The Tudor rose

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  “And people are really so credulous—”

  “It is amazing what they will believe. Even the Londoners are beginning to be hoaxed by it, judging by the glum looks I met. It seems that this Simnel is upstanding and fair-haired like your family. Naturally, my enemies would have chosen such a lad!”

  “The impertinence!” sympathized Elizabeth. “What will you do, Henry?”

  “There is only one intelligent thing to do at the moment. Have the real Warwick brought here from the Tower, riding with an imposing retinue through the streets of London so that everyone may see him. And then, when the fraud is exposed, deal with his supporters who are crazy enough to try a landing in England.”

  Elizabeth looked at him with half-grudging admiration. Without ever trying to be spectacular, he was ever one to apply the simplest and most sensible remedies; and if for one moment she had disbelieved his assurances and suspected him of treating her cousin as King Richard had treated her brothers, she was ashamed.

  As if almost guessing her thoughts, Henry turned back to her with a twisted kind of smile. “And I shall want you to meet him here and welcome him publicly. You, who have lived with him off and on since childhood,” he said. “My subjects seem to find it difficult to believe that I do not murder people like my glamorous predecessor; but whatever you do or say they seem to believe in.”

  At Stoke, near Nottingham, Henry defeated his Yorkist enemies and crushed the Simnel plot. Using only the vanguard of his army, he outmanoeuvred them so that all their courage could not save them. The Earl of Lincoln, Lord Lovell, the Earl of Kildare and Martin Swart, who commanded their German mercenaries, all perished that day—only Dorset, who was preparing the way for them in London, persuaded the King of his innocence and escaped with a short imprisonment in the Tower. And Henry rode home more firmly established on the throne than ever; and almost casually, in his train, he brought Simon, the tutor-priest, and Lambert Simnel.

  “What will you do with them?” asked Elizabeth, trying to divert attention from betrothed Cicely's uncontrollable tears for the twice-wasted gallantry of Francis Lovell.

  Henry was a temperate eater, but after so much activity was enjoying his homecoming meal as much as any of them. “The priest will have to be imprisoned somewhere, of course,” he said negligently, breaking a manchet of bread.

  “Not hanged?” ejaculated Treasurer Empson, with disappointment.

  “And Simnel himself?” asked Stanley.

  Selecting a succulent chicken bone, Henry turned to smile at his wife. “You had better have him in your kitchens, my dear,” he suggested. “Being a baker's son, he should be quite at home among the ovens.”

  There were men at the table who remembered his predecessor's summary way with traitors. They sat, knives suspended, and stared; and Cicely so far forgot herself as to burst into tears. “To think that men like Lincoln and Lovell should be k-killed,” she stammered, “and this lout Simnel, who s-started it all, go free!”

  Being in a good humour, Henry could afford to smile at another display of Plantagenet emotion. “Take heart, dear sister,” he teased, his sharp eyes glancing down the long table to where she sat. “Lord Welles may not have so fine a leg, but his coffers are well filled, I assure you.”

  “I beg you to consider, Sir,” expostulated Stanley, bringing him back to the matter in hand, “that Simnel had the effrontery to have himself proclaimed King.”

  “Then what good would it do, my dear Stanley, to make a martyr of him as well?” countered Henry pleasantly. “At the moment the Londoners must be feeling very foolish, and in that mood I am hoping they may lend me some more money.”

  “How right his Grace is!” laughed handsome Jasper Tudor, surveying his nephew with affectionate pride. “The sooner all this talk of pretenders is forgotten the better. There is something very apt about the turnspit idea, although we might all prefer to see Lambert Simnel hanged. And ridicule, I do assure you, is often a surer and swifter weapon than the sword.” And because what the experienced, grey-haired Welsh chieftain said was usually worth listening to, no one discussed the matter at table any more.

  But Elizabeth was more interested in the strange nature of her husband than in the fate of Simnel. “Do you really mean to make a turnspit of him?” she asked that night, when Henry came to her room.

  “It should give the servants something to laugh at,” he yawned, having none of the love for the common people that she had.

