I blew out the tapers that burned by the bedside. Outside the thunder growled.
We met Buckingham in the gardens the next morning after we had broken our fast, bathed in great wooden tubs, and made ourselves respectable. The grass smelt fresh due to the rain that had come with the storm; herbs in their beds cast off sweet and strong scents to combat the noisome London air.
Almost as soon as Harry arrived, parading into the garden wearing an orange chaperon and a gown embroidered with swans, I knew this was not going to go down well. Anne approached him with courtesy and all the courtly skills learned as a daughter of Warwick and as Duchess of Gloucester, but after a polite but rather tepid greeting from Buckingham, he ignored her and turned to me as if my wife had suddenly donned an invisibility cloak.
“I do not think we have time for dallying with ladies in gardens,” he said, abrupt, nigh on rude. Anne’s lips tightened almost imperceptibly. “Much business, not all of it good, is afoot in London. We need to speak…in private, Richard.”
I was slightly taken aback. I had the feeling Harry Stafford did not like women overmuch—maybe because a wife he loathed was forced on him, although many a man had an arranged match and learned to put up with it or find comfort elsewhere. I did sympathise, that he had Elizabeth Woodville as his sister-by-marriage; but then so did I. Granted, Harry also had the embarrassment of being son-in-law to an accused witch, Jacquetta Woodville, but she had died a little more than ten years ago.
“We will talk later, Harry,” I said. “Later.”
He must have heard something sharp in my voice because his demeanour changed at once. Perhaps he was just suffering the megrims after a surfeit of bad wine and rich food the night before. Suddenly he was smiling, his courtesy recalled, and he was escorting Anne around the garden, pointing out features to her as if she were a young child or a simpleton. She looked most bemused.
After this, he took himself off, making me promise we would meet no later than the morrow. I swore that we would and he rode away, with his banners flying and trumpets blaring.
I dared not ask Anne what she thought of him.
She told me, nonetheless, and her voice was low and dull. “He reminds me of George.”
“And what is wrong with that?” I was defensive. “It is not unexpected; he is close kin, after all.”
“I don’t mean his looks! I mean…Well, I am sure you know what I mean, even if you are determined to pretend you do not!”
“Anne, Harry may have saved my life in Northampton by revealing Anthony’s plot. He is a great orator and speaks for my causes. You do not understand. He is my friend, a true friend, but he is a man’s man, that is obvious by his manner, and you are…”
She smiled sadly and suddenly I noticed how weary she looked, with purple streaks on the skin beneath her eyes. The long journey had sapped her strength and then, like some rutting boar, I had further tired her with the needs of my body…not that she had seemed to mind. “I am just a woman? Just your wife?”
“You know that I am well aware of your capabilities.” I placed my hands upon her slim shoulders. We were almost eye-to-eye. “You are Warwick’s daughter and I do not forget that.”
“Please then, Richard, listen to my words and heed them. If you see George in this man and love him because of it, I beg you; remember how George could act and how it ended!”
“He is not George.”
“You defend him. As you defended George too many times.”
“You truly do not understand…”
She pulled free of my hands, and a barrier rose between us, covered in Stafford knots; at that moment, a cloud slipped over the sun, and shadow swathed her features like a widow’s veil. “I think I do but let us not quarrel. You are my husband and I cede to your will, as is my duty. Go find your friend and see what business he is about. I have my own business to attend to—I have a box of wafers as a gift for Lady Howard.”
********************************************************
CHAPTER TWO: REVELATIONS
My afternoon meeting with Buckingham never happened. I sent a messenger to his London abode to inform him that I was suddenly indisposed.
In truth, I was perfectly well, just otherwise occupied. I had received a strange message from one Bishop Stillington, the Bishop of Bath and Wells. He begged me for an audience, claiming it was a matter of ‘most urgent import’ and ‘must be heard before the Coronation.’
