The White Queen

by Philippa Gregory

“We got in through the water gate, and then across the first lane before they even saw us. We were starting up the steps as someone sounded the alarm, and though we sprinted up the steps to the door of the White Tower, they slammed it shut. We were just seconds away from it. Thomas was firing at the locks and we threw ourselves against it, but I heard the bolts slam from the inside and then they came pouring out of the guard room. Richard and I turned to face them and we fought, holding them off, while Thomas and the Stanley men tried to batter the door in, or even lift it from its hinges, but you know—it is too strong.”

  “The Stanleys were there, as they promised?”

  “They were, and Buckingham’s men. None in their livery, of course, but they all wore a white rose. It was strange to see the white rose again. And strange to be fighting to enter a place that we own. I shouted to Edward to be of good cheer, that we would come for him, that we would not fail him. I don’t know if he heard. I don’t know.”

  “You’re hurt,” I say, suddenly noticing the cut on his forehead.

  He rubs it, as if his blood were dirt. “It is nothing. Elizabeth, I would rather have died than come back without him.”

  “Don’t speak of death,” I say quietly. “Pray God he is safe tonight and was not frightened by this. Pray God they just take him to a more secure room inside the Tower and don’t think to take him away.”

  “And it may only be for another month,” he says to me. “Richard said to remind you of that. Your friends are arming, King Richard is riding north with only his personal guard. Buckingham and Stanley are in his train, they will persuade him not to turn back. They will encourage him to go on to York. Jasper Tudor will bring an army from Brittany. Our next battle will come soon. When the usurper Richard is dead, we will have the keys to the Tower in our hands.”

  Elizabeth straightens up, her sisters’ cloaks draped neatly over her arm. “And do you trust all your new friends, Mother?” she asks coldly. “All these new allies who have suddenly come to your side but don’t succeed? All of them ready to risk their lives to restore Edward to his throne when they all ate well and drank deep at Duke Richard’s coronation just a few weeks ago? I hear that Lady Margaret carried the train of the new Queen Anne, just as she used to carry yours. The new queen kissed her on both cheeks. She was honored at the coronation. Now she calls out her men for us? Now she is our loyal ally? The Duke of Buckingham was the ward who hated you for marrying him to my aunt Katherine, and he still hates you. Are these your true allies? Or are they loyal servants of the new king set out to entrap you? For they play both parts, and they are traveling with him now, and feasting at Oxford. They weren’t there in danger at the Tower, rescuing my brother.”

  I look at her coldly in return. “I cannot choose my allies,” I say. “To save my son, I would plot with the devil himself.”

  She shows me the ghost of a sour smile. “Perhaps you already have.”

  AUGUST 1483

  The summer grows very hot and Lionel slips out of sanctuary and out of London to join our brothers and our allies in the rebellion that is to defeat Richard. Without him I feel very much alone. Elizabeth is quiet and distant, and I have nobody to share my fears. Downriver my son remains a prisoner in the Tower, and Jemma tells us that nobody sees him or the little changeling playing in the Tower gardens anymore. They had been practicing archery on the green, but nobody sees them at the butts now. Since our rescue attempt their guardians have kept them close inside, and I start to fear the danger of plague in the heat of the city and think of them in those small dark rooms.

  At the end of August there is a shout from a boatman on the river, and I swing open the window wide and look out. Sometimes they bring me gifts, often just a creel of fish, but this man has a ball in his hand. “Can you catch, Your Grace?” he asks, seeing me at the window.

  I smile. “Yes, I can,” I say.

  “Then catch this,” he says, and tosses a white ball up to me. It comes soaring through the window over my head, and I reach up and catch it double-handed and laugh for a moment at the fun of playing again. Then I see it is a ball wrapped in white paper and I go back to the window; but the man has gone.

  I unwrap it and smooth out the paper and I put my hand to my heart and then to my mouth to silence my cry as I recognize the childish round hand of my little boy Richard.

