The White Queen of Middleham: An historical novel about Richard III's wife Anne Neville (Sprigs of Broom Book 1)

by Lesley Nickell

  In the strange calm which had succeeded to his earlier agonised raging, he knew his grief as a gentle thing, which would dissolve him away without pain as the consumption was dissolving her. It was an illusion, and somewhere the harshness of reality was lurking, but that was beyond this bed where love still held them and protected them. When he left her sleeping, and unlocked the door, it would be the end. She would linger on for a while, divided from him by prohibition, and he would linger on for a while longer - years, perhaps - but it would mean nothing. Generously she had said, just now, that he had given her life. The gift had not been one-sided, and he had not thanked her. It was probable that now his opportunity was lost for ever, for he had little hope of a reunion beyond the earth: he believed he had broken too many of God’s laws, which she had kept. The parting would be final.

  Outside in Westminster a clock tolled six. Carefully covering his wife, he slipped from the bed and without striking a light he dressed. At the last he went back to her side. He could just make out the white planes of her brow and cheekbones around the deep hollows of her eyes, and her fingers curled on the pillow above where his head had lain. Leaning over her in the darkness, lit by the weird pallid glow from the window, he kissed her lips and left the room.

  The pennants were slapping against the flagstaffs above the tiltyard, and the Prince of Wales shot arrow after arrow into the gold of the target. Beside him a little girl in a red cap was jumping up and down in the snow.

  ‘Ned will catch cold,’ Anne said reprovingly to her husband, but he shook his head and smiled, and replied, ‘No, he won’t, he’s wearing his fur boots. And he must practise, or my lord of Warwick will never take him into his service.’

  ‘But he will never play the lute as well as Frank,’ she sighed, and indeed Lord Lovel was sitting nearby with his foot cocked on a stool and thrumming gently. The sky clouded as if a monstrous storm was impending, and the heraldic gaiety of the pennants vanished. Something brushed across her temples, and she could no longer see her son or her husband but only vague draperies and shadowy faces. Yet the thread of music went on, and drew a little of the bravery of that vision into this sombre present. Her heat came not from the sun but from fever, and while in the place she had just come from she could have run easily across the tiltyard, here she had barely the strength to turn her head and find that it was Margaret who was bathing her with cool water. Farther than that she could not see clearly, for it was night and there were few candles.

  ‘Is it Frank?’ she whispered.

  ‘Thanks be to Our Lady you are with us again,’ responded Meg. ‘You have been away a long time.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry. I was at Middleham. Is it Frank?’

  ‘Yes, madame. It was his idea. He thought music might reach

  through your fever.’

  ‘Will he come?’ At once Francis Lovel was there, the lute trailing its

  pretty ribbons in his grasp. With an effort Anne extricated a hand from

  the bedclothes and gave it to him. ‘Dear Frank!’ she murmured. ‘David

  playing to King Saul. If only I were mad, you’d be sure to make me sane.’ He studied their linked fingers for a moment before he said, in a

  deliberately steady voice, ‘If I brought you back from Middleham,

  perhaps you’d rather be mad.’

  ‘Oh, you were there too -’ Talking too much brought on coughing,

  and when that was over she had no more breath to speak. Meg and

  other attendants moved about her, straightening and mopping,

  troubling her for all their gentleness. But the music had resumed, out

  of sight, soothing her mind despite the unease of her body. It was a pattern that hardly varied: the vivid, vigour-filled dreams,

  where winds blew and horses cantered, and her loved ones from all

  time were around her, mixed and changing, but positive; and the dull

  struggle of an invalid in a cold damp bed where the warming-pan had

  no power of warmth over her feet while her head burned, where some

  of the same people existed but had no vitality or purpose. This curious

  dichotomy, between a waking without reality and an unconsciousness

  rich with meaning, was not entirely new to her. Searching in the

  memory which was so sluggish while she was in control of it, she found

  at length the key: Dog. Wretched Dog, the spit-boy, who had shared

  his food with her, and then abused her, and who had died. Even now,

  that long-buried recollection had the power to repel her - not the

  childish groping which had brought him a thrashing and no doubt

  hastened his death, but the hardly human parcel of skin and bones

  which had collapsed into the ashes of the hearth, choking up blood. It

  must have been about then that her dreams took such a hold of her,

  and the servants of Master Twynyho the grocer faded into grey ghosts

  seen through a winter fog.

  Then Richard had quite literally saved her life. Had he not taken

  her to St Martin’s and given her nursing and a will to survive, she would soon have gone the way of Dog, as little noticed and as little mourned. Paying one of his frequent visits, her husband found the tears running noiselessly down her temples. It was too complicated to explain to him, and the unusual effort of bringing forgotten miseries to mind had sapped her tiny amount of strength. She could only say, with slow emphasis, ‘I am one of the most fortunate of women. Richard ... remember them in your prayers ... the poor who have nobody to care for them ... and those who die alone.’ He promised that he would; that, further, he would give them whatever relief lay within his royal authority; and he wondered, with more than a touch of mournful awe, at the unselfishness which could bestow such charity

  of thought at such a time.