I did not know Stillington well, although he sat on the council. An older man, grey-headed and frail in appearance, he had once held the position of Lord Chancellor in Ned’s government. However, for some reason he had spectacularly fallen out with Edward and spent some time contemplating his sins in prison. Edward never told me why he incarcerated the old Bishop, nor had I asked…but I deemed the old Bishop had secretly supported the follies of my brother Clarence, for the year of Stillington’s imprisonment was 1478.
He stood before me now, in my Great Hall at Crosby, a stoop-shouldered rather battered figure with a long, thick nose and worried eyes that slanted this way and that as if he feared a hidden assassin was hiding behind the glorious tapestries of my house.
“Forgive me for coming here at such short notice, Your Grace.” His thin, old man’s voice was tremulous. He wrung his hands like a woman in distress; great bubbles of sweat rolled from a furrowed brow.
“I am very busy at this time,” I warned him, “with the Coronation of the King in only a few weeks time. Could you have not waited?”
Stillington made a strange moaning sound and a hint of spittle whitened the edge of his dry old lips. Was he ill? What was the matter with him? God forefend, he should have some malady that he was spreading about; bad enough at any time, but worse just before the new King’s Coronation!
“Come on, out with it, man.” I was shorter than I usually would be with a man of the cloth, but I liked not the hue of him, not the disruption to my afternoon.
“Your Grace, it is about the Coronation I must speak.” Unbelievably, tears were welling in the Bishop’s eyes, making his heavy eyelids flutter. His hands now shook as if palsied as he twisted them together.
“What is it?” I frowned. “If there is something I must know, say it now, and do not fear.”
“I cannot speak here!” A high cry burst from him, making all the servants bustling about the hall stop in their duties and stare. I fixed them with a hard look and they hung their heads and went back to their tasks.
“Come then.” I rose from my seat and beckoned him into my private withdrawing room, flushing out sundry pages, floor-scrubbing wenches and other servants. It was dark in the room, the shutters closed against the hot sun; I could hear Stillington’s breath rasping like clawed fingers against old parchment. The sound put my teeth on edge, and, for unknown reasons, set my spine prickling with unease.
“You…your Grace,” he stammered again. Sweat rolled off him, rank, acrid…the sweat of fear? “I must tell you…tell you…”
“Just say it!” I spat, a nameless terror clawing my soul.
He gulped, took a hue gasp of breath. “Your brother, the late King. I must inform you that…that he was not lawfully married to Elizabeth Grey!”
“What on God’s earth are you talking about?” Incredulous, I stared at him, this cowering, wet-eyed churchman. Without doubt, Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville had been controversial—done in secret, on May 1st, the day of temporary Greenwood weddings, with only the priest, Jacquetta Woodville and an unnamed child as witnesses, and kept quiet for months after, but none to my knowledge had ever questioned its validity. There was no need. No consanguinity existed, so no impediments arose in that regard, and no dispensations were needed. It was an irregular alliance for a king—Elizabeth was older than Ned, her father’s side of less than stellar birth, and she had children by her first husband—but it appeared quite legitimate.
Stillington’s breath wheezed in and out, in an out—a distressed and terrified sound. “My lord, you
r brother’s marriage to Dame Grey was not valid because…because it was bigamous! When he espoused Dame Grey, he was already married to one Eleanor Talbot!”
I shook my head from side to side as if to clear it. “Eleanor Talbot? Who is she? And where does she come into things? I had not heard one of his whores was called Eleanor. There was a courtesan called Lucy, mother of his bastards, Arthur and Grace…”
“Eleanor Talbot was no whore. She is dead now.” He crossed himself. “Eleanor lies in the house of the Carmelites in Norwich, of which she was patron. In life, she was a lady of high breeding if not good fortune; the daughter of the earl of Shrewsbury, John Talbot. She was married to Thomas Boteler of Sudeley before…before she married the King.”
“Sudeley….yes, I know of the Botelers. Edward confiscated their castle from old Ralph Boteler, and presented it to me when I was seventeen. I had not heard of any Eleanor though, and later I traded the castle for that of Richmond; Sudeley was too far south.” Playing with my signet ring, I began to pace nervously, now just as jittery as Stillington himself. “Surely, Stillington, this tale is not true, just some kind of malicious tittle-tattle. You know how the King was led by his co…by his lusts; he may well have swived the woman but marriage…Impossible, surely!”
