Some Touch of Pity

by Rhoda Edwards

  We’d had news that my half-brother Dorset had tried to come home, to make his peace with the King, but been caught on his way to Calais by Tudor’s agents, and kept prisoner by them. I thought it had cost my uncle a good deal to pardon him and face the prospect of having him back at court, for they had loathed each other since boyhood. It showed in the proclamations made against Tom — my uncle singled him out as an adulterer, traitor and extortioner. I know there’s some truth in this, but Tom has never been unkind to me, as he often is with his women.

  By the time we’d been at Nottingham three weeks, I began to feel happier, and less strained in the presence of the King and Queen. Cecily bloomed, now that she had fresh air, exercise, occupation and company. The pastiness and spots that had come from confinement in the Sanctuary disappeared. She looked ravishing, putting all the other young women, married or maidens, in the shade. Being a bastard, she got even more stares from men than before, when they had not dared, in case my mother the Queen should have heard of it. I got nearly as many admiring looks, which was very gratifying, as I knew tall girls are not always thought beautiful. Some ancient lady told me I looked like my grandmother, the Duchess of York, whom they used to call the ‘Rose of Raby’. The Queen gave me seven yards of green velvet, the colour of a holly leaf, for a gown. She said wistfully that it suited me better than her, though it was one of her favourite colours. She already had a gown made of it, which gave her a certain snowdrop prettiness. On me, though, with my golden hair, it would turn heads, and the Queen knew it. A less generous woman would have offered me scarlet, or a drab murrey.

  On Palm Sunday, the children of the royal chapel made a procession round the castle at Nottingham, bearing willow palms in their hands, and singing. My father always used to give thanks on this day for his victory at Towton. It was a very terrible, slaughtering battle, fought in a blinding snow-storm. My father said that when he touched his armour, his fingers were burned with the cold. In armour, he looked really frightening, a shining giant, even when just standing still and grinning down at us. I’m sure if I’d been a Lancastrian soldier, seeing him fight, with one of those two-handed swords only very big men can use, I’d have died of fright. In a helmet, and steel shoes, he’d have stood six and a half feet tall. The King, my uncle, though he’s quite little, fought just like my father, at Barnet and Tewkesbury. Our family breeds remarkable men. A poem had been written about my father, mentioning that Palm Sunday victory; I remember it, because I was in it, though of course I wasn’t born when he fought it. My father was called the Rose of Rouen:

  The rose won the victory, the field and the chase.

  Now may the people in the south dwell in their own place.

  His wife and his fair daughter [me!] and all the good he has.

  Such means hath the rose made by virtue and by grace.

  Blessed be the time that ever spread that flower.

  That Palm Sunday had been two weeks earlier in the year than this one. At Nottingham, it was springtime. I like this castle. Perched up high on top of a great rock, you can look from windows and walls over all the centre of England, beyond the flat Trent valley to the high hills in the north, and far away over the rolling fields in the south. Here north and south meet. The Queen said she liked it too, because she always felt at Nottingham that she was half-way home. There are two courtyards, the outer as big as a field, and the inner, where the houses for living in are. In my father’s time, they had been rebuilt in timber, plaster and stone, with lots of glass windows. In the middle of them, was the high tower, containing four storeys of rooms above the level of the rest. From the big windows of those rooms, you can see everything from a dizzying height, the countryside like a map spread out, the water meadows below the rock, where the little river Leen winds, and the cattle in them the size of ants. The King and Queen live in these rooms, while the rest of the court fit into the houses and elsewhere in the castle. In front of the tower, flower gardens have been planted with primroses and tall yellow daffodils, growing right up to the foot of cherry trees in blossom. When the breeze blew strongly, a snow of pink and white petals drifted down among the flowers.

  In the interval between Mass, the palms procession and dinner, I took the Queen’s spaniels outside for a run. I stood watching them rush to and fro, skidding in the fine gravel of the yard. Bo, the cheeky tan and white one, lifted his leg and watered the flowers, which wouldn’t please the gardeners. People came and went as usual from the houses, and the door of the tower. I didn’t take much notice of them. Things are always busy wherever the King is, even on a Sunday. After a while, I became conscious of my own idleness, called the dogs, and turned to go back indoors. A manservant came blundering out of the door, almost knocking me down. He did not beg my pardon. Before I could be angry, he gibbered at me, ‘I’d keep out of there if I were you, lady. There’s bad news come from the north — from Middleham… Everyone’s going stark mad — may the Blessed Lord Jesu preserve us all!’

