The Red Queen

by Philippa Gregory

  She rounds on me, her gown releasing the scent of lavender as it sweeps the strewing herbs on the floor. “We may be of the same family, but that is the very reason why we are not friends, for we are rivals for the throne. What quarrels are worse than family quarrels? We may all be cousins, but they are of the House of York and we are of the House of Lancaster. Never forget it. We of Lancaster are the direct line of descent from Edward III by his son, John of Gaunt. The direct line! But the Yorks can only trace their line back to John of Gaunt’s younger brother Edmund. They are a junior line: they are not descended from Edward’s heir; they descend from a younger brother. They can only inherit the throne of England if there is no Lancaster boy left. So—think, Margaret!—what do you think they are hoping for when the King of England falls into a trance, and his child is yet unborn? What d’you think they dream, when you are a Lancaster heir but only a girl, and not even married yet? Let alone brought to bed of a son?”

  “They would want to marry me into their house?” I ask, bewildered at the thought of yet another betrothal.

  She laughs shortly. “That—or, to tell the truth, they would rather see you dead.”

  I am silenced by this. That a whole family, a great house like York, would wish for my death is a frightening thought. “But surely, the king will wake up? And then everything will be all right. And his baby could be a son. And then he will be the Lancaster heir, and everything will be all right.”

  “Pray God the king wakes soon,” she says. “But you should pray that there is no baby to supplant you. And pray God we get you wedded and bedded without delay. For no one is safe from the ambitions of the House of York.”

  OCTOBER 1453

  The king dreams on, smiling in his waking sleep. In my room, alone, I try sitting, as they say he does, and staring at the floorboards, in case God will come to me as He has come to the king. I try to be deaf to the noises of the stable yard outside my window and to the loud singing from the laundry room where someone is thumping cloths on a washboard. I try to let my soul drift to God, and feel the absorbing peace that must wash the soul of the king so that he does not see the worried faces of his counsellors, and is even blind to his wife when she puts his newborn baby son in his arms and tells him to wake up and greet the little Prince Edward, heir to the throne of England. Even when, in temper, she shouts into his face that he must wake up or the House of Lancaster will be destroyed.

  I try to be entranced by God, as the king is, but someone always comes and bangs on my door or shouts down the hall for me to come and do some chores, and I am dragged back to the ordinary world of sin again, and I wake. The great mystery for England is that the king does not wake, and while he sits, hearing only the words of angels, the man who has made himself Regent of England, Richard, Duke of York, takes the reins of government into his own hands, starts to act like a king himself, and so Margaret, the queen, has to recruit her friends and warn them that she may need their help to defend her baby son. The warning alone is enough to generate unease. Up and down England men start to muster their forces and consider whether they would do better under a hated French queen with a true-born baby prince in her arms, or to follow the handsome and beloved Englishman, Richard of York, to wherever his ambition may take him.

  SUMMER 1455

  It is my wedding day—come at last. I stand at the door of the church in my best gown, the belt high and tight around my rib cage and the absurdly wide sleeves drowning my thin arms and little hands. My headdress is so heavy on my head that I droop beneath the wire support and the tall, conical height. The sweep of the scarf from the apex veils my pale resentment. My mother is beside me to escort me to my guardian Edmund Tudor, who has decided—as any wise guardian would, no doubt—that my best interests will be served by marriage to him: he is his own best choice as caretaker of my interests.

  I whisper to my mother, “I am afraid,” and she looks down at me. My head is only up to her shoulder. I am twelve years old but still a little girl, my chest as flat as a board, my body hairless beneath my thick layers of rich clothes. They had to pack my bodice with linen to give the impression of breasts. I am a child sent out to do a woman’s duty.

  “Nothing to be afraid about,” she says bluntly.

