The Red Queen tc-2

by Philippa Gregory

  She sighs as if I am tiresome. “They won’t ask you that.”

  “And then what will happen?”

  “His Grace, the king, will appoint a new guardian, and, in turn, he will give you in marriage to the man of his choice.”

  “Another betrothal?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I not go to an abbey?” I ask very quietly, though I know what her answer will be. Nobody regards my spiritual gifts. “Now I am released from this betrothal can I not go?”

  “Of course you can’t go to an abbey, Margaret. Don’t be stupid. Your duty is to bear a son and heir, a boy for our family, the Beauforts, a young kinsman to the King of England, a boy for the House of Lancaster. God knows, the House of York has boys enough. We have to have one of our own. You will give us one of our own.”

  “But I think I have a calling-”

  “You are called to be mother of the next heir of Lancaster,” she says briskly. “That is an ambition great enough for any girl. Now go and get ready to leave. Your women will have packed your clothes; you just have to fetch your doll for the journey.”

  I fetch my doll and my own carefully copied book of prayers too. I can read French, of course, and also English, but I cannot understand Latin or Greek, and my mother will not allow me a tutor. A girl is not worth educating, she says. I wish that I could read the gospels and prayers in Latin, but I cannot, and the handwritten copies in English are rare and precious. Boys are taught Latin and Greek and other subjects too; but girls need only be able to read and write, to sew, to keep the household accounts, to make music and enjoy poetry. If I were an abbess, I would have access to a great library, and I could set clerks to copy all the texts that I wanted to read. I would make the novices read to me all day. I would be a woman of learning instead of an untaught girl, as stupid as any ordinary girl.

  If my father had lived, perhaps he would have taught me Latin. He was a great reader and writer; at least I know that much about him. He spent years in captivity in France when he studied every day. But he died just days before my first birthday. My birth was so unimportant to him that he was in France on campaign, trying to restore his fortune, when my mother was brought to bed, and he did not come home again until just before my first birthday, and then he died; so he never knew me and my gifts.

  It will take us three days to get to London. My mother will ride her own horse, but I am to ride pillion behind one of the grooms. He is called Wat, and he thinks himself a great charmer in the stables and kitchen. He winks at me, as if I would be friendly to a man such as him, and I frown to remind him that I am a Beaufort and he is a nobody. I sit behind him, and I have to take tight hold of his leather belt, and when he says to me, “Right and tight? Righty tighty?” I nod coldly, so as to warn him that I don’t want him talking to me all the way to Ampthill.

  He sings instead, which is just as bad. He sings love songs and haymaking songs in a bright tenor voice, and the men who ride with us, to protect us from the armed bands who are everywhere in England these days, join in with him and sing too. I wish my mother would order them to be silent, or at least command them to sing psalms; but she is happy, riding out in the warm spring sunshine, and when she comes alongside me, she smiles and says, “Not far now, Margaret. We will spend tonight at Abbots Langley and go on to London tomorrow. Are you not too tired?”

  I am so unprepared by those who should care for me that I haven’t even been taught how to ride, and I am not allowed even to sit on a horse of my own and be led, not even when we arrive in London and hundreds of people in the streets and markets and shops gawp at the fifty of our household as we ride by. How am I to appear as the heroine who will save England if I have to jog behind Wat, seated pillion, my hand on his belt, like some village slut going to a goose fair? I am not at all like an heir to the House of Lancaster. We stay at an inn, not even at court, for the Duke of Suffolk, my guardian, was terribly disgraced and is now dead, so we cannot stay in his palace. I offer up to Our Lady the fact that we don’t have a good London house of our own, and then I think that She too had to make do with a common inn at Bethlehem, when surely Herod must have had spare rooms in the palace. There must have been more suitable arrangements than a stable, surely. Considering who She was. And so I try to be resigned, like Her.