  ‘What news?’ I asked, too warm and lulled by the sunshine to be alarmed immediately.

  ‘The King’s son,’ he said shakily, ‘is dead.’

  I looked round at the courtyard, at the flowering cherry trees, the daffodils, and could think of nothing to say. I felt stunned and cold, but not in the least like crying. ‘I must go to the Queen,’ I said. I didn’t want to — not to face more deluges of grief over a dead child. My mother’s frenzy of last autumn was too near in time. I dared not think of her, of how she’d prayed for this to happen, of the child image she’d made. It’s an only child, I thought, climbing the stairs, then: today is ill-omened — the feast of Holy Innocents fell last year on a Sunday.

  They were in the room on the third floor of the tower. A lot of men and women were moving helplessly about, hushed with shock. They grouped round the Queen. She was kneeling on the floor, doubled forward, hugging herself as if in pain. I saw a woman huddle like that once, who was having a miscarriage. She didn’t make much noise. No weeping yet, only whimpering. The King was half kneeling, half lying over her, his arms locked round her, his face hidden against her back. He made no sound at all. No one dared touch them, to drag them up off the floor. ‘There’s nothing you can do, Elizabeth,’ Lady Percy said to me. I couldn’t bear it. I ran.

  I heard that the Prince had only been ill a few days, taken without warning by terrible pains in his belly. After a day and a night, he died. The physicians, demented, were helpless. Everyone at Middleham was terrified in case the child had been poisoned, but, as Lady Percy said, the Prince could not have lived in a safer place, and it must have been a sickness. They kept the details from the Queen, because her son had died in pain, screaming, the messenger said, for his father, as if the King had power to vanquish death. My mother would be triumphant when she heard; maybe she would be sure that she had actually brought it about, by her strong magic. The child had died, they said, on the ninth of April, the very day of my father’s death, on which we’d kept his Year Mind. Some saw this as the King’s just punishment.

  I could feel nothing but pity, where I’d expected to be glad. I had an overmastering urge to run to the King and fling my arms round him, as I had when a child, to say how sorry I was, and that I’d never wished this terrible thing to happen. I couldn’t bear him to think I’d wished it. The surprise at minding so much what he thought of me, was something I could not explain to anyone. It troubled me as much as my fears of the cause of the poor little Prince’s death.

  During Holy Week, the King bolted the door in the faces of even his intimates, and let no one in for days. We could hear the Queen weeping piteously for hours, and I kept away, unable to endure the sound. ‘They’ll go clean out of their minds,’ someone said, ‘seeing no one, not even a chaplain.’ Nottingham, where one day it had been spring, and full of hope, had become a place blackened and blighted overnight, as if struck by some evil, unseasonable frost. Instead of throwing off the Lenten gloom at Easter, everyone put on mourning, mostly white, for a child, and
went about with hushed voices and apprehensive looks. We haunted the castle like spectres. The sorrow of that time would haunt the King and Queen for the rest of their lives; he began to call Nottingham, where the dreadful news had driven them almost into madness, his ‘Castle of Care’.

  After another two wretched weeks, we crawled miserably onwards to York, arriving on May Day. Everywhere was sadness and dismay; the citizens did not know how to greet the King, above the usual formalities. The King went to Sheriff Hutton to see the Prince buried, then we rode on to Middleham, where the child had died. The Queen’s ladies dreaded this visit, for she was already inconsolable. She looked ill and plain. I wondered if people really died of a broken heart, or if sorcery could make them wither and pine, even to death.