  It was an unusual display of emotion. For the most part she was a

  quiet patient, suffering the discomforts and indignities of sickness and

  its nursing with a kind of absent forbearance. She was very weak now,

  and between fever and normality the passage of time had ceased to

  have much meaning. One day she knew that winter must be in retreat,

  for Katherine brought her a bowl of crocuses. She had them placed

  next to the rose quartz crucifix which had been one of her son’s last

  gifts, so she could see them whenever she turned her head. On that

  occasion she asked what the date was, and was told that it was March,

  just past St Gregory’s. So she had survived the death of the year, to see

  this small evidence of its life returning; that gave her pleasure. Another day, when the flowers still stood stiff and vigorous in their

  bowl, her confessor came, ceremonially robed, with some assistants

  and she realised without surprise that they were here to administer the

  last rites. Summoning her faculties with all the willpower that remained,

  she prepared to make her confession; they would not be required

  again. Father Doget helped her to cross herself, for she could barely

  move her hand, and she drew courage from the stern controlled face

  that bent over her. He had heard and absolved her sins many times,

  and would understand what her infirmity made her omit. But there was

  little to say. Already he had shriven her of her lesser faults, and in the

  months of her sickness his discussions with her had shown where the

  great faults lay.

  ‘I have been weak,’ she declared, and although her voice was low

  it did not falter, ‘and a coward. I have turned away from challenge and

  would have forsaken my duty if I could. Perhaps I could have fought

  off this consumption if I had been braver. I have questioned God’s will

  and sometimes my husband’
s. And I have loved people and places on

  earth too much, more than my love of Our Blessed Lord and His

  Mother. I ask pardon for these and all other sins and submit myself

  humbly to my judge.’ Through the clouds of exhaustion Anne heard

  Father Doget telling her that God’s mercy was wide enough to embrace

  even such backsliding as hers, and that He would not condemn her for

  loving too much.

  ‘For love of His creatures and His creation is love of Him also, and

  He regards more an excess than a lack of it.’ Then he gave her

  absolution in the name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and began the

  words of the mass. The familiar savour of incense pervaded her nostrils,

  her son’s crucifix was smooth and cool in her fingers, and the

  reassuring Latin phrases slid round her, an unbroken chain with all the

  other masses she had heard. Inside her closed eyes she was far from

  Westminster Palace, in a convent in Normandy, Angers Cathedral, the

  chapel at Middleham, the Minster of St Peter in York, in times of stress

  and distress, serenity and triumph, when the act of receiving the true

  body of her Saviour had been a refuge from misery, a confirmation of

  joy. As the transformed bread touched her tongue, she was sure that

  she would be forgiven.

  It was not quite the last call on her strength, she found. With the

  withdrawal of the priests came the laity, a confusing mêlée of faces

  who demanded responses of which she was incapable. Though she

  recognised few of them she could feel their fear and their grief and

  could not comprehend it. For those she did know there were only

  broken, useless phrases.

  To Katherine, drawn and heavy-eyed with watching, ‘Dear Kate ...

  more than a daughter … forgive hating your birth ... Tell John.’ To Lord Lovel, ‘I hope there is lute music in heaven … to look for

  in purgatory.’

  And to Elizabeth, her proud Woodville features distorted with

  weeping, only, ‘Trust Richard.’

  For him, no inadequate words. He was there, she knew, behind the

  other supplicants, but not like them clamouring for attention, for

  consolation. Only when the furore had subsided, the waves of emotion

  sunk into quiet sobs, her consciousness ebbing, did he appear at her

  side and take her hand. It was enough, and there was no more need

  for her to fight. That strong and sensitive grasp had led her through

  life, and would suffice to send her forth from it. A great quietness fell

  on her; the breath which had been so hard to draw during her recent

  exertions became easy again, so shallow that it would not cloud a

  mirror held to her lips. She could not see him clearly - perhaps it really

  was growing dusk - but it was not necessary.

  There was a light, and very slowly she turned her head towards it.

  A candle, the blue-hearted flame balanced delicately above the wax,

  and beside it, glowing with their own and borrowed radiance, the

  golden flames of the crocuses. Above, surely, not the sombre hangings

  of a bedchamber, but the washed innocent sky of February, traced with

  the bare twigs and half-opened blossoms of an almond tree. Next week

  she would marry Richard and he would take her to Middleham.

