Sovereign

by C. J. Sansom

  ‘It wasn’t personal, is that it? The using me, all the lies. Not personal, just political, as you said the King’s mockery of me was?’

  ‘I have hated it all, I hated killing that woman.’ He shuddered slightly. ‘I spoke true when I said I never killed anyone in my life.’

  ‘And Broderick, what about him?’

  ‘I helped Sir Edward Broderick kill himself because he wanted to die. He would have died a far worse death in the Tower, as we both know. No, that I do not regret. I knew him from the conspiracy, of which I was an important part. Do you remember when he was led out to the wharf in Hull, in chains? He looked towards us and nodded. You thought he was nodding at you, but it was me he recognized. That nod was enough. I knew he had tried to kill himself at York and I decided then I would help him. I waited night after night for an opportunity on that ship, and when it came I took it. I knocked Radwinter out, took his keys and helped Broderick hang himself. It was a terrible thing to do, but he was resolute.’ He straightened his shoulders. ‘He was a fine man, a brave man.’

  ‘Yes, he was,’ I said, then frowned. ‘But you were ill on the boat, all the time.’

  He smiled sadly. ‘You know my condition comes and goes. I pretended to appear frailer than I actually felt on the journey.’

  ‘Jesu, how you have deceived me,’ I said quietly.

  ‘I owed Sir Edward my help. He held out under terrible torture, to keep secret certain matters that affected me.’

  ‘So he knew all along.’ I paused. ‘The secret of your true identity.’

  There was silence for a long moment. The rain drove violently against the window. Come on, Barak, I thought.

  ‘So what do you know about me, Matthew?’ Giles asked at length.

  ‘What I managed to work out this afternoon, as I tried to puzzle out what made you lie to me, assault me and betray me. The key to everything has always been Edward Blaybourne’s confession. Did you meet old Brother Swann, in the library in Hull? He told me of the old legend that Blaybourne was the real father of King Edward IV.’

  His eyes widened. ‘I thought all who remembered the old rumours must be dead by now.’

  ‘He was very old indeed. I did not tell you, for I feared it would be dangerous for you to know.’ I laughed bitterly. ‘But of course you knew already, better than anyone.’

  Giles sat up, and now I saw something fierce spark in his blue eyes. ‘The truth is dangerous for you to know, Matthew. Believe me, and ask no more questions. Stop while you can. Let me walk out of your house, now. You will never see me again.’

  ‘It is too late for that.’

  He sat back, his mouth tightening as I went on.

  ‘I remembered Howlme, your parents’ grave. I am blessed with a good memory, Giles, blessed or cursed. The name of your father, whom you told me you resemble, was Edward. Born in 1421, from his gravestone. Near fifty when you were born, you said you were the child of his old age. He would have been old enough to sire a son in 1442, when King Edward IV was born. I think Edward Blaybourne was your father.’

  Giles answered simply. ‘Yes, he was. King Edward IV was my much older half-brother. Henry VIII is my great-nephew. When I saw him at Fulford, saw the evil in his face, smelt his foul smell, I knew he was the Mouldwarp and it made me sick to think that creature was of my blood. This false King, whose grandsire was the son of an archer.’

  ‘When did you first know?’

  ‘I will tell you, Matthew.’ He still spoke quietly, though his eyes burned. ‘Perhaps then you will understand and forgive my abuse of your friendship. Understand that what I have done was right.’

  ‘Tell me, then.’ My voice came cold and sharp.

  ‘My childhood was happy, as I told you that evening by Howlme church. I knew my father had come to the district many years before I was born. I imagine then he was a man much like young Leacon. Tall and strong, fair and comely. He would never say where he came from, only that it was far beyond Yorkshire. I never gave thought to the possibility that our name, Wrenne, might have been assumed.’

  ‘That is easy to do, take a new name in a new place.’

