The White Queen

by Philippa Gregory

  As the days grow shorter and the nights grow darker, I know that my time is coming and my baby is due. My great terror is that I will die here, in childbirth, and my mother will be left here alone, in our enemy’s city, guarding my children.

  “Do you know what will happen?” I ask her bluntly. “Have you foreseen it? And what will happen to my girls?”

  I see some knowledge in her eyes, but the face she turns to me is untroubled. “You aren’t going to die, if that’s what you’re asking,” she says bluntly. “You are a healthy young woman and the king’s council is sending Lady Scrope to care for you, and a pair of midwives. There is no reason to think that you will die, any more than there was with any of the others. I expect you to survive this, and to have more children.”

  “The baby?” I ask, trying to read her face.

  “You know he is healthy,” she says, smiling. “Anyone who has felt that child kick knows he is strong. There is no reason for you to fear.”

  “But there is something,” I say certainly. “You foresee something about Edward, my baby prince Edward.”

  She looks at me for a moment and then she decides to speak honestly. “I can’t see him becoming king,” she says. “I have read the cards and I have looked at the reflection of the moon on the water. I have tried asking the crystal, and looking into the smoke. Indeed, I have tried everything I know which is inside the laws of God and is allowed in this holy space. But to tell you the truth, Elizabeth: I cannot see him being king.”

  I laugh out loud. “Is that it? Is that all? Dear God, Mother, I cannot see his own father being king again, and he is crowned and ordained! I cannot see myself being queen again, and I have had the holy oil on my breast and the scepters in my hand. I don’t hope for a Prince of Wales here, just a healthy boy. Just let him be born strong and grow to be a man, and I will be content. I don’t need him to be King of England. I just want to know that he and I will live through this.”

  “Oh, you’ll live through this,” she says. An airy wave of her hand dismisses the cramped rooms; the girls’ truckle beds in one corner; the servants’ straw mattresses on the floor in another; the poverty of the space; the chill of the cellar; the damp in the stone of the walls; the smoking fire; the dauntless courage of my children, who are forgetting that they ever lived anywhere better. “This is nothing. I expect to see us rise from this.”

  “How?” I ask her disbelievingly.

  She leans over and she puts her mouth to my ear. “Because your husband is not growing vines and making wine in Flanders,” she says. “He is not carding wool and learning to weave. He is equipping an expedition, making allies, raising money, planning to invade England. The London merchants are not the only ones in the country who prefer York to Lancaster. And Edward has never lost a battle. D’you remember?”

  Uncertainly, I nod. Even though he is defeated and in exile, it is true that he has never lost a battle.

  “So when he comes against Henry’s forces, even when they are captained by Warwick and driven on by Margaret of Anjou, don’t you think he will win?”

  It is not a proper confinement, as a queen should be confined, with a ceremonial retirement from court six weeks before the date of the birth, and a closing of the shutters and a blessing of the room.

  “Nonsense,” my mother says buoyantly. “You retired from daylight itself, didn’t you? Confinement? I should think no queen has ever been so confined. Who has ever been confined to sanctuary before?”

  It is not a proper royal birth with three midwives and two wet nurses, and rockers and noble godmothers and mistresses of the nursery standing by, and ambassadors waiting with rich gifts. Lady Scrope is sent by the Lancaster court to make sure that I have everything I need, and I think this a gracious gesture from the Earl of Warwick to me. But I have to bring my baby into the world with no waiting husband and court at the door, and almost none to help me, and his godfathers are the Abbot of Westminster and the prior, and his godmother is Lady Scrope: the only people who are with me, neither great lords of the land nor foreign kings, the usual godfathers for a royal baby, but good and kind people who have been trapped at Westminster with us.

  I call him Edward, as his father wants, and as the silver spoon from the river predicted. Margaret of Anjou, with her invasion fleet held in port by storms, sends me a message to tell me to call him John. She does not want another Prince Edward in England to rival her son. I ignore her words as from a nobody. Why would I listen to the preferences of Margaret of Anjou? My husband named him Edward, and the silver spoon came from the river with his name on it. Edward he is: Edward, Prince ofWales, he shall be, even if my mother is right and he is never Edward the king.

