The Red Queen

AUTUMN 1461

We are wakened by the clanging of the tocsin, and I jump out of bed, throw on a gown, and run to the nursery. My boy is pulling on his breeches and shouting for his boots. The mistress of the nursery looks up as I come in. “My lady? D’you know what it is?”

I shake my head and look out of the window. The portcullis is coming down with a speedy clatter; the guards and the grooms of the stables are spilling out of their living quarters and shouting. Among the men I see my husband moving quietly and steadily towards the guard tower that overlooks the gate.

“I’m going down,” I say.

“I’ll come! I’ll come!” my son pipes. “I need my sword.”

“You don’t need your sword,” I say. “But you can come if you promise to stay with me.”

“May I come with the little earl, please, m’lady?” his nurse asks. I know she thinks that I won’t be able to make him stay beside me, and I flush with irritation; but I nod, and the three of us run down the stone stairs, across the yard, and up the narrow stairs to the tower, where my husband and the captain of the guard are looking over the battlements to where the flag of William Herbert is fluttering over a small army of his men, trotting along the road.

“God be with us,” I whisper.

Henry drags his nurse to the farthest corner of the tower, where he can look down on the drawbridge being hauled up.

My husband smiles at me. “I doubt we are in danger,” he says gently. “I have no doubt that Herbert has been given this castle, and perhaps the earldom too. He has only come to claim his own. We are his unexpected guests.”

“What will we do?”

“Hand it over to him.”

“Hand it over to him?” I am so shocked at my husband’s traitorous plan that I stare at him, my mouth agape. “Just give him the keys? Of Jasper’s castle? Just open the doors and invite him to dine?”

“He might ask us to dine,” my husband corrects me. “If, as I think, that this is his castle now.”

“You cannot intend to just let him in.”

“Of course I do,” he says. “If King Edward has given him the castle and the command of Wales, then we are behaving as loyal citizens should by giving William Herbert his own, and rendering to Caesar his due.”

“This castle belongs to us Tudors,” I spit at him. “To Jasper, and in his absence to me and Henry. This is Henry’s home; this is my castle.”

My husband shakes his gray head. “No, my dear. You are forgetting that there is a new king on the throne and he will have made new grants and allowances. Lancaster no longer holds the throne, nor Wales, not even Pembroke Castle. For all that this was your home, it will have been given to one of proven loyalty to York. I had thought perhaps William Hastings or Warwick, but as we see, William Herbert is the lucky man.” He glances over the castle wall. They are nearly within hailing distance.

“Jasper would have raised a siege,” I say bitterly. “Jasper would have defended his own. He would have died rather than hand over our castle to such as Herbert. He would not surrender like a woman. He would have fought. Herbert is a traitor, and I won’t admit him to Jasper’s castle.”

My husband looks at me, and he is no longer smiling. “Margaret, you see for yourself what Jasper would have done. You see for yourself what choice he made. He saw that the battle was lost, and he left the castle, and he left your son, and he left you. He left you without a backward glance. He told you he didn’t like long good-byes, and he ran away to secure his own safety, far away. He told me himself that he expected Herbert to come and claim Pembroke, and that he expected us to yield. He told me that he would be glad if we stayed to hand over Pembroke to Herbert and make sure that the servants were safe. Anything like a siege would be to waste our lives for nothing. Anything else and we might as well have run away as he did. The battle is lost: it was lost at Towton, and Jasper knew it and ran away.”

“He didn’t run away,” I say hotly.

“He’s not here now, is he?” my husband observes. He leans out over the battlements and shouts: “Hi! Sir William!”

The big man at the front of his men pulls up his horse and dips his standard. “I am William, Lord Herbert. Who calls me? Is that you, Sir Henry Stafford?”

“The same. I am here with my wife Lady Margaret and her son, the Earl of Richmond.”

“And Jasper Tudor, the traitor, the former Earl of Pembroke?”

Henry pulls at my hand, and I bend down to listen to his whisper. “My uncle is still Earl of Pembroke, isn’t he? Why does that bad man say the former earl?”

“We will never call him that,” I swear. “In our prayers he will always be the Earl of Pembroke to us. It is just the Yorks who think differently. They are all liars.”

“Jasper Tudor is gone away,” Sir Henry shouts back. “You have my word of honor that he is not in the castle nor nearby.”

“I have been granted the castle and the command of Wales by King Edward, God save him!” Herbert bellows up. “Will you open the gates and admit me to my own?”

“I will,” Sir Henry says cheerfully, and nods to the captain of the guard. Two men go running, and I watch, disbelieving, as the portcullis is cranked up and the drawbridge dropped down, and the red dragon standard of the Tudors, smartly as a traitor, drops down the flagpole and disappears from sight as if it had not fluttered over the castle for all the time that I have known it.

William Herbert tips a salute to the soldiers at the gate and rides into the castle that is now his own, with a merry flourish, and dismounts on my mounting block, as if it had been standing there, all these years, just waiting for him.