  Dearest Lady Mother,

  Greetings and blessings [he starts carefully]. I am not allowed to write often, nor to tell you exactly where I am, in case the letter is stolen, except to say that I arrived safely and it is quite all right here. They are kind people and I have learned how to row a boat already and they say I am good and handy. In a little while I am to go away to school for they cannot teach me all I need to know here, but I will come back for the summer and go fishing for eels, which are very nice when you get used to them, unless I can come home to you again.

  Give my love to my sisters and my love and duty to my brother the king, and my honor and love to you.

  Signed,

  your son Richard, Duke of York.

  Though now I am called Peter, and I remember to answer to Peter always. The woman here, who is kind to me, calls me her little Perkin, and I don’t mind this.

  I read the words through tears, then I mop my eyes and read them again. I smile at the thought of his being called handy, and I have to take a breath to stop myself crying out at the thought of his being called Perkin. I want to weep at his being taken away from me, so young, such a small boy; and yet he is safe, I should be glad that he is safe: the only one of my children away from the danger of being of this family in this country, in these wars, which will start again. The boy who now answers to Peter will go quietly to school, learn languages, music, and wait. If we win, he will come home as a prince of the blood; if we lose, he will be the weapon they do not know we have, the boy in hiding, the prince in waiting, the nemesis of their ambitions; and my revenge. He and his will haunt every king who comes after us, like a ghost.

  “Mother Mary watch over him,” I whisper, my head in my hands, my eyes shut tight on my tears. “Melusina, guard our boy.”

  SEPTEMBER 1483

  Every day I get news of the arming and preparing of our people, not just in the counties where my brothers are active but all around the country. As the news slowly spreads that Richard has taken the crown, more and more of the common people, the small squires and market traders, and their betters: the heads of guilds and the small landlords, the greater men of the country, ask: How shall a younger brother take the inheritance of his dead brother’s son? How is any man to go quietly to his Maker if such a thing can happen, unchallenged? Why should a man strive all his life to make his family great if his little brother, the runt of the litter, can step into his shoes the minute he weakens?

  And there are many, at the many places we used to visit, who remember Edward as a handsome man and me as his beautiful wife, those who remember the girls in their prettiness and our strong bright little boys. Those who called us a golden family who had brought peace to England and a quiver of heirs to the throne; and these people say that it is an outrage that we should not be in our palaces with our boy on the throne.

  I write to my son the little King Edward and bid him be of good cheer, but my letters have started to come back without being opened. They come back untouched, the seals unbroken. I am not even spied upon. It is as if they are denying that he is even at the royal rooms in the Tower. I fret for the outbreak of the war that will free him and wish we would bring it forward, and not wait for Richard’s slow vainglorious progress northward through Oxfordshire, then Gloucestershire, then to Pontefract and York. At York he crowns his son, the thin and sickly boy, as Prince of Wales. He gives my Edward’s title to his son as if my boy was dead. I spend this day on my knees praying for God to give me revenge for this affront. I dare not think that it might be worse than an insult. I cannot bear to think that it might be that the title is vacant, that my son is dead.

  Elizabeth comes to me
at dinnertime and helps me to my feet. “You know what your uncle has done today?” I ask her.

  She turns her face away from me. “I know,” she says steadily. “The town crier was shouting it all around the square. I could hear him from the doorway.”

  “You didn’t open the door?” I demand anxiously.

  She sighs. “I didn’t open the door. I never open the door.”

  “Duke Richard has stolen your father’s crown, and now he has put his son in your brother’s robes. He will die for this,” I predict.

  “Haven’t enough people died already?”

  I take her hand and turn her towards me so she has to face me. “We are talking about the throne of England here, your brother’s birthright.”

  “We are talking about the death of a family,” she says flatly. “You have daughters too, you know. Have you thought of our birthright? We have been cooped up here like rats for all summer, while you pray all day for revenge. Your most precious son is imprisoned or dead—you don’t even know which. You sent your other out into the darkness. We don’t know where he is, or even if he is still alive. You thirst for the throne, but you don’t even know if you have a boy to put on it.”

