And of course she had been reared in an unusual ménage: the Duke of Gloucester had lived for much of his married life in only one of his castles, together with his entire family - wife, son, mother-in-law, and illegitimate children. Huntingdon supposed that the common practice of offspring living separately from their parents must be as odd to her as her upbringing was to him. She was looking down at her platter, pushing a slice of bread nervously through the gravy, trying to say something else.
‘She might be … If I were to marry you,’ she said at last, very low, hardly audible above the chatter of the rest of the table, ‘she would be my daughter too.’
Before January was out Elizabeth Herbert arrived in London, a pretty child who had inherited her Woodville mother’s gilt-fair hair. When Katherine first called on her she was also a tired and frightened child, uprooted from her secluded Border valley at a few days’ notice and transported to the greatest and busiest city in the land. She could not have gone more directly to Katherine’s heart. What the elder girl had experienced so recently herself was to be especially pitied in the younger. And she set to work to put Elizabeth, who was at first bewildered by her attentions, at her ease in these new surroundings. No one had thought to let Huntingdon’s daughter know that he was thinking of marrying Dame Katherine Plantagenet, so she tended to shy away from this unaccustomed kindness and affection. It was to win her over that Katherine confided to her before anyone else the decision she had reached, not realising until the statement was made that she had actually decided.
Richard and Anne were overjoyed, and among the pressing business of his first Parliament the King made the time to draw up a covenant ensuring a generous portion for the Countess of Huntingdon.
Anne hardly saw Richard, who was working harder than ever to push as much as possible of his reforming legislation through Parliament before the end of the session. He was straining every nerve in the process, as if everything must be accomplished at one stroke, as if he had no time to take things at an easier pace. Once she ventured to ask him what the hurry was, and his frown deepened before he answered simply that there was so much to be done. What he had been able to do for the citizens of York in a small way, he was attempting to spread over the whole country by parliamentary act.
More unexpectedly he achieved another of his objects, only days after the members of lords and commons had dispersed. Elizabeth Woodville, snug in sanctuary in Westminster Abbey with her daughters since Richard had turned the tables on her the previous summer, capitulated. In return for the King’s promise that he would maintain and care for his nieces, and a bare competency for herself, she gave up the five former princesses into his keeping, a gesture of trust which London found difficult to believe. It was no secret that bad blood had existed between King Edward’s widow and youngest brother for many years, and during his coup d’etat two of the very few heads to fall had been those of her own brother and second son by her first marriage, Rivers and Grey. And what of her two bastard boys by Edward in their Tower lodgings? There was never a shortage of rumour-spreaders in London, whether from malice or idleness.
But it was not only to the scandal-mongers that Elizabeth’s surrender was a mystery. Even in royal circles it was not known how the King had brought about such a change of heart. On the surface he had done nothing; neither blackmail, bribes nor threats had been used. It was suspected that the crux of the matter must lie with the nephews that Richard had supplanted. But they had not been mentioned officially for months. Aware that the King was not entirely easy in his conscience about the way he had assumed power, his friends did not speak of them in his presence. It was not a subject on which Anne herself felt safe to approach her husband, but she took comfort from the fact that Robert Brakenbury, Constable of the Tower and a friend from their Yorkshire days, still frequented their intimate gatherings with no sign of uneasiness. The boys were directly in his charge. and he was surely too honest a man to have connived at any foul play and continued to brazen it out at court. She thought of questioning him, but that would have been going behind Richard’s back.
At length, on the day when in a public ceremony the King swore to abide by the terms set forth in his declaration concerning Elizabeth and her daughters, she resolved to speak. As usual he was late to bed, but she stayed awake until he came. It was extremely seldom that he retired to his own chamber and did not sleep with his wife for the few hours he allowed himself to rest. After some remark about the ceremony it was easy to ask where Elizabeth and Edward’s five daughters would be living after they left sanctuary.
