The Tudor rose

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  NEXT DAY IT WAS not to her confessor but to Margaret of Richmond that Elizabeth went; for if anyone could judge of the provocation she had had or help her to understand Henry, surely it was his mother. “I sent him away. I denied my body to my own husband. Were I a mercer's wife and not a Queen I suppose he might have beaten me,” she confessed bluntly, standing by the long oriel window in the beautiful austerity of Margaret's private room.

  “But since you are a Queen—” submitted Margaret, bending over an exquisite altar cloth she was embroidering so as to hide a smile.

  “It does not make my lack of wifely duty any the less.”

  “It is not so heinous, my dear. Even if Henry were a mercer I cannot imagine him being impatient about—whatever you did.”

  “That is just it,” sighed Elizabeth, picking savagely at the silk cord of a crimson cushion lying on the window-seat. “Sometimes I wish he would beat me. Beat me or desire me. Or—or show some kind of emotion! I don't imagine he lacked ardour with that Herbert girl!”

  “But this was a political marriage for the binding up of England's wounds—loving you both, I had hoped that it would turn out to be a love-match too.” Margaret thrust her needle into the centre of a gold lily and let her lovely hands lie idly in her lap, giving the matter her full attention. “Henry does not show his feelings, I know. Which is strange, considering the way his father loved me. And how his grandfather, Owen Tudor, must have swept King Henry the Fifth's little French widow Katherine off her feet—he being only her Master of Horse and she a Valois! So it would seem, perhaps because of the need of caution during his exile, that my son is scarcely a typical Tudor.” After sitting for a while with a reminiscent smile illuminating the beauty of her face Margaret leaned forward and caught at her daughter-in-law's hand as she went pacing turbulently across the room. “But this I will tell you, child. Henry, of course, has said nothing of this matter to me; but I can see that he is hurt.”

  “I am truly sorry,” said Elizabeth, looking down at her with deep affection. “If only because he is your son.”

  “You two are so different in nature that I think he finds you difficult to understand,” sighed Margaret.

  Elizabeth's blue eyes widened with surprise. “I, difficult! When even Cicely says I blurt out all I think?”

  “And so embarrass him, perhaps. I wager, Bess, that he does not always understand how he offends.”

  “I will try to make amends,” promised Elizabeth, without enthusiasm.

  Margaret let go her hand to jerk forward a stool, and for a while they sat in silence, informally, each thinking in her different way about Henry. “Perhaps if you two were alone more often—if it were he who helped you to make all your decisions…” began the older woman thoughtfully. “If I were to go away for a while and stay in one of my manors or one of Stanley's, as I did before—”

  But that was the last thing Elizabeth wanted. “Oh no!” she cried, laying a beseeching hand on Margaret's knee. “You have been so good to me. I know that I frequently see my own mother, but somehow she…” It was not easy to explain how the vagaries of Elizabeth Woodville could in time wear out the most patient of love, so her daughter did not finish the sentence. “I would not for worlds drive you away, Madam!”

  “But you would not be driving me away,” Margaret assured her pleasantly.

  Elizabeth stared at her, remembering how Cicely and Ann always contended that she stole the place of their mother. “Do you mean—that you want to go?”

  “It means a great deal to me seeing my son every day, after all those empty years.”

  “Of course. And your husband,” prompted Elizabeth.

  It was Margaret who now rose and wandered to the window. “Stanley is goodness itself to me, but it is a long time since we lived as husband and wife,” she said, breaking a reserve which was as strong in her as in her son, although far less obvious. “You see—since you and I are exchanging confidences—I took a vow of chastity.”

  “You took a vow…” Elizabeth's gaze followed the gracious figure with the still youthful lines and prematurely greying hair. “Then no wonder you were not so shocked at me!”

  “Oh, with my husband's consent, of course,” explained Margaret lightly. “And not through any lack of dutiful feeling. It was at the time of the Buckingham rebellion. I felt it was not fair to endanger him because he let me help my son by a former marriage. And had it not been proven that we were no longer bedfellows King Richard might have found it difficult to believe milord Stanley ignorant of the plot.”