  I gasp and step back. “Elizabeth!”

  “I wish you would send word to my uncle that you accept his rule,” she says coldly, and her hand in mine is like ice. “I wish you would tell him that we are ready to come to terms—actually any terms that he chooses to name. I wish you would persuade him to release us to be an ordinary family, living at Grafton, far away from London, far away from plotting and treason and the threat of death. If you surrendered now, we might get my brothers back.”

  “That would be for me to go right back to where I came from!” I exclaim.

  “Were you not happy at Grafton with your mother and father, and with the husband who gave you Richard and Thomas?” she asks quickly, so quickly that I do not prepare my answer carefully.

  “Yes,” I say unguardedly. “Yes, I was.”

  “That is all I want for myself,” she says. “All I want for my sisters. And yet you insist on making us heirs to your misery. I want to be heir to the days before you were queen. I don’t want the throne: I want to marry a man whom I love, and love him freely.”

  I look at her. “Then you would deny your father, you would deny me, you would deny everything that makes you a Plantagenet, a princess of York. You might as well be Jemma the maid if you don’t desire to be greater than you are, if you don’t see your chances and take them.”

  She looks steadily back at me. “I would rather be Jemma the maid than you,” she says, and her voice is filled with the harsh contempt of a girl. “Jemma can go home to her own bed at night. Jemma can refuse to work. Jemma can run away and serve another master. But you are locked to the throne of England and you have enslaved us too.”

  I draw myself up. “You may not speak to me like this,” I say to her coldly.

  “I speak from my heart,” she says.

  “Then tell your heart to be true but your mouth to be silent. I don’t want disloyalty from my own daughter.”

  “We are not an army at war! Don’t speak to me of disloyalty! What will you do? Behead me for treason?”

  “We are an army at war,” I say simply. “And you will not betray me, nor your own position.”

  I speak truer than I know, for we are an army on the march and that night we make our first move. The men of Kent rise first, and when they hear the rallying cries Sussex rises up with them. But the Duke of Norfolk, who remains true to Richard, marches his men south from London and holds our army down. They cannot reach their comrades in the west; he blocks the only road at Guildford. One man gets through to London, hires a little boat, and comes to the sanctuary water gate, under cover of mist and rain.

  “Sir John,” I say through the grille. I dare not even open the gate for the screech of the iron on the wet stone, and besides, I don’t know him, and trust no one.

  “I have come to tender my sympathy, Your Grace,” he says awkwardly. “And to know—my brothers and I want to know—if it is your will that we support Henry Tudor now.”

  “What?” I ask. “What d’you mean?”

  “We prayed for the prince, every day we did, and lit a candle for him, and all of us at Reigate are more sorry than we can say that we are too late for him. We—”

  “Wait,” I say urgently. “Wait. What are you saying?”

  His big face is suddenly aghast. “Oh God spare me, don’t say you did not know and I have told you like a great fool?” He wrings his hat in his hands, so the plume dips into the river water that laps at the steps. “Oh gentle madam, I am a fool. I should have made sure…” He glances anxiously up the dark passageway behind me. “Call a lady,” he says. “Don’t you go fainting now.”

  I hold the grating in clenched hands, though my head swims. “I won’t,” I promise him through dry lips. “I don’t faint. Are you saying that the young King Edward is executed?”

  He shakes his head. “Dead, is all I know. God bless your sweet face, and forgive me for being the one to tell you such dark news. Such bad news and I to bring it to you! When all we wanted to know was your wishes now.”

  “Not executed?”

  He shakes his head. “Nothing public. Poor boys. We know nothing for certain. We were just told that the princes were put to death, God bless them, and that the rebellion would go on against King Richard, who is still a usurper, but that we would put Henry Tudor on the throne as the next heir and the next best thing for the country.”

  I laugh, a cracked unhappy sound. “Margaret Beaufort’s boy? Instead of mine?”

