A Princely Knave

by Philip Lindsay

  “Has our English winter pinched the roses, from your cheeks, my pretty one?” once he asked her when he entered the queen’s presence-chamber and stood to warm his hand over the charcoal fire while around him the ladies drooped into curtsies.

  Surrounded by these ladies in their bright gowns he stood, looking down on their bended necks like an executioner on holiday. Eyes lowered, they crouched in silence as to a god, while he coughed and spat and peered down at them, trying to see into their faces. Of the queen he took no heed. She knelt apart, not daring to rise until he permitted her. Then he snapped his fingers, saying: “Up, dames, up on your feet”; and around him, concealing him from his queen, the women rose and stood in silence.

  “All very silent,”, he said pleasantly. “God’s bones, you can chatter like pies when a man’s not present. Your clacking can be heard in every corner of our palace, yet now … Have I a Gorgon’s head between my ears that your blood chills at me? And you, my Scottish mouse … ah, you were ever the quiet one, were you not? What secrets do you hide under your placket?”

  “I have no secrets to hide from your grace,” she said.

  “Then you are no true woman, although your shape gives the lie to that. Are there no English or Welsh gallants at my court that you have no feminine secrets? Or are you one of those prodigies of which I have sometimes heard, that phoenix of a turtle that loves but once and never again? Ah, then are you rare indeed amongst women.”

  When he talked in this gibing fashion, Katherine had learned that often there was a barb under his tongue. His own ill-humours he revenged on others, on women by raillery and on men by sending them to the secrecy of the Star Chamber.

  “Is that it, lady?” he murmured when she did not answer. “Your heart having been given once cannot be given again? I can remember bold speaking from that kissing-gob once in my chamber and how a certain lady swore that she’d become a lady of the lake and wanton it with all the sparks in my court; yet now do I see men moping after her with the apple still uneaten in her eyes. Perhaps I was hasty in sending you to my queen. Perhaps you would have been content in a humbler guise, wife to a scullion, mayhap?”

  “Your grace,” she said, drawing herself to her full height, “why do you fleer at me in this fashion?”

  “By God, lady,” he cried with an expression of exaggerated horror, “nothing was further from my thoughts. I hoped to pleasure you, seeing you always in these doleful dumps. Indeed, madam, I honour your virtue that even the seductions of court life cannot tempt you to forget that you are still the wife of some man. Let it never fee said that Harry the Seventh parted a good wife from her husband. At your nod, I’ll have this Perkin Warbeck moved to better quarters with a wider bed, that I may be certain of being remembered in both your prayers.”

  “I am content as I am, thank you, your grace,” she said, trembling, because she knew that in a spiteful humour he might think it merry to force her back into her husband’s bed.

  “That is more than can be said of your spouse,” he growled, his long face darkening. “The fellow crawls around my feet and I stumble on him wherever I go. Why must he be so melancholy? Have I not given him back his life? What more could he ask of me? No other king, by God’s glory, would have shown so merciful a face to one who thought to steal his throne; yet still he’s discontented. I like not having sour looks around me. Some day I might wish him elsewhere, and …” Slowly, he smiled into her furtive eyes and shrugged his bowed shoulders “… And then he will never return to darken my court with his misery. I have been too generous, and the generous are never thanked.”

  Why did he threaten? This could not be idle talk, she knew. He was telling her that unless Perkin showed a cheerful countenance he would be sent to a dungeon or quietly murdered; although, whenever possible, the king preferred to cloak injustice under a show of legality. Men said that this was because, having had King Edward’s sons murdered in the Tower, he feared lest, like the ghost of Prince Arthur on King John’s back, their memory undermine his rootless throne. Determined to show the world that he was no secret murderer, he now murdered always with a parade of justice, and for that reason had he created the detested Star Chamber where law could be twisted to his will. Was he awaiting the opportunity that would give him an excuse to kill Perkin? If that were so, why tell her of it? Did he still believe that she so chafed in her non-marriage that she would seize this chance for treachery and embroil her husband in some plot that afterwards she might betray him?

  “Freedom,” he said, going very close to her, his slitted eyes not blinking while they watched her, “freedom is sweet to man and woman and is no treasure till it’s lost. You would make a handsome widow, lady, and a buxom wife for some lord.”

  Then suddenly he smiled and pinched her cheek. “It is only because I love you my moppet,” Be said, “that I talk thus. It drags on my heart that so bonny a bird should moult in a mews when she might be free. What say you, ladies, is not freedom to love wherever you list a dream in all your little hearts?”

  They did not answer. They held their breath and looked down at the rushes on the floor, hands clasped under their girdles, like a flock of nuns before a naked man; for there was not one amongst them who did not tremble when the king was in this malicious mood.

  “My queen is also silent,” he cried, swinging round suddenly on her who stood meekly in her yellow gown, her great calm hazel eyes not flinching before the insolent hatred in his glare; “and she, like her mother, whom God pardon, can be like a very jay with a split tongue. Is not freedom precious to ladies, your grace? to marry which man you choose from your lewd dreaming, some spry young fellow with perfumed locks and a dance in his walk, some bull in doublet and hose, to tickle you to your heart’s root?”

