The White Queen

by Philippa Gregory

  “Has he told you to break off your betrothal to Henry Tudor?” I ask her.

  “No! It’s nothing to do with that!”

  “Oh.” I nod. “But you can see that this will be a tremendous humiliation for Henry Tudor when the news gets out.”

  “I would never marry him anyway,” she bursts out. “I hate him. I believe it was he who sent the men to kill our boys. He would have come to London and taken the throne. We knew that. That’s why we called down the rain. But now…but now…”

  “Now what?”

  “Richard says that he will put Anne Neville aside and marry me,” she breathes. Her face is alight with joy. “He says that he will make me his queen and my son will sit on my father’s throne. We will make a dynasty of the House of York, and the white rose will be the flower of England forever.” She hesitates. “I know you cannot trust him, Lady Mother, but this is the man I love. Can you not love him for my sake?”

  I think that this is the oldest, hardest question between a mother and her daughter. Can I love him for your sake?

  No. This is the man who envied my husband, who killed my brother and my son Richard Grey, who seized my son Edward’s throne and who exposed him to danger, if nothing worse. But I need not answer the truth to this my most truthful child. I need not be open with this most transparent child. She has fallen in love with my enemy, and she wants a happy ending.

  I open my arms to her. “All I ever wanted was your happiness,” I lie. “If he loves you and will be true to you, and you love him, then I want nothing more.”

  She comes into my arms and she lays her head on my shoulder. But she is no fool, my daughter. She lifts her head and smiles at me. “And I shall be Queen of England,” she says. “At least that will please you.”

  My daughters stay with me for nearly a month, and we live the life of an ordinary family, as Elizabeth once wanted. In the second week it snows, and we find Nesfields’ sleigh and harness up one of the cart horses and make an expedition to one of the neighbors, and then find the snow has melted and we have to stay the night. The next day we have to trudge home in the mud and the slush as they cannot lend us horses and we take turns to ride bareback on our own big horse. It takes us the best part of the day to get home and we laugh and sing all the way.

  In the middle of the second week there is a messenger from court and he brings a letter for me, and one for Elizabeth. I call her to my private chamber, away from the girls, who have invaded the kitchen and are making marchpane sweetmeats for dinner, and we open our letters at either end of the writing table.

  Mine is from the king.

  I imagine Elizabeth will have spoken with you about the great love I bear her, and I wanted to tell you of my plans. I intend that my wife shall admit she is past the years of childbearing and take residence in Bermondsey Abbey and release me from my vows. I will seek the proper dispensations and then marry your daughter and she will be Queen of England. You will take the title of My Lady, the Queen’s Mother, and I will restore to you the palaces of Sheen and Greenwich on our wedding day, with your royal pension. Your daughters will live with you and at court, and you shall have the arranging of their marriages. They will be recognized as sisters to the Queen of England and of the royal family ofYork.

  If either of your sons has been in hiding and you know of his whereabouts, then you may now send for him in safety. I will make him my heir until Elizabeth gives birth to my son.

  I will marry Elizabeth for love, but I am sure you can see that this is the resolution of all our difficulties. I hope for your approval, but I will proceed anyway. I remain your loving kinsman. RR

  I read the letter through twice and I find a grim smile at his dishonest phrasing. “Resolution of all our difficulties” is, I think, a smooth way of describing a blood vendetta which has taken my brother and my Grey son, and which led me to foment rebellion against him and curse his sword arm. But Richard is a York—they take victory as their due—and these proposals are good for me and mine. If my son Richard can come home in safety and be a prince once more at the court of his sister, then I will have achieved everything that I swore to regain, and my brother and my son will not have died in vain.

  I glance down the table at Elizabeth. She is rosy with blushes and her eyes are filled with luminous tears. “He proposes marriage?” I ask her.

  “He swears that he loves me. He says he is missing me. He wants me back at court. He asks you to come with me. He wants everyone to know that I will be his wife. He says that Queen Anne is ready to retire.”

  I nod. “I won’t go while she is there,” I say. “And you may go back to court but you are to behave with more discretion. Even if the queen tells you to walk with him, you are to take a companion. And you are not to sit in her place.”

  She is about to interrupt, but I raise my hand. “Truly, Elizabeth, I don’t want you being named as his mistress, especially if you hope to be his wife.”

  “But I love him,” she says simply, as if that is all that matters.

  I look at her and I know my face is hard. “You can love him,” I say. “But if you want him to marry you and make you his queen, you will have more to do than simply loving.”

  She holds his letter to her heart. “He loves me.”

  “He may do, but he will not marry you if there is a whisper of gossip against you. Nobody gets to be Queen of England by being lovable. You will have to play your cards right.”

  She takes a breath. She is no fool, my daughter, and she is a York through and through. “Tell me what I have to do,” she says.