  I try again. “I thought I would be a virgin like Joan of Arc,” I say to her. I put my hand on her sleeve to tug at her attention. “You know I did. I always did. I wanted to go to a convent. I still want to go. I may have a calling. It might be God’s will. We should take advice. We could ask the priest. We could ask him now, before it is too late. What if God wants me for His own? Then it would be blasphemy if I married.”

  She turns to me and takes my cold hand in hers. “Margaret,” she says seriously, “you must know that you could never choose your own life. You are a girl: girls have no choice. You could never even choose your own husband: you are of the royal family. A husband would always have been chosen for you. It is forbidden for one of royal blood to marry their own choice. You know this too. And finally, you are of the House of Lancaster. You cannot choose your allegiance. You have to serve your house, your family, and your husband. I have allowed you to dream, and I have allowed you to read; but the time has come to put aside silly stories and silly dreams and do your duty. Don’t think you can be like your father and run away from your duty. He took a coward’s way out; you cannot.”

  This sudden reference to my father shocks me. She never speaks of her second husband, my father, except in the vaguest and most general terms. I am about to ask, How did he run away? What was his coward’s way out? when the doors of the church open, and I have to walk forwards and take the hand of my new husband, and stand before a priest and swear to be a wife. I feel his big hand take mine and I hear his deep voice answer the questions, where I just whisper. He pushes a heavy ring of Welsh gold on my finger, and I have to hold my fingers together like a little paw to keep it on. It is far too big for me. I look up at him, amazed that he thinks such a marriage can go ahead, when his ring is too big for my hand and I am only twelve and he is more than twice my age: a man, tempered by fighting and filled with ambition. He is a hard man from a power-seeking family. But I am still a child longing for a spiritual life, praying that people will see that I am special. This is yet another of the many things that nobody seems to care about but me.

  I am to start married life in the palace of Lamphey, Pembrokeshire, which is in the heart of horrible Wales. I have no time to miss my mother and my family in the first months, for everything is so different that I have to learn completely new ways. Most of my time is spent with the servants and the women attendants in the castle. My husband and his brother storm in and out like rain. My lady governess has come with me, and my own maidservant, but everyone else is a stranger. They all speak Welsh and stare at me when I try to ask them for a glass of small ale or a jug of water for washing. I so long for a friendly face from home that I would even be glad to see Wat, the groom.

  The castle stands in desolate countryside. Around me is nothing but high mountains and sky. I can see the rain clouds coming like a wet curtain, half an hour before they pour down on the gray slate roofs and rain-streaked walls. The chapel is a cold and neglected building, and the priest is very poor in his attendance; he does not even notice my exceptional piety. I often go there to pray, and the light streams through the western window onto my bowed head, but nobody even notices. London is a nine-day arduous journey away; my old home is as far. It can take ten days for a letter to come from my mother, but she hardly ever writes. Sometimes I feel that I have been stolen from a battlefield and held to ransom in an enemy land, like my father. Certainly, I could not feel more foreign and lonely.

  Worst of all, I have not had a vision since my wedding night. I spend every afternoon on my knees, when I close my privy chamber door and pretend to be sewing. I spend every evening in the damp chapel. But nothing comes to me. Not a vision of the stake, not the battles, not even the flicker of a banner of angels and lilies. I beg Our
Lady for a vision of Joan the Maid; but She grants me nothing, and in the end, sitting back on my heels, I begin to fear that I was holy only when I was a virgin; I am nothing special as a wife.

  Nothing in the world could compensate me for this loss. I was raised to know myself as the daughter of a great man and an heir of the royal family, but my own private glory was that I knew that God spoke to me, directly to me, and that He sent me the vision of Joan the Maid. He sent me an angel in the guise of a beggar to tell me all about her. He appointed William de la Pole as my guardian so that he—having seen Joan—would recognize the same holiness in me. But then God, for some reason, forgot all about this sensible plan and let me fall into the keeping of a husband who takes no interest in my holiness and who, by roughly consummating the marriage vows, takes my virginity and visions in one awful night. Why I should be chosen by God and then neglected by Him, I cannot understand. It is not for me to question the will of God, but I have to wonder: Why did He choose me in the first place if it was just to leave me here, abandoned in Wales? If He were not God, then one would think it very badly planned. It is not as if there is anything I can do here, and for sure, nobody sees me as a living light. It is even worse than Bletsoe, where at least people complained that I was excessively holy. Here they don’t even notice, and I am afraid that I am hidden under a bushel and there is nothing I can do to reveal myself as a beacon for the world.

