This is so far from the reality of being Queen of England that it makes me laugh till I cough and have to hold my aching sides. In any case, I know Richard. He may be taken by her now, he may even have seduced her, he may have bedded her and enjoyed her gasping pleasure in his arms; but he is not such a fool as to risk his kingdom for her. He has taken her away from Henry Tudor – that was his ambition and he has succeeded. He would never be such a fool as to risk offending my kinsmen, my tenants and my people. He will not set me aside to marry her. He will not put the Rivers girl in my place. I doubt even her mother can bring that conclusion about.
I find I must prepare for my death. I don’t fear it. Ever since I lost my son I have been weary to my soul, and I think, when it finally comes, it will be a lying down to sleep without fear of dreams, without fear of waking. I am ready to lie down to sleep. I am tired.
But first there is something I must do. I send for Sir Robert Brackenbury, Richard’s good friend, and he comes to my rooms in the morning, while the court is out hunting. My maid in waiting lets him in and goes when I wave her away.
‘I have to ask you something,’ I say.
He is shocked at my appearance. ‘Anything, Your Grace,’ he says. I see from the quick flicker of doubt in his face that he will not tell me everything.
‘You asked me once about the princes,’ I say. I am too weary to mince my words. I want to know the truth. ‘The Rivers boys who were in the Tower. I knew then that they should be put to death to make my husband safe on the throne. You said I was too kind-hearted to give the order.’
He kneels before me and takes my thin hands in his big ones. ‘I remember.’
‘I am dying, Sir Robert,’ I say frankly. ‘And I would know what I have to confess when I receive the last rites. You can tell me the truth. Did you act on my wishes? Did you act to save Richard from danger, as I know you will always do? Did you take my words for an order?’
There is a long moment of silence. Then he shakes his big head. ‘I couldn’t do it,’ he says quietly. ‘I wouldn’t do it.’
I release him and sit back in my chair. He sits back on his heels. ‘Are they alive or dead?’ I ask.
He moves his big shoulders in a shrug. ‘Your Grace, I don’t know. But if I was looking for them I would not start in the Tower. They’re not there.’
‘Where would you start looking?’
His eyes are on the floor beneath his knees. ‘I would start looking somewhere in Flanders,’ he says. ‘Somewhere near their aunt Margaret of York’s houses. Somewhere that your husband’s family always send their children when they fear for them. Richard and George were sent to Flanders when they were boys. George Duke of Clarence was sending his son overseas. It’s what the Plantagenets always do when their children are in danger.’
‘You think they got away?’ I whisper.
‘I know they’re not in the Tower, and I know they were not killed on my watch.’
I put my hand to my throat where I can feel my pulse hammering. The poison is thick in my veins, filling my lungs so I can hardly breathe. If I could catch my breath I would laugh at the thought that Edward’s sons live, though mine is dead. That perhaps when Richard looks for an heir, it will not be Elizabeth the princess but one of the Rivers boys who steps forwards.
‘You are sure of it?’
‘They are not buried in the Tower,’ he says. ‘I am sure of that. And I did not put them to death. I did not think it was your command, and anyway, I would not have obeyed such an order.’
I give a shuddering sigh. ‘So, my conscience is clear?’
He bows. ‘And mine too.’
I go to my bedchamber as I hear the hunting party return; I cannot bear the noise of their talking and seeing their bright faces. My maids help me into bed and then the door opens and Princess Elizabeth slips in quietly. ‘I came to see if there is anything you want,’ she says.
I shake my head on the richly embroidered pillow. ‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘Nothing.’
She hesitates. ‘Shall I leave you? Or shall I sit with you?’
‘You can stay,’ I say. ‘I have something I should tell you.’
She waits, standing near the bed, her hands clasped, her young face alert but patient.
‘It is about your brothers . . .’
At once her face lights up. ‘Yes?’ she breathes.
