The Reluctant Queen

by Виктория Холт

  "Who told you that?" I asked.

  "George, of course."

  "You seem to have become very friendly with him," I replied.

  She smiled secretively and I went on: The king gives honours to Richard because he is so loyal."

  "George is clever and handsome and if Richard were not the king's brother no one would take any notice of him."

  "You don't know Richard."

  "You're so young," retorted Isabel contemptuously. I think George is very attractive. It is a pity he is not the eldest. Then he would be king."

  There were dreams in her eyes. I thought, she is thinking of George as a future husband.

  That was an uneasy spring followed by an uneasy summer. I supposed it would always be like that until Margaret was completely defeated. There were Lancastrian risings throughout the country and my father would be away for long periods of time, and when there were arrivals at the castle my mother would be fearful of what news they might bring. With good reason. Fortunately there were more Yorkist victories than setbacks and a great deal of the credit must be given to our family.

  At Hedgeley Moor my uncle John Neville, Lord Montague, greatly outnumbered by the Lancastrians, defeated them and shortly afterwards at Hexham delivered the final blow. It was a great success for the House of Neville and it was generally accepted that the Earl of Warwick was making the throne safe for Edward. I had never seen my father so contented. He had achieved the very pinnacle of power; his dream had come true. He had made Edward king and so he thought he could not have chosen a better man to suit his plans. Edward was the perfect king: affable to the people, greatly loved by them: he had all the charm and grace a king should have. Moreover he was pleasure-loving, which would prevent his meddling in state affairs which was exactly what my father wanted. The king should be amused while, in his name, the Earl of Warwick ruled the country.

  It was late September. We had come to a period of comparative peace. After the defeat at Hedgeley Moor and Hexham, Margaret I fled the country; the Lancastrians were in disarray.

  My father returned to us contentedly. His family were receiving the honours they deserved. After his magnificent performance at Hedgeley Moor, John was given the Earldom of Northumberland. George Neville, at that time Chancellor and Bishop of Exeter, was to be made Archbishop of York. This was what my father wanted his family in high places with himself at the head of the state to be called on should his help be needed, while Edward remained the charming representative, doing Warwick's will as though it were his own with the grace and charm of which he was capable. It was a dream come true. Then came the awakening.

  It was a late September day. How well I remember it! We had arisen as usual and Isabel and I had spent the morning at our lessons and in the afternoon ridden out with the grooms for a short period of exercise. We were in the solarium with our mother and some of the ladies when there were sounds of arrival from below. My mother rose from her chair and went towards the door, but before she could reach it my father strode into the solarium.

  I had never seen him look as he did. He had apparently coir straight from a long journey, but where were his followers? Eve as the thought entered my mind I heard the sounds of the arrival below. He must have ridden on ahead of them.

  My mother immediately dismissed the ladies. They left' needlework where it was and went swiftly out. She signed for us to follow them. We went to the door and Isabel caught my hand. She stood in a corner behind a screen and I stood with her.

  Both my parents were so agitated that they did not notice we were there.

  My mother stammered: "You have come from Reading?"

  "Aye ... from Reading."

  "Richard, what has happened?"

  "Disaster," he said.

  "Margaret?" whispered my mother.

  "Worse," he said.

  "Worse. The king has married."

  "But it was his wedding you were going to discuss. You were arranging it."

  "I know. I know. The effrontery! He is not what I thought. This has changed everything. The truth is, Anne, I did not know this man I set up. I have worked for him. I have made him what he is ... and what do I get in return? Ingratitude. Defiance. The Council is outraged, but of what avail? The deed is done. I should never have made him king."

  Isabel and I were as still as statues. We had to stay and hear more.

  The king married! He was to marry Bona of Savoy. Our father had arranged it.

  My mother said: "Richard, what does this mean?"

  My father was silent for a few seconds. Then he said slowly: "It means that all my work has been in vain. I have given my support to the wrong man. I have put him where he is, guiding him, shielding him. I have made him the king. And what does he do? He flouts me. He has married that woman while he was allowing me to negotiate with the King of France. He has made a fool of me. After I have put the crown on his head, he is showing me quite clearly that he intends to go his own foolish way."

  "My dear," said my mother, "this has been a terrible blow. You have ridden far. You need rest. Then we can talk of it calmly. Please rest now, Richard."

  He put his hand to his head.

  "Everything that I have done," he murmured.

  "Useless. I have put him there ... and now I see that I made the wrong choice!"

  "He will regret it. He will soon be back with you."

  "Aye!" said my father fiercely.

  "He shall regret it."

  The Rift

  Everyone at Middleham was talking about the king's marriage and I guessed it was being discussed all over the country. There was a great deal I did not know at the time but I learned later, little by little.

  To my father's chagrin, the people where on the king's side. Was it not just what the handsome boy would do? And, like the romantic lover that he was, he snapped his fingers at conventions and married the object of his devotion.

  "God bless him" said the people.

  "He may be a king but he is a gallant boy at heart."