I am speechless with rage at dinner that night; but my husband and Lord Herbert talk of the new king, of the likelihood of an invasion from France, of the danger of a Scots army marching down on England, as if these were our enemies and not our saviors. I find myself hating my husband for his easy good manners, and I keep my eyes on my plate, and I speak only in reply to a direct question. Indeed, Lord Herbert says almost nothing to me until I rise from the table to withdraw, and then he glances at my husband and says: “I would speak with both of you about young Henry Tudor. Shall we talk in the solar after dinner?”

“Of course,” my husband says, answering for me and so preventing a refusal. “I am sure Lady Margaret will have some good wine and fruit waiting for us when we join her there.”

I bow my head and leave them to their drink and their amiable chat, and then wait in my chair by the fireside. I don’t have to worry alone for long. The two of them come into the room, now talking about the hunting, and my husband is praising the game that can be hunted near the castle, as if it had not been preserved and guarded by Jasper, as if it were not the inheritance of my son and this man were not an interloper, a poacher if he takes our game.

“I’ll be brief,” Lord Herbert says, putting himself before the fire and warming his backside as if the logs were his to burn. “I am to have custody of the boy Henry and he will live with me. The king will confirm that I am to be his guardian after Christmas.”

My head flies up, but my husband does not even look surprised.

“You will live here?” he asks, as if this is all that matters.

“Raglan,” Sir William says shortly. “It’s a better building, and my wife likes it. Henry will be brought up with our children with an education befitting his station. You will be welcome to visit him any time you wish.”

“That’s gracious,” my husband says when I am still silent. “I am sure Lady Margaret is grateful.” His admonitory look towards me prompts me to say something grateful, but I cannot.

“He should stay in my keeping,” I say flatly.

Lord Herbert shakes his head. “That would never have been allowed, my lady. Your son is heir to an enormous fortune and name. Someone would be bound to bid for him and take him as his ward. In many ways you are lucky it is me. I don’t expect you to see it right now, but if a Neville had taken him as their ward, he would have had to go far away among strangers. With me, he can stay in Wales, he can keep his own servants about him, he can be in the country that he knows. My wife is a tenderhearted woman; he will be brought up with my children. He could have done a lot worse.”

“He is my son!” I exclaim. “He is a Lancaster boy, he is heir to-”

“We’re grateful,” my husband says, silencing me.

Lord Herbert looks at me. “Your son’s family connections are a mixed blessing, my lady,” he says. “I wouldn’t boast of them overmuch if I were you. His cousin, the former king, is in exile and plotting with the enemies of our country. His guardian and the head of his house, Jasper Tudor, is in exile with a price on his head as a named traitor. His grandfather was beheaded for treason. I myself captured his father, and your own father’s end was less than glorious. I would be glad that he is to be raised in a loyal York household if I were you.”

“She is grateful,” my husband says again. He steps across to me and holds out a peremptory hand. I have to rise to my feet and hold hands with him as if we were in agreement. “We will tell Henry when he wakes in the morning, and we will go back to our own house in England, as soon as the guards and the horses can be ready.”

“Stay,” says Sir William pleasantly. “Stay till the boy is accustomed, stay as long as you wish. We can hunt some of those deer that Jasper has taken such trouble to preserve.” He laughs, and my husband, the turncoat, laughs with him.

We ride back to our house in Lincolnshire in stony silence, and when we reach home I devote myself to prayer and to my studies. My husband, after a few quizzical remarks that earn him no reply, after asking me if I would like to take a trip to London with him-as if I would go to the city which has celebrated shame! – turns his attention to running our great estates and to his trade in London. The new king’s determination to keep the peace means more work for local gentry, and my husband finds that he is commanded to root out self-serving and corrupt local officers who have thrived under the lackadaisical rule of King Henry. The law courts now have to be open to give justice to all, and not just to those who can bribe the court officers. The new King Edward summons a Parliament and tells them that it is his determination to live of his own and not burden the country with heavy taxation. He commands that the roads be made safe and that private armies be reduced. He orders that brigands and criminals be brought to justice and that the casual violence of the alehouse and the highway be controlled. Everyone welcomes these changes and foresees a time of greater prosperity and peace for England, with this glorious son of York guiding it into the ways of peace. Everyone is delighted with the reforms and the improvements. Everyone seems to be in love with the handsome son of York. Everyone but me.

This King Edward is a young man of nineteen, just a year older than me, surviving the death of his father as I have done, dreaming of greatness as I do-and yet he has put himself at the head of his house’s army and led them to the throne of England, while I have done nothing. It is he who has been a Joan of Arc for England, not me. I cannot even hold my son in my own keeping. This boy, this Edward that they call the sweet rose of England, the fair herb of England, the white flower, is fabled to be handsome and brave and strong-and I am nothing. He is adored by women; they sing his praises, his looks, and his charms. I cannot even be seen at his court. I am known to nobody. I am a flower that wastes its sweetness on the desert air, indeed. He has never even seen me. No one has written a single, solitary ballad about me; no one has drawn my likeness. I am wife to a man of no ambition, who will not ride out to war until he is forced to go. I am mother to a son in my enemy’s keeping, and I am the distant love of a defeated man in exile. I spend my days-which get shorter all the time as the evenings draw in on this most miserable year-on my knees, and I pray to God to let this dark night pass, to let this cold winter pass, and to throw down the House of York and let the House of Lancaster come home.