The White Princess

by Philippa Gregory

  There is something different about the hall as I walk through the silent court and when I am seated, and can look around, I see what has changed. It is how they have seated themselves. Every night the men and women of our extensive household come in to dine and sit in order of precedence and importance, men on one side, women on the other of the great hall. Each table seats about twelve diners and they share the common dishes that are placed in the center of the table. But tonight it is different; some tables are overcrowded, some have empty places. I see that they have grouped themselves regardless of tradition or precedent.

  Those who befriended the boy, those who were of the House of York, those who served my mother and father or whose fathers served my mother and father, those who love me, those who love my cousin Margaret and remember her brother Teddy—they have chosen to sit together; and there are many, many tables in the great hall where they are seated in utter silence, as if they have sworn a vow never to speak again, and they look around them saying nothing.

  The other tables are those that have taken Henry’s side. Many of them are old Lancastrian families, some of them were in his mother’s household or serve her wider family, some came over with him to fight at Bosworth, some, like my half brother Thomas Grey or my brother-in-law Thomas Howard, spend every day of their lives trying to show their loyalty to the new Tudor house. They are trying to appear as usual, leaning across the half-empty tables, talking unnaturally loudly, finding things to say.

  Almost without trying to, the court has sorted itself into those who are in mourning tonight, wearing gray or black or navy ribbons pinned to their jerkins or carrying dark gloves, and those who are trying, loudly and cheerfully, to behave as if nothing has happened.

  Henry would be horrified if he saw the numbers that are openly mourning for the House of York. But Henry will not see it. Only I know that he is facedown on his bed, his cape hunched over his shoulders, unable to walk to dinner, unable to eat, barely able to breathe in a spasm of guilt and horror at what he has done, which can never be undone.

  Outside the storm is still rumbling, the skies are billowing with dark clouds and there is no moon at all. The court is uneasy too; there is no sense of victory, and no sense of closing a chapter. The death of the two young men was supposed to bring a sense of peace. Instead we are all haunted by the sense that we have done something very wrong.

  I look across at the table where Henry’s young companions always sit, expecting them at least to be cracking a jest or playing some foolish prank on each other, but they are waiting for dinner to be served in silence, their heads bowed, and when it comes they eat in silence, as if there is nothing to laugh about at the Tudor court anymore.

  Then I see something that makes me glance across to the groom of the servery, wondering that he should allow it—certain that he will report it. At the head of the table of the young men, where the boy used to sit, they have put his cup, his knife, his spoon. They have set a plate for him, they have poured wine as if he were coming to dine. In their own way, defiantly, the young men are showing their loyalty to a ghost, a dream; expressing their love for a prince who—if he was ever there at all—is gone now.

  WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, WINTER 1499

  Henry is ill, desperately ill. He falls into illness as if he cannot face the brightness of the world after the storm. He keeps to his chamber and only his most trusted servants are allowed in and out and they will not tell anyone what is the matter with him. People whisper that he has taken the sweat, that the illness he brought to England has finally caught up with him. Other people say that he has a growth in his belly and point to the plates that return untouched from his room. He cannot eat, he is as sick as a dog, the cooks say. His mother visits him every day, sitting with him for a couple of hours in the evening. She has her physicians attend him, and once I see an alchemist and an astrologer going quietly up the private staircase to his rooms. Secretly, for it is against the law to consult astrologers or any sort of fortune-tellers, he has his stars drawn up; and they tell him that he will grow stronger, and he was right to kill an enemy, a weak defenseless enemy. His strength depended on the destruction of a youth in his keeping, it is quite all right to destroy the weak. It is quite all right to destroy a dependent helpless prisoner.

  But still the king gets no better, and his mother spends all her time in the chapel praying for him, or in his room begging him to sit up, turn his face from the wall, drink a little wine, taste a little meat, eat. The Master of the Revels comes to me to make plans for the Christmas feasts, the dancers must rehearse and the choristers practice new music, but I don’t know if we are going to have a silent court in mourning with an empty throne, and I tell him we can plan nothing until the king is well again.

  The other men charged with treason in the last plot for the York prince are all hanged or fined or banished. Occasional pardons are issued in the king’s name, with his initial weakly scrawled at the foot of the page. Nobody knows if he has locked himself up, sick with remorse, or if he is just too tired to go on fighting. The plot is over, but still the king does not come out of his chamber; he reads nothing and will see no one. The court and the kingdom wait for him to return.

  I go to visit My Lady the King’s Mother and find her with all the business of the throne on the table before her, as if she were regent. “I have come to ask you if the king is very ill,” I say. “There is much gossip, and I am concerned. He will not see me.”

  She looks at me and I see that the papers are shuffled into piles, but she is not reading them, she is signing nothing. She is at a loss. “It’s grief,” she says simply. “It is grief. He is sick with grief.”

  I rest my hand on my heart and feel it thud with anger. “Why? Why should he grieve? What has he lost?” I ask, thinking of Margaret and her brother, Lady Katherine and her husband, of my sisters and myself, who go through our days and show the world nothing but indifference.

  She shakes her head as if she cannot understand it herself. “He says he has lost his innocence.”

