The White Princess

by Philippa Gregory

  Lady Margaret presses her hands together as if she is praying but says nothing.

  “The Earl of Devon, my brother-in-law.” Henry looks at me as if I am responsible for William Courtenay. “The Earl of Devon, William Courtenay, was going to attack himself but thought they were too strong and he could not trust his men. He’s fallen back to Exeter.” He lifts his head. “The boy has just landed and already he has all of Cornwall and much of Devon; and your brother-in-law has fallen back to Exeter because he cannot trust his men to stay true to him.”

  “How many?” I ask. “How many men does the boy have?”

  “About eight thousand.” Henry gives a mirthless bark of a laugh. “More than I had, when I landed. It’s enough. It’s enough to take the throne.”

  “You were the rightful heir!” his mother says passionately.

  “The Earl of Devon, William Courtenay, is trapped in Exeter,” Henry says. “The boy has set a siege.” He turns to his writing table and shouts for clerks. His mother and I step back as the men run into the room and Henry gives orders. Lord Daubney is to march towards the boy’s forces, and relieve William Courtenay in Exeter. Another army commanded by Lord Willoughby de Broke is to hold the south coast so that the boy cannot get away. Every lord in the country is commanded to raise men and horse and meet Henry to march on the West Country. They must all come, there can be no excuses.

  “I want him brought to me alive,” Henry says to each of his clerks. “Write that to each commander. He must be taken alive. And tell them to fetch his wife and son too.”

  “Where are they?” I ask “His wife and his son?” I cannot bear the thought of the young woman with her baby, the young woman who may be my sister-in-law, in the midst of an army setting a siege.

  “St. Michael’s Mount,” Henry says briefly.

  My Lady the King’s Mother gives an irritated exclamation at the thought of the boy and his son weaving themselves into the story of Arthur, a legend she has tried so hard to attach to our boy.

  The clerks hand over the orders, dripping with hot wax, and Henry stamps them with his seal ring and signs with a spiky up-and-down scratch of the pen HR: Henricus Rex. I think of the proclamation that I saw signed with RR: Ricardus Rex, and know that once again there are two men who claim to be king treading the soil of England, once again there are two rival royal families, and this time I am divided between the two.

  We wait. Henry cannot bring himself to go hawking, but sends me out to dine in the tents in the woods with the hunters and to play the part of a queen who thinks that all is well. I take the children with me on their little ponies, and Arthur on his hunter rides proudly at my side. When one of the lords asks me if the king is not coming I say that he will come in a while, he was detained by some business, nothing of importance.

  I doubt very much that anyone believes me. The whole court knows that the boy is somewhere off our coasts; some of them will know that he has landed. Almost certainly, some of them will be preparing to join him, they may even have his letter of array in their pockets.

  “I’m not afraid,” Arthur tells me, almost as if he is listening to the words and wondering how they sound. “I am not afraid. Are you?”

  I show him an honest face and a genuine smile. “I’m not afraid,” I say. “Not at all.”

  When I get back to the palace there is a desperate message from Courtenay. The rebels have broken in through the gates of Exeter, and he is wounded. With the walls breached, he has made a truce. The rebel army has been merciful, there has been no looting, they have not even taken him prisoner. Honorably, they release him and in return he has allowed them to go on, along the Great West Way, heading for London, and he has promised he will not pursue them.

  “He let them go?” I ask disbelievingly. “To march on London? He promised not to pursue them?”

  “No, he’ll break his word,” Henry says. “I will order him to break his word. A promise to rebels like that need not be kept. I’ll order him to trail behind them, block their retreat. Lord Daubney will come down on them from the north, Lord Willoughby de Broke will attack from the west. We will crush them.”

  “But he made a promise,” I say uncertainly. “He has given his word.”

  Henry’s face is dark and angry. “No promise given to that boy counts before God.”

  His servants come in with his hat, his gloves, his riding boots, his cape. Another goes running to the stables to order his horses, the guard is mustering in the yard, a messenger is riding for all the guns and cannon that London has.