  I had expected the ride north from York to be through barren brown moorlands, amid whistling winds, and to see half-starved peasants trying to grub a living from stony soil. Such was my idea of all Yorkshire! Instead, I saw green, lush pastures, rivers stocked with salmon and trout, rich abbeys and convents. By the Ouse, just beyond Lendal Bridge in York, the cattle stood knee-deep in water, chewing the cud, switching their tails as the first gadflies of the year bit. A barge passed us, three men harnessed to the tow ropes like beasts of burden, pulling it along beside the bank. They stared at us in awe, but did not stop plodding along. On top of the barge’s cargo of monstrous sacks, about half a dozen children were perched, hurling pebbles from a sling at passing ducks. Perhaps they were sacks of grain from fertile Yorkshire farms. Even the hills, when we began to see them, were green and fresh with May grazing. They grew bigger in the distance, a little more as I had imagined, when we came near Middleham.

  Middleham Castle was not at all as I had expected, either. I’d thought of it as the grim, Border fortress my mother had told me about, where my father had once been the Earl of Warwick’s prisoner. Instead, it had a mixture of homeliness and grandeur. It was set beside the market place of a small, steep-streeted town, and flanked by wooded parkland with gentle hills and meadows, where deer and many horses grazed. In the yard, in curious contrast, chickens and peacocks pecked together for grain. It hadn’t been grim for a long time. We only stayed four days, because the King wanted to go on to Newcastle and Durham; I doubted if he could bear to stay longer. When we arrived, the servants there looked as if the Last Judgement had come to them; half of them would fall on their knees and burst into distressing tears.

  During the time that we were at Middleham, a foreign gentleman arrived. He was a Bohemian knight called Nicolas von Poppelau, a great traveller, who had followed the King north, in the hope of meeting him. The Bohemian caused a great stir of curiosity. Not only were his clothes strange and foreign, but he was extraordinary in appearance. Though very short, he was enormously wide, so wide that he looked completely square. He had almost no neck, so his round fair head sat apparently straight on top of his massive shoulders. On top of this, he wore a grotesquely huge hat, with many coloured feathers. His manners were even odder than his appearance. Lord Lovell had been detailed to welcome him, and the square man stomped forward in his giant’s boots, extending a hand, with which he grasped Lovell’s and wrung it. Lovell winced, and von Poppelau stood with his heels together, bowing over this wringing of hands. When Lovell kissed his cheek in greeting, he looked amazed and went very red. For the first time in weeks, I wanted to giggle. When Lady Lovell and Lady Percy came up and kissed him too, the Bohemian went redder than ever. Later, however, he made some roguish remarks about how lovely English ladies were, how delightful it was to be in a country where the custom was to kiss, not shake hands. He pretended to be scandalized to see some of the ladies riding alone, or, worse, with men not their husbands, and that they showed their legs when dismounting. He was sorry not to meet the Queen, who was not well enough to see anybody. I wondered if he was sorry to have missed a glimpse of her legs, too!

  Luckily, he spoke French, though no English, and so got along quite well. He was full of travellers’ tales, especially about what was going on in the lands of the Emperor Frederick. He also told us about the terrible advance of the Turks into Europe, and that the King of Hungary had beaten them in battle on St Martin’s Day last year. Von Poppelau was pleased and flattered that not only did the King invite him to dine at the royal table, but talked with him one day after dinner, quite alone. They had talked about the dangers of the Turkish invaders, and the King had said he wished that England lay near Turkey, so that with good English soldiers, and without the help of other princes, he would drive away not only the Turks, but all his enemies. I thought: most of them lie much nearer home. Poppelau said he realized that he had made his visit at a sad time, with the King’s son having died in this castle, and how kind it was to give him such a gracious reception, and what a brave man the King was, to behave as if everything were well, and not to upset his visitors with private sorrow.

  It was at this time that I began to watch the King, where before I’d disliked even to glance in his direction. I was not sure what I wanted to read in his face — a hitherto undiscovered cruelty, guilt, were what I feared most. I saw none of these things; his face is not easy to read. I hadn’t really looked at him since that banquet a year ago. He seemed older, as if much more than one year had gone by. Some days he looked as if he’d been up all night, and I was distressed to see him like that, which defeated the purpose of my scrutiny. Once started, this study was hard to stop, and he occupied my mind a great deal. His mouth, when he’s quiet and thinking, which is often, used to shut very firmly, now it seemed tight and hard. If my father had been able to get thin, and been caught in a serious mood, he’d have looked quite like his brother, except for the mouth. Odd, how seeing them together, I’d never noticed, perhaps because their sizes were almost comically different, and hid the likeness.

