The White Princess

by Philippa Gregory

  It is a humbling experience, but I don’t feel humbled. I feel as if I understand something that I did not know before. I feel that now I have learned that love does not follow merit; I did not love Henry because he impressed me as a conquerer of England, as a victor of battle. I loved him because I first came to understand him, and then I pitied him, and then my love just flowered for him. And now that he does not love me, it makes no difference to how I feel. I love him still for I see him being, as he often is, mistaken, ill-judging, fearful, and this does not make me jealous but, on the contrary, it makes me tender towards him.

  And I am not even angry towards Lady Katherine for her part in this. When she dismounts from her expensive new horse at the end of a beautiful day and Henry puts her husband aside with one touch on his shoulder, so that she has to slide from her saddle into Henry’s arms, she sometimes looks over at me as if this is no joy but a trouble to her. Then I am not angry with her, but I am sorry for her, and for me. I think that no one could understand how I feel but another woman, no one could understand her dilemma but me.

  Lady Katherine comes to my rooms at the end of the day, to sit with my ladies, and finds that I smile at her gently, patiently, just as Queen Anne used to smile at me. I know she cannot prevent what is happening, just as I could not help myself with Richard. If the king honors a woman with his attention, then she is powerless under his admiration. What I don’t know is how she feels. I fell in love with Richard, who was King of England and the only man who could rescue me and my family from our descent into obscurity. What she feels for the King of England, married as she is to a declared traitor who is living on borrowed time, I can’t imagine.

  THE TOWER OF LONDON, SUMMER 1498

  We come back to London and Henry rules that we will spend a week in the Tower before going to Westminster. The boy rides in under the portcullis, as taut as a bowstring. His eyes flick across to me just once and meet mine, blank to blank, and then he looks away.

  As usual, the lords who have homes in London go to their great houses and only a small court lives with us, the royal household, within the precincts of the Tower. The king, My Lady the King’s Mother and I are housed in our usual rooms in the royal apartments. The Lord Chamberlain’s office puts the boy in the Lanthorn Tower, with the other young men of the court, and I see him make a little gesture with his hand, as he turns towards the stone arch of the perimeter wall, and his smile grows brighter, the set of his head indomitable, as if he refuses to see ghosts.

  Edward of Warwick is in the Garden Tower, where the lost princes were once kept. Sometimes I see his face at the window when we are crossing the green, just as people used to say they saw my little brothers. I am not allowed to visit him; the king rules that it would distress him, and would upset me. I will be allowed to go later—in some unspecified better time. The boy never glances towards the face at the window, never strays towards the dark doorway and the tight spiral stone staircase that leads to the rooms over the archway. He walks around the Tower and the gardens and the chapel as if he were blind to the old buildings, as if he cannot and will not see the place where William Hastings was beheaded on a log of wood for loyalty to his old master my father, the place where the uncrowned King Edward used to play on the green, where the boy they called the little Prince Richard used to shoot arrows at the butts before they went inside to the darkness, and never came out again.

  WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, SUMMER 1498

  We come back to Westminster Palace early in the summer to celebrate Trinity Sunday in the abbey. In the morning when we go to chapel I look around for Lady Katherine, who is missing from my ladies. Her husband, the boy, is not in his usual place among the king’s favored companions. I lean towards Cecily in her dark dress, in double mourning for her husband and daughter, who died this spring, and say tersely: “In God’s name, where are they?”

  Dumbly, she shakes her head.

  Then, while Henry, My Lady, and I are breakfasting in the king’s privy chamber after chapel, two servants come in and kneel before the breakfast table, their heads down, saying nothing.

  “What is it?” Henry asks, though surely it is obvious to all of us that something has happened to the boy. I drop a piece of bread onto my plate, half rise to my feet, with a sense of sudden dread of what is going to come next.

  “Forgive me, Your Grace. But the boy has got away.”

