Cicely's Second King

by Sandra Heath Wilson

  Henry was not present, for it was the tradition that a royal baby would be taken to his or her parents after the baptism. When Cicely carried the baby from the private apartments, Bess had been lying on her vast number of pillows. She was still unwell, although better than she had been. Certainly she remembered what had happened, and would not look at her sister or speak to her. Nor would the Queen Dowager. Cicely was shunned by her own family.

  Henry had been impassive. Or so it seemed, until Cicely looked full at him. Although he met her eyes without flinching, she saw the feelings he had been unable to deny, and that had so devastating a result.

  He was in love with her, she knew that, but she had now seen the brutality that lurked within him, and losing her husband as well had changed everything. Jon had rejected her, and there seemed no hope that he would ever want her back again. But he was still alive, and she would never stop protecting him with her body. Nor would she cease to shield Jack, her lovely Jack, who might never know how glad he made her.

  And so she would go to Henry again, make love with him again, struggle not to like him again, and wish she found no pleasure with him. Henry would still threaten. He could not prevent himself. It was his deepest nature, and even if this scandal had not happened, he would still have used coercion. The struggle within him was a terrible burden, a slow excruciation from which he could do nothing to free himself.

  She walked on into the great church, where the air was cool but filled with incense and shafts of light from the windows. It was crowded, with all the nobility of the land there to see the next King of England christened. The baby snuffled again and would have begun to cry had she not rocked him a little in her arms. Bess had been right; he may be Henry’s child, but he was her sister’s as well, and for that she would love him.

  Then she saw Richard, leaning against a pillar, his arms folded, his body relaxed. His long hair was bright with colours from the sun-drenched stained glass, and his grey eyes were warm. She could feel his strength and support, his unquenchable love. Richard. Her king, her uncle, her lover. The father of her child. The true and only king.

  He smiled, and so did she.

  Holding her head up a little more, to show her pride and lineage to the world, she carried her nephew towards the font.

  Author’s Note

  In my first book about Cicely Plantagenet, CICELY’S KING RICHARD, I confessed to having no cause at all for creating a love affair between her and her uncle, King Richard III. In this present book, I therefore have no basis at all for there having been a son of their union. Nor can I claim any factual ground for further linking Cicely romantically with Richard’s conqueror and successor, King Henry VII.

  All these things are my imagination, together with an irresistible urge to always wonder . . . ‘what if?’ So, while both books feature real historical events and people, they’re fiction, and should not be regarded in any other light. Fiction, set against true events.

  With this in mind, I have also invented Henry Tudor’s torture and mistreatment of Richard III’s illegitimate son, John of Gloucester, who was imprisoned in the Tower and—it is believed—eventually beheaded at Henry’s command. That John was Cicely’s first young love is more roaming imagination.

  John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, Jack, was not formally confirmed as Richard’s heir, but there is sufficient evidence to believe Richard had indeed chosen him. What Lincoln actually looked like is not known, indeed he is quite hard to assess as a man. He was a proud young Yorkist lord, and appears to have been charismatic. Perhaps he had a dangerous charm. He certainly did not lack courage or direction, although I believe he was eventually to make one fatal error of judgement on his path to the Battle of Stoke Field in 1487. He also seems to have had a great talent for masking what he really thought or intended, and that when he was accepted at Henry’s court, he had no intention of remaining loyal to the new king. He merely bided his time. To Lincoln, Henry was far more of a usurper than Richard had ever been accused of being. Jack de la Pole never, for a single moment, forgot his Yorkist birthright.

  There is evidence now that Cicely was married first to Ralph Scrope, but the marriage was hastily annulled in order for her to become the wife of Sir John Welles, Jon. The whys and wherefores of this first union are not known, so the reasons I give in my story are what I think could have happened. I still apologize to Ralph for having denigrated his character. He certainly did not die on the marsh near Wyberton while involved in witchcraft, but lived on to inherit his family’s title. He and Cicely could well have loved each other. It is simply not known.

  That Cicely and Jon came to love each other cannot be confirmed or denied either. They were together until his death in 1498, which left Cicely in great distress. She did become very friendly with his half-sister, Henry Tudor’s mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort. Of course, Jon cannot have married Cicely for the reason I give in this story, because there was no son of Cicely Plantagenet by Richard III. Maybe Henry simply sought to advance his maternal half-uncle’s fortunes by giving him an important royal wife. Maybe it was love. We will never know.

  Nor can it be said whether or not Henry VII and Elizabeth of York—Bess—were happily married. She is believed by many to have been in love with her uncle, Richard III, but there is no proof, and this belief about her affections might even be the result of the modern misunderstanding of medieval wording used in one of her letters, which has now been lost. The fact has to be conceded, though, that neither she nor Cicely ever spoke out against Richard. Nor, after his death, did their mother, Elizabeth Woodville.