“My lord,” Stillington’s voice tolled, mournful, a death knell. “I know it is true. Lady Eleanor was a woman of virtue and refused to lie with the King in sin. He was so consumed with his passions, he agreed to marry her and in secret the marriage was made.”
It was just what Ned had done with Elizabeth Woodville!
The fair older widow, withholding her favours, reluctant to be merely a toy for the lusty King; then Ned, driven to distraction by his lust, swearing anything, anything, in order to get the woman in his bed…
The only difference is that he had eventually produced Elizabeth to the world as his Queen. He could scarcely have hid it any longer; the Earl of Warwick was making arrangements for a royal marriage to Bona of Savoy. Undoubtedly, scores of Woodvilles were also pushing at him…Such a family would not have stayed silent.
“I still need more proof than you have given.” I could hear the quaver in my voice, the doubt. Doubt about my brother.
Stillington stared at his feet. “I can give it, your Grace. I was the one who wed them.
A dreadful, oppressive silence fell over the room. It almost seemed as if Stillington had forgotten to breathe…and so had I. My legs felt strangely weak, shaken; I leaned against the wall, glad of its solidity, its stability. Everything I had once believed about Ned was crumbling; the brother I had loved was not the man I had thought him. The fool, the lecherous fool! And could this hidden marriage have been the real reason he executed George? Had George known? It suddenly became clear to me that he had, and that was why he had to die.
At length, Stillington spoke again. “The King had his way with Eleanor, but swiftly tired of her. She had no children from her first marriage and she never quickened by King Edward either. He began to regret what he had done. Soon after, he came no more to visit her, and in shame she kept her secret. The King went on and wed Dame Grey unlawfully in the same manner as he wed Eleanor Talbot…
“Do you know what that means, your Grace?”
I could not answer him; my throat had constricted as if hands were grasping it, strangling me, cutting off my breath.
“It means all Edward’s children are illegitimate in the eyes of God and the law. They are bastards, my Lord Duke; they cannot inherit. Young Edward must not ascend the throne.”
An emergency meeting of the council was called. The Lords Temporal and Spiritual listened in silence as in a halting whisper Bishop Stillington spilled out the terrible story of deceit and illegitimacy. They then sat on their benches, thunderous-faced or ashen-pale, myself included, even though the news was no longer new to me. Only Harry Stafford seemed unperturbed, taking it all in his confident stride.
Learned doctors, notaries and others began to arrive at the council chamber, some bearing witness to Stillington’s account, others reporting what was rumoured, others questioning and dubious of the evidence.
The Bishop stood before them all, braver now that he had revealed his terrible secret to the world, answering their queries in a fuller voice that grew in intensity as he saw that many listened intently, without hostility or scorn. His hands no longer trembled, but were raised in great gestures, as he cried out, “Do you not trust the word of a man of God? I wed them myself! It was in a chapel in a wood, far and remote, with but one witness, one of the Lady Eleanor’s servants. The King swore me to secrecy.”
“Would not the Lady Eleanor’s family have protested at her treatment?” asked John Howard. “Her father was the Earl of Shrewsbury, by Christ, not some villein.”
“I know not who the Lady told of the clandestine union; maybe no one, other than that one servant. Or maybe they were too afraid to speak, be they high or low. The King, when angered, could be implacable and a terrible foe indeed.” Stillington glanced down, obviously remembering his own imprisonment, the cause of which was now evident. Edward had thought he would reveal this pre-contract whilst supporting George’s claims to the throne.
Unsurprisingly, Stillington’s confession put the entire council in an uproar, and as often happens when opinions are divided and unwelcome tidings given, they fell into a frenzy and began to argue. “Never has such an event happened in the history of all of England’s kings!” someone screamed from the back of the chamber, rather unhelpfully.