‘Here in the palace, I expect,’ Richard answered readily enough, ‘if their mother is agreeable. We shall have left London by the time they take up residence, but when we return they will, with your permission, be attached to your household. Later, perhaps, Sheriff Hutton, for the younger ones at any rate.’
‘And will their brothers join them?’
He looked up warily, but after a moment he said, ‘In Yorkshire, maybe. Not at Westminster.’ She knew by his defensiveness that she was on dangerous ground, but she must go on.
‘I’m sure they would be glad to mix with other children again. They must have been lonely, these past months.’
‘They have been given every consideration,’ Richard said sharply.
‘Of course. But they are only boys. And there cannot be much space for sports and recreation … in the Tower.’ Now he stood up from where he was sitting on the bed and faced her - at bay, she thought.
‘Are you implying that I have not done my duty by my nephews?’
‘No, dear heart, how could I doubt that?’ She held out a hand to him, placatingly, but he drew away.
‘Then why the inquisition. Anne?’
Subtlety of speech had never been her strong point, and she abandoned it. ‘So little has been heard of them since … since you became King. I believe that some fear all is not well with them.’
‘And do you fear it too?’
‘I don’t know. But I do know that if harm has, or did, come to them it would not be through you.’
‘No, not through me,’ Richard agreed emphatically, and fell silent. Then he said coldly, ‘And if ... harm, as you put it, had come to these boys who have been in my care, and in my power, for the past nine months, do you believe that their mother would therefore have consented to place her daughters also in my sole care and power?’ It was the question which all London was asking vainly, which all England and perhaps all Europe would soon be seeking fruitlessly to answer. Anne could only shake her head wordlessly, and then wait for so long that she wondered if the question would remain rhetorical.
At length he said, with apparent inconsequence, ‘Henry Tydder has sworn a sacred oath to take Elizabeth Plantagenet to wife -’
‘- to which the Queen - Dame Elizabeth I mean - has agreed.’
‘She had. Now she has thought better of it. Hence her consent to place her daughters at my disposal instead of that of the Tydder.’
‘But why?’
Richard laughed bitterly. ‘Isn’t it obvious? Dame Elizabeth was persuaded that her sons were dead. She knows now that they are not.’
He began to pace the room, while Anne tried to fit together the pieces of the conundrum. What struck most forcibly to her mother’s heart was the cruelty of the deception practised on the ex-queen. A pang of the anguish which she must surely have felt on receiving such terrible tidings touched Anne, and she murmured. ‘She must have been overwhelmed with joy when she found the tale was untrue.’
‘No more than a chess-queen is overwhelmed on finding that two pawns she thought lost to her game are still on the board and not far from being crowned.’ He saw how he had shocked his wife, and said less cynically, ‘She is not a woman of sentiment, Anne. Ambition is her ruling spirit, still, although all may seem lost. I know that, and have made her no concessions. Dame Elizabeth has called a truce, but it is an armed truce.’
‘And her sons?’
His face closed
again. ‘That is my concern,’ he said shortly, and went purposefully to trim a smoky candle. At last he came back to sit beside her.
‘You will of course speak to no one of this, Anne?’
No, she would speak to no one - as he would not have spoken to her if she had not forced it from him. He kissed the palms of her hands, carefully, while she strove to suppress her hurt that it took so much to wring a confidence out of him. Then as her husband’s arms closed round her another thought arose: how little was her isolation beside that of the two solitary boys in their comfortable imprisonment, whose mother wanted them only for what they could gain for her. Two little pawns; and two queens, herself one of them. Richard was kissing her again, less carefully. Her king at least was still in the game, she told herself confusedly, and he had won the last move. He was not the king to let himself be mated; not as long as his consort was watching over him. She closed her eyes and gave herself up to love.