  “Henry, innocent?” I exclaim. “He entered his throne through the death of a king! He came into the kingdom as a pretender to the throne!”

  “Don’t you dare say it!” She rounds on me. “Don’t you say such a thing! You of all people!”

  “But I don’t understand what you mean,” I explain. “I don’t understand what he is saying. He has lost his innocence? When was he innocent?”

  “He was a young man, he spent his life aspiring to the throne,” she says, as if the words are forced from her, as if it is a hard confession, choked out of her. “I raised him to be like this, I taught him myself that he must be King of England, that there was nothing else for him but the crown. It was my doing. I said that he should think of nothing but returning to England and claiming his own and holding it.”

  I wait.

  “I told him it was God’s will.”

  I nod.

  “And now he has won it,” she says. “He is where he was born to be. But to hold it, to be sure of it, he has had to kill a young man, a young man just like him, a boy who aspired to the throne, who was also raised to believe it was his by right. He feels as if he has killed himself. He has killed the boy that he was.”

  “The boy that he was,” I repeat slowly. She is showing me a boy I had not seen before. The boy who was named for the Tournai boatman was also the boy who said he was a prince, but to Henry he was a fellow-pretender, someone raised and trained for only one destiny.

  “That was why he liked the boy so much. He wanted to spare him, he was glad to bind himself to forgive him. He hoped to make him look like a nothing, keeping him at court like a Fool, paying for his clothes from the same purse as he paid for his Fool and his other entertainments. That was part of his plan. But then he found that he liked him so much. Then he found that they were both boys, raised abroad, always thinking of England, always taught of England, always told that the time would come when they must sail for home and enter into the
ir kingdom. He once said to me that nobody could understand the boy but him—and that nobody could understand him but the boy.”

  “Then why kill him?” I burst out. “Why would he put him to death? If the boy was him, a looking-glass king?”

  She looks as if she is in pain. “For safety,” she said. “While the boy lived they would always be compared, there would always be a looking-glass king, and everyone would always look from one to the other.”

  She says nothing for a moment and I think of how Henry always knew that he did not seem like a king, not a king like my father, and how the boy that Henry called Perkin always looked like a prince.

  “And besides, he could not be safe until the boy was dead,” she says. “Even though he tried to keep him close. Even when the boy was in the Tower, enmeshed in lies, entrapped with his own words, there were people all over the country pledging themselves to save him. We hold England now; but Henry feels that we will never keep it. The boy is not like Henry. He had that gift—the gift of being beloved.”

  “And now you will never be safe.” I repeat her words to her and I know that my revenge on them is here, in what I am saying to the woman who has taken my place in the queen’s rooms, behind this table, just as her son took the place of my brother. “You don’t have England,” I tell her. “You don’t have England, and you will never be safe, and you will never be beloved.”

  She bows her head as if it is a life sentence, as if she deserves it.

  “I shall see him,” I say, going to the door that adjoins his set of rooms, the queen’s doorway.

  “You can’t go in.” She steps forwards. “He’s too ill to see you.”

  I walk towards her as if I would stride right through her. “I am his wife,” I say levelly. “I am Queen of England. I will see my husband. And you shall not stop me.”

  For a moment I think I will have to physically push her aside, but at the last moment she sees the determination in my face and she falls back and lets me open the door and go in.

  He is not in the antechamber, but the door to his bedroom is open and I tap on it lightly, and step into his room. He is at the window, the shutters open so that he can see the night sky, looking out, though there is nothing but darkness outside and the glimmering of a scatter of stars like spilled sequins across the sky. He glances round as he sees me come in, but he does not speak. Almost I can feel the ache in his heart, his loneliness, his terrible despair.

  “You’ve got to come back to court,” I say flatly. “People will talk. You cannot stay hiding in here.”

  “You call it hiding?” he challenges.

  “I do,” I say without hesitation.

  “They are missing me so much?” he asks scathingly. “They love me so much? They long to see me?”

  “They expect to see you,” I say. “You are the King of England, you have to be seen on your throne. I cannot carry the burden of the Tudor crown alone.”

  “I didn’t think it would be so hard,” he says, almost an aside.

  “No,” I agree. “I didn’t think it would be so hard either.”

  He rests his head against the stone window arch. “I thought once the battle was won, it would be easy. I thought I would have found my heart’s desire. But—d’you know?—it is worse being a king than being a pretender.”

  He turns and looks at me for the first time in weeks. “Do you think I have done wrong?” he asks. “Was it a sin to kill the two of them?”

  “Yes,” I say simply. “And I am afraid that we will have to pay the price.”

  “You think we will see our son die, that our grandson will die and our line end with a Virgin Queen?” he asks bitterly. “Well, I have had a prophecy drawn up, and by a more skilled astrologist than you and your witch mother. They say that we will live long and in triumph. They all tell me that.”

  “Of course they do,” I say honestly. “And I don’t pretend to foresee the future. But I do know that there is always a price to be paid.”

  “I don’t think our line will die out,” he says, trying to smile. “We have three sons. Three healthy princes: Arthur, Henry, and Edmund. I hear nothing but good of Arthur, Henry is bright and handsome and strong, and Edmund is well and thriving, thank God.”