  Feeling that she must speak if only for the sake of her dignity, in a low voice the queen said: “I am a woman, your grace, and have no thoughts that are not my husband’s.”

  “I’d like not that,” he growled, and his long face seemed to grow longer, the skin more dully yellow, while the lids, like a bird’s, folded over the blue eyes, leaving only bright slits. “Nay, for only a king is permitted to think treason. Did you know that they call this lady here the White Rose?” and with a sharp fingernail he tapped on Katherine’s chest.

  “Yea, the White Rose,” he repeated. “Is the name not apt as glove to finger, for is she not a very white lady that smells somewhat like a rose? You too, madam, were once called the White Rose before we plucked your whiteness and made it bleed with our Red Rose in a unity of blood, white and red roses mingling. Should not this lady also be grafted to a loyal root?”

  “I have one husband already,” said Katherine.

  “Ay, ay, of course, of course,” chuckled the king; “you have one husband, madam, and have therefore become a castle of the rose guarded by that curmudgeon, chastity, as in the Romaunt, quite safe in your hole from Amor and his allies … for a time, at least, for a time.”

  Had he been an amorous man, Katherine would boldly have countered his smile with a smile of refusal; hut this, she knew, was not amorous gallantry. Under his words there lay some threat aimed at her husband rather than at her; but he used such riddles that she could not tell whether she read his hints aright.

  “Remember,” he said, again pinching her cheek and nipping hard to see her flinch, “roses soon fade and the bonniest lass must grow wrinkles with time, while tender lamb can turn to mutton to break a man’s tooth. You must not waste these, your lusty years, lady. Why, ’tis cruelty to men to watch such a rose turn yellow before it’s plucked … Wife and no wife, married and yet no husband to keep you warm at night … ’Tis most unnatural … But we will see to it, have no fear, we will see to it …”

  “What do you mean by that, my lord?” she cried.

  “You will see,” he smiled. “I am a generous master and like to have about me happy faces and well-loved women carrying sons for England under their hearts … There ar
e women enough in my realm, too many for most husbands’ comfort, and they should all go to it that they might have sons, ay, sons,” he repeated, turning his lizard-eyes towards the queen, who stared back bravely at him.

  Abruptly, with no farewells, he turned and strode out of the chamber, not heeding the women sinking into curtsies; and not until the door had closed behind him did they breathe easily again. As though his presence had sucked the life out of the air, they took deep breaths while colour returned to their cheeks and brightness to their eyes; and they laughed, too loudly; and they talked, too loudly; and they acted, indeed, as though they had been nuns unloosed for a jolly pilgrimage. They took no heed of Katherine or the queen, but fluttered together away from them, as though, being in disfavour with the king, they were both tainted and might infect them, as with plague.

  White-faced, haunted with thoughts of blood and of a dead man whom once she had cherished in her arms, Katherine looked up and saw the queen with great frightened eyes watching her. Neither woman spoke, but with their glances, words were not needed. Each plainly read the other’s thoughts and dared not give them speech while these chirruping women were near to listen and to babble later to their lovers of anything they heard or might suspect.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  JAILED IN THE FLESH

  IN ALL that court, Katherine could scarcely have found a friend so friendless as the queen. Because the king neglected her, others also neglected her, particularly now that her mother was in disgrace on suspicion of helping Perkin in rebellion, although many pitied her and wished to console her in her lonely greatness. She, heiress of England, King Edward’s daughter, possessed nothing that was her own: Henry had married her because he had had to make stronger his demand for the throne; and she had submitted because she had had no alternative and had been fretting in her maidenhood when all her friends had long since won the right to conceal their hair in matrimony. And her ambitious mother had been assured that easily would she be able to tame, this Welsh adventurer. Ever plotting, ever rancorous, that mother, Queen Elizabeth Woodville, after her bid to steal the throne from Richard had been frustrated, had thought to regain power by marrying him to her daughter, his niece, for his wife, the delicate Queen Anne, was plainly ill unto death. “His holiness will grant a dispensation,” she had urged “and it’s not like between father and daughter or brother and sister, not true incest. Uncle and niece have no blood kinship, or very little. It will cost money, the curia being greedy as a dragon, but I will yet have you queen, my child, and I will be queen-mother.”

  Of all her mother’s many intrigues, the queen could think of only one that had been wholly successful, her plot to marry King Edward IV. when she had found herself a widow with a family. After that triumph, her ambition had grown insatiable. Into every possible seat of power had she edged her relations and had almost managed to steal the throne from Richard after her husband died. Then, final, bitter triumph, after King Richard had publicly repudiated her plan of marrying him to his niece, the woman had conspired instead to marry the girl to his enemy and usurper, Henry. And, alas, alas, in that had she succeeded, only to find herself locked away, her daughter the slave to a tyrant, and her two sons murdered in the Tower.

  Extremely beautiful must the queen have been when she was a girl. At thirty, she should have been in womanly perfection of body and spirit; but if not yet broken, that spirit had been cowed by persistent cruelty; and her body, beginning to loosen after child-bearing, she had disdainfully left to take what shape it chose. Only her Plantagenet pride kept heir from becoming a sloven and trying to escape through drunkenness.

