The Red Queen

by Philippa Gregory

  Jasper leaps to his feet in a swift, impatient movement. “Sir Henry, in honor, you have no choice. You must fight because your king has called on you, because the head of your house has called on you. If you are of the House of Lancaster, you follow the call.”

  “I am not a hound to yelp at the hunting horn,” my husband says quietly, not at all stirred by Jasper’s raised voice. “I don’t give tongue to order. I don’t bay for the chase. I will go to war should there ever be a cause I think worth dying for—and not before. But I do admire your, er … martial spirit.”

  Jasper flushes to the roots of his ginger hair at the older man’s tone. “I think this is no laughing matter, sir. I have been fighting for my king and for my house for two years, and I must remind you that it has cost me dear. I lost my own brother at the walls of Carmarthen, the heir to our name, the flower of our house, Margaret’s husband who never saw his son—”

  “I know, I know, and I am not laughing. I too have lost a brother, remember. These battles are a tragedy for England, no laughing matter. Come, let us go in to dine and forget our differences. I pray that it will not come to a fight, and so must you. We need peace in England if we are to grow strong and rich again. We conquered France because the people were divided among themselves. Let us not lose our way, as they did; let us not be our own worst enemies in our own country.”

  Jasper would argue; but my husband takes him by his arm and leads him to the great hall, where the men are already seated, ten to a table, waiting for their dinners. When Jasper comes in, his men hammer the table with the hilts of their daggers as applause, and I think it a great thing that he is such a commander, and so beloved of his men. He is like a knight errant from the stories; he is their hero. My husband’s servants and retainers merely bow their heads and doff their caps in silent respect as he goes by. But no one has ever cheered Henry Stafford to the rafters. No one ever will.

  We walk through the deep rumble of male noise to the high table, and I see Jasper glance over at me as if he pities me for marrying a man who will not fight for his family. I keep my eyes down. I think that everyone knows I am the daughter of a coward, and now I am the wife of a coward, and I have to live with shame.

  As the server of the ewery pours water over our hands and pats them with the napkin, my husband says kindly, “But I have distracted you from the great interest for my wife: the health of her son. How is young Henry? Is he well?”

  Jasper turns to me. “He is well and strong. I wrote you that his back teeth were coming through; they gave him a fever for a few days, but he is through that now. He is walking and running. He is speaking a lot, not always clearly, but he chatters all the day. His nursemaid says that he is willful, but no more than befits his position in the world and his age. I have told her not to be too severe with him. He is Earl of Richmond: he should not have his spirit broken, he has a right to his pride.”

  “Do you tell him of me?” I ask.

  “Of course I do,” he says with a smile. “I tell him that his mother is a great lady in England and will come and see him soon, and he says ‘Mama!’ just like that.”

  I laugh at his impression of a two-year-old’s fluting voice. “And his hair?” I say. “Is it coming through red like Edmund’s?”

  “Ah no,” Jasper says with a disappointment that I don’t share. “We did not breed true in that, as it turns out. His hair is in ringlets and brown, like a bright bay horse. His nursemaid thinks he will go more fair in the summer when he is out in the sunshine, but he won’t be a brass head like us Tudors.”

  “And does he like to play? And does he know his prayers?”

  “He plays with his bat and his ball, he will play all day if someone will throw a ball for him. And he is learning the Lord’s Prayer and his catechism. Your friend Father William sees him every morning for prayers, and his nursemaid sets him at the foot of his bed every night and makes him stay there. He is ordered to pray for you by name.”

  “Do you have playmates for him?” my husband asks. “Children from the neighboring houses?”

  “We are very isolated in the castle,” Jasper replies. “There are no families of his breeding nearby. There are no suitable companions for a boy such as him. He is Earl of Richmond, and kinsman to the king. I cannot let him play with children from the village, and besides, I would be afraid of illness. He plays with his nursemaids. I play with him. He does not need any others.”

  I nod. I don’t want him playing with village children who might teach him rough ways.

  “Surely, he needs to be with children of his own age,” my husband demurs. “He will need to match himself against other lads, even if they are from the village and from cottages.”

  “I will see when the time comes,” Jasper says stiffly. “He needs no companions but those I give him, for now.”

  There is an awkward silence. “And does he eat well?” I ask.

  “Eats well, sleeps well, runs about all day,” Jasper says. “He is growing well too. He will be tall, I think. He has Edmund’s shape: long and lean.”

  “We will go and visit him as soon as it is safe to travel,” my husband promises me. “And Jasper, you are sure you can keep him safe there?”

  “There is not a Yorkist left in Wales who could raise enough troops to take Pembroke village, let alone my castle,” Jasper assures us. “William Herbert is the king’s man now; he has turned his coat completely since his pardon, he is a Lancaster man now. Wales is safer than England for a Lancaster boy. I hold all the key castles and patrol the roads. I will keep him safe, as I promised. I will always keep him safe.”

  Jasper stays with us only two nights, and in the days he rides out among our tenants and musters as many men as will go with him to march to London to defend it for the king. Few of them are willing to go. We may be of the House of Lancaster; but everyone who lives close enough to London to hear the gossip of the court knows better than to lay down his life for a king that they have heard is half-mad, and a queen who is a Frenchwoman and a virago as well.