  My husband is handsome and brave, I suppose. I hardly see him or his brother during the day, as they are constantly riding out to keep the king’s peace against dozens of local uprisings. Edmund is always in the lead; Jasper, his brother, at his shoulder like a shadow. They even walk at the same pace—Edmund striding forwards, Jasper just behind, in step. They are only a year apart in age. I thought them twins when I first saw them together. They have the same unfortunate ginger hair and long thin noses; they both stand tall and lean now, but I think they will run to fat in later life, which must be quite soon. When they talk, they can finish each other’s sentences and they laugh all the time at private jokes. They hardly ever speak to me, and they never tell me what is supposed to be so funny. They are utterly fascinated by weapons and can spend the entire evening talking about the stringing of a bow. I cannot see the use of either of them in God’s will.

  The castle is in a constant state of alert because warring parties and bands of armed and disaffected soldiers come by all the time and raid the nearby villages. Just as my mother feared when the king first fell into his trance, there is unrest everywhere. Worse here than anywhere else, of course, since it is half savage already. And it made no real difference when the king recovered, though the common people were told to rejoice, for now he has fallen ill again, and some people are saying that this is how it will always be: we will live with a king who cannot be relied on to stay awake. This is obviously a disadvantage. Even I can see that.

  Men are taking arms against the king’s rule, first complaining of the taxes raised to fight the unending French wars, and now complaining that the wars are over but we have lost everything we won under the king’s braver father and grandfather. Everyone hates the queen, who is French herself, of course, and everyone whispers that the king is under the cat’s-paw in this marriage, and that a French woman rules the country and that it would be better if we were ruled by the Duke of York.

  Everyone who has a grievance against his neighbor takes this chance to pull down his fences or poach his game, or steal his timber, and then there is a fight and Edmund has to go out and make rough-and-ready justice. The roads are dangerous to travel because of roaming companies of soldiers that were formed in France and are now in the habit of forage and kidnap. When I ride out behind a servant into the little village that clusters around the walls of the castle, I have to take an armed guard with me. I see the white faces and hollow eyes of hunger, and nobody smiles at me, though you would think they would be glad that the new lady of the palace is taking an interest. For who will intercede for them on earth and in heaven if not I? But I can’t understand what they say to me as they all speak Welsh, and if they come too close, the servants lower their pikes and order them back. Clearly, I am not a light for the common people in the village, any more than I am in the palace. I am twelve—if people cannot see that I am a light in a dark world now, when are they going to see it? But how will anyone see anything here in miserable Wales, where they can see nothing for the mud?

  Edmund’s brother Jasper is supposed to live a few miles away at Pembroke Castle, but he is rarely there. He is either at the royal court, trying to hold together the irritable accord between the York family and the king, in the interests of the peace of England, or he is with us. Whether he is riding out to visit the king, or coming home, his face grave with worry that the king has slipped into his trance again, he always manages to find a road that passes by Lamphey and to come for his dinner.

  At dinner, my husband Edmund talks only to his brother Jasper. Neither of them say so much as one word to me, but I have to listen to the two of them worrying that Richard, Duke of York, will make a claim on the throne on his own account. He is advised by Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick, and these two, Warwick and York, are men of too vast an ambition to obey a sleeping king. There are many who say that the country cannot even be safe in the hands of a regent, and if the king does not wake, then England cannot survive the dozen years before his son is old enough to rule. Someone will have to take the throne; we cannot be governed by a sleeping king and a baby.

