“How could I?” she demands. “How could such a thing ever be done? These are faithless people, these are a heartless people, they run after will-o’-the-wisps, they don’t value true worth.”
I look at her and I almost pity her, as she sits twisted in her chair, her glorious prie-dieu with its huge Bible and the richly enameled cover behind her, the best rooms in the palace draped with the finest tapestries and a fortune in her strongbox. “You could not make a beloved king, for your boy was not a beloved child,” I say, and it is as if I am condemning her. I feel as hard-hearted, as hard-faced, as the recording angel at the end of days. “You have tried for him, but you have failed him. He was never loved as a child, and he has grown into a man who cannot inspire love nor give love. You have spoiled him utterly.”
“I loved him!” She leaps up suddenly furious, her dark eyes blazing with rage. “Nobody can deny that I loved him! I have given my life for him! I only ever thought of him! I nearly died giving birth to him and I have sacrificed everything—love, safety, a husband of my choice—just for him.”
“He was raised by another woman, Lady Herbert, the wife of his guardian, and he loved her,” I say relentlessly. “You called her your enemy, and you took him from her and put him in the care of his uncle. When you were defeated by my father, Jasper took him away from everything he knew, into exile, and you let them go without you. You sent him away, and he knew that. It was for your ambition; he knows that. He knows no lullabies, he knows no bedtime stories, he knows no little games that a mother plays with her sons. He has no trust, he has no tenderness. You worked for him, yes, and you plotted for him and you strove for him—but I doubt that you ever, in all his baby years, held him on your knees and tickled his toes, and made him giggle.”
She shrinks back from me as if I am cursing her. “I am his mother, not his wet nurse. Why would I caress him? I taught him to be a leader, not a baby.”
“You are his commander,” I say. “His ally. But there is no true love in it—none at all. And now you see the price you pay for that. There is no true love in him, neither to give nor receive—none at all.”
Horrifying stories come from the North, of the Scots army coming in like an army of wolves, destroying everything they find. The defenders of the North of England march bravely against them, but before they can join battle, the Scots have melted away, back to their own high hills. It is not a defeat, it is something far worse than that: it is a disappearance. It is a warning which only tells us that they will come again. So Henry is not reassured, and demands money from Parliament—hundreds of thousands of pounds—and raises more in reluctant loans from all his lords and from the merchants of London to pay for men to be armed and stand ready against this invisible threat. Nobody knows what the Scots are planning, if they will raid constantly, destroying our pride and our confidence in the North of England, coming out of the blizzards at the worst time of year; or if they will wait for spring and launch a full invasion.
“He has a child,” Maggie whispers to me. The court is busy with preparations for Christmas. Maggie and her husband have been at Ludlow Castle with my son Arthur, introducing him to his principality of Wales, but they have come home to Westminster Palace in time to celebrate the Christmas feast. On the way Maggie listens to the gossip in the inns and great houses and abbeys where they stop for hospitality. “They all say that he has a child.”
At once I think how glad my mother would be, how she would have wanted to see her grandchild. “Girl or boy?” I ask eagerly.
“A boy. He’s had a boy. The House of York has a new heir.”
Foolishly, wrongly, I clasp her hands and know that my bright joy is mirrored in her smile. “A boy?”
“A new white rose, a white rosebud. A new son of York.”
“Where is he? In Edinburgh?”
“They say that he’s living with his wife in Falkland, at a royal hunting lodge. They live quietly together with their baby. They say she is very, very beautiful and that he is happy to stay with her, they are so much in love.”
“He won’t invade?”
She shrugs. “It’s not the season, but perhaps he wants to live quietly. Newly married, with a beautiful wife and a baby in her arms? Perhaps he thinks this is the best that he can get.”
“If I could write to him . . . if I could just tell him . . . oh, if I could tell him that this is the best.”
Slowly, she shakes her head. “Nothing goes across the border but the king knows of it,” she says. “If you sent so much as one word to the boy, the king would see it as the greatest betrayal in the world. He would never forgive you, he would doubt you forever, and he would think you have been his hidden enemy all along.”
“If only someone could tell the boy to stay where he is, to find joy and keep it, that the throne won’t bring him the happiness he has now.”
“I can’t tell him,” Maggie says. “I’ve found that truth for myself: a good husband and a place that I can call my home at Ludlow Castle.”
“Have you really?”
Smilingly, she nods. “He’s a good man, and I am glad to be married to him. He’s calm and he’s quiet and he is loyal to the king and faithful to me. I’ve seen enough excitement and disloyalty; I can think of nothing better to do in my life than to raise my own son and to help yours to become a prince, to run Ludlow Castle as you would wish, and to welcome your son’s bride into our home, when she comes.”
“And Arthur?” I ask her.
She smiles at me. “He is a prince to be proud of,” she says. “He is generous, and fair. When Sir Richard takes him to watch the judges at their work his desire is to be merciful. He rides well and when he goes out he greets people as his friend. He is everything that you would want him to be. And Richard is teaching him all that he knows. He’s a good guardian for your boy. Arthur will make a good king, perhaps even a great king.”
“If the boy does not claim his throne.”
