulders, and drops my gown to the ground, so that I am naked before him, my hair tumbling down. He sighs and put his lips to my bare shoulder. “I shall crown you as Queen of England,” he says simply, and takes me into his arms.

  We go on a progress to celebrate the king’s great victory. My Lady the King’s Mother rides a great warhorse, as if she were caparisoned for battle. I ride the horse that Richard gave me; I feel as if he and I have been through many journeys together, and always riding away from Richard, and never with him as he promised. Henry rides often at my side. I know that he wants to demonstrate to the people who come out to see us that he is married to the York princess, that he has unified the houses and defeated the rebels. But now there is more than this: I know that he likes to be with me. We even laugh together as we ride through the small villages of Lincolnshire and the people come tumbling out of their houses and run across their fields to see us go by.

  “Smiling,” Henry says to me, beaming at half a dozen peasants whose opinions—surely—matter not at all, one way or the other.

  “Waving,” I coach him, and take my hand from the reins and make a little gesture.

  “How do you do it?” He stops his rictus grin at the crowd and turns to me. “That little wave, you look as if it’s easy. You don’t look practiced at all.”

  I think for a moment. “My father used to say that you must remember they have turned out to see you, they want to feel that you are their friend. You are among friends and loyal supporters. A smile or a wave is a greeting to people who have only come to admire you. You might not know them—but they think they know you. They deserve to be greeted as friends.”

  “But did he never think that they would turn out just as eagerly to greet his enemy? Did he not think that these are false smiles and hollow cheers?”

  I consider this for a moment, and then I giggle. “To tell you the truth, I think it never occurred to him at all,” I say. “He was terribly vain, you know. He always thought that everybody adored him. And mostly, they did. He rode around thinking everyone loved him. He claimed the throne on his merits as a true heir. He always thought he was the finest man in England, he never doubted it.”

  He shakes his head, and forgets to wave to someone who calls, À Tudor! It is only one voice, no one else takes up the call, and the cry just sounds wrong, strangely unconvincing. “He can’t have been told more often than I that he was born to be king,” he says. “Nobody in the world could be more sure than my mother that her son should be king.”

  “He was fighting from boyhood,” I say. “At the age that you were in hiding, he was recruiting men and demanding their allegiance. It was very different for him. He was claiming the throne and drawing on the will of the people. He was the claimant: not his mother. Three suns appeared in the sky over his army. He was certain that he was chosen by God to be king. He was visible, he showed himself, at the same age, you were in hiding. He was fighting, you were running away.”

  He nods. I think, but I don’t say, and he was blessed with bravery, he had a great natural courage and you are naturally fearful. And he had a wife that adored him, who married him for irresistible love, and her family embraced him, and his cause was their cause, and all of us—his daughters, his sons, his brothers-in-law, his sisters-in-law—we were all utterly loyal to him. He was at the center of a loving family and every one of them would have laid down their life for him. But you only have your mother and your uncle Jasper, and they are both cold of heart.

  Someone ahead of us shouts “Hurrah!” and the yeomen of the guard raise their pikes and shout “Hurrah!” in full-throated reply, and I think that my father would never have created yeomen of the guard to lead the cheers for he always believed that everyone loved him, and he never had need of guarding.

  WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, AUGUST 1487

  We go back to London to prepare for my coronation. Henry makes a royal entry into the city, and attends a service of thanksgiving for his victory in St. Paul’s. He rewards the faithful, even those who had little choice but to be faithful since they were locked up in the Tower, releasing Thomas Howard the Earl of Surrey and my half brother Thomas Grey from their imprisonment.

  Archbishop John Morton is made Lord Chancellor, which only makes me and others wonder what assistance a Father of the Church could provide for a king that should lead to so great a reward.

  “Spying,” Thomas Grey tells me. “Morton and My Lady the King’s Mother together run the greatest spy network that the world has ever seen, and not a man moves in and out of England but their son and protégé know of it.”

  My half brother is seated with me in my presence chamber, and the music for dancing covers our words as my ladies practice new steps in one corner of the room and we talk in another. I hold up my sewing to cover my face so that no one can see my lips. I am so pleased to see him after so long that I cannot keep myself from beaming.

  “Have you seen our Lady Mother?” I ask.

  He nods.

  “Is sh
e well? Does she know I am to be crowned?”

  “She’s well, quite happy at the abbey. She sent you her love and best wishes for your coronation.”

  “I can’t get him to release her to court,” I admit. “But he knows he can’t hold her there forever. He has no cause.”

  “Yes but he does have cause,” my half brother says with a wry smile. “He knows that she sent money to Francis Lovell and John de la Pole. He knows that she has united all of the Yorkists who plot against him. Under Henry’s nose, under your nose, she was running a spy network of her own, from Scotland to Flanders. He knows that she has been linking all of them, in turn, to Duchess Margaret in Flanders. But what drives him quite mad is that he can’t say that out loud. He can’t accuse her, because to do so would be to admit that there was a plot against him, inspired by our mother, funded by your aunt, and assisted by your grandmother, Duchess Cecily. He can’t admit to England that the surviving House of York is completely united against him. By exposing the conspiracy, he shows the threat they are. It looks far too much like a conspiracy of women in favor of a child of their household. It is overwhelming evidence for the one thing that Henry wants to deny.”

  “What is that?” I ask.

  Thomas leans his chin on his hand so his fingers cover his mouth. No one can read his lips as he whispers, “It looks as though those women are working together for a York prince.”

  “But Henry says that since no York prince came to England, ready for the victory, he cannot exist.”

  “Such a boy would be a precious boy,” Thomas objects. “You wouldn’t bring him to England until the victory was won and the coast secure.”

  “A precious boy?” I echo. “You mean a pretend prince, a false token. A counterfeit.”

  He smiles at me. Thomas has been under arrest in one place or another for two long years: in France since before the battle of Bosworth, and more recently in the Tower of London. He’s not going to say anything that will put him back behind bars again.