by Livi Michael
All of this should be a source of rejoicing to the new queen, but instead she felt only a cold melancholy. Perhaps it was her awareness of how the people disliked her also, and how Warwick would have delighted in leading her through the streets in the same way. Or the fact that she had been disposed to like the former queen; had admired her dignity, her hauteur; had thought her ill served by her men.
Or perhaps it was the pregnancy, stirring new emotions in her. Whatever the cause, she could not take pleasure in the scene below. She turned away from the window in the royal apartments of the Tower, before the procession reached the Tower Gates. She would not allow herself to think about the man who had once been king, who was now tied to a small horse. It was just another demonstration of God’s irony.
She did not entirely trust God and his sense of irony. Look at the way he had made her wait a full year for her pregnancy.
More than a year, in which she had suffered the curiosity, the searching glances of the court. The silent triumph of Cecily Neville, that she, who had brought proof of her fertility to her marriage, should be so long infertile. She had endured medical probing and investigation. And, of course, the intensive questioning of her mother, who had not let a single month pass before posing the same question. And when she received the same answer would respond with raised eyebrows and some barbed comment or advice of a spectacularly useless kind.
‘If I were you I would not keep him waiting too long.’
Or, ‘He is still coming to your bed, I take it?’
Or, ‘I trust you are not going to follow the former queen’s pattern?’
Meaning Margaret of Anjou, who had waited eight long years for a child.
It was a good thing that Elizabeth Woodville was practised at keeping her temper. She felt like slapping her mother, or pulling her hair, or banning her from court.
It would not do to ban her mother from court. Not while so many people were anticipating the downfall of the Woodville clan.
So she smiled and said, ‘All in good time,’ or, ‘If I am, Mother, you can be sure that I will let you know.’
Her mother, of course, had been pregnant almost every year of the first twenty years of her marriage to Elizabeth’s father. Before that she had been married to the Duke of Bedford, and had not conceived at all.
‘Ah, but that was only for a short time,’ she would say, and, ‘He was away for most of it, in France.’
Still, her mother had been fertile with one man and not another. Elizabeth had to hope this would not be true in her own case. She could not afford to be infertile with the king.
It would be another of God’s ironies if she was infertile with the king.
The king himself did not ask as frequently as he had at first, but sometimes she saw a shadowed expression on his face when he looked at her.
So she took the advice of his physician, Dr Dominic de Serigo, about diet and about the phases of the moon; about praying to certain saints and donating at certain shrines.
She lay beneath her husband, praying to all the saints in order.
Meanwhile, her two sons from her first marriage grew bigger and stronger, like a rebuke. And Elizabeth Lucy was pregnant for the second time.
The queen was not given to displays of emotion, and certainly not before the king. She had discovered early on that he did not like them; his face would close and he would leave the room. So only once, when her monthly flow was unusually heavy and prolonged, had she burst into violent weeping. One of her ladies had stayed with her, and chafed her hands and told her not to worry, she should not think about it so much.
But how could she avoid thinking about it when the entire court was watching her, like so many hawks?
Then, exactly one year after her marriage, the flow of blood had been slight and short.
She had gone to Dr de Serigo to be examined in the usual way, and he had risen from between her thighs saying, ‘The Lord be praised,’ with the smile of one who might expect a pension from this. Or a promotion at least.
She made him promise to say nothing, worried about the smear of blood. She’d had miscarriages in her first marriage. But the next month there was no show of blood at all. Her breasts hurt and she felt permanently queasy. And so she told the king. And he carried her around the room.
But she made him promise, too, that he would say nothing until another month had passed. Not even to his mother. She told her own mother, of course, to keep her quiet, but she did not want a public announcement as yet.
The king saw the sense in this, but said they should give thanks in any case, at Canterbury. No one would question their pilgrimage to a shrine.
It was at Canterbury that the deputation came. Sir James Harrington and Sir Thomas Talbot of Bashall, accompanied by one of the Black Monks of Abingdon, who did not speak but looked at the queen with glittering eyes.
So there was to be a celebration, after all. They had made their offerings and hurried back to London, to witness the degradation of the former king. That night there was to be a feast in the Tower, while the old king was incarcerated. Her ladies dressed the queen with especial care; she would be radiant beside her lord.
All the usual congratulatory speeches were made. Warwick said that he hoped the old king, who had been dressed like a monk or a hermit, would find his new cell to his liking, although his kingdom was somewhat reduced.
Then her husband rose. ‘There is more than one cause for celebration tonight,’ he said. And, despite their agreement, he told everyone present in the hall that they could expect a new heir to the throne.
In the second’s silence before the tumultuous applause she saw the look on Warwick’s face.
But the king made her stand with him, and held her hand high while the cheers resounded, and was so boyishly pleased that she had to forgive him. It was almost time, after all; by her calculations she was eleven or twelve weeks pregnant. She could not blame him for capitalizing upon this moment.
But from then on he talked of nothing but his son. And Warwick almost disappeared from the court.