“Be silent!” I yelled back.
Across the room, Hastings’ face was flushed and angry. “We should forget this vile rumour has ever been spoken! Do you not know what you have done, Stillington? Ned should have locked you up forever and kept you from mischief!”
I stared at my brother’s friend, thinking his words and manner strange. A cold chill ripped down my spine despite the mugginess of the day. Hastings had accompanied Edward in his vices; had he been privy to Edward’s folly with the Talbot woman? Had he known all along? If he had…then the miscreant had tried to deceive all England’s people and place a bastard child upon the throne. A bastard, I presumed, with whom he longed to curry favour.
The meeting adjourned for an hour with nothing decided about Edward’s presumed bigamy. The learned and the legal experts were left slouched on their benches, mulling over what they had learned and bickering amongst each other to the point I thought fisticuffs might break out. Young Edward’s secretary Oliver King issued one writ in the name of Edward V that day; I surmised that afterwards there would be no more until the legality of his succession was confirmed. Or not.
Since there was a stalemate in the debate, once we returned to the table I turned the conversation to other urgent matters that needed attending. Dorset’s lands and goods were seized; his dear uncle Edward Woodville would have to keep him with some of the pilfered royal treasure. In Sanctuary, the Dowager Queen was still refusing to come out; apparently she was sitting on straw on the floor, weeping, with the remains of the treasury heaped around her and her children frantic. Once she was aware of the allegations against Edward, I supposed she would be even less likely to speak. I sent a team of negotiators to try to prise her out before the news of Stillington’s revelation reached her ears.
After four hot, turmoil-filled hours, the council session was finally adjourned. As we filed from Westminster to seek our respective abodes, above us the sky dimmed with another approaching storm.
“I suppose it will all get out…” I murmured grimly to myself, as the first flashes of lightning burst over London’s skyline.
And it did, swift as the storm. Within hours, rumours ran rampant across London, in alehouses and taverns, in merchant rows and guardhouses, in religious houses and in the stews. The folk of the city might not have known all the details, but they knew something to do with the young King was deeply wrong.
Straight after the meeting, I met with Buckingham, Catesby, Frank, Richard Ratcliffe and oth
er members of my faction at Harry’s mansion. The stink of the river, gurgling and grinding beyond the back door, clogged our nostrils; multitudes of servants danced around, waving pomanders in a vain attempt to freshen the air.
Harry drove the servants away with many a rebuke; we sat with the casements closed, despite the building heat. Thunder growled outside, and then boomed from Tower to city wall, loud as the last trumpet on the Day of Doom.
We spoke of the day’s events and I told them all how Stillington had come to me first, alone.
“Do you believe him?” asked Francis.
“I did not want to at first, but what else can I think? Why would he come to me with such a tale if it were not true? What could he hope to gain by telling me lies? I have not offered, nor given him, anything. Why would I? ”
“Why would you indeed?” murmured Harry, close by my shoulder, so quietly the others could not hear. “Many men would pay for such knowledge, Richard, my friend. Think on it.”
“Could he be seeking vengeance for the time Edward had him imprisoned?” offered William Catesby before I could respond to Harry’s rather cryptic words.
“Maybe, but is this man of God so wicked he would seek revenge on a dead man…and his child? Remember when Stillington was imprisoned? It was the same time George had been spreading his tales about Edward. I think…I think George knew. Stillington had told him. Edward and Elizabeth Woodville realised that George knew the truth…and that was why George had to die!”
“To preserve the secret.” Francis shook his head in stunned wonderment. “But it seems so unbelievable.”
“Does it?” I said unhappily. “Edward had a penchant for seducing older widows and promising them marriage. He did it with Elizabeth Woodville, and I do believe he probably did it with Eleanor Talbot before that.”
“Why leave the marriage to Eleanor secret but proclaim Elizabeth his wife?” asked Frank. “Why not repudiate both women if these were irregular marriages borne out of naught but Edward’s lust?”
I, Richard Plantagenet: Book Two: Loyaulte Me Lie Page 6