  Among ourselves we call him Baby, and no one calls him the Prince of Wales, and I think as I drift into sleep after the birth, all warm with him in my arms, half drunk from the birthing cup that they have given me, that perhaps this baby will not be king. There have been no cannons fired for him and no bonfires lit on hilltops. The fountains and conduits of London have not run with wine, the citizens are not drunk with joy, there are no announcements of his arrival racing to the great courts of Europe. It is like having an ordinary baby, not a prince. Perhaps he will be an ordinary boy and I will become an ordinary woman again. Perhaps we will not be great people, chosen by God, but just happy.

  WINTER 1470–71

  We spend Christmas in sanctuary. The London butchers send us a fat goose, and my boys and little Elizabeth and I play cards and I make sure that I lose a silver sixpence to her, and send her to bed thrilled to be a serious gamester. We spend Twelfth Night in sanctuary, and Mother and I compose a play for the children, with costumes and masks and enchantments. We tell them our family story of Melusina, the beautiful woman, half girl, half fish, who is found in the fountain in the forest and marries a mortal for love. I wrap myself in a sheet, which we tie at the feet to make a great tail, and I let down my hair, and when I rise up from the floor, the girls are transported by the fish woman Melusina and the boys applaud. My mother enters with a paper horse’s head taped on the stick of a broom, wearing the doorman’s jerkin and a paper crown. The girls don’t recognize her at all and watch the play as if we were paid mummers at the greatest court in the world. We tell them the story of the courtship of the beautiful woman who is half fish, and how her lover persuades her to leave her watery fountain in the wood and take her chance in the great world. We tell only half the story: that she lives with him and gives him beautiful children and they are happy together.

  There is more to the story than this, of course. But I find that I don’t want to think about marriages for love that end in separation. I don’t want to think about being a woman who cannot live in the new world that is being made by men. I don’t want to think of Melusina rising from her fountain and confining herself to a castle while I am held in sanctuary, and all of us, daughters of Melusina, are trapped in a place where we cannot wholly be ourselves.

  Melusina’s mortal husband loved her, but she puzzled him. He did not understand her nature, and he was not content to live with a woman who was a mystery to him. He allowed a guest to persuade him to spy on her. He hid behind the hangings in her bath house and saw her swim beneath the water of her bath, saw—horrified—the gleam of ripple on scales, learned her secret: that although she loved him, truly loved him, she was still half woman and half fish. He could not bear what she was, and she could not help but be who she was. So he left her, because in his heart he feared that she was a woman with a divided nature—and he did not realize that all women are creatures of divided nature. He could not stand to think of her secrecy, that she had a life hidden from him. He could not, in fact, tolerate the truth that Melusina was a woman who knew the unknown depths, who swam in them.

  Poor Melusina, who tried so hard to be a good wife, had to leave the man who loved her and go back to the water, finding the earth too hard. Like many women, she was unable to fit exactly with her husband’s view. Her feet hurt: she could not wa
lk in the path of her husband’s choosing. She tried to dance to please him, but she could not deny the pain. She is the ancestress of the royal house of Burgundy, and we, her descendants, still try to walk in the paths of men, and sometimes we too find the way unbearably hard.

  I hear that the new court has a merry Christmas feast. Henry the king is back in his senses, and the House of Lancaster is triumphant. From the windows of the sanctuary we can see the barges going up and down the river as the noblemen go from their riverside palaces to Whitehall. I see the Stanley barge go by. Lord Stanley, who kissed my hand at my coronation tournament, and told me his motto was “Sans Changer,” was one of the first to greet Warwick when he landed in England. It turns out he is a Lancaster man after all; maybe he will be unchanging for them.

