The White Princess

by Philippa Gregory

  “What’s the point of it?” I ask impatiently. “What’s the point of going on and on causing trouble, while men risk their lives and have to run away to Flanders with a price on their heads? Families are ruined and mothers lose their sons just as you did, women like my aunt Elizabeth, bereft of her son John, her next boy under suspicion. What d’you hope to achieve?”

  She turns and her expression is as tender and as steadfast as ever. “I?” she says with her limpid smile. “I achieve nothing. I am just an old grandmother living in Bermondsey Abbey, glad of a chance to visit my darling daughter. I think of nothing but my soul and my next dinner. Causing no trouble at all.”

  WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, 28 NOVEMBER 1489

  The pains start in the early hours of the morning, waking me with a deep stir in my belly. My mother is with me the moment that I groan, and she holds my hands while the midwives mull some ale and set up the icon so that I can see it while I labor. It is my mother’s cool hand on my head when I am sweating and exhausted, and it is her gaze, locked on mine, quietly persuading me that there is no pain, that there is nothing but a divine cool floating on a constant river, that takes me through the long hours until I hear a cry and realize that it is over and that I have a baby and they put my little girl into my arms.

  “My son commands that you honor me with naming Her Grace the Princess for me.” The sudden appearance of Lady Margaret jolts me back to the real world and behind her I see my mother folding linen and bowing her head and trying not to laugh.

  “What?” I ask. I am still hazy with the birthing ale and with the magic that my mother manages to weave, so that pain recedes and the time passes.

  “I shall be very glad to be her name-giver.” Lady Margaret pursues her own thought. “And it is so like my son to honor me. I only hope that your boy Arthur is as good and as loving a son to you, as mine is to me.”

  My mother, who had two royal sons who adored her, turns away and puts the linen into a chest.

  “Princess Margaret of the House of Tudor,” My Lady says, savoring the sound of her own name.

  “Is it not vanity, to name a child after yourself?” my mother inquires, dulcet from the corner of the room.

  “She is named for my saint,” Lady Margaret replies, not at all disconcerted. “It is not for my own glory. And besides, it is your own daughter who chooses the name. Is it not, Elizabeth?”

  “Oh yes,” I say obediently, too tired to argue with her. “And the main thing is that she is well.”

  “And beautiful,” my beautiful mother remarks.

  Because so many have the pox in London, we don’t hold a big christening, and I am churched privately and return to my rooms and to the life of the court without a great feast. I know also that Henry is not going to waste money on celebrating the birth of a princess. He would have had a public holiday and wine flowing in the public fountains for another boy.

  “I’m not disappointed in a girl,” he assures me as he meets me in the nursery and I find him with the precious baby in his arms. “We need another boy, of course, but she is the prettiest, daintiest little girl that was ever born.”

  I stand at his shoulder and look into her face. She is like a little rosebud, like a petal, hands like little starfish and fingernails like the tiniest shells ever washed up by a tide.

  “Margaret for my mother,” Henry says, kissing her white-capped little head.

  My cousin Maggie steps forwards to take the baby from us. “Margaret for you,” I whisper to her.

  GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, JUNE 1491

  Two years pass before we conceive another child, and then at last it is the boy that my husband needed. He greets him with a sort of passion, as if this boy was a fortune. Henry is coming to have a reputation as a king who loves gold in his treasury; this boy is like a new-minted sovereign coin, another Tudor creation.

  “We’ll call him Henry,” he declares, as the boy is put into his arms when he visits me, a week after the birth.

  “Henry for you?” I ask him, smiling from the bed.

  “Henry for the sainted king,” he says sternly, reminding me that just when I think we are most happy and most easy, Henry is still looking over his shoulder, justifying his crown. He looks from me to my cousin Margaret as if we were responsible for the old king’s imprisonment in the Tower and then his death. Margaret and I exchange one guilty look. It was probably our fathers working together with our uncle Richard who held a pillow over the poor innocent king’s sleeping face. At any rate, we are close enough to the murder to feel guilt when Henry calls the old king a saint and names his newborn son for him.

  “As you wish,” I say lightly. “But he does look so like you. A copper-head, a proper Tudor.”

  He laughs at that. “A redhead, like my uncle Jasper,” he says with pleasure. “Pray God gives him my uncle’s luck.”

  He is smiling, but I can see the strain around his eyes, with the look I have come to dread, as if he is a man haunted. This is how he looks when he bursts out in sudden complaints. This is the look that I think he wore for all those years when he was in exile and he could trust no one and feared everybody, and every message that he had from home warned him of my father, and every messenger who brought it could be a murderer.

  I nod to Maggie, who is as sensitive as I am to Henry’s uncertain temper, and she takes the baby and gives him to his wet nurse, and then sits beside the two of them, as if she would disappear behind the woman’s warm bulk.

  “Is something the matter?” I ask quietly.

  He glares at me for a moment, as if I have caused the problem, and then I see him soften, and shake his head. “Odd news,” he says. “Bad news.”

  “From Flanders?” I ask quietly. It is always my aunt who causes this deep line between his brows. Year after year she goes on sending spies into England, money to rebels, speaks against Henry and our family, accuses me of disloyalty to our house.