  ‘Shortly after he came to Howlme and bought the farm, my father married a local woman. They were childless and when they were in their forties she died of consumption. There is much of it in those marshes. A year later he married my mother. I was their only child.’ He took a bread roll and began kneading it between his big fingers. ‘When I was sixteen I went to London to study law. At Christmas of the following year I came home to visit. That was in 1485. Four months previously the future father of King Henry VIII had beaten Richard III at Bosworth and taken the throne as Henry VII.

  ‘I found my father on his deathbed.’ For a second his voice faltered. ‘He told me he had first felt a lump in his side the year before, and had gradually become iller and weaker.’ His hand went, unconsciously, to his own side. ‘He had been to a physician who told him there was nothing to do but prepare for death. I wished he had told me earlier but I think, like your father, he did not want to disturb my new life far away in London.

  ‘I remember the night he called me to his sickbed. He was near the end then, his big strong body half melted away. The road I am following him down now.’ He looked at the remains of the little loaf, almost crumbled away. ‘It was a still night, snow thick on the ground, everything silent. He told me he had a secret, a secret he had kept hidden over forty years. He wanted to dictate a confession. Shall I tell you what it says?’ As he spoke Wrenne’s hand went to his doublet, touching his pocket. I made out something there. He saw my glance and his expression hardened.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘It relates he was born Edward Blaybourne, the son of a poor family of Braybourne in Kent. Like many such boys he went into the King’s service as an archer. Those were the last years of the French wars, Joan of Arc had been burned and all France had risen against us. My father was sent to garrison duty in the town of Rouen in the year 1441. The Duke of York, who was leading the campaign, was away fighting, and my father joined the guard in attendance upon the duchess.’

  ‘Cecily Neville.’

  ‘Yes. The duchess was young, lonely, afraid in a strange and hostile country. She befriended him and one night he ended in her bed. One night, that was all it was, but enough for her to fall pregnant. When she found out she decided to say the child was her husband’s; she would pretend it had been conceived before the duke went away and when it was born she would say it was overdue. The duchess could have had him killed but instead she sent him away, with enough money to start a new life, coins in a decorated jewelbox —’

  ‘The box—’

  ‘Yes. And an emerald ring she used to wear.’ He raised his hand. ‘My father always kept it and he gave it to me that night. I have worn it ever since.’

  He paused. I heard the rain hammering down, harder than ever, as though it would force a way through the walls. ‘Why did Cecily Neville not produce your father as evidence when she confessed to what else she had done in 1483?’

  ‘She had no idea where he was. My father did not hear the news until months later.’ He sighed again. ‘That winter night my father was in an agony of soul. All his life he had felt he had committed a terrible sin, been responsible for a man taking the throne who had no right to be King. He hid his feelings well under a hearty veneer, as I have learned to do. But when his son King Edward died and Richard III seized the throne he was overjoyed, for Richard was the true son of Cecily Neville and Richard Duke of York, entitled to the succession by virtue of the blood royal. But then Richard was overthrown and Henry Tudor seized the throne. He had only the thinnest stream of royal blood and he married Edward IV’s daughter to strengthen it. You remember the family tree?’

  ‘Yes. Elizabeth of York that married Henry VII, and is the mother of Henry VIII, was in truth the granddaughter of Edward Blaybourne.’

  ‘My niece. And the Princes in the Tower were my nephews, not King Richard’s. So
by an irony of fate Henry VII had not strengthened his family’s claim, but weakened it beyond measure. That sore afflicted my father. He felt his dreadful illness was a punishment by God.’ Wrenne took a deep breath. ‘He made me swear that night, on the Holy Bible, that if ever a right time came to use his confession to bring the true line back to the throne, I would use it.’

  ‘Yet you have waited fifty years.’

  ‘Yes!’ He spoke with sudden passion, leaning forward. ‘Yes, I did nothing, I watched as the Tudors ruined Yorkshire. Watched as the present King, the Mouldwarp as he truly is, stole the lands and positions of the old Yorkshire families, replacing them with common rogues like Maleverer. Watched as he destroyed the monasteries, perverted our faith, stood by as the enclosers took the people’s land. Stood by, in the early years at least, because I did not believe my father’s story!’

