The White Queen

by Philippa Gregory

  “What were they?”

  “They are the things that will never happen; they are the future that we will never know. They are the children who will not be born and the chances that we won’t take and the luck that we won’t have,” she says. “They are gone. They are lost to you. See instead what you have chosen.”

  I lean over the palace wall to draw on the thread and it comes from the water, dripping. At the end is a silver spoon, a beautiful little silver spoon for a baby, and when I catch it in my hand I see, shining in the moonlight, that it is engraved with a coronet and the name “Edward.”

  We keep Christmas in London as a feast of reconciliation, as if a feast will make a friend of Warwick. I am reminded of all the times that poor King Henry tried to bring his enemies together and make them swear friendship, and I know that others at the court see Warwick and George as honored guests and laugh behind their hands.

  Edward orders that it should be done grandly and nearly two thousand noblemen of England sit down to dinner with us on Twelfth Night, Warwick chief among them all. Edward and I wear our crowns and the newest fashions in the richest cloths. I wear only silver white and cloth of gold in this winter season, and they say that I am the White Rose of York, indeed.

  Edward and I give gifts to a thousand of the diners, and favors to them all. Warwick is a most popular guest, and he and I greet each other with absolute courtesy. When commanded by my husband, I even dance with my brother-in-law George: hand to hand and smiling into his handsome, boyish face. Again, it strikes me how like my husband Edward he is: a smaller daintier version of Edward’s blond handsomeness. Again I am struck by how people like him on sight. He has all of the York easy charm and none of Edward’s honor. But I don’t forget and I don’t forgive.

  I greet his new bride Isabel, Warwick’s daughter, with kindness. I welcome her to my court and wish her very well. She is a poor, thin, pale girl, looking rather aghast at the part she has to play in her father’s scheme of things. Now she is married into the most treacherous and dangerous family in England, at the court of the king that her husband betrayed. She is in need of a little kindness and I am sisterly and loving to her. A stranger at court, visiting us in this most hospitable season, would think that I love her as a kinswoman. He would think I had not lost a father, a brother. He would think that I have no memory at all.

  I don’t forget. And in my jewelry case is a dark locket, and in the dark locket there is the corner of the page of my father’s last letter, and on that scrap of paper, written in my own blood, are the names Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, and George, Duke of Clarence. I don’t forget, and one day they will know that.

  Warwick remains enigmatic, the greatest man in the kingdom after the king. He accepts the honors and favors that are shown him with icy dignity, as a man to whom everything is due. His accomplice, George, is like a hound puppy, jumping and fawning. Isabel, George’s wife, sits with my ladies, between my sisters and my sister-in-law Elizabeth, and I cannot help but smile when I see her turn her head away from her husband’s dancing, or the way she flinches as he shouts out toasts in honor of the king. George, so fair-headed and round-faced, has always been a beloved boy of the Yorks, and at this Christmas feast he acts towards his older brother not only as if he has been forgiven but also as if he will always be forgiven anything. He is the spoiled child of the family—he really believes he can do no wrong.

  The youngest York brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, now seventeen and a handsome slight boy, may be the baby of the family, but he has never been the favorite. Of all the York boys he is the only one to resemble his father, and he is dark and small-boned, a little changeling beside the big-boned, handsome York line. He is a pious young man, thoughtful; most at home in his great house in the north of England, where he lives a life of duty and austere service to his people. He finds our glittering court an embarrassment, as if we were aggrandizing ourselves as pagans at a Christian feast. He looks on me, I swear it, as if I were a dragon sprawled greedily over treasure, not a mermaid in silver water. I guess that he looks at me with both desire and fear. He is a child, afraid of a woman whom he could never understand. Beside him, my Grey sons, only a little younger, are worldly and cheerful. They keep inviting him out to hunt with them, to go drinking in the ale houses, to roister round the streets in masks, and he, nervously, declines.