  On the third day, Jasper is ready to ride away again, and I have to say good-bye to him. “You seem happy at any rate,” he says to me quietly in the stable yard as his men saddle up and mount onto their saddles.

  “I am well enough. He is kind to me.”

  “I wish you could persuade him to play his part,” Jasper says.

  “I do what I can, but I doubt he will listen to me. I know he should serve, Jasper, but he is older than me and thinks he knows better.”

  “Our king could be fighting for his very right to rule,” Jasper says. “A true man would be at his side. One of the House of Lancaster should not wait to be summoned, let alone ignore the call.”

  “I know, I know, I will tell him again. And you tell baby Henry that I will come and see him as soon as the roads are safe to travel.”

  “There will be no peace and safety for travel until York and Warwick submit to their rightful king!” Jasper says irritably.

  “I know that,” I say. “But for Sir Henry—”

  “What?”

  “He is old,” I say with all the wisdom of a sixteen-year-old. “He does not understand that God gives us a moment sometimes, and we have to seize it. Joan of Arc knew that, you know it. Sometimes God gives us a moment of destiny, and we have to hear the call and rise to it.”

  Jasper’s smile warms his face. “Yes,” he says. “You are right, Margaret. That is how it is. Sometimes there is a moment and you have to answer it. Even if some think you are nothing more than a foolish hound to the hunting horn.”

  He kisses me as a brother-in-law should do, gently on the mouth, and he holds my hands for a moment. I close my eyes and feel myself sway, dizzy at his touch, and then he lets me go, turns his back on me, and swings into the saddle.

  “Is our old horse Arthur still carrying you well?” he asks, as if he does not want either of us to notice he is leaving me again and riding into danger.

  “Yes,” I say. “I ride out on him
most days. Go with God, Jasper.”

  He nods. “God will protect me. For we are in the right. And when I am in the very heat of battle I know that God will always protect the man who serves his king.”

  Then he wheels his horse and rides at the head of his men, south to London, to keep the palace of Westminster safe from our enemies.

  AUTUMN 1459

  I hear nothing of Jasper until one of our tenants who was persuaded to follow him comes back to his home in the middle of September, strapped on his own little pony, one arm a suppurating stump, his face white, and the smell of death on him. His wife, a girl only a little older than me, screams in terror and faints as they bring him to their door. She cannot nurse him; she does not know what to do with these rotting remains of the young man she married for love, so they bring him up to the manor for better care than they can manage in his dirty cottage. I turn a spare room in the dairy into a sickroom, and I wonder how many more will come home wounded from Jasper’s hastily recruited band. Jasper’s volunteer tells my husband that Warwick’s father, the Earl of Salisbury, was marching his army of men to meet with the Duke of York at Ludlow when two of our lords, Dudley and Audley, prepared an ambush for him at Market Drayton, on the road to Wales. Our force was double the size of Salisbury’s army, our man John said that the York soldiers went down on their knees and kissed the ground of the field, thinking it would be their deathbed.

  But the York army played a trick, a trick that Salisbury could play since his men would do anything for him—fall back, stand, attack—so he commanded them to withdraw, as if giving up the fight. Our cavalry rode them down, thinking they were chasing a runaway force, and found that they were the ones who were caught, just as they were wading through the brook. The enemy turned and stood, fast as a striking snake, and our men had to fight their way uphill through ground that became more and more churned as they tried to charge the horses through it and drag our guns upwards. The York archers could shoot downhill into our men, and their horses died under them, and they were lost in the mud and the mess and the hail of arrows and shot. John said that the river was red with blood of the wounded and the dying, and men who waded through to escape the battle were dyed red.

  Night fell on a battlefield where we had lost the cause, and our men were left in the fields to die. The York commander Salisbury slipped away before the main body of our army could come up, and deceitfully left his cannon in the field and paid some turncoat friar to shoot them off all night. When the royal army thundered up at dawn, ready for battle, expecting to find the Yorks standing on the defensive with their cannon, ready to massacre the traitors, there was no one there but one drunken hedge friar, hopping from firing pan to firing pan, who told them that their enemy had run off to Ludlow, laughing about their victory over the two Lancaster lords.

  “So, battle has been met,” my husband says grimly. “And lost.”

  “They didn’t engage the king himself,” I say. “The king would have won, without a doubt. They just met two of our lords, not the king in command.”

  “Actually, they faced nothing more than one threadbare friar,” my husband points out.

  “Our two lords would surely have won if the forces of York had fought fairly,” I insist.

  “Yes, but one of those lords is now dead, and the other is captured. I think we can take it that our enemies have won the first round.”

  “But there will be more fighting? We can regroup? When Joan failed to take Paris she didn’t surrender—”

  “Ah, Joan,” he says wearily. “Yes, if we take Joan as our example, we should go on to the death. A successful martyrdom beckons. You are right. There will be more battles. You can be sure of that. There are now two powers marching around each other like cocks in a pit, seeking advantage. You can be sure that there will be a fight, and then another, and then another, until one or the other is sickened by defeat or dead.”

