The White Queen

by Philippa Gregory

  “I would trust George as far as I would throw a cat,” Hastings says quietly. “But I would trust young Richard with my life. He will keep his brother on our side until battle is joined. And won, God willing.”

  “Bad odds,” says Anthony thoughtfully.

  “I’ve never known worse,” Hastings says cheerfully. “But we have right on our side, and Edward is a lucky commander, and the three sons of York are together again. We might survive, please God.”

  “Amen to that.” Anthony crosses himself, and goes to sleep.

  “Besides,” Hastings says quietly to himself, “there’s nothing else we can do.”

  I do not sleep in the sanctuary at Westminster, and my mother keeps a vigil with me. A few hours before dawn, when it is at its very darkest and the moon is going down, my mother swings open the casement window and we stand side by side as the great dark river goes by. Gently I breathe out into the night and in the cold air my breath makes a cloud, like a mist. My mother beside me sighs and her breath gathers with mine and swirls away. I breathe out again and again, and now the mist is gathering on the river, gray against the dark water, a shadow on blackness. My mother sighs, and the mist is rolling out down the river, obscuring the other bank, holding the darkness of the night. The starlight is hidden by it, as the mist thickens into fog and starts to spread coldly along the river, through the streets of London, and away, north and west, rolling up the river valleys, holding the darkness into the low ground, so that even though the sky slowly lightens, the land is still shrouded, and Warwick’s men, on the high ridge outside Barnet, waking in the cold hour before dawn, looking down the slope for their enemy, can see nothing below them but a strange inland sea of cloud that lies in heavy bands along the valley, can see nothing of the army that is enveloped and silent in the obscuring darkness beneath them.

  “Take Fury,” Edward says to the page quietly. “I fight on foot. Get me my battle-axe and sword.” The other lords—Anthony, George, Richard, and William Hastings, are already armed for the slugging terror of the day, their horses taken out of range, saddled and bridled, prepared—though no one says it—for flight if everything should go wrong, or for a charge if things go well.

  “Are we ready now?” Edward asks Hastings.

  “As ready as ever,” William says.

  Edward glances up at the ridge, and suddenly says, “Christ save us. We’re wrong.”

  “What?”

  The mist is broken for just a small gap and it shows the king that he is not drawn up opposite Warwick’s men, troop facing troop, but too far to the left. The whole of Warwick’s right wing has nothing against them. It is as if Edward’s army is too short by a third. Edward’s army overlaps slightly to the left. His men there will have no enemy: they will plunge forward against no resistance and break the order of the line, but on his right he is far too short.

  “It’s too late to regroup,” he decides. “Christ help us that we are starting wrong. Sound the trumpets; our time is now.”

  The standards lift up, the pennants limp in the damp air, rising out of the mist like a sudden leafless forest. The trumpets bellow, thick and muffled in the darkness. It is still not dawn, and the mist makes everything strange and confusing. “Charge,” says Edward, though his army can hardly see his enemy, and there is a moment of silence when he senses the men are as he is, weighted down with the thick air, chilled to their bones with the mist, sick with fear. “Charge!” Edward bellows, and plows his way uphill, as with a roar his men follow him to Warwick’s army, who, starting up out of sleep, eyes straining, can hear them coming, and see glimpses now and then, but can be certain of nothing until, as if they have burst through a wall, the army of York with the king, toweringly tall, at their head, whirling a battle-axe, comes at them like a horror of giants out of the darkness.