  Suddenly the vision quivered in a rush of grateful tears. Her lips moved,

  and the kneeling priest and people thought she was praying. But her

  husband knew, although he did not hear, what she was saying. ‘I have been happy. So happy.’ Then the sky faded and the candle,

  and only the flowers continued to glow as her sight was darkened. Those

  and the man’s hand round hers were all that held her to earth, until,

  easily and without pain, they too drifted away into the waiting dark.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  Anne Neville is certainly the only Queen of England ever to have been a kitchen-maid. This surprising fact is contained in a single line of the Croyland Chronicle, a near-contemporary account of the events of her time. Her life is not well documented, except as an adjunct to other people’s schemes or actions. No evidence remains of her own opinion of the career which was thrust upon her. That is what this book attempts to supply.

  The men who dominated her are slightly better served, and for my knowledge of them - Richard III, Warwick the Kingmaker, Edward IV and Louis XI - I am indebted largely to one historian. Paul Murray Kendall’s tetralogy of books on the late fifteenth century has been invaluable, and I recommendThe Yorkist Age, Richard III, Louis XI and Warwick the Kingmaker to anyone who really wants the facts, as far as we have them, presented in a manner both erudite and readable.

  Trying to fill the gaps in Anne’s story with intelligent guesswork, I have invented as little as possible. One or two characters asked to be created: Richard’s two natural children were acknowledged and provided for, but their mother or mothers have escaped the records. The concept of one mistress did less violence to his rather puritan character than two, so Marja van Soeters came into being. Ankarette Twynyho existed, and if she did not have a brother called Francis, she should have done. Of the Wrangwysh family, Thomas was twice Mayor of York, but Janet and John are mine. Bertrand de Josselin insinuated himself into my mind as he did into Anne’s life; I do not know where he came from. Virtually all the others, down to Jane Collins the wetnurse, are historical.

  Lesley J Nickell

  Stratford-upon-Avon | March 1978 In December 2012, Lesley was diagnosed with advanced metastatic disease. She asked me to act as her editor and literary executor, and together we began working on Painted Lady, the first of two volumes of her novel Butterfly, on the life of Lady Mary Villiers. Sadly Lesley died only two months later, on 11 February 2013, just a month short of her 69th birthday. With the approval of Lesley’s sister and brother-inlaw, Tricia and Geoff Callow, I am continuing the task of editing and publishing all five of her completed novels. Painted Lady appeared in October 2013, and we hope that Mourning Cloak, the second volume of Butterfly, will be published towards the end of 2014.

  The White Queen of Middleham was originally called The White Queen. Under that title it was runner up for the first Georgette Heyer Historical Novel Prize, and was published by Bodley Head in 1978. Two other Plantagenet novels by Lesley J Nickell, Sprigs of Broom and Perkin, will appear in 2015 and 2016.

  It was a matter of great satisfaction to Lesley that she lived long enough to hear the announcement on 4 February 2013 that the bones unearthed in a car-park in Leicester were those of King Richard III, and that he would at long last receive an appropriate burial and an honourable tomb.

  Like many other Richard supporters, Lesley was astonished to learn that the king’s “hunchback” was not, after all, purely a figment of Tudor propaganda. In The White Queen she describes Richard as having a knot of muscle in one shoulder which causes it to appear higher than the other, and she believed that it was this or some similar very slight asymmetry in his physique that had given rise to the Tudor claim that he was hunch-backed. However, since the discovery of Richard’s grave, we now know that by the end of his life he was suffering from severe scoliosis; and this could be thought to create a dilemma for anyone re-issuing a novel about him written before 4 February 2013.

  I did indeed consider making changes to the novel to reflect the facts as we now know them; but in the end I decided to let Lesley’s text stand. It is unlikely that Richard was born with scoliosis, since the condition is rarely congenital. It usually begins to develop at or around puberty, when it can be caused or made worse by excessive upper body exercise, such as that described by Lesley as the young Richard trains intensively with the
heavy weapons of the day. Richard’s bones are unusually gracile, so he might well have been vulnerable to developing scoliosis even without the very strenuous physical exercise demanded of young men of his rank.

  Although we now know that by the end of his life Richard’s condition was much more disabling than Lesley believed, we have no way of knowing when the scoliosis began, or how quickly it developed into the very severe condition seen in his bones. It is perfectly possible that for most of his life the historical Richard would not have been obviously “crook-backed” and that he could have done everything that Lesley’s Richard does: so in the end I have chosen to leave all descriptions of him exactly as Lesley wrote them.

  Rosalind Winter

  Chipping Campden | January 2014

  THE HOUSE OF PLANTAGENET AND THE HOUSE OF NEVILLE

  Edward III 1312 - 1377

  Edward Prince of Wales Lionel Duke of Clarence

  Philippa Countess of Ulster

  Richard II Roger Earl of March 1367 - 1400

  Richard Earl

  of Cambridge

  Anne Ralph Neville(m) Mortimer Earl of Westmorland Richard Duke (m) Cecily of York Neville Richard Earl (m) Alice of Salisbury Montagu

  Anne Richard Beauchamp(m)Earl of Warwick 1426-1492 1428 - 1471