The White Queen

by Philippa Gregory

  Edward would have been killed on the spot if they had caught him; but they have missed him—that much is clear. But nobody knows where he is; and someone comes to the Tower once a day to assure me that they have seen him and that he was dying of his wounds, or that they have seen him and he is fleeing to France, or that they have seen him on a bier and he is dead.

  My boys arrive at the Tower travel-stained and weary, furious that they did not get away with the king. I try not to hang on to them, or kiss them more often than morning and night, but I can hardly believe that they have come safely back to me. Just as I cannot believe that my husband and my brother have not.

  I send to Grafton for my mother to come to us in the Tower. I need her advice and company, and if we are indeed lost and I have to go abroad, I will want her with me. But the messenger comes back and his face is grave.

  “Your Lady Mother is not at her home,” he says.

  “Where is she?”

  He looks shifty, as if he wishes someone else could tell me bad news. “Tell me at once,” I say, my voice sharp with fear. “Where is she?”

  “She is under arrest,” he says. “Orders of the Earl of Warwick. He has ordered her arrest, and his men came to Grafton and took her away.”

  “Warwick has my mother?” I can hear my heart thudding in my ears. “My mother is a prisoner?”

  “Yes.”

  I hear a rattling noise, and I see that my hands are shaking so badly that my rings are clicking against the arms of the chair. I take a breath to steady myself, and grip tight to stop myself shaking. My son Thomas comes closer to stand on one side of my chair. Richard steps up to the other.

  “On what charge?”

  I think. It cannot be treason: nobody could argue that my mother has done more than advise me. Nobody could charge her with treason when she has been a good mother-in-law to the crowned king and a loving companion to his queen. Not even Warwick could stoop so low as to charge a woman with treason and behead her for loving her daughter. But this is a man who killed my father and my brother without reason. His desire must only be to break my heart and rob Edward of the support of my family. This is a man who will kill me if he ever gets hold of me.

  “I am so sorry, Your Grace—”

  “What charge?” I demand. My throat is dry and I give a little cough.

  “Witchcraft,” he says.

  There is no need of a trial to put a witch to death, though no trial has ever failed: it is easy to find people to witness on oath that their cows died or that their horse threw them because a witch had overlooked them. But in any case, there is no need of either witnesses or a trial. A single priest is all that is needed to attest a witch’s guilt, or a lord like Warwick can simply declare her guilty and no one will defend her. Then she can be strangled and buried at the village crossroads. They usually get the blacksmith to strangle the woman since he, by virtue of his trade, has big strong hands. My mother is a tall woman, a famous beauty with a long slim neck. Any man could choke the life out of her in minutes. It does not need to be a brawny blacksmith. Any one of Warwick’s guard could easily do it; would do it, in a moment, on a word, gladly on Warwick’s word.

  “Where is she?” I demand. “Where has he taken her?”

  “Nobody at Grafton knew where they were going,” the man says. “I asked everyone. A troop of horse came, and they made your mother ride pillion behind their commanding officer, and they took her north. They told no one where they were going. They just said that she was under arrest for witchcraft.”

  “I must write to Warwick,” I say quickly. “Go and eat and get a fresh horse. I shall need you to travel as fast as you can. Are you ready to leave at once?”

  “At once,” he says, bows, and goes out.

  I write to Warwick demanding her release. I write to every archbishop we once commanded, and anyone who I think would speak for us. I write to my mother’s old friends and family attached to the House of Lancaster. I even write to Margaret Beaufort, who, as the heir of the House of Lancaster, may have some influence. Then I go to my chapel, the Queen’s Chapel, and I get down on my knees all night to pray that God will not allow this wicked man to take this good woman, who is blessed with nothing more than a sacred foresight, a few pagan tricks, and a total lack of deference. At dawn, I write her name on a dove’s feather and send it floating downstream to warn Melusina that her daughter is in danger.