Nobody could think for a moment that this is the face of grief. She knows something, I know that she does. Her mother has done something or managed something or saved them somehow. She may once have thought them dead, and cursed the man that killed them. But this is a girl who expects to hear good news of her brothers. This is not a girl crushed by loss, she knows they are safe.
‘I think I know nothing more than you,’ I say shrewdly. ‘But I have been assured that they were not killed in the Tower, and they are not held in the Tower.’
She does not dare to do more than nod.
‘I take it you are sworn to secrecy?’
Again, that infinitesimal movement of the head.
‘Then perhaps you will see your Edward again in this life. And I will see mine in heaven.’
She sinks to her knees by my bed. ‘Your Grace, I pray that you get well,’ she says earnestly.
‘At any rate, you can tell your mother that I had no part in the loss of her sons,’ I say. ‘You can tell her that our feud is over. My father killed hers, my sister is dead, her son and mine are buried, and I am going too.’
‘I will give her this message, if you wish. But she has no enmity for you. I know that she does not.’
‘She had an enamel box,’ I say quietly. ‘And in it a scrap of paper? And on that scrap of paper two names written in her blood?’
The girl meets my eyes. ‘I don’t know,’ she says steadily.
‘Were those names Isabel and Anne?’ I ask. ‘Has she been my enemy and the enemy of my sister? Have I rightly feared her for all these years?’
‘George and Warwick were the names,’ she says simply. ‘The paper was from my grandfather’s last letter. Her father wrote to her mother the night before he was beheaded. My mother swore she would be revenged upon George and your father who caused his death. Those were the names. None other. And she was revenged.’
I lean back on my pillow and I smile. Isabel did not die of the Woodville woman’s curse. My father died on the battlefield, George she had executed. She does not hold me in thrall. She has probably known for years that her sons were safe. So perhaps my son did not die under her curse. I did not bring her curse down on him. I am free of that fear too. Perhaps I am not dying of her poison.
‘These are mysteries,’ I say to Princess Elizabeth. ‘I was taught to be queen by Margaret of Anjou, and perhaps I have taught you how to be queen in turn. This is fortune’s wheel indeed.’ With my forefinger I draw a circle in the air, the sign of fortune’s wheel. ‘You can go very high and you can sink very low, but you can rarely turn the wheel at your own bidding.’
The room starts to grow very dark. I wonder where the time has gone. ‘Try and be a good queen,’ I say to her, though the words are meaningless to me now. ‘Is it night already?’
She gets up and goes to the window. ‘No. It’s not night. But something very strange is happening.’
‘Tell me what you can see?’
‘Shall I help you to the window?’
‘No, no, I am too tired. Just tell me what you can see.’
‘I can see the sun is being blotted out, as if someone were sliding a plate across it.’ She shades her eyes. ‘It is bright as ever but this dark sphere is moving across it.’ She looks at the bed, blinking as she is dazzled. ‘What can it mean?’
‘A movement of the planets?’ I suggest.
‘The river has gone very still. The fishing boats are rowing for shore and the men are pulling up the boats as if they fear a high tide. It’s very quiet.’ She listens for a moment. ‘All the birds have stopped singing, even the seagulls aren’t crying. It is as if night has
come in a moment.’
She looks down into the garden. ‘The lads have come from the stables and the kitchens, they are all looking up at the sky, trying to see it. Is it a comet, do you think?’
‘What is it like?’
‘The sun is like a ring of gold, and the black plate hides it except for the rim which is blazing like a fire, too bright to look at. But everything else is black.’
She steps back from the window and I can see the small diamond-shaped panes are as black as night.
‘I’ll light the candles,’ she says hastily. ‘It’s so dark. It could be midnight.’
She takes a taper from the fireplace and lights candles in the sconces either side of the fire and at the table beside my bed. Her face in the candlelight is pale. ‘What can it mean?’ she asks. ‘Is it a sign that Henry Tudor is coming? Or that my lord will have victory? It cannot be – can it? – the end of days?’
