Shortly after the Twynyho affair came to light, a man named John Stacy, an Oxford clerk and astronomer, was arrested and accused of sorcery. Under torture, Stacy did confess and he implicated, as well, one Thomas Burdett, a man of some standing in Warwickshire and a member of George’s own household. A commission of oyer and terminar was appointed to try both men on charges of using the black arts to bring about the death of the King. They were tried on May 19th and condemned to death. The next day they were taken to Tyburn and there hanged, Burdett protesting his innocence to the last.
Cecily’s eyes flicked rapidly and critically back over what she’d written. She was well aware that there was some suspicion this had been a deliberately staged political trial meant to convey to George an unmistakable warning. She didn’t doubt that Burdett was involved with George in some sort of double-dealing, but she did not believe him guilty of sorcery and she was not comfortable that a man should die for what he had not done, even if his other crimes did warrant death.
She raised her hand to her face, pressed her fingertips against aching eyes. Sweet Lady Mary, how tired she was. And how ironic that her sons should give her greater grief as men grown than ever they had as children.
This last thought was too closely akin to self-pity for her liking. She blinked rapidly, raised her chin. And then she picked up the pen again and wrote,
On the day after Burdett’s execution, Edward departed London for Windsor. No sooner was he gone than George burst into a meeting of the privy council at Westminster. He had with him—of all men—the Franciscan preacher, Dr John Goddard, the very one who’d once preached Harry of Lancaster’s right to the throne from Paul’s Cross. George contended that Burdett had been innocent and made the council listen while he had Goddard read aloud Burdett’s gallows statement in which he swore he was not guilty of the charge for which he was dying.
I needn’t tell you, Margaret, how serious may be the consequences of George’s actions. This is not behavior Edward can ignore. George did murder an innocent woman and then he actually dared to appeal over Edward’s head to his own council, did all but charge that Burdett’s death was unjust, was a political execution meant to intimidate him into silence. By these actions, he did challenge the King’s justice, and that Edward cannot allow.
In fairness to your brother, Edward has shown great patience with George in past years. But Edward is not as tolerant as he once was, and George has learned nothing from past mistakes. I do not know what Edward means to do when he returns from Windsor, but I think it likely that this will be one time when George’s sins are not forgiven.
10
York
June 1477
It had not been a happy spring for Anne. As deeply as she grieved for her sister, Isabel’s death had come as no great surprise; Anne had known Isabel was “ill unto death” in the weeks following the birth of her son. Anne was not prepared, however, for the death of her aunt Isabella, John Neville’s widow.
Isabella had remarried some two years after John’s death at Barnet, and Anne had been glad; Isabella was her favorite aunt, and she was pleased that Isabella seemed to be building a new life for herself. Isabella was not long in giving her new husband a son, and in the year following, a daughter. Shortly after the Feast of Epiphany, 1477, she had given birth to another daughter. But the birth had been difficult and infection soon set in.
The shock of Isabella’s death had not yet worn off when word reached Middleham of George’s extraordinary vengeance. Anne’s own father had not scrupled to commit murders no less blatant than that of Ankarette Twynyho; he’d sent Lord Herbert and Elizabeth Woodville’s father and brother to the block without even the pretense of a trial accorded Mistress Twynyho. But Warwick would never have avenged himself upon a woman. It was that which Anne found so shocking and Richard so unforgivable.
Next had come the news of the trial and execution of Thomas Burdett and John Stacy. Anne’s private belief was that the sorcery charge against Burdett was a fabrication. Although she didn’t doubt that Burdett deserved hanging. As she saw it, anyone intimately connected with George was bound to be guilty of at least one hanging offense. But the entire episode had cast a pall of sorts over Middleham, and she began to dread the arrival of couriers from London; these days, the news seemed inevitably to be bad.
