It was barely an hour later that Patch returned, pale and tense.
“I gave your missive to the guard, and he took it to another guard who went upstairs with it. I waited in the courtyard and they finally brought me the answer.”
“So, what is it? What does Edward ask for?”
Patch shifted his weight on his feet and averted his face. “Soil.”
“What did you say? I didn’t hear you.”
Patch raised moist eyes to me. “He requests a bit of soil. To plant a seed. To watch it grow. He misses the smell of the earth.”
I turned away, a hand to my mouth to stifle my cry.
ONE DAY AFTER A BRIEF RESPITE IN THE GARDEN, I returned to find Harry and Maggie gone, their lesson books open on the table.
“Where are they?” I asked Kate, my heart jumping in my chest.
“I thought they were with you,” she replied, rising from the window seat where she had been reading.
I turned to the man-at-arms at the door. “Surely you saw them leave?”
“Your Grace, they weren’t here when I came on duty. I took up my post at three o’clock.”
“Gather men—find them!” He spun on his heel.
I sank down on the settle, a hand to my aching head.
Kate squeezed my shoulder in sympathy. “Fret not, sister. I doubt our enemies have penetrated into our midst with all the fortifications Henry has set around us. The children may be visiting the animal menagerie, or the armory.”
Assailed by a tumble of confused thoughts, I regarded her bleakly. “I fear Harry has gone to find Edward of Warwick.”
“I’ll see if they’re at the Beauchamp Tower.”
She returned half an hour later with both children, one in each hand. Swept with relief and joy, I leapt to my feet and kissed their faces, laughing in my delight. “Where were you?” I remembered to ask at last.
Harry’s face lit up. “I saw the prisoners!” he cried. “They’re all in iron chains!”
I stiffened. “Fetch me Harry’s nurse, Kate.”
A quarter hour later she returned with a chastised Anne Oxenbridge, who had been visiting in the kitchen with one of the cooks. I received her in a far corner of the room and spoke softly so Harry would not hear. “I fault you for his ways, Anne. You should curb his obstinacy and teach him to obey you. It also troubles me that he appears to take pleasure in the suffering of others. You are with him most of the day. You could guide him better than you have done.”
“My queen, I have tried but he will have his own way. He does not listen to me. He has more respect for Master Giles. Perhaps if you spoke to him . . .” Her voice trailed off. But I had caught the lack of conviction in her tone. It appeared that Harry needed a new tutor, someone of a lofty stature who might be able to instill ideals in him.
“Let the children play in the garden for a while,” I said wearily. “Make sure there are plenty of guards around you.”
She curtsied. Taking Harry and Maggie by the hand, she led them from the chamber.
“You’re as white as a phantom, Elizabeth,” Kate said. “That was quite a fright they gave you.”
“With all that’s going on, it’s hard not to think the worst.”
I sank into the settle, and she came and sat beside me. “You’re right to be concerned about Harry. When I found him, he was tormenting the wretched prisoners through the bars of their cells.”
“I don’t know what to do, Kate. He seems to delight in human misery. I’ve spoken to him about it until I weary of my own words, but I can’t seem to get through to him. Though he will not be king, he shall wield great power one day, and it worries me.”
“Speak to Henry. Maybe he can think of a way to reach Harry.”
There were no more escapes after that, for I chastised all the household and doubled up the guard. I also commanded Patch never to leave them alone. Now that they couldn’t run away, Harry and Maggie held vigil at the window, watching the glow of camp-fires by night and the smoke by day. Early one morning, as we were preparing to break fast in our chamber, Harry let out a loud cheer. “Father has arrived! He’s moving the royal army into position on the south bank!”
We all rushed to the window.
“What’s going to happen to Father?” asked Maggie anxiously.
“He’s going to win,” Harry replied before I could reply.
“How do you know?” Maggie demanded.
“Because it cannot be any other way,” Harry said.
“And then what?” Maggies demanded.
“Then he’s going to chop the traitors up into teeny pieces while they’re alive.”
“How do you know?” Margaret asked.
“Because that’s what I would do if I were king,” he said.
