I shake my head. ‘Iz, how could I refuse Father? How could either of us?’
‘And now? Now I have to go to England to join him and George, and just leave you here? With her?’
‘What can we do?’ I ask her. ‘What can we say?’
‘Nothing,’ she says furiously. She turns and walks away from me.
‘Where are you going?’ I call after her.
‘To tell them to pack,’ she throws over her shoulder. ‘To tell them to pack for me. They can put in a shroud for all I care. I don’t care if I drown this time.’
King Louis has provided an elegant little merchant ship, for Isabel to go with a couple of ladies to keep her company. My mother, Queen Margaret and I are on the quayside to see her leave.
‘Really, I can’t. I can’t go on my own,’ Isabel pleads.
‘Your father says he needs you to be with your husband,’ my mother rules. ‘He says you must go at once.’
‘I thought I was to sail with Annie. I should stay with Annie and tell her how to behave. I am her lady in waiting, she needs me.’
‘I do,’ I confirm.
‘Queen Margaret has the command of Anne now, and Anne keeps the queen faithful to our agreement. She does that just by being there, being married to Prince Edward. She doesn’t have to do anything more. She needs no advice, she just has to obey the queen. But you must go to do your work with George,’ my mother tells her. ‘Your task is to keep him faithful to our cause and keep him away from his family. Intercept any messages they send him, make sure he is true to your father. Remind him that he is sworn to your father and to you. We’ll be only a few days behind you, and your father is victorious in England.’
Isabel reaches for my hand. ‘Oh go on,’ Mother says irritably. ‘Stop clinging to your sister. It just means you will be in London, with your father, making merry at court while we are stuck with the army in Dorset, making our way slowly to London. You will be at Westminster Palace picking your clothes from the royal wardrobe, while we trudge up the Fosse Way.’
They take her chests of clothes and bags of things.
‘Don’t go,’ I say in an urgent whisper. ‘Don’t leave me with the bad queen and her son.’
‘How can I refuse?’ she asks. ‘Don’t anger her, or him, just do as you are told. I’ll see you in London. We’ll be together then.’ She finds a smile. ‘Think, Annie, you’ll be Princess of Wales.’
Her smile dies, and we look bleakly at one another. ‘I have to go,’ she says as Mother beckons her impatiently, and with our half-sister Margaret and two other ladies in waiting she walks along the dock to the little ship. She glances back as she goes up the gangplank, and raises her hand to me. I think that nobody but me cares that she will be seasick.
HARFLEUR, FRANCE, MARCH 1471
The winds are holding us in harbour though we said we would set sail more than two weeks ago. My mother-in-law, Queen Margaret, is desperately impatient, and every dawn finds her on the quayside arguing with the captains of her fleet. They assure her that since we are held in port by winds that blow so strongly onshore that we cannot get our ships out to sea, then the very same winds will be blowing the invasion fleet of King Edward further along the coast in Flanders, against his harbour walls, holding him powerlessly in port, like us.
For it turns out that he has not been wasting his time in exile. While my father has taken England under his command, released the king from the Tower and crowned him again, restored the lords of Lancaster to glory and announced that Prince Edward and I are married, the vanquished King Edward has scrounged for money, raised a fleet, recruited a ragtail army, and is waiting for good winds – just like us – to get back to England. Since his wife Elizabeth has given birth to a boy in sanctuary his friends and supporters claim this as a sign of their destiny, and urge him to attack my father’s peace. So now we have to get to England before him, so that we can support my father against the invasion of Edward of York. We have to get to England ahead of King Edward, his loyal brother Richard, his friends and his fleet. This is a necessity, not a matter of choice; it must be done, and yet the wind blows steadily and powerfully against us. For sixteen days it has held us here, on the quayside, while the queen rages at her captains, and clings white-faced to the clenched fists of her son, and looks at me as if I am a heavy burden to ship across a stormy sea.