  I see the Beaufort barge with the flag of the red dragon of Wales flying at the stern. Jasper Tudor, the great power of Wales, is taking his nephew young Henry Tudor to court to visit the king, his kinsman. Half outlaw, half prince. Jasper will be back in the castles of Wales again, and Lady Margaret Beaufort will weep tears of joy all over her fourteen-year-old son, Henry Tudor, I don’t doubt. She was parted from him when we put him with good York guardians, the Herberts, and she had to endure the prospect of his marrying the Yorkist Herbert girl. But now William Herbert lies dead in our service, and Margaret Beaufort has her son back in her keeping. She will be pushing him forward at court, pushing him forward for favors and places. She will want his titles restored; she will want his inheritance guaranteed. George, Duke of Clarence, stole both the title and the lands, and she will have named them in her prayers ever since. She is a most ambitious woman, and determined mother. I don’t doubt she will have the earldom of Richmond off George within the year and, if she can, her son will be named as the Lancaster heir after the prince.

  I see Lord Warwick’s barge, the most beautiful on the river, his rowers going in time to the beat of the drummer in the stern, moving swiftly against the tide as if nothing can stop his onward progress, not even the flow of the river. I even make him out, standing in the prow of the boat as if he would rule the very water of the river, his hat pulled off and held in his hand so that he can feel the cold air in his dark hair. I purse my lips to whistle up a wind, but I let him go. It makes no difference.

  Warwick’s older daughter Isabel may be hand in hand with my brother-in-law George in the seats at the back of the barge as they go past my subterranean prison. Perhaps she remembers the Christmas that she came to court as an unwilling bride and I was kind to her, or perhaps she prefers to forget the court where I was the Queen of the White Rose. George will know I am here, the wife of his brother, the woman who stayed loyal when he did not: living in poverty, living in half darkness. He will know I am here; he may even feel me watching him, my narrowed eyes overlooking him—this man who was once George of the House of York, and is now a favored kinsman at the court of Lancaster.

  My mother puts her hand on my arm. “Don’t ill wish them,” she warns me. “It comes back on you. It is better to wait. Edward is coming. I don’t doubt it. I don’t doubt him for a moment. This time will be like a bad dream. It is as Anthony says: shadows on the wall. What matters is that Edward musters an army big enough to defeat Warwick.”

  “How can he?” I say, looking out at the city that now declares itself all for Lancaster. “How can he even begin?”

  “He has been in touch with your brothers, and with all our kinsmen. He is raising his forces, and he has never lost a battle.”

  “He has never fought Warwick. And Warwick taught him everything he knows about war.”

  “He is king,” she says. “Even if they now say that it meant nothing. He was crowned, he is divinely ordained, he has had the holy oil on his breast—they cannot deny that he is king. Even if another crowned and ordained king sits on the throne. But Edward is lucky, and Henry is not. Perhaps it comes down only to that: if you are a lucky man. And the Yorks are a lucky house.” She smiles. “And of course he has us. We can wish him well, no harm in a little spell for good luck. And if that does not improve his chances, then nothing will.”

  SPRING 1471

  My mother brews up tisanes and leans from the window and pours them into the river, whispering words that no one can hear, throws powder on the fires to make them burn green and smoke. She never stirs the children’s porridge without whispering a prayer, turns her pillow over twice before she gets into bed, claps her shoes together before putting them on to rid them of bad luck.

  “Does any of it mean anything?” my son Richard asks me, one eye on his grandmother, who is twisting a plait of ribbon and whispering over it.

  I shrug. “Sometimes,” I say.

  “Is it witchcraft?” he asks nervously.

  “Sometimes.”

  Then in March my mother tells me, “Edward is coming to you. I am sure of it.”

  “You have foreseen it?” I ask.

  She giggles. “No, the butcher told me.”

  “What did the butcher tell you? London is filled with gossip.”

  “Yes, but he had a message from a man in Smithfield who serves the ships that go to Flanders. He saw a little fleet sailing northwards in the worst weather, and one of them was flying the Sun in Splendor: the badge of York.”

  “Edward is invading?”

  “Perhaps at this very moment.”