  “We can’t endure another long regency; we have to have a king,” Jasper says. “I wish to God you had married and bedded her years ago. At least we would be ahead of the game now.”

  I flush and look down at my plate, heaped with overcooked and unrecognizable bits of game. They hunt better than they farm in Wales, and every meal brings some skinny bird or beast to the table in butchered portions. I long for fast days when we have only fish, and I impose extra fast days on myself to escape the sticky mess of dinner. Everyone stabs what they want with their dagger from a common plate, and sops up the gravy with a hunk of bread. They wipe their hands on their breeches, and their mouths on their coat cuffs. Even at the high table we are served our meat on trenchers of bread that are eaten up at the end of the meal. There are no plates laid on the table. Napkins are obviously too French; they count it a patriotic duty to wipe their mouths on their sleeves, and they all bring their own spoons as if they were heirlooms, tucked inside their boots.

  I take a little piece of meat and nibble at it. The smell of grease turns my stomach. Now they are talking, in front of me as if I were deaf, of my fertility and the possibility that if the queen is driven from England, or her baby dies, then my son will be one of the king’s likely heirs.

  “You think the queen will let that happen? You think Margaret of Anjou won’t fight for England? She knows her duty better than that,” Edmund says with a laugh. “There are even those who say that she was too determined to be stopped by a sleeping husband. They say she got the baby without the king. Some say she got a stable boy to mount her rather than leave the royal cradle empty and her husband dreaming.”

  I put my hands to my hot cheeks. This is unbearable, but nobody notices my discomfort.

  “Not another word,” Jasper says flatly. “She is a great lady, and I fear for her and her child. You get an heir for yourself, and don’t repeat gossip to me. The confidence of York with his quiver of four boys grows every day. We need to show them there is a true Lancaster heir-in-waiting; we need to keep their ambitions down. The Staffords and the Hollands have heirs already. Where’s the Tudor-Beaufort boy?”

  Edmund laughs shortly and reaches for more wine. “I try every night,” he says. “Trust me. I don’t skimp my duty. She may be little more than a child herself, with no liking for the act, but I do what I have to.”

  For the first time, Jasper glances over to me, as if he is wondering what I make of this bleak description of married life. I meet his gaze blankly with my
teeth gritted. I don’t want his sympathy. This is my martyrdom. Marriage to his brother in this peasant palace in horrible Wales is my martyrdom; I offer it up, and I know that God will reward me.

  Edmund tells his brother nothing more than the truth. Every single night of our life, he comes to my room, slightly unsteady from the wine at dinner that he throws down his throat like a sot. Every night, he gets into bed beside me, and takes a handful of my nightgown as if it were not the finest Valenciennes lace hemmed by my little-girl stitches, and holds it aside so he can push himself against me. Every night I grit my teeth and say not one word of protest, not even a whimper of pain, as he takes me without kindness or courtesy; and every night, moments later, he gets up from my bed and throws on his gown and goes without a word of thanks or farewell. I say nothing, not one word, from beginning to end, and neither does he. If it were lawful for a woman to hate her husband, I would hate him as a rapist. But hatred would make the baby malformed, so I make sure I do not hate him, not even in secret. Instead, I slide from the bed the minute he has gone and kneel at the foot of it, still smelling his rancid sweat, still feeling the burning pain between my legs, and I pray to Our Lady who had the good fortune to be spared all this by the kindly visit of the bodiless Holy Ghost. I pray to Her to forgive Edmund Tudor for being such a torturer to me, her child, especially favored by God. I, who am without sin, and certainly without lust. Months into marriage I am as far away from desire as I was when I was a little girl; and it seems to me that there is nothing more likely to cure a woman of lust than marriage. Now I understand what the saint meant when he said that it was better to marry than to burn. In my experience, if you marry, you certainly won’t burn.