  It was indeed a romantic story. He had met Elizabeth Woodville in the forest by chance, it was said; but there were some who laughed that to scorn. Who was this woman? She was older than he was and already a mother with two children by her first marriage. She, with her mother, had planned the whole episode. She had stood there, her golden hair loose about her shoulders, holding her two boys by the hand and when the king had appeared she had knelt and begged him to restore her late husband's estates; and, so attracted was he by her outstanding beauty that she was able to trap him into marriage.

  Isabel was obsessed with the subject; she was a little piqued because the king had come to Middleham and seen her. Yet he had not fallen madly in love with her. How she envied Elizabeth Woodville!

  "It is witchcraft, of course," she said.

  "Elizabeth Woodville's mother is said to be a witch. And who is Elizabeth Woodville? There are ladies of higher birth than she is who would have been far more suitable. Oh yes, it was certainly witchcraft."

  "Ladies of high birth such as the daughter of the Earl of Warwick?" I asked rather maliciously."I feel sure that if I had been older I studied her. She really was very pretty and well aware of it. Yes, I thought, perhaps if she had been older ... how differently my father would have felt about that! Then he would not be regretting the cancellation of the plans for marrying the king to Bona of Savoy. It was hard to imagine Isabel, my sister, Queen of

  "Of course." I said, "the new Queen's mother was the widow of the Duke of Bedford so she is connected with royalty. Was not the Duke of Bedford brother of King Henry the Fifth?"

  "Yes, but when he died, she married Sir Richard Woodville, Lord Rivers, and he was killed in battle ... fighting against the king!"

  "That's what makes it all so romantic!"

  "Everyone expected she would be his mistress, but she said, "No, I will not have you unless you marry me." Had I been her, that is what I should have said."

  "If he had wanted to marry you he could have done
so without any fuss. Our father would have liked that, surely. In fact, I wonder he did not arrange it."

  "He should have done so," she said almost tearfully.

  "But it is too late now."

  "Isabel, have you thought what this is going to mean to us?"

  "We shall not be Yorkists any more."

  "Then what shall we be?"

  "I suppose," she said, "we shall have to wait and see."

  "Does this mean that they are our enemies ... Richard ... George ...?"

  She looked grave at the suggestion.

  "I do not think," I went on, "that I would ever be Richard's enemy ... certainly not just because his brother had married Elizabeth Woodville."

  "Our father is very angry."

  "I know. He shuts himself away and does not talk to anyone but our mother."

  "He is so shocked by all this. He thought that, as he had made Edward king, he could make him do exactly what he wanted. What has upset him so much is to find he cannot."

  And so we talked and scarcely of anything else. We heard rumours of the king's besotted love for his new wife. He had given her everything she wanted and her family were already filling most of the important posts in the country. It seemed that we were in danger of being ruled no longer by the Earl of Warwick, but by the Woodvilles.

  There was tension throughout the castle. We all knew that the storm must break soon.

  And so we waited for it.

  Eventually my father began to look more like his old self, but his anger still burned within him, and, as was proved later, he was making plans.

  As Premier Earl of the Kingdom, it would naturally fall to him to present the new queen to the Lords in Reading Abbey. For a few hours he raged and stormed in my mother's presence and declared it would be an added insult for him to do this and he would not endure it; but she managed to persuade him that to decline would mean an open rift with the king himself and this was not the time for that. He saw the good sense of this.

  There was so much talk about the situation between the king and the earl that I could not help hearing it and, although at that time I was not old enough to understand it all, I did later, for this quarrel was one which was talked of for years to come.

  My father did go to Reading to the ceremony and stood on one side of Queen Elizabeth, while George of Clarence stood on the other and they presented her to the Lords and listened to their acceptance of her as Queen Elizabeth.

  I can picture that cold and beautiful woman the poor widow of a man killed in action fighting against the king whom she had now married. I can picture the triumph in her eyes, for she had reached the height of her ambition and, being shrewd, as she proved in later years, she must have been amused to be presented to the Lords of the Realm by the man who, she knew, disapproved with all his heart of her marriage and was now, for the sake of expediency, being forced to accept it.

  There was something very significant which came out of that ceremony, for my father's companion in this distasteful office, George, Duke of Clarence, shared the resentment of his brother's marriage as fervently as my father did. It was the beginning of that alliance between Warwick and Clarence.

  My father soon began to realise that the marriage was even more disastrous than he had first thought. It was not merely an instance of the king's showing that he had a will of his own and was determined to make his own decisions. The queen had a rapacious and ambitious family, all eager to exploit the amazing good luck which had come to them. The king was under the spell of his wife and that meant grand marriages for members of her family and there were many of them. My father could see that through these alliances with the richest and most powerful men in the land and the taking over of important posts, before long there would be another family ruling England and taking over from the Nevilles. As he and his family had risen to great power through advantageous marriages, none knew better how this could be achieved.

  I learned that it was when my father heard that the queen's sister was betrothed to the Earl of Arundel's heir, Lord Maltravers, that his rage broke forth.