  “I don't think Richard ever trusted him, anyhow,” said Elizabeth slowly. “But your absence may have saved his life.” For a while the two women fell silent again until Elizabeth asked in bewilderment, “Do you really not like Court life, Madam? You, who so adorn it?”

  “Were it not for Henry—”

  “But all this is really more yours than his. You stood aside for him.”

  “England is not yet ready for a Queen regnant,” said Margaret thoughtfully. “And I would sooner live quietly in a convent.”

  “You would make a lovely abbess! Looking like a stained-glass saint yet understanding the silliest peccadillo of your least-important novice!”

  “That is the nicest tribute I have ever had,” laughed Margaret Beaufort, turning to kiss her daughter-in-law. “But I have no vocation. Or perhaps I have been too much in love with life. I meant only that I often yearn for the peace and leisure to pursue those things which are of most value and which are so crowded out at Court. Such things as the fostering of learning and the contemplative life of the spirit.”

  “But you are so devout. And look how much you are doing in building colleges up at Oxford and Cambridge! And how you encourage Master Caxton with the printing of more and more books.”

  “I do not want the chance to learn to be locked only in our hands, but given freely to the people.”

  “Will it make them any easier to govern, do you suppose?” smiled the practical Queen.

  “Perhaps not,” agreed Margaret. “But they have a right to it. I am so proud that Henry is improving the conditions of the ordinary people.”

  “Only, I suspect, because it cuts down the power of the barons and makes him feel safer,” smiled his wife. “Will he succeed as a ruler, do you suppose, Madam?”

  “I am sure that he will,” said the Countess. “You see, this Tudor dynasty of ours is starting with a new formula. Because Henry cannot rely upon having been born a King he is forced to make up for it by working harder than any of his subjects. Both Wales and England should benefit by this; and I, and many others who have striven to bring about this union of the Lancastrian and Yorkist branches, believe that it will give our country time to lick her wounds and live graciously. This was the dream for which poor Buckingham died. So I beseech you, dear Bess—even though you may derive no personal happiness from your marriage—to continue to see in it something more than the emotional satisfaction or dissatisfaction of two people. And, of your abounding generosity, I pray you pour into it all the patience and intelligence necessary to make at least a smooth outward symbol to the world.”

  When Elizabeth returned to her own apartments, full of good resolutions, she was greeted by gales of laughter and found to her relief that Henry had met her halfway in the matter of reconciliation. Although he may not have understood in the least how he had offended, he had sent her a peace-offering. A human peace-offering already surrounded approvingly by her laughing sisters. “In the pursuance of weightier matters I forgot that a Queen should have a jester,” he had written in the letter which was handed to her. “And the bearer of this, although short of stature, has a large store of wit. Moreover, his Welsh heart is full of the music which you love.”

  Elizabeth accepted the gift, and the lack of rancour which it stood for, with alacrity. Already her rooms seemed full of laughter, and looking upon the small, misshapen fool she read a wealth of wisdom in his sad, simian eyes. “What shall we call you?” she asked,
when he had sung to them of his native hills, plucking a wild sweetness from the strings of his beribboned lute.

  “What but the Queen's fool, Madam?” he asked, squatting before her like a devoted dog.

  “But he must have a real name!” insisted young Katherine, more delighted with his drollery than with his music. And the little man looked at his Queen with his big head on one side and said with all the liberty of inconsequent jesting, “Many's the lover sends a gift to his mistress to patch up a quarrel; and I, who wish you well, would be that patch.”

  “Then Patch you shall be,” agreed Elizabeth, with a smile which sealed the beginning of a queer, enduring friendship.

  And so Patch came into her household, teasing her ladies without malice and making absurd quips by day, and soothing her with his singing when she sat alone in the evenings waiting for her husband. And because a woman's senses may be starved and her body yet prove fertile, Elizabeth was soon able to promise Henry as her peace offering a second child.

  “Let us hope it will be another boy,” he said, kissing her gently.