He was helping to organize his brother’s inauguration as Archbishop of York, he said, when the king sent messages. And when the king said there could not be so much to organize, he sent back a list.
The inauguration or enthronement at Cawood Castle would go on all week. Twenty-eight peers, ten abbots and fifty-nine knights would attend, together with seven bishops, any number of lawyers, esquires and their attendants. There would be a banquet of 104 oxen, 1,000 sheep, 2,000 pigs, 500 stags, 6 wild bulls, a dozen porpoises and seals, 2,000 geese, 4,000 pigeon, 1,000 capons, 1,000 quail, 304 calves, 204 kids, 4,000 venison pies, 4,000 dishes of jelly, 608 pikes and bream, 4,000 baked tarts, 2,000 hot custards, 300 tuns of ale and 100 tuns of wine as well as many other birds and beasts.
‘There will be no animals left in Yorkshire,’ Elizabeth said. The king had turned away, but she knew he was angry by the set of his shoulders.
They did not go themselves, but sent the king’s brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, while they made a procession of their own. Because it was September, and the queen’s pregnancy was showing, and the baby was kicking in her womb. No one at court talked about anything else. The court astrologers made their calculations and said it would definitely be a son. Dr de Serigo was especially loud in his assurances.
The queen did not say that she’d had two sons already, and this pregnancy felt different; it was not growing in the same way.
Edward talked about naming the child Richard after his father. The pregnancy had stirred up memories of his father, who had so nearly been king. And his brother, who’d died with him at the Battle of Wakefield. He still grew emotional when he spoke of them. But he did not think he would call their son Edmund. There had been no kings called Edmund, after all.
The queen said nothing, but dreamed of a daughter.
Soon after Christmas she went into confinement, for the baby might come early, although the court astrologers had declared that th
e new prince would be born on 10 February, which was an auspicious date for a future king.
Already she felt a little remote from the world. She had entered that twilight state of late pregnancy in which she felt nothing but the desire for it to be over. Soon it would be over, but the words soon and over had lost their meaning.
She was attended only by women, with their talk of babies and labour, nipples and blood. It was as if she too had entered the female world of the womb. Then, late on the appointed day, 10 February, her waters did in fact break.
There was great excitement, of course. It will not be long now, her ladies cried, until the new prince is born.
But it took longer than expected. Midnight came and went, morning came and still the prince was not born.
Finally, past noon on 11 February, she was delivered of a daughter.
‘A little girl, your majesty,’ the midwife said, then to offset the tone of disappointment, she added, ‘A beautiful baby girl.’
And Elizabeth Woodville sank back into her bed, disordered and panting, while one of her ladies wiped her face and smoothed back the strands of hair that were plastered to her forehead.
Another of God’s little ironies, she thought.
Wherefore it was after told, that this Master Dominic, to the intent to have great thanks and reward from the king, stood in the second chamber where the queen travailed that night that he might be the first to bring tidings to the king of the birth of the prince; and when he heard the child cry, he knocked and called at the chamber door, and asked what the queen had. To whom it was answered by one of the ladies, ‘Whatsoever the queen’s grace hath here within, certain it is that a fool stands without.’ And so he departed without seeing the king.
Robert Fabyan
22
Two Letters
To the Countess of Richmond, my Mother: I thank you for the psalter, I will keep it safe. I am to have a different tutor now and my own falcon. I am learning to joust.
Henry of Richmond
When she received this letter, she sobbed violently for several minutes. ‘He tells me nothing,’ she wept, ‘he does not know me.’
Her husband read the letter, holding it close to his eyes and subjecting it to his careful scrutiny. Then he asked her what nine-year-old boy gave a full account of himself. ‘When I was nine it was as much as my tutor could do to get me to sign my name.’
He said all the old words to her, that her son was being well educated and taken care of. The Herberts would not waste the money they had spent on buying his wardship. ‘Look how neat his handwriting is,’ he said. ‘And he is to have his own falcon.’
‘He will love to joust,’ he added.
She allowed herself to be comforted. She tried not to think about all the things her son’s letters never told her: how tall was he, had the colour of his hair changed, what did he like best about his day?
Did he still wake sometimes in the dark unable to breathe and, if so, who held his hand?
There was no answer to these questions, and no point crying over them. Margaret passed her hand swiftly over her cheeks and eyes. ‘I will write back to him,’ she said.
And she did write back at once, with injunctions to take care when jousting, and to remember her in his prayers. But she felt as though she was writing into a void; she did not know if words could breach the distance between them. So her mood was not improved by writing, and it deteriorated further at the thought that she had to accompany her mother that day to Crowland Abbey.
Her mother, too, was in a querulous mood. She complained about the weather – it was a fine spring day but the turn of the season made her joints ache. There was the cost of repairing roads and fences after the winter floods, and she was sure she had heard mice in the wainscoting of her room. The soup was salty, the meat tough, Margaret’s shoulders were becoming quite hunched, she would never learn to carry herself like a lady. Also she mumbled when reading and spent too much time thinking about her son.