  “You’re going to your army?” I ask. “You’re riding out?”

  “I’ll meet with Daubney and his army,” he says. “We’ll outnumber them by three to one. I’ll fight him with odds like these.”

  I catch my breath. “You’re going now?”

  He kisses me perfunctorily, his lips cold, and I can almost smell the scent of his fear. “I think we’ll win,” he says. “As far as I can be certain, I think we’ll win.”

  “And what will you do then?” I ask. I dare not name the boy and ask what Henry plans for him.

  “I will execute everyone who has raised a hand against me,” he says grimly. “I will show no mercy. I will fine everyone who let them march by and did not stop them. When I have finished, there will be no one left in Cornwall and Devon but dead men and debtors.”

  “And the boy?” I ask quietly.

  “I will bring him into London in chains,” he says. “Everyone has to see that he is a nobody, I will throw him down into the dust and when everyone understands at last that he is a boy and no prince, I will have him killed.”

  He looks at my white face. “You will have to see him,” he says bitterly, as if all of this is my fault. “I will want you to look him in the face and deny him. And you had better make sure that you say no word, give no look, not a whisper, not even a breath of recognition. Whoever he looks like, whatever he says, whatever nonsense he spouts when he is asked: you had better be sure that you look at him with the gaze of a stranger, and if anyone asks you, you don’t know him.”

  I think of my little brother, the child that my mother loved. I think of him looking at picture books on my lap, or running around the inner courtyard at Sheen with a little wooden sword. I think that it will not be possible for me to see his merry smile and his warm hazel eyes and not reach out to him.

  “You will deny him,” Henry says flatly. “Or I will deny you. If you ever, by so much as a word, the whisper of a word, the first letter of a word, give anyone, anyone to understand that you recognize this imposter, this commoner, this false boy, then I will put you aside and you will live and die in Bermondsey Abbey as your mother did. In disgrace. And you will never see any of your children again. I will tell them—each one of them—that their mother is a whore and a witch. Just like her mother, and her mother before that.”

  I face him, I rub his kiss from my mouth with the back of my hand. “You need not threaten me,” I say icily. “You can spare me your insults. I know my duty to my position and to my son. I’m not going to disinherit my own son. I will do as I think right. I am not afraid of you, I have never been afraid of you. I will serve the Tudors for the sake of my son—not for you, not for your threats. I will serve the Tudors for Arthur—a true-born king of England.”

  He nods, relieved to see his safety in my unquestionable love for my boy. “If any one of you Yorks speaks of the boy other than as a young fool and a stranger, I will have him beheaded that same day. You will see him on Tower Green with his head on the block. The moment that you or your sisters or your cousin or any of your endless cousins or bastard kinsmen recognize the boy is the moment that you sign the warrant for his execution. If anyone recognizes him then they die and he dies. D’you understand?”

  I nod my head and I turn away from him. I turn my back on him as if he were not a king. “Of course I understand,” I say contemptuously over my shoulder. “But if you are going to continue to claim that he is the son of a drunken boat
man from Tournai, you must remember not to have him beheaded like a prince on Tower Green. You’ll have to have him hanged.”

  I shock him, he chokes on a laugh. “You’re right,” he says. “His name is to be Pierre Osbeque, and he was born to die on the gallows.”

  With ironic respect I turn back to him and sweep a curtsey, and in this moment I know that I hate my husband. “Clearly, we will call him whatever you wish. You can name the young man’s corpse whatever you wish, that will be your right as his murderer.”

  We do not reconcile before he rides out and so my husband goes out to war with no warm farewell embrace from me. His mother gives him her blessing, clings to his reins, watches him go while she whispers her prayers, and looks curiously at me, as I stand dry-eyed and watch him ride off at the head of his guard, three hundred of them, to meet with Lord Daubney.

  “Are you not afraid for him?” she asks, her eyes moist, her old lips trembling. “Your own husband, going out to war, to battle? You did not kiss him, you did not bless him. Are you not afraid for him riding into danger?”