  News of our Christmas feast goes all around Christendom. The new court in England is said to be the most beautiful, elegant, mannered, and gracious court in Europe. Edward is determined that the English court of York shall become as famous as Burgundy for fashion and beauty and culture. He loves good music, and we have a choir singing or musicians playing at every meal; my ladies and I learn the court dances, and compose our own. My brother Anthony is a great guide and advisor in all of this. He has traveled in Italy and speaks of the new learning and the new arts, of the beauty of the ancient cities of Greece and of Rome and how their arts and their studies can be made new. He speaks to Edward of bringing in painters and poets and musicians from Italy, of using the wealth of the crown to found schools and universities. He speaks of the new learning, of new science, of arithmetic and astronomy and everything new and wonderful. He speaks of arithmetic that starts with the number zero, and tries to explain how this transforms everything. He speaks of a science that can calculate distances that cannot be measured: he says it should be possible to know the distance to the moon. Elizabeth, his wife, watches him quietly, and says that he is a magus, a wise man. We are a court of beauty, grace, and learning, and Edward and I command the best of everything.

  I am amazed at the cost of running a court, of the price of all this beauty, even the charges for food, of the continual demands from every courtier for a hearing, for a place, for a slice of land or a favor, for a post where he can levy taxes or for help in claiming an inheritance.

  “This is what it is to be a king,” Edward says to me as he signs the last of the day’s petitions. “As King of England I own everything. Every duke and earl and baron holds his lands at my favor; every knight and squire below him has a stream from the river. Every petty farmer and tenant and copyholder and peasant below him depends on my favor. I have to give out wealth and power in order to keep the rivers flowing. And if it goes wrong, at the least sign of it going wrong, there will be someone saying that they wished Henry was back on the throne, that it was better in the old days. Or that they think his son Edward, or George, might do a more generous job. Or, surely to God, there is another claimant to the throne somewhere—Margaret Beaufort’s son Henry, let’s have the Lancaster boy for a change—who might speed the flow. To keep my power, I have to give it away in carefully spaced and chosen pitchers. I have to please everyone. But none too much.”

  “They are money-grubbing peasants,” I say irritably. “And their loyalty goes with their interest. They think of nothing but their own desires. They are worse than serfs.”

  He smiles at me. “They are indeed. Every one of them. And each of them wants their little estate and their little house just as I want my throne and as much as you wanted the manor of Sheen, and places for all your kinsmen. We are all anxious for wealth and land, and I own it all, and have to give it out carefully.”

  SPRING 1470

  As the weather turns warmer and it starts to grow brighter in the mornings and the birds start to sing in the gardens of Westminster Palace, Edward’s informers bring him reports from Lincolnshire of another uprising in favor of Henry, the king, as though he were not forgotten by everyone else in the world, living quietly in the Tower of London, more an anchorite than a prisoner.

  “I shall have to go,” Edward says to me, letter in his hand. “If this leader, whoever he is, is a forerunner for Margaret of Anjou, then I have to defeat him before she lands her army in his support. It looks like she plans to use him to test the support of her cause, to have him take the risk of raising troops, and when she sees he has raised an English army for her, she will land her French one and
then I will have to face them both.”

  “Will you be safe?” I ask. “Against this person who has not even the courage to have a name of his own?”

  “As always,” he says steadily. “But I won’t let the army go out without me again. I have to be there. I have to lead.”

  “And where is your loyal friend Warwick?” I ask acidly. “And your trusted brother George? Are they recruiting for you? Are they hurrying to be at your side?”

  He smiles at my tone. “Ah, you are mistaken, little Queen of Mistrust. I have a letter here from Warwick offering to raise men to march with me, and George says he will come too.”

  “Then you make sure that you watch them in battle,” I say, completely unconvinced. “They will not be the first men to bring soldiers to the battlefield and change sides at the last moment. When the enemy is before you, cast an eye behind you to see what your true and loyal friends are doing at the rear.”

  “They have promised their loyalty,” he soothes me. “Truly, my dearest. Trust me. I can win battles.”