She is regretting now that she waited in France for our wedding. She is thinking that we should have marched at once and invaded alongside my victorious father. If we had gone then, we would be in London now, receiving oaths of fealty. But she did not trust my father, and she did not trust me. She delayed to see me married to her son; she had to see my father pin me, like a pledge into her hat, without chance of retreat. Only our marriage and my bedding reassured her that neither he nor she could play false. And secretly, she wanted the delay. She wanted to see that my father could capture England before she wasted her precious son on me. Now, because she delayed to see Father win, because she had to wait to secure me, she is trapped on the wrong side of the narrow seas and an inexplicable wind blows against her every day.
HARFLEUR, FRANCE, 12 APRIL 1471
‘We sail tomorrow at dawn,’ the queen says as she walks past Mother and I, standing on the quayside as usual, as we do every day, looking out to sea. This is all any of us has done for the past two weeks – we look to the horizon and we wait for the wind to die down and the seas to quiet. ‘They think the wind will drop overnight. Even if it does not, we have to sail tomorrow. We cannot delay.’
I wait for my husband to tell his mother that we cannot risk sailing into a storm but he has her hard eyes and fixed mouth. He looks as if he would drown rather than stay any longer. ‘And then we will be waiting for him when he lands,’ he says. ‘As the false king Edward steps off his ship we will put him to the sword, and he will go face down into the shingle. We will see his head on a pike on London Bridge.’
‘We cannot sail against the wind,’ I suggest.
His eyes are quite blank. ‘We will.’
In the morning the wind has dropped but the waves are still capped with white, and outside the bar of the harbour we can see the sea is grey and heaving, as if ready for a storm. I have a sense of foreboding, but I can tell no-one, and anyway nobody cares how I feel.
‘When will we see my father?’ I ask Mother. It is only the thought that he is victorious on the other side of these seas that makes me feel I dare set sail. I so want to be with him, I want him to know that I have done my part in this great venture, I have wedded and bedded the prince he found for me, I did not shrink from the altar nor from the bed. My husband never speaks to me and does his duty on me as if I were a mare that must foal. But I have done all that my father asks, and when I call the bad queen ‘My Lady Mother’, and kneel for her blessing I do more than he asked of me. I am ready to take the throne that he has won for me. I am his daughter, I am his heir, I will cross the seas that are so fearsome and I will not fail him. I will become a queen like Margaret of Anjou with a will like a wolf. ‘Will he meet us when we land?’
‘We are to meet him in London,’ my mother says. ‘He has arranged a state entry for us into the city. They will throw down green boughs and flowers before you, there will be poets to sing your praises, your father will have the king greet you on the steps of Westminster Palace. There will be parades and pageants to celebrate your arrival, the fountains will run with wine. Don’t worry, he has everything planned for you. This is the pinnacle of his ambition. He has won what he has wanted for years. He has won for himself what he fought for – and first gave to others. When you have a son, your father will have put a boy of Warwick – a Neville – on the throne of England. He is the kingmaker indeed, and you will be the mother of a king.’
‘My son, my father’s grandson, will be King of England,’ I repeat. I still cannot believe it.
‘Guy of Warwick.’ My mother names the great founder of our house. ‘You will call him Guy Richard of Warwick and he will
be Prince Guy of Warwick and Lancaster.’
A shrill whistle from the boatswain warns us that we must leave. My mother nods to the ladies of her household. ‘Get aboard,’ she says. ‘We are taking that ship.’ She turns to me: ‘You sail with the queen.’
‘Aren’t you coming with me?’ I am immediately frightened. ‘Surely you will come with me, Lady Mother?’
My mother laughs. ‘You can sail across the narrow seas on your own with her, I should think,’ she says. ‘She spends all her time telling you how to be queen. You spend all your time listening to her. The two of you will hardly miss me.’
‘I . . .’ I cannot tell my mother that without her and without Isabel I feel quite abandoned. Being Princess of Wales is no compensation, being coached by a woman of mad ambition is no substitute for being cared for by my mother. I am only fourteen, I am afraid of the heaving sea, and afraid of my husband, and afraid of his fierce mother. ‘Surely you will travel with me, Lady Mother?’