  “Yes, it would be greater charity to produce a son,” she had agreed, “for at least they have the ruling of their lives.” And he had looked at her uncertainly. She was always kind and dutiful these days, but often of late she had made odd, disconcerting remarks like that, and he had not known how to take them. But because, for all his studiousness, one of the few subjects he had not bothered to learn about was a woman's mind, Elizabeth was beginning to find that she could say them with impunity.

  There was the same tedious etiquette of the lying-in chamber to be gone through, but this time Henry wanted her to stay at Westminster in order to appease the Londoners, who, it seemed, resented his heir having been born at Winchester. And whatever they wished for, this time the child was a girl. They called her Margaret after the King's mother, and upon this eldest daughter of his Henry came as near to lavishing affection as was in his nature.

  These were the domestic years, with a growing nursery and a round of public royal duties.

  There was the grand ceremony of the festival of the Order of the Garter to attend at Windsor, and all the excitement of her sisters' marriages, and—grandest of all perhaps—the marriage of her Aunt Katherine, Buckingham's widow, to the King's uncle Jasper. And it saddened Elizabeth a little when Henry proposed, for political reasons, to push Tom Stafford, who had loved her, into a union with the girl-heiress from Brittany. For everyone that summer seemed to be a season of marrying and giving in marriage. “Though for me,” sighed Elizabeth, who so loved the sunshine and the countryside, “everything seems to happen in the winter! My marriage, my coronation—and even my babies.”

  But at last, in the midst of all the fullness of her life, there came a summer when her June baby was born at Greenwich. Born much more informally, in a room with windows open to the riverside gardens that she loved. He was lusty, good-tempered and a red-head, and from the moment old Mattie put him into her arms Elizabeth loved him with a delight which made all the disappointments of her marriage bearable.

  “He might be one of us!” exclaimed Cicely, now a mother herself. “He does not look at all like the King.”

  “He is the adorable thing I have always wanted,” said Elizabeth, holding him close. “You know, Cicely, I was ashamed to say so of so dear a son, but when they first showed me Arthur I was disappointed because he did not look at all like Ned or Dickon.”

  “This one may turn out a little like tall, handsome Ned,” decided Cicely, reviewing the crumpled faced mite consideringly, “but he will be much bigger than either of them. Look at those limbs of his, Bess! Is it decided yet what they are going to christen him?”

  “He is to be called after his father.”

  “How confusing!”

  “It always is, but we can call him Harry,” said his mother. “It is a jollier, more dashing sort of name, and somehow I think he looks like a Harry.”

  And because he was a second son Elizabeth was allowed to see more of him. While Arthur, the studious, was with his tutor, Bernard Andreas, at Croydon being taught all those grave things which were considered necessary for his future kingship, little Harry romped boisterously at Richmond or Greenwich and gurgled with laughter at the antics of Patch, who adored him—or, as he grew older, stood at his mother's knee listening attentively while she played upon her harp or her virginals. For even in the midst of his most exciting games the sound of music lured him, and as he grew older this formed a fresh bond between them. In the years to come Elizabeth was to remember with nostalgia all those care-free, homely hours. Looking back upon the days of Harry's childhood, it seemed to her, quite absurdly, that the sun must always have been shining then at Greenwich. And that, like most sunny days, they passed all too quickly.

  For red-headed Harry was still only a toddler when Elizabeth first overheard someone talking about another mysterious young man in Ireland. Two clerks were loitering with their heads together outside the council-chamber as she passed, and when she enquired gaily of whom they were speaking so earnestly they bowed low and turned red about the ears and said they didn't know his name, but they believed he was someone the Earl of Kildare had befriended. He'd been mentioned, it seemed, in the despatches which had just arrived from Dublin.

  And when Elizabeth mentioned the matter later among her women they all fell silent. But their very silence piqued her curiosity so that the same evening she questioned the King.

  “Who is this young man in Ireland who was specially mentioned in the Deputy's despatches?” she asked, looking up from the score of a madrigal which she was striving to compose.

  “Only another pretender,” answered Henry carelessly, without raising his eyes from his book.

  “And whom,” asked Elizabeth, inking in a gay little semiquaver, “does he pretend to be this time?”