They were on the road again. March was heralding spring, and having salved his conscience with three fruitful months’ stay in London, the King was itching to be away from it. The eventual goal was Nottingham, a strategic point in the very centre of the kingdom from which to observe any attempt at invasion by Henry Tydder. On the way, however, the royal couple would visit Cambridge; Richard had been to Oxford the previous summer and did not wish to antagonise the touchy schoolmen of the younger university. Tact was not the only reason: for one thing, there was the building of King’s College Chapel, which he had endowed, to oversee; for another, the atmosphere of ancient learning was very congenial, especially after the brash modernity of London.
They came there when crocuses and the first daffodils were brightening the grass by the River Cam, under the biting wind that swept across the fens from the North Sea. It was colder than Wensleydale in winter, Anne declared, shivering in their college lodgings while the smoke from the sea-coal fire blew back down the chimney. But the warmth of their reception made up for the chilly wind. The House of York had been generous to the University of Cambridge: Edward IV had made possible the resumption of work on the chapel of King’s College, and his queen had founded a college. Poor Henry VI had done the same thing, but his money had run out when it was half-constructed. Picking her way through the builders’ debris surrounding the chapel, Anne spared a thought for the man who had been her father-in-law, and who, it was said, was now being prayed to as a saint in some parts of the country. Saint or no, he had been a good man, that was sure, although a failure in the eyes of the world. And like her husband and herself, he would have been at home in this island of scholarship among the East Anglian marshes. If his college was ever completed, she hoped that it would still bear his name.
Its chapel, at any rate, was already roofed. The master mason, John Wolrich, appeared for his presentation to the King and Queen surrounded by an entourage of his own. Richard received him with due respect, and Anne saw that the mask of worry he wore in London was beginning to animate. Architecture had been an absorbing interest of his ever since he owned any property to improve. He loved to turn the dark draughty strongholds which had been constructed for defence into comfortable residences, with wall fireplaces and, above all, large windows.
‘Why waste money on tallow and oil when the day will light the place for us?’ he had said many times. He had even had his boar carved into the ceiling of a fine oriel window overlooking the Tees at Barnard Castle, so that posterity should know who had provided the splendid vista. So it was with particular delight that he learned that the east window was about to be glazed, and asked eagerly to see the cartoon. The side-chapels to right and left of the altar were already complete, glazed and vaulted. Richard stood in each, examining each boss and groin. In the second, he caught hold of Anne’s hand and pressed it in a rare public gesture of affection.
‘This is what will last,’ he murmured, to himself perhaps, and she placed her other hand on the cool white stone of the wall. ‘A chantry or a tower or a window - that’s what I’d like to be remembered for. Like Julius Caesar’s Tower in London. All the citizens know that, but how many could name one of his battles?’ Anne always felt very close to him when he was borne up by one of his enthusiasms. And when they emerged from the hopeful shell and she looked up among the scaffolding at the buttresses and the pinnacles piercing that vivid sky, she was grateful that they had come here.
They lingered several days longer. A man in search of knowledge among those devoted to its pursuit, a lover of beauty in a city full of it, Richard was displaying in Cambridge that curious reverse side of a character which was also happy in the saddle, in constant purposeful movement in the open air. Anne found her husband restored to her almost as he had been before Hastings’ messenger arrived at Middleham. There was business, always, to attend to, but he smiled more freely, and at night he slept soundly beside her. With regret they took their departure, Anne no less than her husband feeling the tug of the sequestered academic life, kin to her long-abandoned dream of the cloister. The daffodils beside the Cam bowed a farewell, as graceful and self-contained as the trained minds of the scholars. To be attached to nothing but learning and God might indeed be a simpler way to pass one’s days. But she had chosen, years ago, or rather Richard had chosen for her. Ahead lay Nottingham, affairs of state, and an impending invasion by Henry Tydder.