  Then I have to wait for news. For a whole week I have to wait, hearing nothing and fearing the very worst. Daily, people come to tell me that my husband is dead. Now I fear they will say the same of my mother, and I will be utterly alone in the world. I pray to God, I whisper to the river: someone has to save my mother. Then, at last, I hear that she is freed, and two days later she comes to me in the Tower.

  I run into her arms and I cry as if I were her daughter of ten years old. She holds me and she rocks me as if I were still her little girl, and when I look up into her beloved face, I see there are tears on her own cheeks.

  “I’m safe,” she says. “He didn’t hurt me. He didn’t put me to question. He held me only for a few days.”

  “Why did he let you go?” I ask. “I wrote to him, I wrote to everybody, I prayed and I wished; but I didn’t think he would show you any mercy.”

  “Margaret d’Anjou,” she answers with a wry smile. “Of all the women in the world! She commanded him to release me as soon as she heard that he had arrested me. We were good friends once, and we are kinswomen still. She remembered my service at her court, and she ordered Warwick to release me, or face her extreme displeasure.”

  I give an incredulous laugh. “She commanded him to release you, and he obeyed?”

  “She is his daughter’s mother-in-law now, as well as his queen,” my mother points out. “And he is her sworn ally and counting on her army to support him as he recaptures the country. And I was her companion when she came to England as a bride, and her friend through all the years of her queenship. I was of the House of Lancaster then, as we all were, until you married Edward.”

  “It was good of her to save you,” I concede.

  “This is a cousins’ war, indeed,” my mother says. “We all have those we love on the other side. We all have to face killing our own family. Sometimes we can be merciful. God knows, she is not a merciful woman, but she thought she would be merciful to me.”

  I am sleeping uneasily in the rich royal apartments of the Tower of London, the flicker of moonlight reflected from the river onto the drapes over my bed. I am lying on my back, the weight of the baby heavy on my belly, an ache in my side, drifting between sleep and wakefulness when I see, as bright as moonlight on the arras above me, my husband’s face, gaunt and aged, bent low over the galloping mane of his horse, riding like a madman through the night, less than a dozen men around him.

  I give a little cry and turn on the pillow. The rich embroidery presses against my cheek and I sleep again; but again I wake to the image of Edward riding hard through darkness on a strange road.

  I half wake, crying out against the picture in my mind, and as I drift between sleeping and wakefulness, I see a small fishing port, Edward, Anthony, William, and Richard hammering on a door, arguing with a man, hiring his boat, forever looking over their shoulders to the west, for their enemies. I hear them promise the ship’s master anything, anything! if he will launch his little ship and take them to Flanders. I see Edward strip off his great coat of furs and offer it as payment. “Take it,” he says. “It’s worth more than your boat twice over. Take it and I will think it a service.”

  “No,” I say in my sleep. Edward is leaving me, leaving England, leaving me and breaking his word that he would be with me for the birth of our son.

  The seas are high outside the harbor, the dark waves topped with white foam. The little ship rises and falls, rolling between the waves, water breaking over the bows. It seems impossible that it should climb to the top of the waves, and then it crashes down in the troughs. Edward stands at the stern
, clutching to the side for support, thrown about by the movement of the boat, looking back at the country he called his own, watching for the flare of the torches of the men coming after him. He has lost England. We have lost England. He claimed the throne, and he was crowned king. He crowned me as queen, and I believed that we were established. He never lost a battle; but Warwick has been too much, too fast, too duplicitous for him. Edward is heading for exile, just as Warwick did. He is heading out into a vicious storm, just as Warwick did. But Warwick went straight to the King of France and found an ally and an army. I cannot see how Edward will ever return.

  Warwick is back in power, and now it is my husband and my brother Anthony and my brother-in-law Richard who are the fugitives, and God knows what wind will ever blow them back to England again. And the girls and I, and the baby in my belly, are the new hostages, the new prisoners. I may be in the royal apartments of the Tower for now, but soon I shall be in the rooms below, with the bars over the window, and King Henry will sleep in this bed again, and I shall be the one who people say should, for Christian charity, be released, so that I do not die in prison, without sight of the free sky.