  “My mother had three princes,” I reply. “And she died without an heir.”

  He crosses himself. “Dear God, Elizabeth, don’t say such a thing. How can you say such things?”

  “Someone killed my brothers,” I say. “They both died without saying good-bye to their mother.”

  “They didn’t die at my hand!” he shouts. “I was in exile, miles away. I didn’t order their deaths! You can’t blame me!”

  “You benefit from their deaths.” I pursue the argument. “You are their heir. And anyway, you killed Teddy, my cousin. Not even your mother can deny that. An innocent boy. And you killed the boy, the charming boy, for being nothing but beloved.”

  He puts one hand over his face and blindly stretches his other hand out to me. “I did, I did, God forgive me. But I didn’t know what else to do. I swear there was nothing else I could do.”

  His hand finds mine and he grips it tightly, as if I might haul him out from sorrow. “Do you forgive me? Even if no one else ever does. Can you forgive me? Elizabeth? Elizabeth of York—can you forgive me?”

  I let him draw me to his side. He turns his head towards me and I feel that his cheeks are wet with tears. He wraps his arms around me and he holds me tightly. “I had to do it,” he says into my hair. “You know that we would never have been safe while he was alive. You know that people would have flocked to him even though he was in prison. They loved him as if he was a prince. He had all that charm, all that irresistible York charm. I had to kill him. I had to.”

  He is holding me as if I can save him from drowning. I can hardly speak for the pain I feel but I say: “I forgive you. I forgive you, Henry.”

  He gives a hoarse sob and he puts his anguished face against my neck. I feel him tremble as he clings to me. Over his bent head I look at the stained-glass windows of his room, dark against the dark sky, and the Tudor rose, white with a red core, that his mother has inset into every window of his room. Tonight it does not look to me as if the white rose and the red are blooming together as one, tonight it looks as if the white rose of York has been stabbed in its pure white heart and is bleeding scarlet red.

  Tonight, I know that I do indeed have much to forgive.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book is written on a number of levels. It is a fiction about a mystery—so two steps from any historically recorded fact; but at the heart of it are some historical facts that you can rely on, or study for yourself. The death of the princes, traditionally blamed on Richard III, was not, I believe, his act, and the suggestion that one prince actually survived has been made by several historians whose books are listed below. I am inclined to believe the version I tell here. However, nobody knows for sure, not even now.

  The support that the dowager queen Elizabeth gave to the Simnel rebellion suggests to me that she was fighting Henry VII (and her own daughter) for a preferred candidate. I cannot think she would have risked her daughter’s place on the throne for anyone but her son. She died before the young man who claimed to be Richard landed in England, but it seems that her mother-in-law, Duchess Cecily, supported the pretender. Sir William Stanley’s support (for the pretender against his brother’s stepson) is also recorded. Stanley went to his death without apologizing for taking the side of the pretender; this suggests to me that he thought that the pretender might win, and that his claim was good.

  The treatment of the young man who was eventually so uncertainly named as Perkin Warbeck is also very odd. I suggest that Henry VII plotted to get “the boy” out of his court by setting a fire in the royal wardrobe which blazed out of control and destroyed the Palace of Sheen, subsequently engineered his escape, and then finally entrapped him in a treasonous conspiracy with the Earl of Warwick.

  Most historians wo
uld agree that the conspiracy with Warwick was allowed if not sponsored by Henry VII to remove the two threats to his throne, and their deaths were indeed requested by the Spanish king and queen before they would allow the marriage of the infanta and Prince Arthur.

  It is possible that we will never know the identity of the young man who claimed to be Prince Richard and confessed to being “Perkin Warbeck.” What we can be sure of is that the Tudor version of events is not the truth. Anne Wroe’s meticulous research shows the construction of the lie.

  This book does not claim to reveal the truth either: it is a fiction based on many studies of these fascinating times and gives, I hope, an insight into the untold stories and the unknown characters with affection and respect.

  Touchstone Reading Group Guide

  * * *

  The White Princess

  By Philippa Gregory

  The White Princess opens with Elizabeth of York grieving the loss of her lover, Richard III, who was killed at the battle of Bosworth by his Lancastrian rival, Henry Tudor. As soon as Henry claims the crown to become Henry VII, he cements his succession by demanding Elizabeth’s hand in marriage.

  While Elizabeth dutifully bears a male Tudor heir and endures her husband’s suspicion of her York relations, her mother, Elizabeth of Woodville, concocts a plan for revenge. Making the most of her York connections, Elizabeth Woodville secretly supports an uprising against Henry, placing her daughter, now Queen to Henry’s King, between two families.

  When Henry learns of the treasonous plot, he imprisons his mother-in-law and becomes preoccupied with capturing “the boy”—the handsome leader of the rebellion whose adherents claim is the true York heir. But when the King arrests the imposter, who strongly resembles Elizabeth’s missing brother, Prince Richard, his Tudor court is thrown into turmoil. Elizabeth must watch and wonder as her loyalty between family and crown is divided once more.