  “I know you can, I know you do,” I say. “But it is so hard to see you march out. When will it end? When will they stop raising an army for a cause which is over?”

  “Soon,” he says. “They will see we are united and we are strong. Warwick will bring in the north to our side, and George will prove to be a true brother. Richard is with me as always. I will come home as soon as this man is defeated. I will come home early and I will dance with you on May Day morning, and you will smile.”

  “Edward, you know, just this once, this one time, I think I cannot bear to see you go. Cannot Richard command the army? With Hastings? Can you not stay with me? This time, just this time.”

  He takes my hands and presses them against his lips. He is not affected by my anxiety but amused by it. He is smiling. “Oh why? Why this time? Why does this time matter so much? Do you have something to tell me?”

  I cannot resist him. I am smiling in return. “I do have something to tell you. But I have been saving it.”

  “I know. I know. Did you think I didn’t know? So tell me, what is this secret that I am supposed not to have any idea about?”

  “It should bring you home safely to me,” I say. “It should bring you home quickly to me, and not send you out in your pomp.”

  He waits, smiling. He has been waiting for me to tell him as I have been reveling in the secret. “Tell me,” he says. “This has been a long time coming.”

  “I am with child again,” I say. “And this time I know it is a boy.”

  He scoops me to him and holds me gently. “I knew it,” he says. “I knew that you were with child. I knew it in my bones. And how can you know it is a boy, my little witch, my enchantress?”

  I smile up at him, secure in women’s mysteries. “Ah, you don’t need to know how I know,” I say. “But you can know that I am certain. You can be sure of it. Know this. We will have a boy.”

  “My son, Prince Edward,” he says.

  I laugh, thinking of the silver spoon that I drew out of the silvery river on midwinter’s eve. “How do you know that his name will be Edward?”

  “Of course it will. I have been determined on it for years.”

  “Your son, Prince Edward,” I repeat. “So make sure you are home safely, in time for his birth.”

  “Do you know when?”

  “In the autumn.”

  “I will come home safely to bring you peaches and salt cod. What was it you wanted so much when you were big with Cecily?”

  “Samphire,” I laugh. “Fancy you remembering! I could not have enough of it. Make sure you come home to bring me samphire and anything else I crave. This is a boy, this is a prince; he must have whatever he desires. He will be born with a silver spoon.”

  “I shall come home to you. And you are not to worry. I don’t want him born with a frown.”

  “Then you beware of Warwick and your brother. I don’t trust them.”

  “Promise to rest and be happy and make him strong in your belly?”

  “Promise to come back safe and make him strong in his inheritance,” I counter.

  “It is a promise.”

  He was wrong. Dear God, Edward was so wrong. Not, thank God, about winning the battle: for that was the battle that they called Losecoat Field, when the barefooted fools fighting for a lack-wit king were in such a rush to run away that they dropped their weapons and even their coats to escape from the charge led by my husband, who was fighting his way through them, to keep his promise to me, to come home in time to bring me peaches and samphire.

  No, he was wrong about the loyalty of Warwick and George, his brother, who—it turned out—had planned and paid for the uprising and had decided this time to be certain of Edward’s defeat. They were going to kill my Edward and put George on the throne. His own brother and Warwick, who had been his best friend, had decided together that the only way to defeat Edward was to stab him from behind on the battlefield, and they would have done it too; but for the fact that he rode so fast in the charge that no man could catch him.

  Before the battle had even begun Lord Richard Welles, the petty leader, had gone down on his knees to Edward, confessed the plan, and showed Warwick’s orders and George’s money. They paid him to lead an uprising in the name of King Henry, but in truth it was only a feint to draw Edward into battle and to kill him there. Warwick had learned his lesson truly. He had learned that you cannot hold a man like my Edward. He has to be dead to be defeated. George, his own brother, had overcome his fraternal affection. He was ready to slit his brother’s throat on the battlefield and to wade through his blood to get to the crown. The two of them had bribed and ordered poor Lord Welles to raise a battle to bring Edward into danger, and then found once again that Edward was too much for them. When Edward saw the evidence against them, he summoned them as kinsmen, the friend who had been an older brother to him and the youth who was his brother indeed; and when they did not come, he knew what to think of them at last, and he summoned them as traitors to answer to him: but they were long gone.