  “Edward!” I see him look up, almost as if he can hear me call for him in my sleep, in my dream. “Edward!” I cannot believe that he could leave me, that we could have lost our fight for the throne. My father laid down his life that I might be queen; my brother died beside him. Are we now to be nothing but pretenders, dismissed after a few years of good luck? A king and a queen who overreached themselves and for whom the luck ran out? Are my girls to be the daughters of an attainted traitor? Are they to marry small squires on country estates and hope to live down their father’s shame? Is my mother to greet Margaret of Anjou on her knees, and hope to worm her way back into favor again? Am I to have the choice of living in exile or living in prison? And what of my son, the baby not yet born? Is Warwick likely to let him live—he who lost his own grandson and only heir, as we closed the gates of Calais to him, his daughter losing her baby in rough seas with a witch’s wind blowing them on shore?

  I scream out loud: “Edward! Don’t leave me!” and the terror in my voice starts me into full wakefulness, and next door my mother lights a candle from the fire, and opens the door. “Is he coming? The baby? Is he early?”

  “No. I had a dream. Mother, I had a most terrible dream.”

  “There, there, never mind,” she says, quick to comfort. She lights candles at my bedside; she stirs up the fire with a kick from her slippered foot. “There, Elizabeth. You’re safe now.”

  “We’re not safe,” I say certainly. “That’s the very thing.”

  “Why, what did you dream?”

  “It was Edward, on a ship, in a storm. It was night, the seas were huge. I don’t even know if his ship will get through. It’s an ill wind that blows no good, Mother, and he was facing an ill wind. It was our wind. It was the gale we called up to blow George and Warwick away. We called it up, but it has not blown away. Edward is in a storm of our making. Edward was dressed like a servant, a poor man: he had nothing, nothing but the clothes he stood up in. He had given away his coat. Anthony was there; he didn’t even have his cape. William Hastings was with them, and Edward’s brother Richard. They were all that had survived, they were all that could run. They were…” I close my eyes trying to remember. “They were leaving us, Mother. Oh Mother, he’s left England, he’s left us. He’s lost. We’re lost. Edward has gone, Anthony too. I am sure of it.”

  She takes my cold hands and rubs them in her own. “Perhaps it was just a bad dream,” she says. “Perhaps nothing but a dream. Women with child, near their time, have strange fancies, vivid dreams…”

  I shake my head, I throw back the covers. “No. I am certain. It was a Seeing. He is defeated. He has run away.”

  “D’you think he has gone to Flanders?” she asks. “To take refuge with his sister, the Duchess Margaret, and Charles of Burgundy?”

  I nod. “Of course. Of course he has. And he will send for me, I don’t doubt him. He loves me, and he loves the girls, and he swore he would never leave me. But he has gone, Mother. Margaret of Anjou must have landed, and she will be marching here, to London, to free Henry. We have to go. I have to get the girls away. We can’t be here when her army comes in. They will imprison us forever if they find us here.”

  My mother throws a shawl around my shoulders. “Are you sure? Can you travel? Shall I send a message to the docks and shall we take a ship?”

  I hesitate. I am so afraid of the voyage when my baby is near to his time. I think of Isabel, crying out in pain on a rocking ship, and nobody to help her with the birth, the baby dying and not even a priest to christen him. I can’t face what she had to face, with the wind screaming in the rigging. I am afraid that the wind I whistled up is still blowing down the sea roads, its ill nature unsatisfied by the death of one baby, looking around the horizon for unsteady sails. If that wind sees me and my girls on the heaving sea, then we will be drowned.

  “No, I can’t bear it. I don’t dare. I am too afraid of the wind. We’ll go into sanctuary. We’ll go to Westminster Abbey. They won’t dare hurt us there. We’ll be safe there. The Londoners love us still and Queen Margaret wouldn’t break sanctuary. If King Henry is in his wits, he would never let her break sanctuary. He believes in the power of God working in the world. He will respect sanctuary and make Warwick leave us alone. We’ll take the girls and my Grey sons and go into sanctuary. At least until my son is born.”