  In April, in the early hours of the night, I hear the sound of cheering from the streets outside and I jump from my bed and go to the window to listen. The abbey serving girl pounds on the door and comes running into the room and babbles, “Your Grace! Your Grace! It is him. It is the king. Not King Henry, the other king. Your king. The York king. King Edward!”

  I draw my nightgown around me and put my hand to the plait of my hair. “Here now? Are they cheering for him?”

  “Cheering for him now!” she exclaims. “Lighting torches to guide him on his way. Singing and throwing down gold coins before him. Him, and a band of soldiers. And he must be coming here!”

  “Mother! Elizabeth! Richard! Thomas! Girls!” I call out. “Get up! Get dressed! Your father is coming. Your father is coming to us!” I seize the serving girl by the arm. “Get me hot water to wash in and the best gown I have. Leave the firewood, it doesn’t matter. Who’s going to sit by that paltry fire ever again?” I push her from the room to fetch the water, and I pull my hair out of the nighttime plait as Elizabeth comes running into my room, her big eyes wide. “Is it the bad queen coming? Lady Mother, is the bad queen here?”

  “No, sweetheart! We are saved. It is your own good father coming to visit us. Can’t you hear them cheering?”

  I stand her up on a stool to the grille in the door, then I splash water on my face and twist my hair up under my headdress. The girl brings me my gown and ties it up, fumbling with the ribbons, and then we hear the thunder of his knock at the door and Elizabeth screams and jumps down to open it, and then falls back as he comes in, taller and graver than she remembers him, and in a moment I have run to him, barefoot as I am, and I am in his arms again.

  “My son,” he demands after he has held me and kissed me and rubbed his rough chin against my cheek. “Where is my son? Is he strong? Is he well?”

  “He is strong and well. He is five months old this month,” my mother says as she brings him in, swaddled tightly, and sweeps Edward a great curtsey. “And you are welcome home, son Edward, Your Grace.”

  Gently he puts me aside and goes swiftly to her. I had forgotten that he could move so lightly on his feet, like a dancer. He takes his son from my mother’s arms, and though he whispers “Thank you,” he does not even see her: he is quite distracted. He takes the baby over to the light of the window, and Baby Edward opens his dark-blue eyes and yawns, his rosebud mouth opening wide, and he looks into the face of his father as if to return the intense gray-eyed scrutiny.

  “My son,” he says quietly. “Elizabeth, forgive me, that you had to give birth to him here. I would not have had that for the world.”<
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  I nod in silence.

  “And he is baptized and named Edward as I wanted?”

  “He is.”

  “And he thrives?”

  “We are just starting to feed him solid food,” my mother says proudly. “And he is taking to it. He sleeps well and he is a bright, clever boy. Elizabeth has nursed him herself, and no one could have been a better wet nurse to him. We have made you a little prince here.”

  Edward looks at her. “Thank you for his care,” he says. “And for staying with my Elizabeth.” He looks down. His daughters, Elizabeth, Mary, and Cecily, are gathered around him, gazing up at him as if he were some strange beast, a unicorn perhaps, who has suddenly cantered into their nursery.

  Gently he kneels so that he does not tower above them, still holding the baby in the crook of his arm. “And you are my girls, my princesses,” he says quietly to them. “Do you remember me? I have been away a long time, more than half a year; but I am your father. I have been away from you for far too long, but there was never a day when I did not think of you and your beautiful mother and swear that I would come home to you and set you in your rightful places again. Do you remember me?”

  Cecily’s lower lip trembles, but Elizabeth speaks: “I remember you.” She puts her hand on his shoulder and looks into his face without fear. “I am Elizabeth, I am the oldest. I remember you; the others are too small. Do you remember me, your Elizabeth? Princess Elizabeth? One day I shall be Queen of England like my mother.”

  We laugh at that, and he gets to his feet again, hands the baby to my mother, and takes me into his arms. Richard and Thomas step forward and kneel for his blessing.

  “My boys,” he says warmly. “You must have hated it, cooped up in here.”

  Richard nods. “I wish I had been with you, Sire.”