  “Not this time,” he says. “Perhaps something worse than the duchess . . . if you can imagine anything worse than her.”

  I wait.

  “Has your mother said anything to you?” he asks. “This is important, Elizabeth. You must tell me if she has said anything.”

  “No, nothing,” I say. My conscience is clear. She did not come into confinement with me this time, she said she was unwell and feared bringing illness into the room with her. At the time I was disappointed, but now I have a clutch of apprehension that she stayed outside to weave treasonous plots. “I have not seen her. She has written nothing to me. She is ill.”

  “She’s said nothing to your sisters?” he asks. He tips his head to where Maggie sits beside the wet nurse, petting my son’s little feet as he sleeps. “She’s said nothing? Your cousin of Warwick? Margaret? Nothing about her brother?”

  “She asks me if he can be released,” I remark. “And I ask it of you, of course. He is doing nothing wrong—”

  “He’s doing nothing wrong in the Tower because he is powerless to do anything as my prisoner,” Henry says abruptly. “If he were free, God knows where he would turn up. Ireland, I suppose.”

  “Why Ireland?”

  “Because Charles of France has put an invasion force into Ireland.” He speaks in a suppressed angry mutter. “Half a dozen ships, a couple of hundred men wearing the cross of St. George as if they were an English army. He has armed and fitted out an army marching under the flag of St. George! A French army in Ireland! Why d’you think he would do that?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know.” I find I am whispering like him, as if we are conspirators, planning to overthrow a country, as if it is we who have no rights, who should not be here.

  “D’you think he is expecting something?”

  I shake my head. Truly, I am baffled. “Henry, really, I don’t know. What would the King of France be expecting to come out of Ireland?”

  “A new ghost?”

  I feel a shiver crawl slowly down my spine like a cold wind, though it is a summer day,
and I gather my shawl around my shoulders. “What ghost?”

  At that single potent word, I have lowered my voice like him, and the two of us sound as if we are calling up spirits as he leans towards me and says, “There’s a boy.”

  “A boy?”

  “Another boy. A boy who is trying to pass himself off as your dead brother.”

  “Edward?”

  “Richard.”

  My old pain, at the name of the man I loved, given to the brother that I lost, taps on my heart like a familiar friend. I tighten my shawl again and find that I am hugging myself, as if for comfort.

  “A boy pretending to be Richard? Who is he? Another false boy, another imposter?”

  “I can’t trace this one,” Henry says, his eyes dark with fear. “I can’t find who’s backing him, I can’t discover where he comes from. They say he speaks several languages, carries himself like a prince. They say he is convincing—well, Simnel was a convincing child, that’s what they’re trained up to be.”

  “They?”

  “All these boys. All these ghosts.”

  I am silent for a moment, thinking of my husband surrounded in his mind by many boys, nameless boys, ghost boys. I close my eyes.

  “You’re tired, I shouldn’t have troubled you with this.”

  “No. Not tired. Only weary at the thought of another pretender.”

  “Yes,” he says, suddenly emphatic. “That’s what he is. You are right to name him so. Another pretender. Another liar, another false boy. I shall have to hunt him down, find out who he is and where he comes from, attack his story, split his lies like kindling, disgrace his sponsors, and ruin him and them together.”

  I say the worst thing that I could say. “What d’you mean—that it is I who name him as a pretender? Who could he be if not a pretender?”

  He stands at once and looks down on me, as if we were newly married and he still hated me. “Exactly. Who would he be if not a pretender? Sometimes, Elizabeth, you are so stupid that I find you quite brilliant.”

  He walks out of the room, pale with resentment, and Maggie glances across at me and she looks afraid.

  I come out of my confinement to dazzlingly hot summer weather and find the court anxious despite the birth of a second son. Every day brings a new message from Ireland, and the worst of it is that nobody dares to speak of it. Sweating horses stand in the stable yard, men caked in dust are taken straight in to see the king, his lords sit with him to hear their report, but nobody remarks upon it. It is as if we are at war but nobody will say anything; we are under siege in silence.

  To me it is clear that the King of France is taking revenge on us for our long, loyal support of Brittany against him. My uncle died to keep Brittany independent from France; Henry never forgets that he found a safe exile in the little dukedom. He is honor-bound to support his former hosts. There is every reason for us to see France as our enemy. But for some reason, though the privy council is all but a council of war, nobody speaks openly against France. They say nothing, as if they are ashamed. France has put an army into our kingdom of Ireland and yet nobody rages against them. It is as if the lords feel that it is our fault, the failure of Henry to be a convincing king, that is the real problem, and that the French invasion is just another sign of this.

  “The French don’t care about me,” Henry says to me tersely. “France is the enemy of the King of England, whoever he may be, whatever the color of his jacket. They want Brittany for themselves, and they want to cause trouble for England. The shame that they bring on me, of two rebellions in four years, means nothing to them. If the House of York were on the throne, then it would be you that they were conspiring against.”