  Henry is recorded as being ‘unuxorious’, so I have to think his was a solely political marriage and never became anything more, although, like Richard III and his queen before them, he and Bess were distraught by the sudden death of their son, Prince Arthur. However, I have created Bess as she might have been, loathing Henry and submitting with great distaste to his obligatory marital attentions. That he was passionate and skilled between the sheets with Cicely, is, again, my ‘what if?’

  Henry’s unreasonable moods and flashes of temper are also my view of how he might have been. Conjecture. He certainly became like that in later years, so who is to say it was not evident when he was still a young man? The coughing that I have begun to hint at is intended to be a very early indication of the tuberculosis that was eventually to be one of the health problems that killed him. He was not a robust man, and came close to death several times before he eventually succumbed.

  Regarding his ruthlessness, he certainly set about ridding himself of potential enemies, and so did his even more fearsome son, Henry VIII. The Tudors were relentless. Richard III was not, and would have fared better if he had been. Henry was a deeply suspicious monarch, always beset by challengers, always afraid to trust anyone, always perceiving treachery in every shadow. And it was natural he should feel that way, considering his acquisition of the throne came solely as a result of Richard being betrayed. If lords have betrayed one king, they can most probably betray another. Henry had to live with that knowledge. He became old before his time, probably the result of all the stress, suspicions, fear and constant anxiety that dogged his life.

  Towards the end of this story, the boy pretender claiming to be Richard, Duke of York, one of the ‘Princes in the Tower’, is, of course, the strangely named Lambert Simnel, who in 1487, after changing his identity to that of the young Earl of Warwick, was to pose Henry’s first real test of kingship. But not his last.

  Writing about Henry caused me, a staunch Ricardian, to feel unexpected sympathy for him. He certainly became a cruel king, but whether the cruelty was within him from the outset I cannot say. He won at Bosworth when he should not have done, and he clung to the throne he had stolen because he had amazing good luck. Fate always seemed to tip in his direction, but whether or not he ever felt truly happy is another matter. I believe he forfeited his real self. Perhaps he lost it in childhood. Maybe he sometimes wished he had never returned to England.
r />   What the actual Henry was like can never be known, although there is a letter that he wrote to his mother in later years in which he confesses to having taken days to write it because his eyesight is so bad. It is the letter of a fond son to his mother. He was also said to have shot someone’s cockerel by mistake while hunting, not realizing what it was because he could not see it properly. He was advised after that not to go hunting with a crossbow. I imagine that if he did, his companions were all careful to stand behind him.

  Perhaps his true character surfaced when he allowed his young son to beat him at a game. In that, he was the loving, indulgent father. He also had a dry sense of humour that could not be imagined from his likenesses, although I swear it is there in his famous National Portrait Gallery portrait. He looks menacing and sly, with his hooded eyes, high cheekbones and hollow cheeks. But there is a glint in those eyes and a wry set to his mouth that suggests he finds something amusing . . . at someone else’s expense, of course.

  My overt support for Richard III is again evident in this story. I believe he has been cruelly misjudged over the centuries, and nothing short of his personal diary of abhorrent sins will convince me otherwise. Even then I’d have to see very definite proof it was his writing, not forged by one of his enemies! He showed quite breathtaking bravery at Bosworth, and died the rightful, anointed King of England. He also died a grief-stricken widower, and a father who had just lost his only legitimate son. Fate certainly did not tip in his direction. It should have, though, for he was a conspicuously just man who endeavoured to do what he considered to be the right thing. He thought of England and the wellbeing of his people, which Henry Tudor was certainly never to do. Henry thought only of Henry, and clinging to power regardless. In my opinion, had Richard lived he’d have been a great king. He was certainly a man ahead of his time.

  His ‘appearances’ to Cicely are figments of her imagination, the result of her intense grief. He isn’t a ghost, but through him she can talk of things that she already knows or thinks herself but does not understand or want to face. She also conjures him when she is particularly emotional. It is not witchcraft, sorcery, the Otherworld or any other venture into the paranormal, but simply her agony of loss and unwillingness to concede that the real Richard has gone forever.

  But death is final, and Cicely has to live on without him. It’s not easy, especially when faced with Henry Tudor, for whom she ought to feel nothing . . . but is forced by circumstance and her own nature to feel a great deal.

  Sandra Heath Wilson

  July 2014

  By the same author

  Cicely’s King Richard

  © Sandra Heath Wilson 2014

  ISBN 978 1 910208 20 5 (epub)

  ISBN 978 1 910208 21 2 (mobi)

  ISBN 978 1 910208 22 9 (pdf)

  ISBN 978 0 7198 1261 3(print)

  Robert Hale Limited

  Clerkenwell House

  Clerkenwell Green

  London EC1R 0HT

  www.halebooks.com

  The right of Sandra Heath Wilson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988