  Without my mother to restrain him, he took an unprecedented action. He went to the king's chambers and confronted Edward and there gave vent to his anger.

  He told the king that it was an act of folly to have married a woman of no standing in the realm, one who had already had a husband and had two sons as old as the king's own brothers, and who came of a family who had actually fought with the enemy.

  Moreover, he had placed him, Warwick, his loyal friend and ally, in an invidious position by allowing him to parley with the King of France for a marriage with Bona of Savoy while he was already married. So he had insulted the man who, more than any other, had helped him to the throne.

  I see now how clearly that encounter reveals the character of those two men. My father was ambitious in the extreme; he was single-minded, possessed of certain gifts, but he showed a lack of wisdom in some ways. His great rise to power had been largely through the accumulation of wealth and luck; of course, he had made the most of his opportunities, but I have come to wonder whether he lacked the essential qualities for greatness.

  Edward was a man of easy temper, it was true. But my father had miscalculated in summing up his character. Edward was luxury-loving, a man who wanted to be on good terms with those about him; he disliked quarrels, I think, partly because he thought they were a waste of time and energy; he saw himself as the benign monarch; he went about the countryside bestowing his smiles on all his people and particularly the female section. He knew that he had behaved badly to my father, but the earl would never understand the sensual nature of a man like the king. Edward had seen Elizabeth Woodville; she had refused to become his mistress: and therefore, because of his insuppressible desire for her, he had been forced to marry her. How could he explain that to a man like Warwick? On the other hand, he was grateful to Warwick, and it grieved him to disappoint him. Perhaps it would have occurred to him that the king should not tolerate a subject's insolence and he should order his arrest. But Edward was not impulsive. Some might think so because of his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, but that had been a calculated act; simply, he had had to marry Elizabeth because his desire could not be slaked in any other way.

  He would realise, too, that if he ordered Warwick's arrest a civil war might be provoked. He might have seen Warwick joining with the Lancastrians and that would certainly mean disaster for the House of York. So he did what was typical of him. He set aside his kingship and talked to Warwick as though he were still his friend.

  The queen's mother was the widow of the Duke of Bedford, he explained gently. She was of the noble house of Luxembourg. There were royal connections on her mother's side. It was unfortunate that she had married a Lancastrian, but that was no fault of hers. Young girls could not choose their husbands. She was beautiful and had already shown herself capable of bearing strong healthy children. If the Earl of Warwick would set aside his disappointment about the marriage to Bona of Savoy, he would realise there was nothing to regret. And such a matter should not come between old friends.

  Edward, as everyone knew, was one of the most charming of men, and he did manage to some extent to soothe my father's wounds. There was a reconciliation of a kind. The king embraced the earl and said: "There has been too much friendship between us two, Warwick, for this matter to spoil it."

  My father's anger must have cooled sufficiently for him to realise that it would be folly for him to indulge in more outbursts and commonsense got the better of anger. He appeared to agree with the king.

  But whatever was said, danger was looming. The Woodvilleswere trying to oust the Nevilles and that was quite unacceptable. My father returned to Middleham.

  Richard, naturally, was no longer at Middleham, and I wondered if he would ever come back. But I did see him not very long after the quarrel.

  One day my mother called Isabel and me to come to her and she told us we were going on a journey. She looked happier than she had
for some time.

  "Your uncle George is to be made Archbishop of York, and there will be a grand banquet afterwards. All the nobility will be there and your father wants every member of the family to be present if possible."

  Isabel was very excited.

  "Will the king be there?" she asked.

  "Oh no. I don't expect the king will be there. But he will surely send someone to represent him. We shall see."

  I was thinking, could it be that Richard would be there?. The prospect of seeing him made me very happy. Moreover if he were, it might be an indication that this feud between the king and my father was coming to an end.

  "We shall go to Cawood Castle," went on my mother.

  "It is very pleasant there on the south bank of the Ouse. We shall have the river and it is only ten miles from York, so after the ceremony the company will, with your father and the archbishop, join us there for the feast."

  In due course we set out for Cawood and as soon as we arrived, if we had not been aware of it before, we would have realised what an important occasion this was. The castle was swarming with retainers. There were fifty cooks at work in the kitchens and the carcasses of sheep, cattle, pigs, swans and geese were being prepared for the table, together with artistically fashioned pastry commemorating the archbishop's elevation and the power of the Nevilles. It was borne home to me that there was something significant about this occasion.

  The party arrived from York and, to my great joy, riding with my father and uncle was Richard.

  In the great hall I was seated at the long table with my mother, and Isabel and Richard was with us. He gave me his rare smite! and I knew that meant that he was glad to see me.

  All the feasting ... the drinking ... the dancing ... the splendour indicated one thing: the power of the Nevilles which was by no means diminished. The local peasantry had the earl's permission to go the kitchens and take as much meat as they could carry off on their knives; and for that they were ready to throw their caps in the air at any time and shout "A Warwick" as often and as enthusiastically as the great earl wished.