“Perhaps the boy will think that loving a woman and loving his child is enough,” Maggie says. “Perhaps he will understand that a prince does not have to become a king. Perhaps he will think that it is more important to be a man, a loving man. Perhaps when he sees his wife with the child in her arms he will know that this is the greatest kingdom a man can wish for.”
“If I could tell him that!”
“I can’t get a letter to my own brother, just down the river in the Tower of London. How could we ever get a letter to yours?”
THE TOWER OF LONDON, SUMMER 1497
The Cornishmen start by grumbling that the king is taxing them too hard, and then that he has stolen their rights to the tin that they mine. They are a hardworking, bitter set of men who face danger daily, in the tiny cramped conditions underground, speaking their own strange language, living more like barbarians than Christian men. Far away from London, in the utmost west of the country, they are easily persuaded by dreams or rumors. They believe in kings and angels, in appearances and miracles. My father always said that they were Englishmen like no others, Cornishmen, not of English stock at all, and that they had to be ruled with kindness, as if they were the mischievous elves that live alongside them.
In days, in moments, they are agreed and furious; they go through the west like a summer fire, blazing up, jumping a field or two, raging on faster than a galloping horse. Soon they have the whole of Cornwall up in arms, and then the other western counties join with them, equally angry. They form separate armies led by men from Somerset, Wiltshire, and Cornwall under the command of a Cornish blacksmith, Michael Joseph, An Gof, a man said to be ten feet high who has sworn that he will not be ruined by a king whose father was no king, who is trying new ways, Tudor ways, Welsh ways against good Cornishmen.
But it is not just a rebellion of ignorant men: yeomen turn out for them, fishermen, farmers, miners, and then, worst of all, a nobleman, Lord Audley, offers to lead them.
“I’ll leave you and my mother and the children here,” Henry says tersely to me, his horse
waiting at the head of his yeomen of the guard, who are arrayed in battle order outside the White Tower, the gates closed, the cannons rolled up to the walls, everything ready for a war. “You’ll be safe here, you can hold out against a siege for weeks.”
“A siege?” I hold Mary on my hip, as if I were a peasant woman seeing a husband off to battle, her own future desperately uncertain. “Why, how close are they going to get to London? They’re coming all the way from Cornwall! They should have been contained in the West Country! Are you leaving us with enough troops? Is London going to stay loyal?”
“Woodstock, I’m going to Woodstock. I can muster troops there and cut off the rebels as they come up the Great West Way. I have to get my troops back from Scotland, as soon as I can. I sent them all north to face the boy and the Scots, I wasn’t expecting this from the southwest. I’m recalling Lord Daubney and his force, I’ve sent orders for them to turn back south at once. I’ll get them back here, if the messenger finds them in time.”
“Lord Daubney is a Somerset man,” I observe.
“What d’you mean by that?” Henry shouts at me in his desperation, and Mary flinches at his raised voice and wails pitifully. I tighten my grip on her little plump body and rock her, stepping from one foot to the other.
I keep my voice low so as not to disturb her, and not to unsettle Henry’s bodyguard, who are lining up grim-faced. “I mean only that it will be hard for his lordship to attack his fellow countrymen,” I say. “He will have to fire on his neighbors. The whole county of Somerset has joined with the Cornishmen, and he will have known Lord Audley from boyhood. I don’t suggest that he will fail you, I just mean that he is a man from the west and he is bound to sympathize with his people. You should put other men round him. Where are your other lords? His kinsmen and peers that would keep him to your side?”
Henry makes a sound, almost a moan of distress, and puts his hand on his horse’s neck as if he needs the support. “Scotland,” he whispers. “I have sent almost everyone north, the whole army and all my cannon and all my money.”
For a moment I am silent, seeing the danger that we are in. All my children including Arthur are in the Tower as the rebels march on London, the army is too distant to recall; if Henry’s small force cannot stop them on the road we will be besieged. “Be brave,” I say, though I am sick with fear myself. “Be brave, Henry. My father was captured once and driven from his kingdom once and he still was a great king of England and died in the royal bed.”
He looks at me bleakly. “I’ve sent Thomas Howard the Earl of Surrey to Scotland. He was against me at Bosworth and I kept him in the Tower for more than three years. Do you think that will have made a friend of him? I have to gamble that marriage to your sister makes him a safe ally for me. You tell me that Daubney is a Somerset man and will sympathize with his neighbors as they march against me. I didn’t even know that. I don’t know any of these men. None of them knows me or loves me. Your father was never alone like me, in a strange land. He married for love, he was followed by men with a passion. He always had people that he could trust.”
We take up battle stations in the Tower, with cannon rolled out, the fires kept burning and the cannonballs stacked beside the guns. We hear that there is a mighty rebel army, perhaps as many as twenty thousand men, marching on London from Cornwall and gathering strength as it marches. That is an army big enough to take the kingdom. Lord Daubney gets south in time to block the Great West Way and we expect that he will turn them back, but he does not even delay them. Some say that he orders his troops to clear the road, and lets them go by.