  He spoke with fierce passion and I saw that he felt a guilt about his father far worse than anything I felt about mine.

  ‘I could not believe so fantastic a tale at first. But I set myself to seek out the truth, to trawl in old and forbidden papers to find if it could be true. It took me years, years of ferreting out old books, manuscripts, pictures. Some of them forbidden.’

  ‘So that was how you became an antiquary and built that astonishing library.’

  ‘Yes, and found I loved the work for its own sake so that in the end it became a pastime rather than what should have been, a mission. It was hard, the Tudors hid traces of the Yorkist legacy well.’

  ‘They knew all along, though, didn’t they? The King knows he has no right to the throne.’

  ‘Oh, yes. The King and his father have always known that. But no doubt they convinced themselves they were each entitled to keep it. Those who have power do not give it up readily. And such power this King has.’ He was silent for a moment, then resumed in a quieter tone.

  ‘Years I worked away at it, years. I went to Braybourne, visited the grave of my grandparents, heard the local people speak in the same accent as my father. But it was a decade before I found a copy of the Titulus, in a chest of discarded papers at York Minster. Then I found a painting of Cecily Neville, in one of Lord Percy’s houses. I bought it, though it cost a year’s fees. It is hidden in my library. It shows her sitting at a table, with the jewelbox before her, the jewelbox my father kept to the end of his days and that Maleverer has now. And wearing this ring.’ He held up his hand, the emerald glinting. ‘Then I began making visits to London. I found, as you did in Hull, people who remembered Cecily Neville declaiming after Edward IV died that he was the son of an archer and that Richard III, not King Edward’s young son, was the true King. I had to be very careful, it was nearer in time to the event then, but gold loosens tongues and eventually I had a number of depositions written down.’ His hand went unconsciously to his doublet again. ‘In time I had enough evidence. Perhaps it is as well my wife and I had no children, or I would not have been able to afford my bribes, my purchases of papers and pictures.’

  ‘Yet you have left me your library. Or was that another falsehood to secure my friendship?’

  He winced. ‘No, I have left it to you and it is out of affection. Others will have removed the dangerous things before it comes to you.’

  ‘Before it comes to me. I will still be alive, then. I thought perhaps you plan to kill me now.’

  His eyes bored into mine. ‘I want you on our side, Matthew. I feel you are on our side already. I have seen that you know the King for what he is, feel for the cruel things he has done to the north, to all England.’

  ‘Why did you wait so long, Giles?’

  He sighed. ‘Yes, many more years went by and I did nothing, content with my life. But those were the quiet years, before the King married the witch Anne Boleyn and prohibited religion itself while we were taxed and oppressed more each year. Public opinion loved the King before then. To reveal what I knew would have brought punishment and death, not popular support. And I wondered, had I the right to threaten the throne when England was at peace? I did not want bloodshed. My father had said to act if a right time came, and this was not it.’ His face clouded. ‘Or was I just lazy, content in my prosperous middle age? Perhaps I needed to be looking my own death in the face before I found my courage.’

  ‘Then the north rose in rebellion. The Pilgrimage of Grace.’

  ‘Yes. And still I did nothing. To my shame. I thought the rebels would win, you see. I thought the King’s power would be broken and I could reveal the truth afterwards, when it would be safe. Back in 1536, as you know, the King promised negotiation. But then he broke his word, and sent an army to the north with fire and sword. You saw yourself what he did to Robert Aske. Cromwell’s informers and servants came to run the Council of the North and supervise the destruction of our monasteries, selling their lands to London merchants who take the rents to the capital, leaving Yorkshire to starve. It was then I decided to act at last, reveal my knowledge to others. When my illness began, and I had nothing to lose. I screwed up my courage, my resolution.’

  ‘So you joined the conspirators.’

  ‘Yes. I made certain contacts in York, told them my secret, showed them the papers. They were ready at last to overthrow the King. Royal spies were everywhere and it was agreed I would keep silent until Yorkshire had risen and was ready with the Scots to march south. Then the truth of King Henry’s ancestry would be cast in his face to confound him. The papers were handed over to Master Oldroyd, to keep them safe and to bind me irrevocably to the conspirators.’