  We are standing in the stable yard, and around us is the usual buzz of conversation, the horses led out of their stalls by the grooms, the ladies lifted into the saddles, the gentlemen standing by their stirrups, passing up a glass of wine, holding a glove, talking, courting, enjoying the sunshine. We should be happy, with three children in the nursery and a loyal court around us.

  “Of course, France is always our enemy,” I reply comfortingly. “As you say. And we have always resisted an invasion, and we have always won. Perhaps because you were in Brittany for all that long time, you learned to fear them overmuch? For look—you have your spies and your reporters, your posts to bring you news, and your lords who are ready to arm in an instant. We must be the greater power. We have the narrow seas between them and us. Even if they are in Ireland they cannot be a serious danger to us. You can feel safe now, can’t you, my lord?”

  “Don’t ask me, ask your mother!” he exclaims, gripped with one of his sudden furies. “You ask your mother if I can feel safe now. And tell me what she says.”

  PALACE OF SHEEN, RICHMOND, SEPTEMBER 1491

  Henry comes to my rooms with his court before dinner and takes me to a window bay, out of the way of everyone. Cecily, my sister, newly returned to court after the birth of her second daughter, raises an eyebrow at Henry’s warm embrace of me and his publicly seeking to be alone with me. I smile at her taking notice.

  “I want to talk to you,” he says.

  I incline my head towards him and feel him draw me closer.

  “We think it is time that your cousin Margaret was married.”

  I cannot stop myself glancing over towards her. She is hand in hand with My Lady the King’s Mother, who is speaking earnestly to her. “It looks like more than a thought, it looks like a decision,” I observe.

  His smile is boyish, guilty. “It is my mother’s idea,” he admits. “But I think it is a good match for her, and truly—sweetheart—she has to be settled with a man we can trust. Her name, and the presence of her brother, mean that she will always live uneasily under our rule. But we can change her name at least.”

  “Who have you picked out for her?” I ask. “For Henry, I warn you, I love her like a sister, I don’t want her sent away to Scotland or”—I am suddenly suspicious—“bundled off to Brittany, or to France to make a treaty.”

  He laughs. “No, no, everyone knows that she’s not a princess of York like you or your sisters. Everyone knows that her husband must keep her safe and out of the way. She can’t be powerful, she can’t be visible, she must be kept quietly inside our house so that no one thinks she will support another.”

  “And when she is married and quiet and safe, as you say—can her brother come out of the Tower then? Could he live with her and her safe husband?”

  He shakes his head, taking my hand. “Truly, my love, if you knew how many men whisper about him, if you knew how many people plot for him, if you knew how our enemies send money for weapons for him—you would not ask it.”

  “Even now?” I whisper. “Six years after Bosworth?”

  “Even now,” he says. He swallows as if he can taste fear. “Sometimes I think that they will never give up.”

  My Lady the King’s Mother comes towards us, leading Maggie by the hand. I can see that Maggie is not unhappy, she looks flattered and pleased by the attention, and I realize that this proposed marriage might give her a husband and a home and children of her own and free her from her constant vigil for her brother, and her endless anxious attendance on me. More than that, she might be lucky enough to be given a husband who loves her, she might have lands that she can watch grow and become fertile, she might have children who—though they can never have a claim to the throne—might be happy in England as children of England.

  I step towards her, and look at My Lady. “You have a proposal for my dear cousin?”

  “Sir Richard Pole.” She names the son of her half sister, a man so reliable and steady in my husband’s cause that he might as well be his warhorse. “Sir Richard has asked me for permission to address Lady Margaret and I have said yes.”

  I overlook for a moment the fact that she has no right to say yes to a marriage to my cousin. I overlook that Sir Richard is nearly thirty to my cousin’s eighteen years, I even overlook that Sir Richard has nothing more than a
respectable name, virtually no fortune, and my cousin is an heir to the York throne of England and the Warwick fortune, because I can see Maggie is bright with excitement, her cheeks blushing, her eyes bright.

  “You want to marry him?” I ask her quickly in Latin, which neither My Lady nor my husband can easily understand.

  She nods.

  “But why?”

  “To be free of our name,” she says bluntly. “To be no longer a suspect. To be one of the Tudors and not one of their enemies.”

  “Nobody thinks you are an enemy.”

  “In this court you are either Tudor or enemy,” she says shrewdly. “I am sick of being under suspicion.”

  WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, AUTUMN 1491

  We celebrate their wedding as soon as we return to Westminster for the autumn, but their happiness is overshadowed by more bad news from Ireland.

  “They have raised up their boy,” my husband says to me briefly. We are about to ride out, down to the riverside, and see if we can put up some duck for the hawks. The sunshine is bright in the yard, the court in a bustle calling for their horses. From the doorway of the mews the falconers bring out their birds, each one hooded with a brightly colored bonnet of leather, a little plume at the top. I notice one of the spit boys peering out of the kitchen door, looking longingly at the birds. Good-naturedly, one of the falconers beckons the boy over and lets him slip his hand in a gauntlet and try the weight of the bird on his fist. The boy’s smile reminds me of my brother—then I see that it is the spit boy, the little pretender, Lambert Simnel, changed and settled into his new life.