‘Go on with you,’ my mother says briskly, ‘go to the queen and sit at her feet like her lapdog, like you always do.’ She goes up the gangplank of her ship, and does not look back at me, as if she has half-forgotten me already. She is in a hurry to join her husband, she is eager to get back to our London house; she wants to see him where he was born to be, at the right hand of the throne of England. I look around for my new husband, who is arm in arm with his mother, and they are laughing together. He waves for me to go on board our ship and I grip the rope and go up the gangplank, feeling my shoes slip on the damp timbers. The ship is small and poorly appointed; it is not one of my father’s great flagships. It has been supplied by King Louis for his kinswoman Margaret, and he has equipped it to transport soldiers and horses, not for our comfort. The queen’s ladies and I go into the master cabin and sit awkwardly on stools in the cramped space, leaving the best chair vacant for the queen. We sit in silence. I can smell the scent of my fear on my rich gown.
We hear the shouts of the sailors as they cast off the ropes then the door of the cabin bangs open and the queen comes in, her face alight with excitement. ‘We are sailing,’ she says. ‘We will be there before Edward.’ She laughs nervously. ‘We must get there before Edward and raise our troops to face him. He will be racing to catch this wind, just like us, but we must outsail him. It is a race now; we must get there before him.’
CERNE ABBEY, WEYMOUTH, 15 APRIL 1471
The queen sits in state in the great hall of the Cerne Abbey, her son standing behind her chair as if he is her personal guard, his hand on her shoulder, his handsome face grave. I am seated beside her on a lower chair – really, a stool – as if I were a little mascot, to remind everyone that the Warwick name and fortune is attached to this venture. We are waiting for the Lancaster lords to welcome us to the kingdom. Seated like this we present them with a tableau of unity. Only my mother is missing, as her ship and a few others of our fleet made landfall further up the coast at Southampton. She will be riding to join us now.
The double doors at the end of the hall swing open and the brothers of the House of Beaufort come in together. The queen rises to her feet and first gives her hands and then her cheek to Edmund Duke of Somerset, the son of the man that people said was her only love, then she greets his brother: John the Marquis of Dorset. John Courtenay the Earl of Devon kneels to her. These are men who were her loyal favourites when she was queen, who stayed faithful to her when she was in exile, and who rallied to my father for her sake.
I had expected them to come in shouting greetings, filled with excitement, but they look grim, and their entourage and the other lords behind them are not beaming either. I look from one dark face to another and I know already that something has gone wrong. I glance at the queen and see that her face has lost its rosy colour. The excitement of greeting is draining away, leaving her pale and stony. So she knows it too, though she greets one man after another, often by name, often asking after friends and family. Too often they shake their head, as if they cannot bear to say that a man is dead. I start to wonder if these are new deaths, if there has been some sort of attack in London, an ambush on the road? They look like men with new fears, with fresh grief. What has happened while we waited at the quayside in France? What disaster happened while we were at sea?
She makes up her mind to know the worst and turns, sweeping the train of her gown, to her throne, and seats herself. She clasps her hands in her lap, she grits her teeth. I see her screw up her courage. ‘Tell us,’ she says shortly. She indicates her son and even me. ‘Tell us.’
‘The York claimant, the impostor Edward, landed in the North a month ago,’ Edmund Beaufort says bluntly.
‘A month ago? He can’t have done. The seas must have held him in port . . .’
‘He set sail into the very teeth of the storm and he was all but wrecked, he lost his fleet at sea, but they found each other again and marched on York and then London. As always, he has a witch’s luck: his fleet scattered and then found each other again.’
Her son looks at her as though she has failed him. She says again, ‘The seas must surely have held him in port as they did us.’
‘Not him.’
She makes a small gesture with her hand as if to push away the bad news. ‘And my lord Warwick?’