She was looking forward all the more, therefore, to their June visit to York. Anne’s favorite festival was the Feast Day of Corpus Christi. She’d been six the first time she’d been taken to York to view the city’s celebrated mystery plays, performed outdoors on huge wooden stages mounted on wheels and transported about the city to be enacted before enthusiastic crowds at designated locations. She still enjoyed the plays as thoroughly as she had as a little girl, and only childbirth and war had kept her and Richard from York’s Corpus Christi festival in the years since their marriage.
This year was to be a particularly memorable occasion. On the day after Corpus Christi, she and Richard were to become members of the Corpus Christi Guild, a prestigious religious fraternity. The following Wednesday would see a celebration of a milestone birthday for Anne, her twenty-first. And the culmination of their stay in York would be the wedding on St. Basil’s Day of Rob Percy and Joyce Washburne. As Anne had spent the past six months actively promoting this courtship, she was delighted that her efforts had borne such fruit, and by mid-May she had already begun to mark off the days in the back of her Book of Hours.
They had arrived in York several days before Corpus Christi, had settled themselves comfortably at Prior Bewyk’s friary. Preparations advanced smoothly for the upcoming wedding; the children had been as fascinated by the guild plays as Anne herself had been upon her first viewing, even four-year-old Ned, who was still rather young for any sort of sustained inactivity. But at supper that night, Anne happened to overhear a remark made by Francis Lovell, newly come from London, and it all went suddenly sour.
“What did you say, Francis? You did make mention of my Uncle Johnny. I would hear it again.” Remembering her manners then, she added tersely, “If you please.”
Francis looked uncomfortable. “You know, of course, that the eldest son of the King had been titled since his first year as Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall, and Earl of Chester. And his second son, Dickon’s namesake, has been made Duke of York. Well…now it seems that the King does mean to take from John Neville’s son his title of Duke of Bedford and bestow it upon his third son, the babe born this past March.”
Anne could not suppress a gasp. Ned had always claimed to love her uncle. Hadn’t Richard told her that he’d wept when told of Johnny’s death? How could he now do this to Johnny’s son?
There was an awkward silence, and then conversation resumed with a rather artificial animation. Anne sat quietly, pushed her food about on the plate. One of her best-kept secrets was that she had little liking for her brother-in-law the King. Since her marriage, he’d shown her nothing but kindness. She was willing to concede that. She’d concede, too, that he’d been extremely generous with Richard. But she did not trust him, and she resented the hypnotic influence he seemed able to exert over Richard. For years she’d watched him charm with lazy laughter, watched with wary judgmental eyes. With the illogical certainty of instinct, she sensed there was a danger in loving Ned too much. Her memories rang warning bells, flagged the risks in the blood of Barnet. Her father had loved Ned once. Her Uncle Johnny had loved him until the day he died. Now as she thought of Johnny and her young cousin who was to lose his title to serve Ned’s newborn son, years of bitten-back criticisms clamored to be said.
“How can he do it, Richard?” she’d demanded as soon as they were alone in their bedchamber. “The boy’s mother is not six months dead, and now he’s to have his title taken, too? How can Ned so demean Johnny’s memory?”
“We’re dealing with rumor, Anne, have no way of knowing if it be true or not. Until we do…”
“Oh, it be true enough! You know it is!”
“No, I d
on’t,” he said tersely, and Anne was suddenly swept by a bitter resentful rage, all the more intense for being so long repressed.
“Just once,” she said acidly, “just once I’d like to see you stop defending Ned no matter what he does. Just once I’d like to hear you admit there is no excuse for what Ned means to do!”
Richard had flushed, his eyes darkening to slate, but she was too angry herself now to care if he, too, was angry. “But you won’t, will you? Not even now! I don’t know why it should surprise me…. Just don’t ever tell me again how much Ned did care for Johnny! It’s as mean-spirited an act as I could ever imagine, and there’s no way on God’s earth it can be justified to me!”
As arguments generally do, it soon shifted ground. Richard could not defend his brother’s action without falling back upon Johnny’s treason, without reminding her that Johnny had died in rebellion against the crown, died an ally of Lancaster. This Richard could not bring himself to do. He chose, instead, to take issue with what he saw as his wife’s unreasonable attitude.