  “Got away?” Henry repeats the words almost as if they have no meaning. “How do you mean: got away?”

  His mother glances at him sharply, as if she hears like me the detachment in his voice like a man repeating words he has prepared.

  “The boy?” she demands. “The Warbeck boy?”

  “Escaped,” one of them says.

  “How could he escape? He’s not imprisoned?” I ask.

  They bow their heads at the incredulity in my voice. “He had a key cut to fit the lock.” One of them looks up to tell me. “His companions were asleep, perhaps drugged, they slept so heavily. He opened the door and walked out.”

  “Walked out?” Henry repeats.

  “He had a key.”

  “Walked out?”

  “Perhaps he drugged the guards.”

  Some strange prescience teaches me to look, not at Henry’s well-manifested surprise and growing anger, but at his mother. She is looking at him, not with her usual expression of approbation and approval, but as if she has never seen him before, as if he is doing something which surprises even such a wily old plotter as herself. I sink back down into my chair again.

  “How could he have got a key? How could he have got drugs?” Henry demands, loud enough to be heard through the door in the presence chamber where anyone could be waiting to wish him the best of the day, ears pricked for gossip.

  Nobody replies that the boy could have got anything he wanted, since Henry himself had given him free run of the court and an allowance of money which would cover the price of some leather trim for his saddle, or a feather for his hat, or indeed cheap sleeping powders and a fee to a locksmith. Nobody points out that if the boy wanted to escape, he could have walked down to the stables and taken his horse and ridden away any day since last October. He did not have to wait till the nighttime, when he would be locked in and then need a key to get himself out. The whole story has a fairy-tale quality to it, like his name, like his history. Now the boy, who once passed as a prince only because someone dressed him in a silk shirt, disappears from a locked room in the dead of night.

  “He must be recaptured!” Henry shouts.

  He snaps his fingers for one of his clerks and the man bustles in, his tonsure shining, his writing desk around his neck, his quills sharpened at the ready. Henry rattles off a string of orders: the ports to be locked shut, the sheriffs of every county to be on alert to look for the boy, messengers to ride down the main highways to alert all the inns and guesthouses along the way.

  “Pay a reward for his recapture, dead or alive,” his mother suggests.

  I keep my gaze on my plate and I don’t say quickly, “Oh, they are not to hurt him!” I am a princess of York and I know that the stakes are always those of life or death. And he will have known this too; he will have known, when he slipped away into the darkness, that he was signing his own death warrant. Once he broke his parole they would be certain to go after him with a sword.

  “I think I’ll tell them to bring him in alive,” Henry says carelessly, as if it does not much matter either way. “I would not want to distress Lady Katherine.”

  “She will be distressed,” I observe.

  “Yes, but now she must see that her husband has run away and left her, run like a coward and left her as if he did not regard himself as married anymore,” Henry said firmly to me, impressing me with his view. “She must see that he can care nothing for her if he would just go—abandon her completely.”

  “Faithless.” His mother nods.

  “You had better go and break the news to her,” Henry says. “Tell her that he organiz
ed his own escape and he did it quite without honor, drugging a guard and sneaking out like a thief. Leaving her alone, and their son fatherless. She must despise him for this. I expect she will get her marriage annulled.”

  I rise from my seat and as he pulls back the heavy wooden chair for me I turn and face him, my gray eyes looking into his dark ones. “I shall certainly tell her that you think she should despise him, I shall certainly tell her that you think she should regard herself as a single woman, as you have always done. In addition, shall I assure her that your motives are chivalrous when you call for her marriage to be annulled?” I ask icily, and I walk out and leave him and his mother to call for a map of the kingdom and calculate where the boy might be.

  That night, Henry comes to my bedroom, surprising me and Cecily, who was going to be my bedmate for the night. She scuttles from the room, pulling her robe around her as Henry strolls in, bringing a jug of mulled ale, and a glass of wine for me, just as he used to do when we were happy together.