  NOVEMBER 1470

  When I had heard of desperate men claiming sanctuary by hanging on to the ring on the church door and yelling defiance at the thief takers, or dashing up the aisle and putting their hand on the high altar as if they were playing a childhood game of tag, I always thought that they must live thereafter on the wine of the Mass and the bread of the Host, and sleep in the pews pillowed on hassocks. It turns out that it is not as bad as this. We live in the crypt of the church built in St. Margaret’s churchyard, within the precincts of the abbey. It is a little like living in a cellar, but we can see the river from the low windows on one side of the room and we can glimpse the highway through the grille in the door, on the other side. We live like a poor family, dependent on the goodwill of Edward’s supporters and the citizens of London, who love the family of York and continue to do so, even though the world has changed again, the family of York is in hiding, and King Henry is acclaimed king once more.

  Warwick, the ascendant Lord Warwick, the murderer of my father and brother and the kidnapper of my husband, enters London in triumph, George, his unhappy son-in-law, at his side. George may be a spy in their ranks, secretly on our side, or he may have turned his coat and turned it again and now hopes for crumbs from the Lancaster royal table. At any rate, he gets no message to me, nor does anything to guarantee my safety. He bobs along in the wake of the Kingmaker, as if he had no brother, no sister-in-law, perhaps still hoping for a chance at being king himself.

  Warwick, triumphant, takes his old enemy King Henry from the Tower and proclaims him fit to rule and fully restored. He is now the liberator of his king and the savior of the House of Lancaster, and the country is filled with joy. King Henry is confused by this turn of events, but they explain to him, slowly and kindly once a day, that he is king again, and that his cousin Edward of York has gone away. They may even tell him that we, Edward’s family, are hiding in Westminster Abbey, for he orders—or they order in his name—that the sanctuary of the holy places shall be observed, and we are safe in our self-imposed prison.

  Every day, the butchers send us meat, the bakers send us bread, even the milkmaids from the green fields of the city bring us pails of milk for the girls, and the fruit sellers from Kent bring the best of the crop to the abbey and leave it at the door for us. They tell the churchwardens that it is for the “poor queen” at her time of trouble, and then they remember that there is a new queen, Margaret of Anjou, only waiting for a fair wind to set sail and return to her throne, and they trip
over their words and finally say, “You know who I mean. But make sure she has it, for fruit from Kent is very good for a woman near her time. It will make the baby come easier. And tell her that we wished her well and we will come again.”

  It is hard for my girls to have so little news of their father, hard for them to be kept inside in the few small rooms, since they were born to the best of things. They have lived all their lives in the greatest palaces of England; now they are confined. They can stand on a bench to look out of the windows at the river, where the royal barge used to take them up and down between one palace and another, or they can take turns to get on a chair and look out of the grating at the streets of London, where they used to ride and hear people bless their names and their pretty faces. Elizabeth, my oldest girl, is only four years old, but it is as if she understands that a time of great sorrow and difficulty has come on us. She never asks me where her tame birds are; she never asks for the servants who used to pet her and play with her; she never asks for her golden top or her little dog, or her precious toys. She acts as if she had been born and bred in this little space, and she plays with her baby sisters as if she were a paid nursemaid, ordered to be cheerful. The only question she poses is: Where is her father?—and I have to learn to become accustomed to her looking up at me, a little puzzled frown on her round face, asking, “Is my father the king here yet, Lady Mother?”

  It is hardest of all on my boys, who are like confined lion cubs in the small space and prowl around, bickering. In the end, my mother sets them exercises, sword play with broom handles, poems to learn, jumping and catching games that they have to do every day, and they keep a score and hope that it will make them stronger in the battle they long for, which will restore Edward to the throne.