Not like you then, Margaret did not say.
She tried not to respond badly when her mother was in this mood. She knew her well enough to understand that something else lay beneath the aggravated tone. The set of her head and shoulders, the stiffness of her walk, all spoke of some other, hidden grievance.
Maybe it was the amount of paperwork spread on the table, for her mother had inherited a long-standing dispute over the reclaimed land of Goggisland Marsh. She was consulting Margaret rather than any of her other children over this dispute, partly because she lived nearby and partly because it had been inherited from Margaret’s father.
Margaret’s father had extended his boundary rights to the north-east of Maxey Castle, leaving a legacy of unrest and acrimony between the tenants of Deeping and the tenants of Crowland Abbey. An embankment had been breached by the people of Crowland, and this had caused the flooding of several acres of land. Stones marking the boundary had been pulled down; Margaret’s mother would have to employ several men to repair the damage. And more, perhaps, to keep guard over the boundary from now on. And she could not go ahead with either repairs or improvements until it was established where exactly that boundary was. The abbey claimed to own Goggisland Marsh, which cut across the boundary, in which case they should be responsible for its drainage and reclamation. So nothing could be done by either party, and the land remained subject to regular flooding, which affected Margaret’s mother’s right of way.
This, then, was the source of her grievance. Or not this alone, but the fact that all she had left from three marriages was a series of legal disputes and responsibilities. Documents were strewn in uncharacteristic disorder across the table.
But here her mother could find no fault in Margaret, whose paperwork was rigorous and meticulous. She took a certain pride in being consulted, preferred to her older half-brothers and even to the lawyers. Here, at least, she was indispensable to her mother.
More than an hour later she had extracted the relevant documents and was ready to do battle with the abbot.
They set off in her mother’s carriage into watery sunshine and the insistent calling of birds. But her mother’s voice drowned out all other sounds.
‘See how we have to take the longest way?’ she said.
The marshland was flooded as usual and the bridge inaccessible. And she would swear that more marker stones had been shifted. She would not put it past the monks themselves to have done it – nothing exceeded the avarice of monks. Had she not donated regularly and generously to the abbey? Only last year she and Margaret had been admitted to the confraternity, and this had been accompanied by a generous bequest. It would ruin her, this dispute; they were trying to ruin her, she said.
Margaret wondered what her role would be at this meeting; whether she would get to say anything at all.
The abbot welcomed them in a conciliatory way and listened carefully to her mother’s complaints. The marker stones had not gone, he said; they had merely been removed as a preparatory step towards drainage. But Margaret’s mother said they were not responsible for the drainage and instructed Margaret to show him the map.
But the abbot had other maps, showing a different boundary.
Margaret’s mother, the Dowager Duchess of Somerset, drew herself up to her not very impressive height. ‘Then we will go to the lawyers,’ she said.
The abbot pressed the tips of his fingers together. He had already consulted lawyers, he said mildly, and was convinced it would not be in her best interests to go to court.
Margaret assumed he meant that the courts were presided over by the king and their family was not in favour with King Edward. Her mother’s third husband had been posthumously attainted, after Towton, and many of his lands had reverted to the crown. But the next words the abbot said made her think again.
‘Certain facts may come to light regarding your late husband, the duke.’
Margaret’s mother turned to her and said, ‘Leave us for a moment. I wish to speak to the abbot.’
Margaret was startled, and wanted to protest. She was not a child any more but a woman of almost twenty-three. Her mother regularly called on her to help with legal problems. But the look on her mother’s face was terrible, while the abbot’s expression, of careful regret, was unchanged.
After a moment’s hesitation she left the room.
She sat initially on a bench in the hallway. Monks passed her as she sat; it would not do to be seen with her ear pressed to the door. But then a monk came out of a different doorway, leading to a small chapel.
He had not closed the door properly behind him.
Margaret waited for a moment, but there were no other signs of life inside the chapel. She got up and cautiously pushed the door.
It was a tiny chapel reserved, apparently, for private prayer. Possibly for the abbot’s personal use, since it adjoined his room. The walls were panelled with wood and, as Margaret had suspected, she could hear her mother’s voice through the panels, carping, insistent, then the abbot’s deep, regretful tones.
She knelt and lowered her head as though praying.
There was something about the manner of her father’s death; the understandable need for discretion. And her mother’s voice rose shrilly. ‘Call yourself a man of God!’ she said.
For reasons that she could not quite determine, Margaret’s heart was pounding. The pulse of it in her ears made it difficult to hear. And now the voices were lowered again.
After another moment she got up and returned to the bench. Just in time, for the door clicked open and her mother came out, looking distraught. The abbot was grave and thoughtful.
‘This is not the end of it,’ her mother said. ‘I will come back.’
The abbot said he hoped they would return; they were always welcome. ‘I trust you do not feel you have had a wasted journey,’ he said, and her mother made a small, explosive sound. He hoped they would forgive him for not accompanying them to their carriage, but he was expecting another visitor any time.