  “And the real Warwick?”

  “He can go back to the Tower to-morrow.”

  “And it really does not anger you that this baker's son dared to impersonate him?” she persisted, trying to understand him.

  “As I told you before, it was not his idea,” said Henry. “Probably he has no idea beyond food, and I have dealt with those who had— quite successfully. Really, Madam, I do not see why you should concern yourself with such carrion.”

  It exasperated her that he should call her Madam in the privacy of her own bedroom, and that he could neither love nor hate. Nor let anyone but his mother—and possibly that Morton man—look inside his thoughts. He would be called merciful over this rebellion business, she supposed; yet to be young and unprotected from ridicule was a cruel fate. Probably Henry would not show vengeance lest men guessed that he was afraid—that he knew the usurper's growing fear of anyone who had a better claim to the throne than himself, or who could make men believe they had. But whatever the cause, it was his uncaring mercy which was so much more terrible than rougher men's vengeance. Elizabeth knew herself to be no coward, and yet she was afraid of him. She had often stood up to Richard Plantagenet, with all his ruthlessness; but knew no way of defending herself against the impersonal civility of Henry Tudor. Gradually, as the years passed, her resistance, her very personality, would be worn down. She, whose menfolk had had passion about them, wanted no man who yawned or called her Madam in her bed—and longed to have the right to tell him so. “I am his broodmare, his chattel,” she thought bitterly, submitting to his silent, businesslike embrace. “I who, by every Christian right, am Queen of England!”

  In her chapel next morning Elizabeth confessed herself an undutiful wife and prayed anew for that humility which she had taken as her motto but which, alas, came so hardly to her. And later in the day she went to console her mother, who was wildly aggrieved because the King had cut down the allowance he made her. “The crown coffers were so emptied by war when he came,” Elizabeth tried to explain loyally, “and the Commons would grant him only the half of what he asked—and then only as a loan.”

  “But it is so unjust when I did everything I could to help him against Richard!” complained her mother.

  “And have of late been doing everything secretly to harm him!” flashed out Elizabeth, angered because her mother was still pretending innocence. “I do not think anyone can accuse Henry of being unjust,” she added more gently, because the Queen Dowager had begun to cry. “It is probably we who have misjudged him by blaming him for delaying my coronation, when all the time he had this treacherous plot on his mind.”

  “That an ungrateful daughter of mine should speak to me so!” wailed the Woodville woman. “I wish this wretched Simnel were dead!”

  “I daresay he does, too, by now!” said Elizabeth, returning to her apartments before her patience gave out.

  And even there nobody seemed to be able to talk of anything else. “None of us has ever heard of a pretender being spared before,” one of the Countess of Richmond's women was saying. “Anyone but our merciful Welsh King would have had him hanged, drawn and quartered by now!” And as Elizabeth passed close to two of her younger women, who had their heads too close together to notice her, she overheard one of them saying excitedly, “I peeped through one of the kitchen windows and saw him. They'd put a saucepan on his head and made him hold a poker for a sceptre. The poker was red hot, my dear…The head cook was letting people in from the street at a groat a time to look at him. You should have heard the other scul
lions hoot with laughter…”

  Elizabeth passed on without even reproving their lapse from duty, but the painful picture stayed with her. It had sounded so like the guardroom torturing of the Christ. And this Simnel was of about the age her brothers would have been had they lived. It had even been supposed at first that he impersonated one of them, not Warwick. That thought and an uneasy sense of responsibility for what was happening among her own servants worried her all day. “I am going down to the kitchens,” she announced towards evening, taking only two ladies with her. “And I will go in alone,” she added, making them wait in the stone corridor outside.

  In the main kitchen preparations were going on for supper, so that the cooks were all occupied, and at first the turnspits and scullions were too busy carrying crocks back and forth between the well and the great open fires to notice her. When the kitchen clerk came bowing and scraping from his little room she waved him aside. “Tell them to go on with their work,” she said. “Which is the lad they call Lambert Simnel?”