  FEBRUARY 1485

  I bid my daughters farewell on a dark day in February and watch their guard trot off through the mist that swirls around us for all of the day. They are out of sight in moments, as if they had disappeared into cloud, into water, and the thud of the hoofbeats is muffled and then silenced.

  The house seems very empty without the older girls. And in missing them, I find my thoughts and my prayers go to my boys, my dead baby George, my lost boy Edward, and my absent boy Richard. I have heard nothing of Edward since he went into the Tower, and nothing of Richard since that first letter when he told me he was doing well and answering to the name Peter.

  Despite my own caution, despite my own fears, I start to hope. I start to think that if King Richard marries Elizabeth and makes her his queen I will be welcomed at court again, I will take up my place as My Lady, the Queen’s Mother. I will make sure that Richard is trustworthy, and then I will send for my son.

  If Richard is true to his word and names him as his heir, then we will be restored: my son in the place he was born to, my daughter as Queen of England. It will not have come out as Edward and I thought it would when we had a Prince of Wales and a Duke of York and we thought, like young fools, that we would live forever. But it will have come out well enough. If Elizabeth can marry for love and be Queen of England, if my son can be king, after Richard, then it will have come out well enough.

  When I am at court, and in my power, I shall set men to find the body of my son, whether it is under the convenient stair—as Henry Tudor assures us—or buried in the river, as he corrects himself, whether it has been left in some dark lumber room, or is hidden on holy ground in the chapel. I shall find his body, and trace his killers. I shall know what took place: whether he was kidnapped and died by accident in the struggle, whether he was taken away and died of ill health, whether he was murdered in the Tower and buried there, as Henry Tudor is so very certain. I shall learn of his end, and bury him with honor, and order Masses for his soul to be said forever.

  MARCH 1485

  Elizabeth writes to me briefly of the queen’s worsening health. She says no more—she need say no more—we both realize that if the queen dies, there will be no need for an annulment or the settlement of Queen Anne in an abbey; she will be out of the way in the easiest and most convenient way possible. The queen is afflicted with sorrows, she weeps for hours without cause, and the king does not come near her.
My daughter records this as the queen’s loyal maid-in-waiting and does not tell me if she slips from the sick chamber to walk with the king in the gardens, if the buttercups in the hedgerow and the daisies on the lawn remind her and him that life is fleeting and joyful, just as they remind the queen that it is fleeting and sad.

  Then one morning in the middle of March I awake to a sky unnaturally dark, to a sun quite obscured by a circle of darkness. The hens won’t come out of their house; the ducks put their heads under their wings and squat on the banks of the river. I take my two little girls outside and we wander uneasily, looking at the horses in the field who lie down and then lumber up again, as if they don’t know whether it is night or day.

  “Is it an omen?” asks Bridget, who of all of my children seeks to see the will of God in everything.

  “It is a movement of the heavens,” I say. “I have seen it happen with the moon before, but never with the sun. It will pass.”

  “Does it mean an omen for the House of York?” Catherine echoes. “Like the three suns at Towton?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “But I don’t think any of us are in danger. Would you feel it in your heart, if your sister was in trouble?”

  Bridget looks thoughtful for a moment then, prosaic child, she shakes her head. “Only if God spoke to me very loud,” she says. “Only if He shouted and the priest said it was Him.”

  “Then I think we have nothing to fear,” I say. I have no sense of foreboding, though the darkened sun makes the world around us eerie and unfamiliar.

  Indeed, it is not for three days that John Nesfield comes riding to Heytesbury with a black standard before him and the news that the queen, after a long illness, is dead. He comes to tell me, but he makes sure to spread the news throughout the country, and Richard’s other servants will be doing the same. They will all emphasize that there has been a long illness, and the queen has at last gone to her reward in heaven, mourned by a devoted and loving husband.

  “Of course, some say she was poisoned,” Cook says cheerfully to me. “That’s what they’re saying in Salisbury market, anyway. The carrier told me.”

  “How ridiculous! Who would poison the queen?” I ask.

  “They say it was the king himself,” Cook says, putting her head to one side and looking wise, as if she knows great secrets of the court.

  “Murder his wife?” I ask. “They think he would murder his wife of a dozen years? All of a sudden?”

  Cook shakes her head. “They don’t have a good word to say of him in Salisbury,” she remarks. “They liked him well enough at first and they thought he would bring justice and fair wages for the common man, but since he puts northern lords over everything—well, there’s nothing they would not say against him.”

  “You can tell them that the queen was always frail, and that she never recovered from the loss of her son,” I say firmly.

  The Cook beams at me. “And am I to say nothing about who he might take as his next queen?”

  I am silent. I had not realized that gossip had gone so far. “And nothing about that,” I say flatly.

  I have been waiting for this letter ever since they brought me the news that Queen Anne was dead and the world was saying that Richard would marry my daughter. It comes, tearstained as always, from the hand of Lady Margaret.