‘Stayed true to you. Mustered his army and marched out against Edward. But he was betrayed.’
‘Who?’ The one word is like a cat’s spit.
Somerset throws a quick sideways glance at me. ‘George Duke of Clarence turned his coat and joined with his brother, Edward. The younger son Richard brought them together. They were, all three, reconciled. It was the three sons of York together again and George’s army and wealth was thrown onto the side of Edward. All George’s affinity stood behind him, the Yorks were reunited.’
She turns a burning glance on me as if I am to blame. ‘Your sister Isabel! We sent her ahead to keep him faithful! She was there to hold him to his word!’
‘Your Grace . . .’ I shrug. What could she do? What could she make George do, if he chose to change his mind?
‘They met near the village of Barnet, on the Great North Road.’
We wait. There is something terrible about the slow unfolding of this story. I clench my hands in my lap to prevent myself shouting out: ‘But who won?’
‘There was a mist like a low cloud that rolled in through the night, which they said was a witch’s mist. All night it grew thicker and darker, you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. One army couldn’t see the other. At any rate – we couldn’t see them.’
We wait, as they waited.
‘They could see us though. At dawn when they came at us out of the mist, they were far closer than we thought – they were on top of us. They had been hiding in the mist, as close as a stone’s throw, all night. They had known where we were when we were like blind men. We had been shooting cannon all night far over their heads. We parried the charge, we took them on, then through the day the battle lines shifted and though we locked forces with Edward and held him, the Earl of Oxford, our faithful ally, broke through them and then came back to the battle through the mist and our men thought the earl had turned traitor and was coming against them. Some thought it was reinforcements for Edward, coming at them again from behind, Edward often keeps a battle in reserve . . . at any rate, they broke and fled.’
‘They fled?’ She repeats the word as if she does not understand it. ‘Fled?’
‘Many of our men were killed, thousands. But the rest fled back to London. Edward won.’
‘Edward won?’
He goes down on one knee. ‘Your Grace, I am sorry to say that in this first battle he was victorious. He defeated your commander the Earl of Warwick; but I am confident we can defeat him now. We have mustered the army again, they are on their way.’
I wait. I expect her to ask where my father is, when he will arrive with those of his army who managed to get away.
She turns to me. ‘So Isabel did nothing f
or us, though we sent her ahead to be with her husband. She didn’t keep George to our alliance,’ she says spitefully. ‘I will remember this. You had better remember this. She failed to keep him faithful to you, to me, to your father. She is a poor daughter and a poor wife, a wretched sister. I think she will regret this. I will make sure that she regrets the day her husband betrayed us.’
‘My father?’ I whisper. ‘Is my father coming now?’
I see the Duke of Somerset wince and look at the queen for permission to speak.
‘My father?’ I ask more loudly. ‘What of my father?’
‘He died in the battle,’ he says quietly. ‘I am sorry, my lady.’
‘Died?’ she demands baldly. ‘Warwick is dead?’
‘Yes.’
She starts to smile, as if it is funny. ‘Killed by Edward?’
He bows in assent.
She cannot help herself. She lets out a peal of laughter, clapping her hand over her mouth, trying to silence herself but not able to cease laughing. ‘Who would have thought it?’ she gasps. ‘Who would ever have thought such a thing? My God! The wheel of fortune – Warwick killed by his own beloved protégé! Warwick against his own wards and they kill him. And Edward with his two brothers at his side again – after all we have done and sworn . . .’ Slowly she subsides. ‘And my husband, the king?’ She moves onto the next question as if there is nothing more to be said about the death of my father.
‘How did he die?’ I ask, but nobody answers me.
‘The king?’ she repeats impatiently.
‘Safe in London, back in the Tower. They picked him up after the battle and took him as their prisoner.’
‘He was well?’ she asks quickly.
Somerset shifts uncomfortably. ‘Singing,’ he says shortly. ‘In his tent.’ The mad king’s son and his wife exchange one brief look.
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