  A lonely figure bending before an open fire at the far end of the great vaulted room was pointed out to her. Clumsily and painstakingly, as though unaccustomed to the work, the unfortunate lad was turning a roasting pig before the blaze. His ostracism was patent and complete. “I will talk to him alone,” said the Queen of England, lifting her skirts fastidiously to cross the brick floor.

  Hearing someone approach, Simnel swung round defensively, lifting an arm to protect his head from the usual blow. His eyes were too reddened and bleared from the smoke to see her very clearly at first. Even his well-built body had been rendered ridiculous by giving him a kitchen smock which was far too small for him.

  “Are you the tradesman's son who pretended to be an earl?” she asked.

  “Yes, Madam,” he answered, obviously wondering who she was.

  “And now you are a turnspit?”

  “By the King's grace,” he said almost cheerfully.

  “His Grace treated you better than you deserve.”

  “'Tis better than hanging. I did not want to die.” The lad rubbed a hand across his aching eyes, leaving his face yet more smeared with soot. “I had no wish to harm him, Madam,” he said, with uncowed independence. “I but did as my tutor bade me. I see now that it was wrong.”

  “It was very foolish,” said Elizabeth, surveying his large hands and grease-smeared jerkin, and noticing for the first time the ugly bruise beneath his matted hair. In spite of the roaring fire, such rough clouts as he had hung damply to the strong muscles of his back, so she guessed that dishwater had recently been thrown over him.

  “So you are content to work in the kitchens?” she said, with an effort to control her loathing of the way he stank.

  “Grateful, my lady. Not content.”

  In spite of everything, there was a manliness about him, and apart from his broad country accent he spoke well.

  “Are they—very unkind to you?” she asked gently.

  It was then that he saw her for the first time as someone worshipfully beautiful. “I can fend for myself,” he muttered awkwardly.

  Because of the accessible humanity of her father, Elizabeth had had considerable contact with the cheerful courage of the people. Here, she thought, was the patient, unglamorous kind which had won fame for England at Crecy and Agincourt. And the thought passed through her mind, too, that probably Henry—who had passed this much-talked-of merciful sentence—would not even have recognized it. “What would content you?” she found herself asking, hating to waste a quality which she rated highly.

  Warned by the smell of burning meat, Simnel gave the spit another turn. “I suppose they'd never let me go back home to Oxfordshire?” he said wistfully.

  “I am afraid not,” smiled Elizabeth.

  He sighed and pushed back his grease-bespattered hair. For all her grand clothes, here was a lady one could tell things to, even if one hadn't much gift that way. “It's the open country—” he began diffidently. “Sometimes the other servants go out into the fields beyond the City walls—by the way these townsmen brag when they come back, it's mostly to tumble a wench, I reckon—saving your presence! But for me it'd be the space and the sky. And the clean smell of it. I hate this filth more than their fists.” For the first time the tears welled in his eyes. “If I could only get outside these kitchens and hear the birds sing again—”

  Elizabeth saw that his face beneath the dirt was fresh and ruddy, his mouth kind. “Do you love birds, then?” she asked.

  “Yes, Madam. There's scarcely a call I can't imitate.” His eagerness suddenly cooled to wonder. Perhaps he had become aware of the hushed servants staring from a respectful distance. “But why should the likes of you care? Who are you, Milady?”

  “A woman who once had young brothers whom she loved,” answered Elizabeth, her voice low and warm as it always was when she spoke of them. And as she spoke an idea was born. “Do you know anything about falcons, Simnel?”

  “Well, not rightly,” he admitted. “But back home I sometimes helped one of the Earl of Oxford's falconers clean their mews and in return he let me go along to watch them being trained. Once he let me carry his perch and unhood them. Quick to learn, he said I'd be. Their wings were so strong, and swift as lightning as they mounted!”