Gently, I took Harry aside. With my arms around his small shoulders, I explained about mercy.
“That’s foolish,” Harry said. “They’re only going to rise up again.”
“Maybe they won’t. Maybe your kindness will win their hearts, dear son.”
Harry laughed. “Who cares about their hearts? If they’re dead, they’re done.”
Again came that disquiet as I regarded my child. He charmed everyone with his winning smile, his laughter, and zest for sport; his musical talent, dancing ability, love of poetry, and brilliant mind, so advanced for his years. He looked angelic with his rosy complexion and red-gold locks. But blood held a macabre fascination for him.
He is young yet. There is time to correct his failings, I told myself.
At dawn the next morning we were awakened by shouts and screams and the far-off boom of cannon and neighing of horses.
“The royal forces have attacked!” cried Harry, running to the window. “Father has attacked!”
I gave Harry permission to watch the battle from the turrets after extracting his solemn promise to come directly to me once the outcome was known. Taking Maggie and Kate, and accompanied by the women of my household, I retired to pray. The fighting continued for hours. Then Harry came running to me at noon with the announcement.
“Father has won! The rebellion’s been crushed! Black Heath is covered with dead bodies and we are all safe!”
At two o’clock in the afternoon, amid much rejoicing and the blaring of trumpets, the gates of London were thrown open to the royal army. I went down to the court to meet Henry. Smiling broadly, he took my hand in his own.
LORD AUDLEY, THE ONLY NOBLE TO CHAMPION THE cause of the rebels, was taken to Newgate the next day. Dressed in a torn paper tunic with his arms reversed, he was drawn in a cart through the city to Tower Hill and beheaded.
“Can I watch, Father?” Harry demanded.
“ ’Tis not a sight for a child’s eyes,” I interjected.
“But I’m a man—I have the heart of a man! I saw Uncle William die. Why should I not see Audley get his head chopped off?”
I turned to Henry. “I am most decidedly against it, my lord.”
Henry ruffled Harry on the head. “Your mother is right. You have seen enough blood already.”
Later that same day, I found Harry in the presence chamber, seated on the throne, his short, sturdy legs sticking straight out over the edge of the chair. Maggie was bowing and scraping at his feet. “More!” he yelled, laughing. “I want more homage or I’ll send you to the headsman!”
“What are you doing?” I demanded.
Both children scrambled to attention before me.
“He’s king, and I’m a traitor,” Maggie said. “And I’m going to be chopped into pieces by the headsman.”
“Leave us, Maggie!” I commanded, trembling with anger. “As for you, Harry, ’tis best to remember that you shall never be king, for that estate belongs to your brother. Never let me catch you at such pretense again. ’Tis a serious offense.”
Harry went off, downcast. I joined Henry in his privy chamber. He lay down his papers and met me with a kiss on the cheek, and then a sigh.
“What is the trouble?” I asked.
“I have to decide what to do with the rebels. I’ll give the leaders a trial, but the rest—”
“Henry, show them mercy!” I saw his face harden. I was always preaching mercy. I added hastily, “Their punishment can be severe nevertheless.”
He regarded me in puzzlement for a moment, then his face lit. “Fines, you mean? Take their money instead of their blood? ’Tis an excellent idea.”
I smiled inwardly. By appealing to Henry’s avarice, I had reached his heart.
The rank and file of the Cornish rebels were sent home unharmed, except for the massive fine he levied. Over the next few days, trumpets sounded through London as Henry’s proclamation was read to the crowds. “All men who took prisoners at the battle shall bring them to the Tower. For each prisoner the lord king will pay twelve pence a peasant, more for those of higher degree.”
A procession of dejected prisoners made their way through the grounds, accompanied by captors anxious to collect their money. Henry presided over the trials of the rebel leaders personally, and Harry was permitted to watch. They were condemned to a traitor’s death and disemboweled at Tyburn. Pieces of their bodies were impaled on the Tower gates, while their heads went to London Bridge.
“See, I told you,” I heard Harry whisper to Maggie as we rode out from the Tower to Sheen. “Father chopped them up into little pieces.”