  He looks around him for help, frightened by the ring of madness in my laughter. “We didn’t know. We were sworn to free the princes. We all mustered in your cause, Your Grace. So we don’t know what we should do, now your princes have gone. And Thomas Howard’s men are holding the road to your brother’s camp, so we couldn’t ask him. We thought it best that I should slip away quietly, and come to London to ask you.”

  “Who told you they are dead?”

  He thinks for a moment. “It was a man from the Duke of Buckingham. He brought us some gold, and weapons for those who had none. He said we could trust his master, who had turned against the false King Richard for killing the boys. He said the duke had been the King Richard’s loyal servant, thinking him the protector of the boys, but when he found out that he had killed our princes he turned against him in horror. He said that the duke knew all that the false king did and said, but he could not prevent this murder.” He looks at me warily again. “God keep Your Grace. Should you not have a lady with you?”

  “The duke’s man told you all this?”

  “A good man, he told us it all. And he paid for the men to have a drink to the Duke of Buckingham as well. He said that the false King Richard had ordered their deaths in secret before he left on his progress, and that, when he told the duke what he had done, the duke swore he could have no more of this murderer’s reign but would defy King Richard and we should all rise up against this man who would kill boys. The duke himself would make a better king than Richard, and he has a claim to the throne and all.”

  Surely I would know if my son was dead? I heard the river sing for my brother. If my son and heir, the heir to my house, the heir to the throne of England, was dead, I would surely know that? Surely, my son could not be killed no more than three miles from me, and I not know it? So I don’t believe it. I won’t believe it until they show me his blessed body. He is not dead. I cannot believe he is dead. I will not believe he is dead until I see him in his coffin.

  “Listen to me.” I draw close to the bars and speak earnestly to him. “You go back to Kent and tell your fellows that they are to rise for the princes, for my boys are still alive. The duke is mistaken and the king has not killed them. I know this; I am their mother. Tell them also that, even if Edward was dead, his brother Richard is not with him but safely got away. He is safe in hiding and he
will come back and take the throne that is his. You go back to Kent and, when the word comes for you to muster and march out, go with a proud heart for you must destroy this false King Richard and free my boys and free me.”

  “And the duke?” he asks. “And Henry Tudor?”

  I make a face, and wave the thought of the two of them away. “Loyal allies to our cause, I am sure,” I say with a certainty I no longer feel. “You be true to me, Sir John, and I will remember you and every single one who fights for me and my sons, when I am come to my own again.”

  He bows and ducks back down the stairs and steps cautiously into the rocking rowboat and then he is lost in the dark mist of the river. I wait for him to disappear and for the quiet splash of the oars to fade away and then I look down into the dark waters. “The duke,” I whisper into the waters. “The Duke of Buckingham is telling everyone that my sons are dead. Why would he do that? When he is sworn to rescue them? When he is sending gold and arms to the rebellion? Why would he tell them, in the very moment that he calls them out, that the princes are dead?”

  I eat supper with my girls and with the few servants who have stayed with us in sanctuary, but I cannot hear seven-year-old Anne’s careful reading of the Bible, nor join Elizabeth in questioning them as to what they have just heard. I am as inattentive as Catherine, who is only four. I can think of nothing but why there should be a rumor that my boys are dead.

  I send the girls to bed early; I cannot bear to hear them playing at cards or singing a round. All night I walk up and down in my room, stepping along the one floorboard that does not creak to the window over the river, and back again the other way. Why would Richard kill my boys now, when he has accomplished all that he wanted without their deaths? He has persuaded the council to name them as bastards, he has passed an act of Parliament that denies my marriage. He has named himself as the next legitimate heir and the archbishop himself has put the crown on his dark head. His sickly wife Anne is crowned as Queen of England and their son is invested as Prince of Wales. All this was achieved with me mewed up in sanctuary, and my son in prison. Richard is triumphant: Why would he want us dead? Why would he need us dead now? And how should he hope to escape blame for the crime, when everyone knows the boys are in his keeping? Everyone knows he took my son Richard against my will; it could not have been more public, and the archbishop himself swore that no harm would come to him.