“You’re so eager to believe the worst of Ned, aren’t you? Francis repeats some London gossip and you act as if he’d presented you with the truth engraven upon tablets of stone! Tell me, are you so quick to suspect the worst of me, too?”
“That’s not fair, Richard, and you know it! The truth is that you’re willfully blind where Ned is concerned. You always have been and always will be!”
Their voices rose, carried beyond their bedchamber. Pent-up grievances were aired, unfair accusations traded. They knew each other too well, knew the words that would draw the most blood. It was by far the ugliest quarrel of their marriage, ended with Richard walking out on her.
He was gone several hours. She was too proud to seek him out, had no way of knowing if he was still within the friary or not. At last, she’d summoned her ladies, made ready for bed. When he finally returned, she lay very still, pretended to sleep.
The next morning, they arose in strained silence to take part in the processional of the Corpus Christi Guild. The sun bleached the sky over their heads a brilliant blinding blue. The city streets were hung with richly woven tapestries and strewn with fragrant flowers; the procession itself was heralded with flaming torches, crosses held aloft, streaming scarlet banners. The route was thronged with cheering spectators, from the gates of Holy Trinity Priory and up Micklegate Street, past the guild hall, up Stonegate and through the Minster Gates, into the magnificent cathedral of St Peter. There a sermon was preached in the Chapter House, and the procession moved on to its ultimate destination, to present the Holy Sacrament to the waiting priests at St Leonard’s Hospital. Afterward, Lawrence Boothe, the man who’d succeeded Anne’s uncle as Archbishop of York, gave a lavish banquet in the great hall of the bishopric palace close by the Minster.
It was an event Anne had been anticipating for weeks, should have been a day of much happiness for her. It was, instead, one of the most miserable she could recall.
The quiet was suddenly jangled by the sound of chimes. The friars were being summoned to Matins. That meant, Anne knew, it was after 2:00. For more than two hours now she’d lain rigid and resentful beside Richard, begrudging him the sleep she could not share.
Her anger had long since been quenched in misery. As she’d done all day, she kept reliving their quarrel, dredging up the hurtful things they’d said to one another. He’d charged that she had never forgiven Ned for forbidding their betrothal, had never forgiven him for not defying Ned as George had done. That was a particularly unsettling accusation to Anne. Was there truth in it? Last night she’d said no; tonight she wasn’t all that sure. She did feel that Richard had let her down; fairly or not, the feeling persisted, even after all these years and against all logic. Could that be why she needed to hear him denounce his brother? To assure herself that his first loyalties no longer were given to Ned, were given now to her? She didn’t know, but it was not a thought she was comfortable with.
In fact, the more she did dwell upon the events of the night before, the less comfortable she became. She had been right to be angry with Ned; she still was. But she’d been wrong to vent that anger upon Richard. It would never even occur to her to hold Richard to account for anything George might say or do. Why, then, should he be accountable for Ned’s actions? So he could not judge Ned dispassionately, could not keep from tripping over old loyalties. What of it? She’d long ago concluded that he was not the best judge of men, that he invariably let his emotions color his assessments. But surely part of loving a man was accepting him as he was.
Beside her, Richard stirred. He seemed unable to get comfortable, rolling over onto his back and, a few moments later, over onto his stomach again. So he hadn’t been asleep after all. Somehow, that made Anne feel better; she’d been vexed to think he could so easily escape into sleep while she lay wide awake and miserable. Reaching over, she laid her hand lightly against the small of his back. She felt his muscles tense at her touch, but beyond that, he didn’t react.
“Richard? Richard, I’m sorry. The argument was of my making. I realize that now.”
“Do you?” His voice was noncommittal, but he’d turned on his side, toward her.
“Yes,” she whispered. “You were right; we don’t know if there be any truth to Francis’s story, and yet I did take it as gospel. I wasn’t being fair to Ned, and I most assuredly wasn’t being fair to you.”