  “Really, I doubt very much that he’ll get too close,” I say cruelly, and I turn and go inside to the second-best apartment.

  EAST ANGLIA, AUTUMN 1497

  The king keeps all England informed as the rebellion disappears, and then melts away, before his carefully slow advance. The Cornishmen slip away every night as they realize that not one, not two, but three armies are mustered and slowly marching on them, and one night the boy goes too, taking a wild ride with only two companions, escaping the teeth of the trap that Henry has set for him, gaining the coast, learning of the ships waiting offshore to capture him, and plunging into the sanctuary of Beaulieu Abbey.

  But England is not as it was. The king’s writ runs up to the high altar now, his mother and her friend the archbishop have made sure of that. There is no sanctuary for the boy though he claims it as a king ordained by God to rule. The abbey breaks its own time-honored traditions, and hands over the boy. Unwillingly, he has to come out to make his surrender to a king who rules England and the Church too.

  He came out wearing cloth of gold, and answering to the name of Richard IV—a hastily scribbled note which I guess is from my half brother, Thomas Grey, is tucked under my stirrup when I am taking the children out on their ponies. I did not see the hand that tied it to the stirrup leathers and I can be sure that no one will ever say that I saw it and read it. But when the king questioned him, he denied himself. So be it. Mark it well. If he himself denies it, we can deny him.

  I scrunch the paper into a tiny ball and tuck it in my pocket to burn later. It is good of Thomas to let me know, and I am glad that the boy saw one friendly face in a room full of enemies, before he denied himself.

  The rest of the news I have, as the court has it, as England has it, in long triumphant dispatches from Henry that are written by him personally, to be read aloud, throughout the country. He sends verbose announcements to the kings of Christendom. I imagine Henry’s words bawled out at every village marketplace, at every town cross, on the steps of country churches, at the entrance to staple halls. He writes as if he were creating a story, and I read it almost smiling, as if my husband were setting up to be a Chaucer, to give the people of England a tale of their beginnings, an entertainment and an explanation. He becomes the historian of his own triumph, and I cannot be the only person who thinks that he has imagined a victory that he did not experience in the windswept fields of Devon. This is Henry the romancer, not Henry a true king.

  Henry’s story is that there was once a poor man, a man who kept the watergate at Tournai in Flanders. He was a weak man, a bit of a drunkard, married to a common woman, a bit of a fool, and they had a son, a silly boy who ran away from home and fell into bad company, serving as a page to someone (it doesn’t matter much who or why) and went to the court of Portugal and for some reason (for who knows what silly lads will say?) passed himself off as a prince of England and everyone believed him. Then, suddenly he became a servant for a silk merchant. He learned to speak English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese (which is a little surprising but presumably not impossible). Dressed in his master’s clothes, showing off the goods for sale, parading himself like a May Day pageant in Ireland, he was again mistaken for a prince (don’t pause to ask if such a thing is likely) and was persuaded to take on the pretense all across Christendom—to what end and why is never discussed.

  How such a poor ignorant boy from a common home should fool the greatest kings of Christendom, the Duchess of Burgundy, the Holy Roman Emperor, the King of France, the King of Scotland, should delight the court of Portugal and tempt the monarchs of Spain, Henry does not say. It is part of the magic of the fairy tale, like a goose-girl who is really a princess, or a girl who cannot sleep on a pea even when it is covered by twenty feather mattresses. Amazingly, this common, vulgar, ill-educated boy, the son of a drunkard and a fool, engages the richest, most cultured men in Christendom, so that they put their wealth and their armies at his disposal. How he learns to speak four languages and Latin, how he learns to read and write with an elegant hand, how he learns to hunt and joust, hawk and dance so that people admire him as a courageous graceful prince, though he was raised in the backstreets of Tournai, Henry doesn’t say. How he learns the royal smile, the casual warm acknowledgment of homage, Henry does not even consider in his long account, though of all the men in the world he would have been the most struck by this. This is a story of magic: a common boy puts on a silk shirt, and everyone falls for the illusion that he has royal blood.