I wonder if she is right and this is the end of the world, if Richard will be the last Plantagenet king that England ever has, and I will see my son Edward this very night.
‘I don’t know,’ I say.
She goes back to her station at the window. ‘It’s so dark,’ she says. ‘As dark as it has ever been. The river is dark and all the fishermen are lighting their torches on the riverbank, and all of the ships have pulled in. The kitchen boys have gone back inside. It is as if everyone is afraid of the darkness.’
She pauses. ‘I think it is getting a little lighter. I think it is growing light. It’s not like dawn, it is a terrible light, a cold yellow light, like nothing I have seen before. As if yellow and grey were one.’ She pauses. ‘As if the sun were freezing cold. It’s getting brighter, it’s getting lighter, the sun is coming out from behind the darkness. I can see the trees and the other side of the river now.’ She pauses to listen. ‘And the birds are starting to sing.’
Outside my window the blackbird makes its penetrating questioning call.
‘It is as if the world is reborn,’ Elizabeth says wonderingly. ‘How strange it has been. The disc is moving from the sun, the sun is blazing in the sky again and everything is warm and sunny and like spring once more.’
She comes back to the bed. ‘Renewed,’ she says. ‘As if we can start all over again.’
I smile at her optimism, the hopefulness of the young and foolish. ‘I think I will sleep now,’ I say.
I dream. I dream that I am on the battlefield at Barnet, and my father is speaking to his men. He is high on his black horse, his helmet under his arm so everyone can see his bold brave face and his confidence. He is telling them that he will lead them to victory, that the true prince of England is waiting to set sail across the narrow seas, and that he will bring with him Anne, the new Queen of England, and that their reign will be a time of peace and prosperity, blessed by God, for the true prince and the true princess will come to their thrones. He says my name ‘Anne’ with such love and pride in his voice. He says that his daughter Anne will be Queen of England, and that she will be the best Queen of England that the world has ever seen.
I see him, as bright as life, laugh in his confidence and his power, as he promises them that the good times are coming, that they need only stand fast, be true, and they will win.
He swings his leg over his horse and he drops to the ground. He pats his horse’s neck and the big dark head turns with trust as his hand goes up to pull gently the black moving ears that flicker forwards to listen to him. ‘Other commanders will ask that you stand and fight, will ask that you fight to the death,’ he tells them. ‘I know that. I’ve heard that too. I have been in battles where commanders have asked their men to fight to the death but then ridden away and left them.’
There is a ripple of agreement from the men. They have known battles where their commanders have betrayed them, just like this.
‘Other commanders will ask you to stand and fight to the death but when the battle goes against them they will send their pages for their horses and you will see them ride away. You will face the charge alone, you will go down, your comrades will go down, but they will be spurring their horses and riding away. I know that. I have seen it as well as you.’
There is a mutter of agreement from men who have been able to run away, who remember comrades who could not get away in time.
‘Let this be my pledge to you.’ He takes his great broadsword and carefully, feeling for the horse’s ribs, puts the point of the sharp blade between the ribs, aimed at the heart. There is a low murmur of refusal from the men and in the dream I cry out, ‘No, Father! No!’
‘This is my pledge to you,’ he says steadily. ‘I will not ride away and leave you in danger for I shall have no horse,’ and he thrusts the blade deep into the ribcage, and Midnight goes down on his forelegs and down on his backlegs. He turns and looks at my father with his dark beautiful eyes as if he understands, as if he knows, that this is a sacrifice my father has to make. That he is a pledge that my father will fight and die with his men.
Of course he died with them, that day on the battlefield of Barnet, he died with them to make me queen, and I had to learn alone later what a hollow crown it is. As I turn in my bed and close my eyes once more, I think that tonight I will see my beloved father, Warwick the kingmaker, and the prince who is my little boy, Edward, and perhaps, in fields greener than I can imagine, Midnight the horse is turned out to graze.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is an historical novel based on a character whose own biographer predicted that the life would be impossible to write because of the lack of information. Luckily for all of us, historian Michael Hicks found much valuable material about Anne Neville despite being hampered by the usual silences that surround women in history.