  In the center of the field the king presses forward and the Lancastrians fall back before him, but on the wing, that fatal empty right side, the Lancastrians can push down, bear down, outnumbering the fighting York army, hundreds of them against the few men on the right. In the darkness and in the mist the outnumbered York men start to fall, as the left wing of Warwick’s army pushes down the hill, and stabbing, clubbing, kicking, and beheading, forces its way closer and closer to the heart of the Yorkists. A man turns and runs, but gets no farther than a couple of paces before his head is burst open by a great swing from a mace, but that first movement of flight creates another. Another York soldier, seeing more and more men pouring down the hill towards them and with no comrade at his side, turns and takes a couple of steps into the safety and shelter of the mist and the darkness. Another follows him, then another. One goes down with a sword thrust through his back, and his comrade looks behind, his white face suddenly pale in the darkness, and then he throws down his weapon and starts to run. All along the line men hesitate, glance behind them at the tempting safety of the darkness, look ahead and hear the great roar of their enemy, who can sense victory, who can hardly see their hands before their faces but who can smell blood and smell fear. The unopposed Lancastrian left wing races down the hill, and the York right flank dare not stand. They drop their weapons and go like deer, running as a herd, scattering in terror.

  The Earl of Oxford’s men, fighting for Lancaster, are on their trail at once, baying like hunting dogs, following the smell since they are still blind in the mist, with the earl cheering them on until the battlefield is behind them and the noise of the battle muffled in the fog, and the fleeing Yorkists lost, and the earl realizes that his men are running on their own account, heading for Barnet and the ale shops, already settling to a jog, wiping their swords and boasting of victory. He has to gallop around them to overtake them, block the road with his horse. He has to whip them, he has to have his captains swear at them and chivvy them. He has to lean down from his saddle and run one of his own men through the heart, and curse the others before he can bring them to a standstill.

  “The battle isn’t done, you whoresons!” he yells at them. “York is still alive, so is his brother Richard, so is his brother the turncoat George! We all swore the battle would end with their deaths. Come on! Come on! You have tasted blood, you have seen them run. Come and finish them, come and finish the rest. Think of the plunder on them! They are half beaten, they are lost. Let’s make the rest run, let’s make them skip. Come on, lads, come on, let’s go, let’s see them run like hares!”

  Driven into order and persuaded into ranks, the men turn and the earl dashes them at a half run back from Barnet towards the battle, his flag before him with its emblem of the Streaming Sun proudly raised. He is blinded by the mist, and desperate to rejoin Warwick, who has promised wealth to every man at his side today. But what de Vere of Oxford does not know, as he leads his troop of nine hundred men, is that the battle lines have swung round. The breaking of the York right wing and their pressing forward of their left has pushed the battlefield off the ridge, and the line of battle now runs up and down the London road.

  Edward is at the heart of it still; but he can feel he is losing ground, dropping back off the road as Warwick’s men push them harder and harder. He starts to feel the sense of defeat, and this is new to him: it tastes like fear. He can see nothing in the mist and the darkness but the attackers who come, one after the other, out of the mist before him, and he responds with the instincts of a blind man to the rush of the men who come, and then come again, and again, with a sword or an axe or sometimes a scythe.

  He thinks of his wife and his baby son, waiting for him and depending on his victory. He has no time to think what will happen to them if he fails. He can feel his own soldiers around him, giving way, as if they are being thrust back by the sheer weight of Warwick’s extra men. He can feel himself wearying at the unstoppable approach of his enemies, the constant demand that he should swing, thrust, spear, kill: or be killed. In the rhythm of his endurance he has a glimpse, almost a vision it is so bright, of his brother Richard: swinging, spearing, going on and on, and yet feeling
his sword arm grow tired and fail. He has a picture in his mind of Richard alone on a battlefield, without him, turning to face a charge without a friend at his side, and it makes him angry and he bellows, “York! God and York!”

  De Vere of Oxford, bringing his troops in at a run, gives the order to charge, seeing the battle line before him, expecting to take his men into the rear of the York lines, knowing he will wreak havoc, coming out of the mist at them, as good as fresh Lancaster reinforcements, as terrifying as an ambush. In the darkness they rush, swords and weapons drawn and already bloody, into the rear—not of the York soldiers—but of his own army, the Lancaster line, who have turned in the battle and are off the hill.