  As my half brother wrote to me that one time: So be it.

  I receive only one private letter from Henry during this busy time as he writes and rewrites explanations of how the boy, John Perkin, Piers Osbeque, Peter Warboys—for Henry offers several different names—made his transformation to prince and back again.

  I am sending his wife to join you at court, Henry writes, knowing that there is no need for him to say whose wife is joining me. You will be surprised at her beauty and elegance. You will oblige me by making her welcome and comforting her in the cruel deceit that has been played on her.

  I hand his letter to his mother, who stands with her hand out, waiting impatiently to read it. Of course, the boy’s wife has been cruelly, amazingly deceived. Her husband wore a silk shirt and she was blinded by beautiful tailoring. She could not see that beneath it he was a common little boy from Flanders. Easily deluded, amazingly deluded, she saw the shirt and thought he was a prince, and married him.

  PALACE OF SHEEN, RICHMOND, AUTUMN, 1497

  I sit in my rooms waiting for the woman that we are to call Lady Katherine Huntly. She is not to be known by her married name; I suspect that no one is yet quite sure of her married name, whether it is Perkin or Osbeque or Warboys.

  “She is to be considered as a single woman,” My Lady the King’s Mother announces to my ladies. “I expect the marriage will be annulled.”

  “On what grounds?” I ask.

  “Deception,” she replies.

  “In what way was she deceived?” I ask demurely.

  “Obviously.” My Lady snubs me.

  “Not much of a deception, if it was obvious,” Maggie whispers tartly.

  “And where is her child to be housed, My Lady?” I ask.

  “He is to live away from court with his nursemaid,” My Lady says. “And we are not to mention him.”

  “They say that she’s very beautiful,” my sister Cecily volunteers, sweet as Italian powders.

  I smile at Cecily, my face and my eyes quite blank. If I want to save my throne, my freedom, and the life of the baby of the boy who calls himself my brother, I am going to have to endure the arrival of Lady Katherine, a beautiful, single princess, and much, much more.

  I can hear the noise of her guard outside the door, the quick exchange of passwords, and then the door is thrown open. “Lady Katherine Huntly!” the man bellows quickly, as if they fear that someone might say: “Queen Katherine of
England.”

  I stay seated, but my Lady the King’s Mother surprises me by rising from her chair. My ladies sink down, as low as if they were honoring a woman of full royal blood, as the young woman comes into the room.

  She is wearing black, in mourning as if she is a widow, but her cape and gown are beautifully made, beautifully tailored. Who would have thought that Exeter had such seamstresses? She is wearing a black satin dress trimmed with rich black velvet, a black hat on her head, a black riding cloak over her arm, she is wearing gloves of black embroidered leather. Her eyes are dark, hollowed in her pale face, her skin utterly clear, like the finest palest marble. She is a beautiful young woman in her early twenties. She curtseys low to me and I see her scanning my face, as if she is looking for some resemblance to her husband. I give her my hand and I rise to my feet and I kiss one cool cheek and then another for she is cousin to the King of Scotland, whoever she married, whatever the quality of the silk of his shirt. I feel her hand tremble in mine and again I see that wary look as if she would read me, as if she would know where I stand in this unfolding masque which her life has become.

  “We welcome you to court,” My Lady says. There is no careful reading needed for My Lady. She is doing what her son requested, welcoming Lady Katherine to court with such kindliness that even the most hospitable host would have to wonder why we are making such a fuss of this woman, the disgraced wife of our defeated enemy.

  Lady Katherine curtseys again and stands before me as if I am going to interrogate her. “You must be tired,” is all I say.

  “His Grace the King was most kind,” she says. She speaks with such a strong Scots accent that I have to strain to understand her soft voice with the enchanting lilt. “I had good horses and we rested on the way.”

  “Please be seated,” I say. “We will dine in a little while.”