The rebels come on, nearing London, growing in numbers. They are led by Lord Audley, and we know that other lords must be sending them arms, money, and men. I hear nothing from Henry, I have to trust that he is mustering his men, preparing a force and readying himself to march against them. I have no word from him and he does not write to his mother either, though she spends her days on her knees in the chapel that blazes, night and day, with the light of the votive candles that she has lit for him.
My son Arthur, in the Tower for safety with us, comes to me. “Is my father blocking the rebels’ march?” he asks me.
“I am sure,” I say, though I am not sure.
In his rooms Edward, my cousin, must hear the marching feet, the shouted orders, the changing of the guard at four-hourly intervals. Maggie, who joins me as her husband rides out with mine, is the only one of us who is allowed to see him. She comes to me with her face grave.
“He’s very quiet,” is all she says. “He asked me why we were all here, he knows we are all here in the Tower, and why there was so much noise. When I said that there were rebels marching on London all the way from Cornwall he said—” She breaks off and puts her hand over her mouth.
“What?” I ask. “What did he say?”
“He said that there was not much to come to London for, it is a very dull place. He said someone should tell them that there is no company in London at all, and it is lonely. It’s very, very lonely.”
I am horrified. “Maggie, has he lost his wits?”
She shakes her head. “No, I’m sure not. It’s just that he has been kept alone for so very long, he has almost forgotten how to speak. He is like a child who has had no childhood. Elizabeth—I have failed him. I have failed him so badly.”
I go to embrace her, but she turns away from me and drops a curtsey. “Let me go to my room and wash my face,” she says. “I can’t speak of him. I can’t bear to think of him. I have changed my name and denied my family and left him behind. I have snatched my own freedom and left him in here, like a little bird in a cage, like a blinded songbird.”
“When this is over . . .”
“When this is over it will be even worse!” she exclaims passionately. “All this time we have been waiting for the king to feel safe on his throne; but he never feels safe. When this is over, even if we triumph, the king will still have to face the Scots. He may have to face the boy. The king’s enemies come one after another, he makes no friends and he has new enemies every year. It is never safe enough for him to release my brother. He will never be safe on the throne.”
I clap my hand over her trembling mouth. “Hush, Maggie. Hush. You know better than to talk like this.”
She drops a curtsey and goes from my rooms and I don’t detain her. I know she speaks nothing but the truth and that these battles, between these ill-armed desperate men from the west, the war in the North between the Scots and the English, the mustering rebels in Ireland, and the conflict to come between the boy and the king, will give us a summer of bloodshed and an autumn of reckoning, and nobody can tell what the count will be, or who will be the judge or the victor.
The panic starts at dawn. I can hear the shouted commands and the noise of running feet as the commander of the watch calls out the troops. The tocsin starts to sound a warning and then all the bells through the City of London and beyond, all the bells of England, start to sound as the alarm is given that the Cornishmen have come and now they are not demanding that taxes be forgiven and the king’s false advisors dismissed, now they are demanding that the king be thrown down.
Lady Margaret, the king’s mother, comes out of the chapel, blinking like a frightened owl at the dawn light, and at the uproar inside the Tower. She sees me at the entrance to the White Tower and hurries across the green towards me. “You stay here,” she says harshly. “You’re commanded to stay here for your own safety. Henry said that you were not to leave. You and the children are to stay here.”
She turns towards one of the commanders of the guard, and I realize that she will give the order for my arrest if she thinks for a moment that I am hoping to escape.
“Are you mad?” I suddenly demand bitterly. “I am Queen of England, I am the king’s wife and mother of the Prince of Wales! Of course I am staying here in this, my home city, among my people. Whatever happens I would not leave. Where do you think I would go? I am not the one that spent my life in exile!
I did not come in at the head of an army, speaking a foreign language! I am English born and English bred. Of course I am going to stay in London. These are my people, this is my country. Even if they carry arms against me they are still my people and this is still where I belong!”
She wavers in the face of my unexpected fury. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” she says. “Don’t be angry, Elizabeth. I am only trying to keep us all safe. I don’t know anything, anymore. Where are the rebels?”
“Blackheath,” I say shortly. “But they have lost a lot of men. They went into Kent and there was a skirmish.”
“Are they opening the city gates to them?” she asks. We can both hear the uproar in the streets. She clutches hold of my arm. “Are the citizens and their militia going to let them into London? Are they going to betray us?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Let’s go up on the walls where we can see what’s happening.”
My Lady, my sisters, Maggie, Arthur and the younger children, and I all go up the narrow stone steps to the perimeter walls of the Tower. We look south and east, to where the river winds out of sight, and we know that, not far away, only seven miles, the Cornish rebels are triumphantly occupying Blackheath, outside our palace of Greenwich, and setting up camp.
“My mother once stood here,” I tell my children. “She was here under siege, just like this, and I was with her, just a little girl.”
“Were you frightened?” six-year-old Henry asks me.
I hug him, and smile to feel him pull away from me. He is eager to stand on his own two feet, he wants to look independent, ready for battle. “No,” I say. “I wasn’t frightened. For I knew that my uncle Anthony would protect us, and I knew that the people of England would never hurt us.”
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