They had been installed in the castle there, on its red rock high above the town, for nearly a month and there was no stirring from Brittany. Already the court was more of a reflection of Richard’s character than the ready-made one he had inherited at Westminster: more work, less ostentation, and a great deal of music. There were other ways in which the austerity of Richard’s régime was lightened, for he was well aware of the necessity to impress observers both English and foreign with shows of royal bounty. It was an unseasonably hot April that suggested an entertainment in Sherwood Forest for the benefit of a group of merchants from Ghent and Bruges, guests of the King at Nottingham while they discussed trade treaties between England and the Archduke Maximilian. First there would be a hunt, and then if the weather held, as it surely would, an alfresco meal with accompanying pageantry. As always, Anne declined the hunting, with the excuse that her fosterdaughter was due to arrive from London, but she would join the party for the gentler pursuits after the kill. Katherine had been nursing little Elizabeth Herbert through a bout of measles, but now was happy to greet Anne again, accompanied by an unspotty Bess. Despite a long journey she waited only to despatch her charge to the nursery before preparing to set out for the forest with the Queen’s entourage. Anne kept her at her side as they left the town; since Richard’s elevation Katherine was perhaps her closest confidante. And there was one thing in particular that she wanted to learn from her, in the comparative privacy of their pacing mares.
‘Have the Lady Elizabeth and her sisters come from sanctuary yet?’ Katherine thought she understood her anxiety: even if their mother was not permitted to come to court, the girls were quite old enough to have been primed as her instruments, and especially with the King absent they would have endless opportunity to stir trouble.
‘Yes, madame, they are at the palace. There were wagons and wagons of their possessions - it took a whole morning to unload them. I don’t think their living in sanctuary could have been so hard,’ she added ingenuously.
‘Indeed not,’ said Anne a little tartly. ‘It was said that a wall had to be broken down when they arrived there, to admit all the chattels that had been stolen from King Edward’s apartments. Have you seen them?’
‘The Lady Elizabeth sent for me - I don’t know why.’ To herself Anne reflected that perhaps it was a case of royal bastards making common cause, but she said nothing so unkind; however much she might have disapproved of Richard’s mistress, she had certainly died too soon to inculcate any grandiose ambitions in her children. Not so Elizabeth Woodville.
‘Was she proud?’
‘A little proud, yes. But that was to be expected, wasn’t it? She w
as kind too, and asked after your health, and my lord father’s. And my brother John’s. I didn’t think she would be so grown. She is very tall and elegant, and although not beautiful she has ... something. I don’t know. Not cold. Rather shy. As if she wanted one to help her.’
Well, Anne thought, if she had the skill to appeal to Kate’s maternal instinct in their first meeting, this girl was formidable indeed. Unless it was genuine. She remembered Richard saying that the breaking off of her betrothal to the Dauphin, the winter before King Edward died, had been a terrible blow to her as well as to her father. Give her the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps she really was in need of friends.
‘I think she’s good,’ concluded Katherine positively, ‘although the Lady Cecily is prettier.’
They were out of the town now, approaching the eaves of the forest, and they turned to easier topics. Among them was a projected visit to Middleham, if all remained quiet for another month. The King was to superintend the fitting of his fleet at Scarborough, and it was hoped that on the way the royal parents would at last be able to escort their son from his birthplace to Sheriff Hutton. Katherine talked with animation of how she was longing to tell Ned that he had been right about the Earl of Huntingdon.
‘He’ll make a good king, won’t he, madame, if he can see so easily into people’s hearts?’ With various reservations, Anne agreed. She had caught her foster-daughter’s high spirits, abetted by the delicious freshness of the spring noon, the new grass fretted with the shadows of the half-fledged branches. The hollow thud of the mares’ hoofs on the turf was balm to the hearing after the hard ring of city cobbles. She found herself humming the tune of a ballad of Robin Hood, in anticipation perhaps of the revelry to come, and Margaret Wrangwysh and then others of her ladies joined in with the words.
The White Queen of Middleham: An historical novel about Richard III's wife Anne Neville (Sprigs of Broom Book 1) Page 34