  He gives me my glass, sits at the fireside, pours himself a tankard of ale, and drinks a deep draft, like a man who has reached a safe haven and can afford to celebrate.

  “He was plotting, you know,” he says shortly. “Plotting his escape with Flanders, with France, with Scotland. The usual allies. The friends who never forget him.”

  I don’t ask who “he” is. “They helped him get out?” I ask.

  Henry chuckles, puts out his booted foot, and kicks a log that is teetering on the edge of the fire. “Well, someone certainly helped him. Bundled him out and set him free.”

  I find that I am looking at him coldly, trying to understand what he is saying. “Was he drugged like his guards?” I ask eventually. “Was he drugged and kidnapped and put out of the castle?”

  Henry does not meet my eyes. Again, he reminds me of Harry, who will twist his finger in his hair and look at his boots and tell me whatever little lie would best suit his case.

  “How would I know?” Henry says. “How ever would I know what these traitors will do?”

  “So where is he now?”

  He chuckles. This, he is willing to admit. “I know where. I’ll give him a few days to know his predicament. He’s on his own, he has no supporters. He’ll sleep cold and damp. I’ll pick him up tomorrow, or the day after, soon.”

  I curl my feet up in my chair. “And why is this a triumph for us? Since you come to me to celebrate?”

  He smiles at me. “Ah, Elizabeth. You know me so well! It is a triumph, though it is a hidden one. I had to break this new habit, this accidental accord that had come about. I never thought he would be like this, at the heart of my own court! There he was, happy as a pig in clover, sneaking into his wife’s rooms—don’t deny it, I know he was—and dancing with the ladies, writing poems, singing songs, going hunting, all at my expense, dressed like a prince and everywhere greeted like one. That’s not what I wanted when I dragged him out of sanctuary and named him as a common pretender. I had him in chains at Exeter. I had him confessing everything I put before him. He signed anything I wanted, he took whatever name I gave him. He was humbled to dirt, the son of a drunk boatman. I didn’t expect him to bob up, bob up into her bedroom. I didn’t expect him to come to court and charm everyone he met. I didn’t expect him to live like a prince when I had made him confess that he was a liar and a cheat. I didn’t think she would . . . who would have dreamed that she would . . . a princess?”

  “Stand by him?”

  “Go on loving him,” he says quietly. “When I had made him look a fool.”

  “What did you want? What did you hope would happen?”

  “I thought everyone would see that he was a pretender, like the other feigned lad, Simnel, my falconer. I thought they would cluster to see him and laugh at his impertinence and then forget all about him. I thought he would be humbled by being kept around us, I thought he would sink.”

  “Sink?”

  “I thought he would disappear into the crowd of hangers-on and placemen and toadies and beggars who go with us everywhere. Chased off now and then, reprimanded here and there, but always trailing along behind, living hand to mouth. I thought he would become one of them. I thought he would be the page boy at the back of the procession, the one that no one likes, who gets a kicking when the Master of the Horse is drunk. I thought people would despise him. I didn’t expect him to shine.”

  “I did nothing to recognize him.” I make it clear. “I never brought him into my company. He was never invited into my rooms.”

  “No,” Henry says thoughtfully. “But he strolled in as if he belonged there. He made his own place. People liked him, gathered round him. He was just . . .” He pauses and then he says the one betraying word: “Recognized.”

  I give a little gasp. “Someone recognized him as Prince Richard? My brother?”

  “No. No one would be such a fool. Not at my court. Not surrounded by spies. He was recognized for himself. People saw him as a power, as a person, as a Someone.”

  “People just happen to like him.”

  “I know. I can’t have that. He has that damned charm that you all have. I can’t have him at court being happy, being charming, looking like he belongs here. But—and this was the problem—I had given my word to him when he surrendered to me. His wife went down on her knees to me, and I gave my word to her. And she held me to it. She would never have allowed me to imprison him or put him on trial.”