  ‘But the conspiracy was betrayed.’

  ‘There was an informer, yes. We do not know who. And after the leaders were taken someone must have been tortured into revealing that a cache of papers proving Edward Blaybourne was Edward IV’s father existed. But whoever talked did not know my identity. And why should anyone suspect a respectable old lawyer? But Broderick knew. It was he who came to me and told me to bring the papers to London, try to make contact with sympathizers there. He didn’t have names, but I had to look at Gray’s Inn.’

  ‘Now he is dead.’

  ‘There are others in London. I will find them before I die. That is my final task.’

  ‘You must have lived in constant fear that Broderick would talk.’

  ‘I knew what manner of man he was. Far braver than me. I knew it would take the utmost torture to make him talk. It was my duty to help him die. I am not ashamed; you should be more ashamed of helping keep him alive against his will. I was deeply shocked when you told me Cranmer gave you that task.’

  ‘Perhaps you were right to be,’ I said slowly.

  Wrenne’s keen eyes narrowed. He leaned back in his chair. ‘That is my tale, Matthew. I regret nothing. Believe me, though, when I say I never meant to kill you at King’s Manor. Only knock you out, as I did Radwinter. Sometimes one must do unpalatable deeds for a higher end. I hated deceiving you. Sometimes it brought me to tears.’

  Another shiver ran through me, followed by a hot flush. I felt sweat on my brow. I was catching a fever.

  ‘But it was for a higher end,’ I repeated. ‘The overthrow of the King.’

  ‘You have seen him. You have seen Yorkshire. You know he is the Mouldwarp, the Great Tyrant, cruelty and darkness personified.’

  A heavy splash of rain from outside, as a gutter flooded over, made me start.

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘He is a monster.’ I rubbed at my wrist, where the manacle was chafing again.

  ‘And no rightful King, a pretender to the throne as his father was. He does not have the royal blood that God ordains for Kings.’

  ‘A few drops from the Tudor side. But none from the House of York, no. There too you are right.’

  He patted his pocket. ‘I have the papers here. Tomorrow I take them into town. I will find the men I seek. I will have those papers printed and posted all over London. With the arrest of the Queen there will be more discontent. What better time could there be to start a new rebellion?’

  ‘
Your last chance.’

  ‘Come with me, Matthew, be a part of it. A part of the new dawn.’

  ‘No,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Remember how he mocked you at Fulford. A casual piece of cruelty that people will gossip about behind their hands for the rest of your life.’

  ‘There is far more than my feelings at stake. Whom would you make King in Henry’s place?’ I asked quietly. ‘The only Clarence left, if she still lives, is a female child. And the law is not even clear a female can inherit. The people will not rally to a little girl.’

  ‘We shall offer a regency to the next living Clarence. Cardinal Pole.’

  ‘A papist bishop?’

  ‘The Pope would let him renounce his office to take the throne. Come with me, Matthew,’ he said intently. ‘Let us destroy these brutes and vultures.’

  ‘And Cranmer?’

  ‘The fire,’ he said with certainty.

  ‘No,’ I told him again.

  For a moment he looked deflated, then a calculating look came into his eyes. I thought, what will he do? This was why I had wanted Barak back; to provide force if it was needed to keep Giles Wrenne here.

  ‘You are still a reformist at heart?’ he asked. ‘You oppose the restoration of true religion?’

  ‘No. I am beyond allegiance to either side, I have seen too much of both. I oppose you because your belief in the rightness of your cause blinds you to the reality of what would happen. I doubt your rebellion would succeed but whether or not it did there would be bloodshed, anarchy, protestant south against papist north. Women left widows, children orphans, lands laid waste. The Striving of the Roses come again.’ I shook my head. ‘Papists and reformers, you are so alike. You think you have a holy truth and that if the state is run by its principles all men will become happy and good. It is a delusion. It is always men like Maleverer who benefit from such upheavals while poor men still cry out to heaven for justice.’