  “I shall see them dead,” I say to my mother as we sit before an open window in my privy chamber at Westminster Palace, spinning wool and gold thread to make yarn for a costly cloak for the baby. It will be purest lambswool and priceless gold, a cloak fit for a little prince, the greatest prince in Christendom. “I shall see the two of them dead. I swear it, whatever you say.”

  She nods at the spindle in her hand and the wool I am carding. “Don’t put ill-wishing into his little cape,” she says.

  I stop the wheel and put the wool to one side. “There,” I say. “The work can wait; but the ill-wishing cannot.”

  “Did you know: Edward promised a safe conduct to Lord Richard Welles if he would confess his treason and reveal the plot; but when he did so, he broke his word and killed him?”

  I shake my head.

  My mother’s face is grave. “Now the Beaufort family are in mourning for their kinsman Welles, and Edward has given a new cause to his enemies. He has broken his word, too. No one will trust him again; no one will dare to surrender to him. He has shown himself a man who cannot be trusted. As bad as Warwick.”

  I shrug. “These are the fortunes of war. Margaret Beaufort knows them as well as I. And she will have been unhappy anyway, since she is the heir to the House of Lancaster and we summoned her husband Henry Stafford to march out for us.” I give a hard laugh. “Poor man, caught between her and our summons.”

  My mother can’t hide her smile. “No doubt she was on her knees all the while,” she says cattily. “For a woman who boasts that she has the ear of God, she has little benefit to show for it.”

  “Anyway, Welles doesn’t matter,” I say. “Alive or dead. What matters is that Warwick and George will be heading for the court of France, speaking ill of us, and hoping to raise an army. We have a new enemy, and this one is in our own house, our own heir. What a family the Yorks are!”

  “Where are they now?” my mothe
r asks me.

  “At sea, heading for Calais, according to Anthony. Isabel is big with child, on board ship with them, and no one to care for her but her mother, the Countess of Warwick. They will be hoping to enter Calais and raise an army. Warwick is beloved there. And if they put themselves in Calais, we will have no safety at all with them waiting just over the sea, threatening our ships, half a day’s sail away from London. They must not enter Calais; we have to prevent it. Edward has sent the fleet to sea, but our ships will never catch them in time.”

  I rise to my feet and lean out of the open window into the sunshine. It is a warm day. The River Thames below me sparkles like a fountain; it is calm. I look to the southwest. There is a line of dark clouds on the horizon as if there might be dirty weather at sea. I put my lips together and I blow a little whistle.

  Behind me, I hear my mother’s spindle laid aside, and then I hear the soft sound of her whistle also. I keep my eye on the line of clouds and I let my breath hiss like the wind of a storm. She comes to stand behind me, her arm around my broad waist. Together we whistle gently into the spring air, blowing up a storm.

  Slowly but powerfully the dark clouds pile up, one on top of another, until there is a great thunderhead of threatening dark cloud, south, far away, over the sea. The air freshens. I shiver in the sudden chill, and we turn from the cooler, darkening day and close the window on the first scud of rain.

  “Looks like a storm out at sea,” I remark.

  A week later my mother comes to me with a letter in her hand. “I have news from my cousin in Burgundy. She writes that George and Warwick were blown off the coast of France and then nearly wrecked in terrible seas off Calais. They begged the fort to let them enter for the sake of Isabel, but the castle would not admit them and they had the chain up across the entrance to the port. A wind got up from nowhere and the seas nearly drove them on to the walls. The fort would not let them in; they could not land the boat in high seas. Poor Isabel went into labor in the middle of the storm. They were tossed about for hours, and her baby died.”