  He frowns at the glowing embers of the fire, quite unaware that he is confiding to his wife the commands of his mistress.

  “And there’s another thing. I established that he is the son of a Flanders boatman—which I thought a very good story at the time—but of course that makes him no subject of mine, so I can’t try him for treason. He’s not my subject, he’s not treasonous. I wish someone had warned me of that when we were going to such trouble to find his parents in Flanders. We should never have found them in Flanders, we should have found them in Ireland, somewhere like that.”

  I absorb in silence the cynicism of the creation of the boy’s story.

  “So now I have two bad choices: either I can’t try him for treason because he’s foreign, or—”

  “Or?”

  “Or he’s not foreign but the rightful king!” Henry bursts out laughing, swigs from his tankard, looks at me bright-eyed over the dull pewter. “You see? If he’s who I say he is, then I can’t try him for treason. If he’s who he says he is, then he should be King of England and I am the traitor. Either way I was stuck with him. And every day he grew more and more happy that I was stuck with him. So I had to get him out, I had to make him betray the sanctuary that I had given him.”

  “Sanctuary?”

  He laughs again. “Wasn’t he born in sanctuary?”

  I take a breath. “It was my brother Prince Edward who was born in sanctuary,” I say. “Not Richard.”

  “Well, anyway,” he says carelessly. “So the main thing is that I’ve got him out of his comfortably safe billet at my court. Now he’s on the run, I can prove that he’s plotting against me. He’s broken his word that he would stay at court. He’s dishonored his promise to his wife too. She thought he would never leave her; well, he has. I can arrest him for breaking his parole. Put him in the Tower.”

  “Will you execute him?” I ask, keeping my voice light and level. “Do you think you will execute him?”

  Henry puts down his tankard and throws off his cloak and then his nightgown. He gets into my bed naked, and I just glimpse that he is aroused. Winning excites him, catching someone out, tricking someone, getting money off them or betraying their interest brings him so much pleasure that it makes him amorous.

  “Come to bed,” he says.

  I show no sign of unwillingness. I don’t know what might depend upon my behavior. I untie the ribbons on my nightgown and I drop it to the floor, I slide between the sheets and he grabs me at once, pulls me beneath him. I make sure that I am smiling as I close my eyes.

 
“I can’t execute him,” he says quietly, thrusting inside me with the words. I keep my smile on my face as he makes love while speaking of death. “I can’t behead him, not unless he does something stupid.” Heavily he moves on me. “But the joy of him is that he is certain to do something stupid,” he remarks, and his weight bears down on me.

  For a manhunt for a known traitor, a claimant to the throne, the ghost that terrorized Henry’s life for thirteen years, the pursuit is curiously leisurely. The guards who slept on duty are cautioned and return to their posts, though everyone expected them to be tried and executed for their part in the escape. Henry sends out messengers to the ports but they travel easily, setting out to north and west, south and east, as if riding for pleasure on a sunny day. Inexplicably, Henry sends out his own personal guard, his yeomen, in boats, rowing upstream, as if the boy might have gone deeper into England, and not to the coast to get back to Flanders, to Scotland, to safety.

  His wife has to sit with me while we wait for news. She has not gone back into widow’s black but she is no longer gorgeous in tawny velvet. She wears a dark blue gown and she sits half behind me, so that I have to turn to speak to her, and so that visitors to my rooms, even the king and his mother, can hardly see her, hidden by my great chair.

  She sews—heavens, she sews constantly; little shirts for her son, exquisite nightcaps and nightgowns fit for a prince, little socks for his precious feet, little mittens so that he does not scratch his peerless complexion. She bends her head over her work and she sews as if she would stitch her life together again, as if every small hemming stitch would take them back to Scotland, to the days when it was just her and the boy, in a hunting lodge, and he was full of the stories of what he had done and what he had seen and who he said that he was—and nobody asked him what he might do and what he might claim and who he would have to deny.