“No, you weren’t,” he said, but then she felt his hand on her face. She closed her eyes as his fingers lingered on her cheek, wiped away wetness.
“Did I make you cry?” he asked softly, and she nodded, rolled over into his arms.
“Anne…Anne, listen. I want to talk to you about Ned. There is something you should understand. When he first did take the crown, he sought no bloodbath. He did what he could to reconcile the Lancastrian lords to his rule, men like Somerset and Henry Percy. Nor was he reluctant to give his trust—to Somerset, to the Stanleys, to your father. You’ll not deny that he did give them the benefit of the doubt…more than once.”
“No, I’d not deny that,” she echoed quietly.
“For ten years, Anne, he did rule with a light hand. I’m not saying that he scrupled to take harsh measures if need be, but he didn’t unless forced to it. He offered friendship to foes, forgave betrayals. And the result? He did lose his throne, came close, Christ, so close to losing all. Those are his words, Anne, not mine, what he told me when I did argue with him about Harry of Lancaster. He said he did mean to learn from his past mistakes, to do what he must to make sure there’d never be a repeat of Olney or Doncaster.”
Anne was startled. This was the first time that Richard had admitted, even indirectly, what all knew, that Harry of Lancaster had died at his brother’s command. She started to speak, thought better of it.
“If he is no longer as generous as he once was, if he’s less quick to forgive, less quick to trust…can you truly blame him? He did learn a hard lesson at Doncaster, that he could rely on no one but himself.”
What he said made sense to Anne, seemed to her a likely explanation of the decided differences between the first years of Edward’s reign and the years since Barnet and Tewkesbury. What mattered most to her, however, was not so much the reasons for Edward’s increasingly autocratic rule as Richard’s willingness to discuss them with her.
She leaned over, kissed him lightly on the mouth. Even after more than five years of marriage, certain of her inhibitions had shown themselves to be remarkably resilient, long-lived. She was still shy, even now, to be the one to initiate their lovemaking, to admit openly she wanted him. She had, however, evolved any number of subtle indicators of her mood and her need, had contrived a code he’d become quite adroit at reading.
Sitting up, she tugged fretfully at the long braid that swung over her shoulder, trailed across one breast.
“Véronique didn’t plait this as she should; it’s too tight, is pulling against my temples. I think I’d best undo it…perhaps rebraid it.
”
She watched him as she spoke, waiting to see if her hint passed unnoticed. He much preferred her hair loose, almost always asked her to leave it unbound when they meant to make love.
“No,” he said. “Don’t rebraid it.”
It was too dark for her to see his face, but she didn’t need to; his voice had taken on a new intonation, a low caressing murmur that no one but she ever heard.
“I truly think,” she said, “that you could seduce the very angels themselves when you do sound like that.”
“I’d gladly settle for you,” he said, and she knew he was smiling. With fingers suddenly impatient, she freed her hair, shook it loose about her shoulders, playfully trailing it across his chest and throat until he reached up, drew her down into his arms.
It was almost dawn. Through the bed-hangings, Anne could see the shadows retreating; familiar shapes began to materialize. She stretched, smothered a yawn.
“Oh, Lord, Richard, we’ve got to get up….”
He kept his eyes shut, groaned when she nudged him again.
“Richard? May I ask you a question…about Ned?”
He mumbled something that passed for assent, and she touched her lips to his hair, then said, “Richard…what do you think Ned means to do about George?”
He was wide awake now, regarding her with shadowed dark eyes.
“I rather think,” he said grimly, “that Ned is going to collect a debt long overdue.”
The third Sunday after Trinity that year fell on the twenty-second of June. It was, as well, a month-mind for Isabel Neville, marked the passage of six months since she died in delirium at Warwick Castle, and should have been celebrated with pomp and ceremony in accordance with custom. But, to George, the day had but one meaning. It was the day that he had been summoned by his brother the King.
The Sunne In Splendour: A Novel of Richard III Page 77