  At least I am to have London clothes before we go to court for me to renounce my betrothal. My Lady Mother summons the tailors and the seamstresses to our inn, and I am fitted for a wonderful gown. They say that the ladies of the court are wearing tall, conical headdresses, so high that a woman has to duck to get under a seven-foot doorway. The queen, Margaret of Anjou, loves beautiful clothes and is wearing a new color of ruby red made from a new dye; they say it is as red as blood. My mother orders me a gown of angelic white by way of contrast, and has it trimmed with Lancaster red roses to remind everyone that I may be only a girl of nine years old but I am the heiress of our house. Only when the clothes are ready can we take a barge downriver to declare my dissent against my betrothal, and to be presented at court.

  The dissent is a tremendous disappointment. I am hoping that they will question me and that I might stand before them, shy but clear-spoken, to say that I know from God Himself that John de la Pole is not to be my husband. I imagine myself before a tribunal of judges, amazing them like Baby Jesus at the synagogue. I thought I might say that I had a dream which told me that I was not to marry him for I have a greater destiny: I am chosen by God Himself to save England! I am to be Queen of England and sign my name Margaret Regina: Margaret R. But there is no opportunity for me to address them, to shine. It is all written down before we arrive, and all I am allowed to say is, “I dissent,” and sign my name, which is only Margaret Beaufort, and it is done. Nobody even asks me for my opinion on the matter.

  We go to wait outside the presence chamber, and then one of the king’s men comes out and calls “Lady Margaret Beaufort!” and everyone looks around and sees me. I have a moment, a really wonderful moment, when I feel everyone looking at me, and I remember to cast down my eyes, and despise worldly vanity, and then my mother leads the way into the king’s presence chamber.

  The king is on his great throne with his cloth of estate suspended over the chair and a throne almost the same size beside him for the queen. She is fair-haired and brown-eyed, with a round pudding face and a straight nose. I think she looks beautiful and spoiled, and the king beside her looks fair and pale. I can’t say I see any great light of holiness at this first inspection. He looks quite normal. He smiles at me as I come in and curtsey, but the queen looks from the red roses at the hem of my gown to the little coronet that holds my veil, and then looks away as if she does not think much of me. I suppose, being French, she does not understand who I am. Someone should have told her that if she does not have a baby, then they will have to find another boy to be their heir for the House of Lancaster and it could well be mine. Then I am sure she would have paid me more attention. But she is worldly. The French can be terribly worldly; I have observed it from my reading. I am sure she would not even have seen the light in Joan the Maid. I cannot be surprised that she does not admire me.

  Next to her is a most beautiful woman, perhaps the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. She is wearing a gown of blue with a silver thread running through, which makes it shimmer like water. You would think her scaled like a fish. She sees me staring at her, and she smiles back at me, which makes her face light up with a warm beauty like sunlight on water on a summer’s day.

  “Who is that?” I whisper to my mother, who pinches my arm to remind me to be silent.

  “Jacquetta Rivers. Stop staring,” my mother snaps, and pinches my arm again to recall me to the present. I curtsey very low and I smile at the king.

  “I am giving your daughter in wardship to my dearly loved half brothers, Edmund and Jasper Tudor,” the king says to my mother. “She can live with you until it is time for her to marry.”

  The queen looks away and whispers something to Jacquett
a, who leans forwards like a willow tree beside a stream, the veil billowing around her tall headdress, to listen. The queen does not look much pleased by this news, but I am dumbfounded. I wait for someone to ask me for my consent so that I can explain that I am destined for a life of holiness, but my mother merely curtseys and steps back and then someone else steps forwards and it all seems to be over. The king has barely looked at me; he knows nothing about me, no more than he knew before I walked in the room, and yet he has given me to a new guardian, to another stranger. How can it be that he does not realize that I am a child of special holiness as he was? Am I not to have the chance to tell him about my saints’ knees?

  “Can I speak?” I whisper to my mother.

  “No, of course not.”

  Then how is he to know who I am, if God does not hurry up and tell him? “Well, what happens now?”

  “We wait until the other petitioners have seen the king, and then go in to dine,” she replies.