  Henry looked up then, but it was a moment or two before he spoke, rather as if he were debating within himself whether to tell her or not. But the matter seemed so negligible, so patently absurd, that he told her the truth so far as he had been bothered to corroborate it. “People are always inventing fresh absurdities,” he said, in that clear, rather expressionless voice of his. “They say this one is your young brother—Richard, Duke of York.”

  The half-finished score slipped from her lap and Elizabeth's heart seemed to miss a beat. “Dickon!” she breathed, almost inaudibly. And for a moment or two, instead of her solemn husband and the excellent furnishings of his room, she saw with the eyes of memory a slender young boy in black smiling back at her from the austere arch of the Abbot of Westminster's doorway.

  “It is the sort of story these crazy Irish would think of!” said Henry irritably, turning over a page.

  “Of course it is impossible,” agreed Elizabeth, almost instantly, “when everybody knows that both my brothers were—murdered in the Tower.”

  TIN BUCKLES ON THE Queen of England's shoes! Oh no, Madam, I protest! Let me order silver ones,” exclaimed Jane Stafford, holding out the worn footgear destined for repair.

  “Four pence for hemming up the bottom of my old blue kirtle. Eight pence each for the bargemen's wages. Ten shillings to the carpenter for making that music chest,” muttered Elizabeth, without looking up from the accounts before her. “But, my dear Jane, I cannot afford silver every day.”

  Tom Stafford's sister regarded the diligently bent head of her mistress with passionate devotion. “But the King can!” she ventured boldly.

  Elizabeth laid down her quill and looked at her reprovingly.

  “Will you not ask him, Madam?”

  “Since you must know, Jane, I have just asked him for some more money. For my mother. And his Grace has increased her allowance almost to what it was before the Lambert Simnel affair. She is failing sadly and needs it.”

  Obediently, Jane laid the little shoes by ready for one of the pages to give to the shoemaker, which reminded her darting mind of some gossip she had heard outside a shop in Eastcheap. �
��They say the London merchants have made his Grace another loan,” she said, taking advantage of the liberty which was often allowed to her loving, garrulous tongue.

  “Because, to their amazement, he was punctilious about paying off the first one on the day it fell due.” Elizabeth sat there smiling to herself and marvelling that some of the older men hadn't had apoplexy, considering their former less satisfactory dealings with a line of persuasive but impecunious, Plantagenets. “His Grace has even found better markets for their produce among the towns which he knows abroad. Our London merchants are beginning to find that it pays them very well to lend money to the King; and personally I suspect that he is a rather better business man than any of them.”

  “Everyone says he is growing rich,” agreed Jane eagerly. “Which is all the more reason why—”

  “It is no reason why he should keep all my relatives,” snapped Elizabeth, hating the Woodville reputation for cupidity and determined to live it down.

  Jane was on her knees in a moment, all repentance and concern. “Oh, Madam, we of your household know only too well where your money goes—always to your mother and sisters. Master Andreas, his little Grace's tutor, was saying only the other day that the love you bear your family is incredible. Fifty pounds each for the Princesses' private expenses,” she ticked off on her fingers, “all manner of pretty gifts and an annuity to their husbands—”

  “You run on about things you do not understand,” reproved Elizabeth proudly, closing her account-book. “It is true that owing to the civil wars and my father's death my sisters have neither dowries nor suitable marriages with foreign princes. But they are still Plantagenets, and surely you do not expect us to be beholden to their husbands for the very food they eat?”

  Jane bent her head very humbly to kiss the Queen's hand. “No, Madam,” she murmured, “but it grieves me that your lovely generosity should leave you so poor.” And because Elizabeth had a fellow feeling for any woman who had the courage to pursue her own argument, she lifted the girl's troubled face and kissed her. “God knows, I am not poor in love!” she said softly. Then, rising, she went to a side-table which, as usual, she had found strewn with an assortment of humble gifts. “Only look at the things my people have sent me this morning!” she cried gaily. “A fat chicken from some Surrey farmer, baskets of cherries brought in on their early-morning market carts— even vegetables from cottage gardens. And always the first of their crop, bless them! And posies,” she added, picking up a tight little bunch of pansies and burying her face in their country fragrance. “Precious posies from the children!”