What we know from Hicks and from other historians is that she was related to most of the great players of the Cousins’ War (only called the Wars of the Roses centuries later in the 1800s). What I suggest in this novel is that perhaps she was a player in her own right.
She was the daughter of the Earl of Warwick, known in his lifetime as ‘the kingmaker’ because of his extraordinary role as puppeteer to the claimants of royal power in England. First he supported Richard Duke of York, then his son and heir Edward, then the second son George, then their enemy Henry VI. Warwick died fighting for the House of Lancaster, having lived his life as the great supporter of the House of York.
Anne, although a young woman, moved with her father through these twists and turns of loyalty. She attended the coronation dinner of the new queen of the House of York and witnessed her father’s gradual exclusion from the court, which became dominated by the Rivers family and adherents. As the novel describes, Anne fled with her father into exile in France, returning to England as his new candidate for queen, at the head of a Lancaster army, married to their Prince of Wales, and in little more than a year was married into the house of her enemy: York. It is at this point that I suggest that the young woman, who had lost her father and her husband, and whose mother had abandoned her, took her life into her own hands. Nobody knows the true story of how Anne escaped from the protection or imprisonment of her sister and brother-in-law. We have no reliable account – but some wonderful versions – of her courtship and marriage to Richard. My version of these stories is to put Anne at the heart of things.
It was fascinating to me as a novelist to portray the York court as a centre of intrigue and a source of fear for the Warwick girls. Part of the joy of writing this series based on rivals and enemies is turning the page upside down (as it were) and seeing a totally different picture. As an historian the known facts looked very different when I changed my viewpoint from my favourite, Elizabeth Woodville, to my new heroine, Anne Neville. The confused conspiracy around the death of Isabel and the judicial murder of George suddenly becomes a far darker story with Elizabeth as the villain.
Another reputation which I have had to address in this story is that of Richard III. As I suggest here and in The White Queen, I don’t subscribe to t
he Shakespearean parody that has blackened his reputation for centuries. But also I don’t acquit him of usurpation. He might not have killed the princes but they would not have been in the Tower without the protection of their mother except for his actions. What I think might have happened to the two royal boys is the subject of my next book, the story of their sister and Richard’s secret lover, Princess Elizabeth of York: The White Princess.
I list here the books which have been most useful to me in writing The Kingmaker’s Daughters.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Amt, Emilie, Women’s Lives in Medieval Europe (New York, Routledge, 1993)
Baldwin, David, Elizabeth Woodville: Mother of the Princes in the Tower (Stroud, Sutton Publishing, 2002)
Baldwin, David, The Lost Prince: The Survival of Richard of York (Stroud, Sutton Publishing, 2007)
Baldwin, David, The Kingmaker’s Sisters (Stroud, The History Press, 2009)
Barnhouse, Rebecca, The Book of the Knight of the Tower: Manners for Young Medieval Women (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)
Castor, Helen, Blood & Roses: The Paston Family and the Wars of the Roses (London, Faber and Faber, 2004)
Cheetham, Anthony, The Life and Times of Richard III (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972)
Chrimes, S.B., Lancastrians, Yorkists, and Henry VII (London, Macmillan, 1964)
Cooper, Charles Henry, Memoir of Margaret: Countess of Richmond and Derby (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1874)
Duggan, Anne J., Queens and Queenship in Medieval Europe (Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 1997)
Field, P.J.C., The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory (Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 1993)
Fields, Bertram, Royal Blood: King Richard III and the Mystery of the Princes (New York, Regan Books, 1998)
Gairdner, James, ‘Did Henry VII Murder the Princes?’, English Historical Review, VI (1891)
Goodman, Anthony, The Wars of the Roses: Military Activity and English Society 1452–97 (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981)
The Kingmaker's Daughter Page 40