  “No, I mean, what happens to me?”

  She looks at me as if I am foolish not to understand. “You are to be betrothed again,” she says. “Did you not hear, Margaret? I wish you would pay attention. This is an even greater match for you. You are first going to be the ward, and then the wife, of Edmund Tudor, the king’s half brother. The Tudor boys are the sons of the king’s own mother, Queen Catherine of Valois, by her second marriage to Owen Tudor. There are two Tudor brothers, both great favorites of the king, Edmund and Jasper. Both half royal, both favored. You will marry the older one.”

  “Won’t he want to meet me first?”

  “Why would he?”

  “To see if he likes me?”

  She shakes her head. “It is not you they want,” she says. “It is the son you will bear.”

  “But I’m only nine.”

  “He can wait until you’re twelve,” she says.

  “I am to be married then?”

  “Of course,” she says, as if I am a fool to ask.

  “And how old will he be?”

  She thinks for a moment. “Twenty-five.”

  I blink. “Where will he sleep?” I ask. I am thinking of the house at Bletsoe, which does not have an empty set of rooms for a hulking young man and his entourage, nor for his younger brother.

  She laughs. “Oh, Margaret. You won’t stay at home with me. You will go to live with him and his brother, in Lamphey Palace, in Wales.”

  I blink. “Lady Mother, are you sending me away to live with two full-grown men, to Wales, on my own? When I am twelve?”

  She shrugs, as if she is sorry for it, but that nothing can be done. “It’s a good match,” she says. “Royal blood on both sides of the marriage. If you have a son, his claim to the throne will be very strong. You are cousin to the king, and your husband is the king’s half brother. Any boy you have will keep Richard of York at bay forever. Think of that; don’t think about anything else.”

  AUGUST 1453

  My mother tells me that the time will pass quickly, but of course it does not. The days go on forever and ever, and nothing ever happens. My half brothers and half sisters from my mother’s first marriage into the St. John family show no more respect for me now that I am to be married to a Tudor than when I was to be married to a de la Pole. Indeed, now they laugh at me going to live in Wales, which they tell me is a place inhabited by dragons and witches, where there are no roads, but just huge castles in dark forests where water witches rise up out of fountains and entrance mortal men, and wolves prowl in vast man-eating packs. Nothing changes at all until one evening, at family prayers, my mother cites the name of the king with more than her usual devotion, and we all have to stay on our knees for an extra half hour to pray for the health of the king, Henry VI, in this, his time of trouble; and beg Our Lady that the new baby, now in the royal womb of the queen, will prove to be a boy and a new prince for Lancaster.

  I don’t say “Amen” to the prayer for the health of the queen, for I thought she was not particularly pleasant to me, and any child that she has will take my place as the next Lancaster heir. I don’t pray against a live birth, for that would be ill-wishing, and also the sin of envy; but my lack of enthusiasm in the prayers will be understood, I am sure, by Our Lady, who is Queen of Heaven and understands all about inheritance and how difficult it is to be one of the heirs to the throne, but a girl. Whatever happens in the future, I could never be queen; nobody would accept it. But if I have a son, he would have a good claim to be king. Our Lady Herself had a boy, of course, which was what everyone wanted, and so became Our Lady Queen of Heaven and could sign her name Mary Regina: Mary R.

  I wait till my half brothers and half sisters have gone ahead, hurrying for their dinner, and I ask my mother why we are praying so earnestly for the king’s health, and what does she mean by a “time of trouble”? Her face is quite strained with worry. “I have had a letter from your new guardian, Edmund Tudor, today,” she says. “He tells me that the king has fallen into some sort of a trance. He says nothing, and he does nothing; he sits still with his eyes on the ground and nothing wakens him.”

  “Is God speaking to him?”