  I wondered if I would dare to ask him for news of my brothers — if they were in the north, and if I might see them. I thought the answer to the second question would be no. As each day went by, I waited for an opportunity to catch the King alone, which was asking the near impossible; he is always surrounded by a crowd of people. I could not ask to see him, being afraid of refusal.

  I got my opportunity by chance. I was going up the stairway to the Queen’s rooms at Middleham, and met the King quite alone, coming down very fast, sideways, because he wore long jingling spurs. On the spiralling stairs, he almost ran into me before noticing I was there; I jerked him out of some grim abstraction. An odd look crossed his face in that moment, startled, embarrassed and angry all at once, as if he wanted to run straight upstairs again. My knees gave way, and I sank down on the narrow step in a great spread of skirts, entirely blocking his way.

  ‘Get up, Elizabeth,’ he said. His voice was stony. I stared as a coney might at a stoat, unable to move.

  ‘You have something to say to me?’ This was no more encouraging.

  Then I blurted it out, too frightened for artifice or caution. ‘I want to know if my brothers are safe,’ I said.

  He was standing on the wide end of the steps above me, and leaned his back against the wall, as if suddenly resigned to being caught in a situation he’d wished to avoid. ‘The elder boy’s health is indifferent, but the younger is well,’ he said levelly.

  I nearly fainted with relief. ‘May I…?’ I was going to say: may I see them?

  ‘No,’ he said, anticipating, ‘you may not see them — not yet. You must trust me.’

  I burst into tears.

  ‘Don’t weep,’ he said harshly, ‘my ears are bludgeoned with weeping.’ Before I could move, he bent down and lifted me to my feet, his hands gripping the upper part of my arms. As he passed me, on the narrow side of the stairs, he said, much more gently, ‘Men and women are born to too much sorrow. It’s hard to endure it, Bess — I know.’ With that he disappeared, running down the rest of the stairs and into the castle courtyard.

  I cried as I never had in all my life, as if he had been unkind to me, when he had not. ‘Comfort
me,’ I sobbed into the empty air, ‘comfort me — me — me — like you comfort her, and I might learn to endure it all.’

  June–November 1484

  8

  Mon Seul Désir

  Told by Queen Anne

  A! mercy, Fortune, have pitee on me,

  Ande thinke that thu has done gretely amisse

  To parte asondre them whiche ought to be

  Alwey in on. Why hast thu doo thus?

  Have I offended thee? I? Nay! iwisse.

  Then turne thy whele and be my frende again,

  And send me joy where I am nowe in pain.

  And thinke what sorowe is the departing

  Of two trewe hertes loving feithfully.

  For parting is the most soroughfull thinge,

  To mine entent, that ever yet knewe I.

  Therefore I pray to thee right hertely

  To turne thy whele and be my frende again,

  And sende me joy where I am nowe in pain.

  Late 15th century

  ‘Ave Maria, gratia plena: Dominus tecum… Blessed art thou among women, Ora pro nobis…’ I’d said so many Aves I thought the words would be graven on the air in front of me, like those scrolls that issue from the mouths of stone weepers on tombs, words that rise as incense smoke to Heaven. So many prayers to be said: for Richard, who is now always in danger, for the soul of my dead son. This June, he would have been eight years old. Most Blessed Lady, help me to free myself from my anchoress’s cell of sorrow. The hours of a day seem so long now, to say an Ave for each does little to shorten them. I want to bear my husband another son.

  I opened one of the hinged agate beads of my Italian rosary that Richard had given me, and looked at the tiny picture inside of Our Lord’s Nativity. The heads of the ox and ass were modelled very life-like, resting their chins on the edge of the manger. The ox was white, our Lady’s robe sky-blue. Lord God, I thought, have pity on me, an earthly Queen; I wish I were poor, with only a manger in which to lay my child, if it would make me more worthy to bear one. I dreaded another birth, yet most desperately wanted it, for Richard’s sake. Our child would be begotten in love, not carelessly, or in anger. Yet I do not conceive, while those women who fall pregnant so easily often seem to resent it, saying sour things about how a baby can be made in less time than it takes to say a Pater Noster.