  I am deaf to his scathing tone. “Husband, will you go now to serve your king? Now that the first battle has been fought, and we have lost. Now that you can see that you are badly needed. That every man of honor has to go.”

  He looks at me. “When I have to go, I will,” he says grimly. “Not before.”

  “Every true man in England will be there but you!” I protest hotly.

  “Then there will be so many true men that they won’t need a faintheart like me,” says Sir Henry, and walks from the sick chamber, where Jasper’s volunteer is dying, before I can say more.

  There is coldness between Sir Henry and me after this, and so I don’t tell him when I receive a crumpled piece of paper from Jasper with his spiky ill-formed writing that says simply:

  Don’t fear. The king himself is taking the field. We are marching on them

  —J.

  Instead, I wait till we are alone after dinner and my husband is fingering a lute without making a tune, and I ask: “Have you any news from your father? Is he with the king?”

  “They are chasing the Yorks back to their castle at Ludlow,” he says, picking out a desultory little melody. “My father says there are more than twenty thousand turned out for the king. It seems that most men think that we will win, that York will be captured and killed, though the king in his tender heart has said he will forgive them all if they will surrender.”

  “Will there be another battle?”

  “Unless York decides he cannot face the king in person. It is one sort of sin to kill your friends and cousins, quite another to order your bowmen to fire at the king’s banner and him beneath it. What if the king is killed in battle? What if York brings his broadsword down on the king’s sanctified head?”

  I close my eyes in horror at the thought of the king, all but a saint, being martyred by his own subject who has sworn loyalty to him. “Surely, the Duke of York cannot do it? Surely, he cannot even consider it?”

  OCTOBER 1459

  As it turned out, he could not.

  When the army of York came face-to-face with their true king on the battlefield, they found that they could not bring themselves to attack him. I was on my knees for all of the day that the York forces drew up behind their guns and carts and looked down the hill to Ludford Bridge and the king’s own banners. They spent the day parlaying, as I spent the day wrestling with my prayers, and in the night, their sinful courage collapsed beneath them and they ran away. They ran like the cowards they were, and in the morning the king, a saint, but thank God not a martyr, went among the ranks of the York common soldiers, abandoned in their lines by their commanders, and forgave them and kindly sent them home. York’s wife, the Duchess Cecily, had to wait before the town cross in Ludlow as the king’s mob poured in, hungry for plunder, the keys to the castle in her hand, her two little boys George and Richard trembling on either side of her. She had to surrender to the king and take her boys into imprisonment, not knowing where her husband and two older sons had fled. She must have been shamed to her soul. The great rebellion of the House of York and Warwick against their divinely appointed king was ended in a brawl of looting in York’s own castle, and with their duchess in prison clutching her little traitorous boys who wept for their defeat.

  “They are cowards,” I whisper to the statue of Our Lady in my private chapel. “And You punished them with shame. I prayed that they would be defeated, and You have answered my prayers and brought them low.”

  When I rise from my knees, I walk out from the chapel a little taller, knowing that my house is blessed by God, is led by a man as much a saint as a king, and that our cause is just and has been won without so much as an arrow being loosed.

  SPRING 1460

  “Except that it is not won,” my husband observes acidly. “There is no settlement with York nor answer to his grievances. Salisbury, Warwick, and the two older York boys are in Calais, and they won’t be wasting their time there. York has fled to Ireland and he too will be gathering his forces. The queen has insisted that they all be arraigned as traitors, and now she is demanding lists of every able
-bodied man in every county of England. She thinks she has the right to summon them directly to her army.”

  “Surely, she means only to ask the lords to call up their own men as usual?”

  He shakes his head. “No, she is going to raise troops in the French way. She thinks to command the commons directly. Her plan is to have lists of young men in every county and raise them herself, to her standard, as if she were a king in France. No one will stand for it. The commons will refuse to go out for her—why should they, she’s not their liege lord—and the lords will see it as an act against them, undermining their power. They will suspect her of going behind their backs to their own tenants. Everyone will see this as bringing French tyranny to England. She will make enemies from her natural allies. God knows, she makes it hard to be loyal to the king.”

  I take his gloomy predictions to confession and tell the priest that I have to confess the sin of doubting my husband’s judgment. A careful man, he is too discreet to inquire about my doubts—after all, it is my husband who owns the chapel and the living and pays for the chantries and masses in the church; but he gives me ten Hail Marys and an hour on my knees in remorseful prayer. I kneel, but I cannot be remorseful. I am starting to fear that my husband is worse than a coward. I am starting to fear the very worst of him: that he has sympathies with the York cause. I am beginning to doubt his loyalty to the king. My rosary beads are still in my hand when I acknowledge this thought to myself. What can I do? What should I do? How should I live if I am married to a traitor? If he is not loyal to our king and our house, how can I be loyal to him as a wife? Could it be possible that God is calling me to leave my husband? And where would God want me to go, but to a man who is heart and soul loyal to the cause? Would God want me to go to Jasper?