CHAPTER 23
Fortune’s Smile, 1497
UNCERTAINTY WAS CASTING A SHADOW OVER OUR comfortable lives.
Perkin Warbeck was rumored to have sailed for the south of England. Henry prepared for invasion and distributed placards all over the land, offering a reward of a thousand pounds for his capture. While he waited, he went hunting at his palace of Woodstock to give the impression he was unconcerned—I remembered how Richard had done the same at Nottingham—and at night, he gambled at dice and cards, losing great sums as if to appease Fortune. When a messenger came to report that the pretender had captured St. Michael’s Mount, Henry turned to the poet Bernard Andre, smiled sarcastically, and said,“So this prince of knaves is troubling us again.”
Not long afterward, news arrived that the pretender had departed the Mount, leaving behind the two most precious to his heart: his wife, Lady Catherine Gordon, and his small son, another Richard. I thought of the daughter of the Earl of Huntly, so young, so vulnerable, possessed of such great beauty, now alone in a foreign land, separated from the one she loved, facing the extinction of her world. And I prayed for her and her child.
“Wherever the pretender goes, men flock to him,” Henry complained bitterly. “They say he has charm.”
Like my father, I thought.
Henry threw the dice as we gambled together in the solar while a great fire blazed in the fireplace.
“You lose,” I said, gathering my winnings.
“He who wins, loses,” Henry said, referring to the name of a favorite card game. “And he who loses, wins.” He relaxed into his chair and gave me a sly smile. “I pay Fortune off, and she rewards me by drawing to my side.”
That Henry was superstitious, I knew well. He had lost at cards the night before Bosworth, and had emerged victorious in a battle that he had neither fought in nor directed. Ten years later, he still couldn’t believe his good fortune: how he, with a few adventurers at his side, had won a kingdom from the one who held in his hands the resources of a nation. What he didn’t know was that Richard had not cared to keep what he had and chose not to wield his power, whereas Henry would fight for his crown with fists of iron for as long as he should live.
“Fortune will be yours,” I said.
Over the next week, messengers galloped in and out of the palace, bearing news and carrying back Henry’s orders.
“The pretender has traveled east and taken Castle Canyke, sire,” they said, and Henry sent a force of twenty thousand Cornishmen against the pretender’s eight, outnumbering them by more than two to one.
“Sire, the royal troops approached the castle, but they stopped and would go no further. They turned and fled, sire.”
“Perkin Warbeck entered Bodmin, sire, and was greeted as King Richard IV by heralds and trumpeters who proclaimed him the second son of King Edward.”
“The pretender has set out for Devon, sire. He has with him three thousand archers.”And Henry commanded that the sheriff of Devon prevent his march to Exeter.
“Sire, the troops, awed by the sight of the pretender, refused to fight. They have fled, my liege.”
Henry turned from the window with his hands clasped behind his back. “ ’Tis time for Lord Daubeny to march against him with the royal army,” he said. “And for you, Elizabeth, to go to the Tower with the children.”
The pretender must have learned of the forces massing against him, for he had his wife, Catherine, transferred from the Mount, which had no privilege of sanctuary, to St. Buryan, eight miles to the west. A strange and dismal place, virtually abandoned by the clergy, St. Buryan was built of brown granite on a bleak plateau with views of nothing but gray sky. It was said that the dark church was the gloomiest in England, its rood screen decorated with depictions of black demons devouring blue and gold birds, hounds tearing down gold-antlered deer, and most fearful of all, a winged dragon, its jaws open, about to seize a unicorn by the throat. Amid these fearful scenes the young bride and new mother waited with a few servants, and a few priests, for news of the man she loved.
He has no chance for there is no one left to speak for him, I thought with a stab of great sorrow. All who had championed his cause were dead or rotting in the Tower. Others who would gladly have deserted Henry, like my brother Dorset, released from captivity but staggering under an enormous fine and threatened with the disinheritance of his son, were too terrified to do so. Dragging myself to my prie-dieu, I opened the triptych of the “Virgin and Child Enthroned” that my Uncle Anthony had brought back for me from Florence and bowed my head in prayer for Lady Catherine Gordon and her babe.