  The lad's eagerness shone through his awkwardness and filth so that the Queen cared what became of him, and was angry with herself for caring. In her heart she knew that she had really come to this abominable place, as she would have gone down to hell, secretly hoping to see someone who faintly resembled Dickon. And this youth did not resemble him at all. Others might say easily, “He is upstanding and blue-eyed and fair"—but where was the slenderness, the grace? The gaiety and fine-bred intuition? She had ceased to listen to the turnspit's ramblings. “Do you know who this is?” she asked harshly, jerking from beneath the bosom of her gown an exquisitely painted miniature that hung about her neck upon a slender gold chain.

  Startled by her seeming irrelevance, Simnel leaned forward to look at it. “I never saw the young gentleman before in my life,” he affirmed.

  “It is my brother, Richard Duke of York,” she said, almost snatching it back from his gaze. “A pity, perhaps, that you did not see it before.” Because this boy from Oxfordshire had convinced her that he was somebody with a decent personality she wanted to show him the enormity of the thing which he had done. “You are as much like a Plantagenet as that burnt pig there is like the sun!” she cried, raging at him out of the constant ache in her heart.

  It was clear that he thought she had come to mock at him too, and by the stricken look on his face she saw that because of some worship that had grown in him the sudden disillusionment hurt more than all the cruelties he had endured. “But I will see what the King says about having you trained for falconry,” she promised before she turned to leave him; and by the bemused way in which he stared and by the obsequiousness with which all the other servants made way for her she supposed that he must have guessed then who she was.

  Whether it was the swaying of her emotions between pity and indignation or merely the smell of cooking, Elizabeth did not know; but back in her rooms she felt herself shaking with a return of the ague which she had supposed to be cured. Very sensibly she sat still for a while, quietly, in an anteroom by a favourite window which overlooked the peace of her herb garden, consciously trying to control the trembling of her hands as they lay idle in her lap. And as she sat there she wondered how she could have been so foolish as to have disturbed herself over a very ordinary young man caught in a clumsy fraud. He had nothing to do with the rich eventfulness of a life such as hers.

  And all unexpectedly in the middle of such rare peace the great moment of her life was upon her.

  The door of the anteroom was thrown wide for the King and he was standing there before her telling her that he had arranged Sunday, the twenty-fifth of November, for the date of her coronation.

  The little room seemed suddenly to be full of important
people with whom he had been arranging it, and judging by the pleased expressions of their faces Elizabeth suspected that they had used their utmost efforts to push him to this decision at last. Her good friend Stanley was positively beaming at her; Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, kissed both her hands; and even Bishop Morton's dark, secret face showed relief and satisfaction. “Henry and I have been two years married and I have given him a son, yet it takes a Yorkist conspiracy to convince him that it will be safer not to slight me any longer,” thought Elizabeth involuntarily. She rose from her chair and made a deep obeisance to him and thanked him, trying to keep all signs of ague from her limbs and all trace of irony from her voice. Yet seeing the sheaves of notes in his secretary's hand and having to listen to the almost tediously careful arrangements which had been made, she came to the conclusion that Henry had intended to keep his promise, anyway.

  “I have arranged for a procession through London, and my mother and I will watch your triumph from some window,” he told her later, when at last they were alone. “You have waited with great patience, Elizabeth, and I want this to be your day.”

  Elizabeth looked up at him with a swift new hope of gladness in her heart. When he spoke appreciatively like that it was so easy to be beguiled into believing that he loved her; not merely that he was a just man, repaying her for producing an heir. “I shall love to ride through London, and be Queen,” she said simply. “And I will try to make you proud of me.”

  “It should not be difficult, with your extraordinary beauty,” he said, consulting his papers when most men would have been looking at her face. “And with the lavish sum of money I have set aside to spend on the pageantry.”

  It was unfortunate to mention money at such a moment, even though his early life may have taught him to count every florin. His wife's grateful radiance faded visibly, and as she stood watching him her thoughts strayed to her mother, that supreme opportunist who had always man aged to advance some member of other of her grasping family upon each special occasion of her life—whether it were childbirth or crowning or merely her husband's latest infidelity. “Now is the moment to ask Henry for anything you want, Bess,” she would almost certainly have whispered, had she been there.