  How could such a woman, herself powerless and afraid, help her in her sorrow? wondered Katherine, sensing in the queens glances the sympathy and pity that she felt.

  Each night, in turn, one of her ladies slept in the queen s chamber, and that night, although it was not her turn, Katherine arranged to take another lady’s place in the truckle-bed after the queen had been disrobed and, wrapped in a furred nightrail, laid under the sheets and blankets. On a small ledge jutting from the wall twinkled the night-light in its perforated metal box. Otherwise, the room was dark, the queen’s vast bed, curtained all four sides, seeming a large black box, a tomb for love, forgotten in a nest of women.

  On her small wheeled bed at the great bed’s foot, Katherine lay, for never must the queen be left alone lest she commit treason with some lover; and she stared into the night until her eyes ached while she wondered if she dared speak before the queen spoke to her. Then excitedly she heard the curtains rustle and, starting up, the sheet wound round her naked body, she saw them open and saw the white smudge that was the queen’s face peering towards her.

  “You are unhappy, child?” whispered the queen. When Katherine did not answer, remaining with bowed head standing before her, she sighed and said: “I have heard something of your story, how you married the man, and a handsome man, forsooth, who said he was my brother. My poor brother is dead, alas. I know it as certainly as if I had seen both him and Edward killed. He delights in suggesting it, hinting of it, to taunt me …”

  She could say no more. The court might know of her martyrdom but only to her confessor was she able to bring herself to speak openly of it; even to this girl, even while she was veiled in darkness, she could not humiliate herself by telling how the king liked to whisper to her, in his subtle way, by innuendoes only, while he clasped her inescapably in his arms, how he had had her brothers murdered.

  “Did you really believe he was my brother?” she asked suddenly.

  “I — I don’t know,” whispered Katherine; and suddenly she realized that she never had believed it nor had she cared. “My king bade me marry him and if my king told me he was Prince Richard who was I to question it?”

  “You are young, so young … What can the young know of life? Bonny then does it seem to be a wife and proud to be a mother. It is not men we love when we are girls. It is love itself. And men seem to us such masterful, frightening creatures who can desire us yet can soon tire of us. Bold yet wary, certain that we can hold our husbands yet fearful lest we disappoint them in our ignorance of love. Thus do we enter marriage, with joy and trepidation, and wake to find a hog or a bully in our bed.”

  “I was, mayhap, more fortunate,” whispered Katherine, remembering the awe and rapture with which Perkin had first touched her on that wonderful night, as though he feared to kiss away a dream. “I have been cruel,” she said. “Not he.” The thought came to her as a revelation and she seemed to weep internally with regret, her body shaken with sobs while no tears came. “Doubtless it was the fashion in which I had been reared,” she said, “for they were very strict with me and I was devout and grew frightened of men who have the power of committing us to hell through body’s weakness. Therefore did I always challenge them and grew wary of their approach. Yea, I was cruel to him because I was afraid, afraid of myself.”

  “Yet there can be womanly satisfaction in mastery,” said the-queen, “although, God knows, it is a satisfaction denied me since I was a girl My being a great king’s daughter made men timid in my presence and I delighted in tormenting them with hinted offers which they dared not take. They suffered my humours because they thought they loved me, but how can a woman hurt a man who hates her? There must be delight in cruelty when you know how soon and easily you can turn His pain to joy and win his gratitude by doing what you want to do. How else can women know for certain that we’re loved?”

  “Deeper satisfaction must be there,” sighed Katherine, “in surrender, in submitting as my heart never allowed me to submit. Always there’s a core of anger in me; even when I most love, I resent my weakness and wish for revenge in a bite or a blow or a cruel word. I hate myself at times because of it, but how can one conquer oneself? Yet had I the chance again …”

  “The chance again …” murmured the queen; and both women were silent, tears in their eyes while they thought how pleasantly life should h
ave run, and they envied those placid women who did not appreciate their good fortune in having a contented home.

  “You must be given that chance again,” said the queen suddenly. “Women are basely treated in this man’s world, and we are fools because too readily we submit. Take happiness when' you can, my child, for youth is fleeting and age has only regrets. When today my husband taunted you, I could see in his eyes that he was working some secret devilry, for he can smile only at what others fear, that he might prove his power by hurting them. But take heart, he dare not slay your husband. That would only show he feared him, an admission that the youth was indeed my brother. Had I the opportunity I’d call him so; before the world I’d swear he was that poor Richard I last saw years ago. No one has seen him those many years. No one … save those who murdered him.”

  All had died, or nearly all, those petals of the-White Rose. King Edward dead in his manly sins; his brother Clarence murdered at his command; and his other brother, Richard, trapped by traitors on the bloody ground of Bosworth; and his two sons, Edward and Richard. Henry had had to kill them after his usurpation; otherwise he would have had to pass to the elder lad his stolen crown. Only remained Clarence’s son, the Earl of Warwick, whom the king kept in the Tower while he awaited an excuse for killing him also. This lady, the queen, was one of the last of those petals, she and the Duchess of Burgundy.