KATE’S FATHER-IN-LAW, EDWARD COURTENAY, EARL of Devon, shut the gates of Exeter and repelled the pretender on St. Lambert’s Day, the seventeenth of September.
Over the next week, the pretender’s army lost heart. Five hundred rebels had died in battle since the Cornish rebellion, and many more from sickness traced to the tainted grain used to brew their ale and bake their bread. It was said they fell as if poisoned, cut down by the papal curses of excommunication issued against them. But I suspected Henry’s hand in the rumors, and Margaret Beaufort’s in the deaths, for she and Morton never left anything to chance. What better way to thin the ranks of their enemies than by poisoning their bread and ale? Now Henry was on the march from Woodstock with ten thousand troops equipped with knights and many guns, and Lord Daubeny had left London with the highly disciplined royal army, both descending on the pretender from the northeast. Meanwhile, Perkin Warbeck had no nobles at his side to give him credibility, and no generals to advise him; he had no money, no armor, no weapons save a few swords, pitchforks, and bows. He was outmanned and outgunned, and while Henry’s coffers overflowed with six million in gold, the pretender had no coin even to buy food for his army.
I thought of Buryan and the winged dragon with its jaws open, about to seize the white unicorn by the throat. The tidings of the pretender’s defeat came as no surprise to me.
A messenger knelt before me. “The pretender, cornered by the royal army, fled east to Beaulieu Abbey where he took sanctuary disguised as a monk, deserting his army in the dead of night like the base coward he is,” he reported.
Pressed against my skirts, Harry threw a glance up at me to smile his triumph. But I thought of my uncle Anthony Woodville, the heart of bravery, who had fled the retinue of Charles the Rash just before a battle with the Swiss. And I thought of Henry himself, who had abandoned his troops on the eve of Bosworth, struck in the heart by terror of Richard’s great army. Like the pretender, Henry had lost his nerve. But Henry had returned, offering as excuse something about having lost his way in t
he night. Since he had won Bosworth, no one dared call him a coward.
Shortly after this messenger, de Puebla paid me a visit.
“Pray, Doctor de Puebla, take a seat,” I said, always pleased to see his kindly face. I indicated the hearth where a pair of tapestried chairs stood on either side of a small table. Servants brought us wine on a silver tray and set cheese, bread, and sweetmeats before us, for I knew de Puebla had few comforts at the inn of ill repute where he was forced to lodge for lack of funds. Like Henry, King Ferdinand was a miser. He didn’t pay de Puebla the wages he owed him, just as Henry had not paid the maker of Richard’s marble headstone. Neither of them parted with money if it could be kept in their pockets.
“Your Grace,” he said, accepting the wine, “I have here a letter from King Henry, who has apprised me of events that transpired on the thirtieth of September. He requested that I pass this news on to you, as well as to the Venetian and Milanese ambassadors.”
I nodded.
“The pretender, surrounded by the king’s men in sanctuary, and cut off from all escape, was most anxious to accept the king’s pardon. King Henry writes that he knows you shall be glad to hear this.”
Glad? Am I glad to hear this young man might have been dragged from sanctuary by sixty or more armed men, as Thomas and his brother, Humphrey Stafford, had been from Culham in 1486? Henry had a long history of violating the ancient laws of sanctuary, but he would make sure to let out that the “feigned boy” had requested to surrender, trembling with fear and racked with weeping, and Henry, the “most merciful” of kings, had granted his request.
I understood Henry’s need to keep what he had. But sometimes I wondered how he could live with the cost.
I WATCHED HENRY’S TRIUMPHANT ENTRY INTO LONDON from the gabled window of a house in Cheapside with Kate and the children at my side. Only Arthur was absent, for he was still in Wales and had remained there throughout the ordeal. Henry had deemed him safer in Ludlow than elsewhere in the kingdom. The November day was cold but bright with sunshine, and the chill wind that blew did not deter the crowds.
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