  She gives a little irritated sniff. “Well, who knows? Who knows? I am sure your piety does you great credit, Margaret. But certainly, if God is speaking to the king, then He has not chosen the best time for this conversation. If the king shows any sign of weakness, then the Duke of York is bound to take the opportunity to seize power. The queen has gone to parliament to claim all the powers of the king for herself, but they will never trust her. They will appoint Richard, Duke of York, as regent instead of her. It is a certainty. Then we will be ruled by the Yorks, and you will see a change in our fortunes for the worse.”

  “What change?”

  “If the king does not recover, then we will be ruled by Richard of York in place of the king, and he and his family will enjoy a long regency while the queen’s baby grows to be a man. They will have years to put themselves into the best positions in the church, in France, and in the best places in England.” She bustles ahead of me to the great hall, spurred on by her own irritation. “I can expect to have them coming to me, to have your betrothal overturned. They won’t let you be betrothed to a Tudor of Lancaster. They will want you married into their house, so your son is their heir, and I will have to defy them if the House of Lancaster is to continue through you. And that will bring Richard of York down on me, and years of trouble.”

  “But why does it matter so much?” I ask, half running to keep up with her down the long passageway. “We are all royal. Why do we have to be rivals? We are all Plantagenets, we are all descended from Edward III. We are all cousins. Richard, Duke of York, is cousin to the king just as I am.”

  She rounds on me, her gown releasing the scent of lavender as it sweeps the strewing herbs on the floor. “We may be of the same family, but that is the very reason why we are not friends, for we are rivals for the throne. What quarrels are worse than family quarrels? We may all be cousins, but they are of the House of York and we are of the House of Lancaster. Never forget it. We of Lancaster are the direct line of descent from Edward III by his son, John of Gaunt. The direct line! But the Yorks can only trace their line back to John of Gaunt’s younger brother Edmund. They are a junior line: they are not descended from Edward’s heir; they descend from a younger brother. They can only inherit the throne of England if there is no Lancaster boy left. So-think, Margaret! – what do you think they are hoping for when the King of England falls into a trance, and his child is yet unborn? What d’you think they dream, when you are a Lancaster heir but only a girl, and not even married yet? Let alone brought to bed of a son?”

  “They would want to marry me into their house?” I ask, bewildered at the thought of yet another betrothal.

  She laughs shortly. “That-or, to tell the truth, they would rather see you dead.”

  I am silenced by this. That a whole family, a great house like York, would wish for my death is a frightening thought. “But su
rely, the king will wake up? And then everything will be all right. And his baby could be a son. And then he will be the Lancaster heir, and everything will be all right.”

  “Pray God the king wakes soon,” she says. “But you should pray that there is no baby to supplant you. And pray God we get you wedded and bedded without delay. For no one is safe from the ambitions of the House of York.”

  OCTOBER 1453

  The king dreams on, smiling in his waking sleep. In my room, alone, I try sitting, as they say he does, and staring at the floorboards, in case God will come to me as He has come to the king. I try to be deaf to the noises of the stable yard outside my window and to the loud singing from the laundry room where someone is thumping cloths on a washboard. I try to let my soul drift to God, and feel the absorbing peace that must wash the soul of the king so that he does not see the worried faces of his counsellors, and is even blind to his wife when she puts his newborn baby son in his arms and tells him to wake up and greet the little Prince Edward, heir to the throne of England. Even when, in temper, she shouts into his face that he must wake up or the House of Lancaster will be destroyed.

  I try to be entranced by God, as the king is, but someone always comes and bangs on my door or shouts down the hall for me to come and do some chores, and I am dragged back to the ordinary world of sin again, and I wake. The great mystery for England is that the king does not wake, and while he sits, hearing only the words of angels, the man who has made himself Regent of England, Richard, Duke of York, takes the reins of government into his own hands, starts to act like a king himself, and so Margaret, the queen, has to recruit her friends and warn them that she may need their help to defend her baby son. The warning alone is enough to generate unease. Up and down England men start to muster their forces and consider whether they would do better under a hated French queen with a true-born baby prince in her arms, or to follow the handsome and beloved Englishman, Richard of York, to wherever his ambition may take him.