  “Traitor! Treason!” screams a man, stabbed from behind, who looks round and sees de Vere. A Lancastrian officer looks over his shoulder and sees the most dreaded sight on the battlefield: fresh soldiers, coming up from the rear. In the mist he cannot see the flag clearly, but he sees, he is sure he sees, the Sun in Splendor, the York standard, fluttering proudly over fresh troops who are running up the road from Barnet, their swords out before them, battle-axes swinging, their mouths gaping as they bellow in their powerful charge. The banner of the Streaming Sun of Oxford, he mistakes for the emblem of York. He and his men have soldiers of York before them, pressing them hard, fighting like men with nothing to lose, but more and more of them coming out of the mist, from behind, like an army of specters, is more than any man can stand.

  “Turn! Turn!” Somebody bellows in a panic, and another voice shouts, “Regroup! Regroup! Fall back!” And the orders are right, but the voices are filled with panic and the men turn from the York enemy before them to find another army behind them. They cannot recognize their allies. They think themselves surrounded and outnumbered and certain of death, and the heart goes out of them in a rush.

  “De Vere!” shouts the Earl of Oxford, seeing his men attacking his own side. “De Vere! For Lancaster! Hold! Hold! In the name of God, hold!” But it is too late. Those who now recognize the Oxford standard with the Streaming Sun, and see de Vere laying about him in the middle of the confusion, and shouting to bring his men to order, think that he has turned his coat in midbattle—as men do—and those who are close enough, his old friends, turn on him like furious dogs to kill him as a thing worse than the enemy: a traitor on the battlefield. But in the mist and the chaos most of the Lancaster forces know only that an untold enemy is before them, pressing forward with soldiers of clouds, and now a fresh battalion has come from behind, and the darkness and fog on the road could hide more on every side. Who knows how many soldiers will rise out of the river? Who knows what horror, that Edward, married to a witch, might conjure from rivers and springs and streams? They can hear the sounds of battle and the screams of the wounded; but they cannot see their lords, they cannot recognize their commanders. The battlefield is shifting; they cannot even be sure of their comrades in the eerie half-light. Hundreds throw down their weapons and start to run. Everyone knows that this is a war in which no prisoners will be taken. It is death to be on the losing side.

  Edward, stabbing and slicing, in the very heart of the battle, William Hastings on his shield arm, his sword out, his knife in his other hand, bellows, “Victory to York! Victory to York!” and his soldiers believe that mighty shout, and so does the Lancaster army, attacked from the front in darkness, attacked from the rear in mist, and now leaderless, as Warwick shouts for his page to save him, flings himself on his waiting horse, and gallops away.

  It is a signal for the battle to break into a thousand adventures. “My horse!” Edward yells for his page. “Get me Fury!” And William cups his hands and throws the king upwards into the saddle, seizes his own bridle, scrambles onto his own charger, and races after his lord and master and dearest friend, and the York lords go at a headlong gallop after Warwick, cursing him for getting away.

  My mother straightens up with a sigh, and together the two of us close the window. We are both pale from watching all night. “It is over,” she says with certainty. “Your enemy is dead. Your first and most dangerous enemy. Warwick will make no more kings. He will have to meet the King of Heaven and explain what he thinks he has been doing to this poor kingdom here below.”

  “My boys are safe, I think?”

  “I am sure of it.”

  My hands are curled into claws like a cat. “And George, Duke of Clarence?” I ask. “What do you think for him? Tell me he is dead on the battlefield!”

  My mother smiles. “He is on the winning side as usual,” she says. “Your Edward has won this battle, and loyal George is at his side. You may find that you have to forgive George for the death of your father and brother. I may have to leave my vengeance to God. George may survive. He is the king’s own brother, after all. Would you kill a royal prince? Could you bring yourself to kill a prince of the House of York?”

  I open my jewelry box and take out the black enameled locket. I press the little catch and open it. There are the two names—George, Duke of Clarence, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick—written on the scrap of paper torn from my father’s last letter. The letter that he wrote in hope to my mother, speaking of his ransom, never dreaming that those two, whom he had known all his life, would kill him for no better reason than spite. I tear it in half and the piece that says Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, I scrunch in my hand. I do not even trouble to throw it into the fire. I let it fall on the floor and I tread it into the rushes. It can be dust. The name of George I put back in my locket and into my jewelry case. “George will not survive,” I say flatly. “If I myself have to hold a pillow over his face when he is sleeping in bed under my roof, a guest in my own house, under my protection, my husband’s beloved kin. George will not survive. A son of the House of York is not inviolate. I will see him dead. He can be sweetly sleeping in his bed in the Tower of London itself and I will still see him dead.”