  To Lady Elizabeth Grey

  Your Ladyship,

  It has come to my notice that your daughter Elizabeth, the declared bastard of the late King Edward, has sinned against God and her own vows and dishonored herself with her uncle the usurper Richard, a process so wrong and unnatural that the very angels hide their gaze. Accordingly, I have advised my son Henry Tudor, rightful King of England, that he should not bestow his hand in marriage on such a girl alike dishonored by Act of Parliament and by her own behavior, and I have arranged for him to marry a young lady of birth far superior and of behavior far more Christian.

  I am sorry for you that in your widowhood and your humiliation you should have to bow your head under yet another sorrow, the shame of your daughter, and I assure you that I shall think of you in my prayers when I mention the foolish and the vain of this world.

  I remain your friend in Christ,

  To whom I pray for you in your old age that you may learn true wisdom and womanly dignity,

  Lady Margaret Stanley

  I laugh at the pomposity of the woman, but as my laughter drains away, I feel cold, a shiver of cold, a foreboding. Lady Margaret has spent her life waiting for the throne that I called my own. I have every reason to think that her son Henry Tudor will also go on waiting for the throne of England, calling himself king, drawing to him the outcasts, the rebels, the disaffected: men who cannot live in England. He will go on haunting the York throne until he is dead, and it may be better that he should be brought to battle and killed sooner rather than later.

  Richard, especially with my daughter at his side, can face down any criticism and should certainly win any battle against any force that Henry could bring. But the cold prickling of the nape of my neck tells me otherwise. I pick up the letter again and I feel the iron conviction of this Lancaster heiress. This is a woman whose belly is filled with pride. She has been eating nothing but her own ambition for nearly thirty years. I would do well to be wary of her now that she has decided that I am so powerless she need not pretend friendship anymore.

  I wonder who she intends for Henry’s wife now? I guess she will be casting about for an heiress, maybe the Herbert girl, but nobody but my daughter can bring the love of England and the loyalty of the York House to the Tudor claimant. Lady Margaret may vent her spite, but it does not matter. If Henry wants to rule England, he will have to ally with York; they will have to deal with us one way or another. I take up my pen.

  Dear Lady Stanley,

  I am sorry indeed to read that you have been listening to such slander and gossip and that this should cause you to doubt the good faith and honor of my daughter Elizabeth, which is, as it has always been, above question. I have no doubt that somber reflection on your part, and on his, will remind you and your son that England has no other York heiress of her importance.

  She is beloved of her uncle as she was beloved of her aunt, as she should be; but only the whispers of the gutter would suggest any impropriety.

  I thank you for your prayers, of course. I will assume that the betrothal stands for its many manifest advantages; unless you seriously wish to withdraw, which I think so unlikely that I send you my best wishes and my thanks for your prayers, which I know are especially welcome to God coming from such a humble and worthy heart. Elizabeth R

  I sign “Elizabeth R,” which I never do these days; but as I fold the paper and drip wax and stamp it with my seal, I find I am smiling at my arrogance. “Elizabeth Regina,” I say to the parchment. “And I shall be My Lady, the Queen’s Mother, while you are still Lady Stanley with a son dead on the battlefield. Elizabeth R. So take that,” I say to the letter. “You old gargoyle.”

  APRIL 1485

  Mother, you must come to court, Elizabeth writes to me in a letter smudged in haste, folded twice, and double sealed.

  It is all going terribly wrong. His Grace the king thinks he must go to London and tell the lords that he will not marry me, that he has never had any intention of marrying me, in order to scotch the rumors that he poisoned the poor queen. Wicked people are saying that he was determined to marry me and would not wait for her death or agreement, and now he thinks he has to announce that he is nothing to me but my uncle.

  I have told him that there is no need for such a declaration, that we could wait in silence for the gossip to die down, but he listens only to Richard Ratcliffe and William Catesby, and they swear that the north will turn against him if he insults the memory of his wife, a Neville of Northumberland.

  Worse, he says that for my reputation I have to go away from court, but he won’t allow me to come to you. He is sending me to visit Lady Margaret and Lord Thomas Stanley of all terrible people. He sa
ys that Lord Thomas is one of the few men whom he can trust to keep me safe, whatever happens; and no one can doubt that my reputation is perfect if Lady Margaret takes me into her house.

  Mother, you have to stop this. I cannot stay with them: I shall be tormented by Lady Margaret, who must think I have betrayed my betrothal to her son, and who is bound to hate me for her son’s sake. You must write to Richard, or even come to court yourself, and tell him that we will be happy, that all will be well, that all we have to do is to wait out this time of gossip and rumor and we can marry in the end. He has no advisors whom he can trust, he has no Privy Council who would tell him the truth. He is dependent on these men whom they call the Rat and the Cat, and they fear that I will influence him against them, for revenge for what they did to our kin.

  Mother, I love him. He is my only joy in this world. I am his in heart and in thoughts and in body and all. You said to me that it would take more than love for me to become Queen of England: you have to tell me what to do. I cannot go to live with the Stanleys. What am I to do now?