  Two days I have with Edward when he comes home from the battle, two days when we move back to the royal apartments at the Tower, hastily cleaned and poor Henry’s things tossed to one side. Henry, the poor mad king, is returned to his old chambers with the bars on the windows, and kneels in prayer. Edward eats as if he has starved for weeks, wallows like Melusina in a deep long bath, takes me without grace, without tenderness, takes me as a soldier takes his doxy, and sleeps. He wakes only to announce to the London citizens that stories of Warwick’s survival are untrue: he saw the man’s body himself. He was killed while he was escaping from the battle, fleeing like a coward, and Edward orders that this body be shown in St. Paul’s Cathedral so that there can be no doubt that the man is dead. “But I’ll have no dishonoring of him,” he says.

  “They put our father’s head on a spike on York gate,” George reminds him. “With a paper crown on his head. We should put Warwick’s head on a spike on London Bridge, and quarter his dead body and send it round the kingdom.”

  “That’s a pretty plan you propose for your father-in-law,” I observe. “Will it not disturb your wife a little, as you dismember her father? Besides, I thought you had sworn to love and follow him?”

  “Warwick can be buried with honor by his family at Bisham Abbey,” Edward rules. “We are not savages. We don’t make war on dead bodies.”

  Two days and two nights we have together, but Edward watches for a messenger, and keeps his troop armed and ready, and then the messenger comes. Margaret of Anjou has landed at Weymouth, too late to support her ally but ready to fight her cause alone. At once we get reports of the rise of England. Lords and squires who would not turn out their men for Warwick feel it is their duty to support the queen when she comes armed for battle, and her husband Henry is held by us, her enemy. People start to say that this is the last battle, the one that will count: one last battle, which will mean everything. Warwick is dead; there are no intermediaries. It is the queen of Lancaster against King Edward, the royal House of Lancaster against the royal House of York, and every man in every village in the kingdom has to make a choice;
and many choose her.

  Edward commands his lords in every county to come to him fully armed with their proper number of men, demands that every town send him troops and money to pay them, exempts no one. “I have to go again,” he says at dawn. “Keep my son safe, whatever happens.”

  “Keep yourself safe,” I reply. “Whatever happens.”

  He nods, he takes my hand and puts my palm to his mouth, folds my fingers over the kiss. “You know that I love you,” he says. “You know I love you as much today as I did when you stood under the oak tree?”

  I nod. I cannot speak. He sounds like a man saying farewell.

  “Good,” he says briskly. “Remember, if it goes wrong, you are to take the children to Flanders? Remember the name of the little boatman at Tournai where you are to go and hide?”

  “I remember,” I whisper. “But it won’t go wrong.”

  “God willing,” he says, and with those last words he turns on his heel and goes out to face another battle.

  The two armies race, the one against the other, Margaret’s army heading for Wales to gather reinforcements, Edward in pursuit, trying to cut her off. Margaret’s force, commanded by the Earl of Somerset, with her son, the vicious young prince, commanding his own troop, charges through the countryside going west to Wales, where Jasper Tudor will raise the Welsh for them and where the Cornishmen will meet them. Once they get into the mountains of Wales they will be unbeatable. Jasper Tudor and his nephew Henry Tudor can give them safe haven and ready armies. Nobody will be able to get them out of the fortresses of Wales, and they can amass forces at their leisure and march on England in strength.

  With Margaret travels little Anne Neville, Warwick’s youngest daughter, the prince’s bride, reeling at the news of the death of her father, the betrayal of her brother-in-law George, Duke of Clarence, and abandoned by her mother, who has taken to a nunnery in her grief at the loss of her husband. They must be a desperate trio, everything staked on victory, and so much lost already.