The White Queen

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 mother 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.”

I cross myself. “God bless the poor little one,” I say. “Nobody would have wished that on them.”

“Nobody did,” my mother says robustly. “But if Isabel had not taken ship with traitors, then she would have been safe in England with midwives and friends to care for her.”

“Poor girl,” I say, a hand on my own big belly. “Poor girl. She has had little joy from her grand marriage. D’you remember her at court at Christmas?”

“There is worse news,” my mother goes on. “Warwick and George have gone to his great friend King Louis of France, and now the two of them have met with Margaret d’Anjou at Angers, and another plot is spinning, just as we have been spinning here.”

“Warwick still goes on against us?”

My mother makes a grimace. “He must be a determined man, indeed, to see his own grandchild stillborn while his family is on the run, and go from a near shipwreck straight to forswear his oaths of loyalty. But nothing stops him. You would think a storm out of a blue sky would make him wonder, but nothing makes him wonder. Now he is courting Margaret d’Anjou, whom he once fought against. He had to spend half an hour on his knees to beg the forgiveness of her, his greatest enemy. She would not see him without his act of contrition. God bless her, she always did take herself very high.”

“What d’you think he plans?”

“It is the French king who is planning the dance now. Warwick thinks he is Kingmaker, but now he is a puppet. They call Louis of France the spider, and I must say he spins a finer thread even than us. He wants to bring down your husband and diminish our country. He is using Warwick and Margaret d’Anjou to do it. Margaret’s son, the so-called Prince of Wales, Prince Edward of Lancaster, is to marry Warwick’s younger daughter Anne to bind their lying parents together in a pact they cannot dishonor. Then I imagine they will all come to England to free Henry from the Tower.”

“That little thing Anne Neville?” I demand, immediately diverted. “They would give her to that monster Edward, to make sure her father does not play false?”

“They will,” my mother agrees. “She is only fourteen and they are marrying her to a boy who was allowed to choose how to execute his enemies when he was eleven years old. He was raised to be a devil. Anne Neville must be wondering if she is rising to be queen or falling among the damned.”

“But it changes everything for George,” I say, thinking aloud. “It was one thing to fight his brother, the king, when he hoped to kill him and succeed him-but now? Why would he fight Edward when he gains nothing for himself? Why would he fight his brother to put the Lancaster king and then the Lancaster prince on the throne?”

“I suppose he didn’t think such a thing would happen when he set sail with a wife near her time, and a father-in-law determined to win the crown. But now he has lost his son and heir, and his father-in-law has a second daughter who could be queen. George’s prospects are changed very much. He should have the sense to see that. But d’you think he has?”

“Someone should advise him.” Our eyes meet. I never have to spell things out for my mother: we understand each other so well.

“Shall you visit the king’s mother before dinner?” Mother asks me.

I take my foot from the pedal of the spinning wheel and stop it with my hand. “Let’s go and see her now,” I suggest.

She is sitting with her women sewing an altar cloth. One of them is reading from the Bible as they work. She is famously devout; her suspicion that we are not as saintly as she, worse, perhaps pagans, worst of all, perhaps witches, is just one of the many fears she holds against me. The years have not improved her view of me. She did not want me to marry her son, and even now, though I have proved my fertility and myself a good wife for him, she hates me still. Indeed, she has been so discourteous that Edward has given her Fotheringhay to keep her from court. As for me, I am not impressed by her sanctity: if she is such a good woman, then she should have taught George better. If she had the ear of God, she would not have lost her son Edmund and her husband. I curtsey to her as we enter, and she rises to curtsey low to me. She nods her women to pick up their work and go to one side. She knows I am not visiting her to inquire after her health. There is still no great love lost between us and never will be.

“Your Grace,” she says levelly. “I am honored.”

“My Lady Mother,” I say, smiling. “The pleasure is mine.”

We all sit simultaneously in order to avoid the issue of priority, and she waits for me to speak.

“I am so concerned for you,” I say sweetly. “I am sure you are worried about George, so far from home, proclaimed as a traitor, and all but entrapped with the traitor Warwick, estranged from his brother and from his family. His first baby lost, his own life in such danger.”

She blinks. She had not anticipated my concern for her favorite George. “Of course I wish he were reconciled to us,” she says cautiously. “It is always sad when brothers quarrel.”

“And now I hear that George is abandoning his own family,” I say plaintively. “A turncoat-not just against his brother but against you and against his own house.”

She looks at my mother for an explanation.

“He has joined Margaret d’Anjou,” my mother says bluntly. “Your son, a Yorkist, is going to fight for the Lancastrian king. Shameful.”

“He will be defeated for certain: Edward always wins,” I say. “And then he must be executed as a traitor. How can Edward spare him, even for brotherly love, if George takes up the Lancaster colors? Think of him dying with a red rose at his collar! The shame for you! What would his father have said?”

She is truly aghast. “He would never follow Margaret of Anjou,” she says. “His father’s greatest enemy?”

“Margaret of Anjou put George’s father’s head on a spike on the walls of York, and now he serves her,” I say thoughtfully. “How can any of us ever forgive him?”

“It cannot be so,” she says. “He might be tempted to join Warwick. It is hard for him to always come second to Edward, and-” She breaks off, but we all know that George is jealous of everyone: his brother Richard, Hastings, me, and all of my kin. We know she has filled his head with wild thoughts that Edward is a bastard and so he is the true heir. “And besides, what-”

“What good does it do him?” I supplement smoothly. “I see what you think of him. Indeed, he always thinks of nothing but his gain and never of loyalty or his word or his honor. He is all George and no York.”

She flushes at that, but she cannot deny that George has been the most selfish spoiled boy who ever turned coat.

“He thought when he went with Warwick that Warwick would make him king,” I say bluntly. “Then they found that nobody would have George for king if they could have Edward. Only two people in the country think George is a better man than my husband.”

She waits.

“George himself and you,” I say precisely. “Then he fled with Warwick because he did not dare face Edward after betraying him again. And now he finds that Warwick’s plan has changed. Warwick will not put George on the throne. He will marry Anne his daughter to Edward of Lancaster; he will put the young Edward of Lancaster on the throne and become father-in-law to the King of England that way. George and Isabel are no longer his choice for King and Queen of England. Now it is Edward of Lancaster and Anne. The best that George can hope for is to be brother-in-law to the usurping Lancaster King of England instead of brother to the rightful York king.”

George’s mother nods.

“Little profit for him,” I observe. “For a great deal of work, and dreadful danger.”

I let her think on this for a moment. “Now, if he were to turn his coat again and come back to his brother, penitent and truly loyal, Edward would have him back,” I say. “Edward would forgive him.”

“He would?”

I nod. “I can promise it.” I don’t add that I will never forgive him, and that he and Warwick are dead men to me and have been ever since they executed my father and brother after the battle of Edgecote Moor, and they will be dead men hereafter, whatever they do. Their names are in the black locket in my jewelry case, and their names will never see the light again until they themselves are in the eternal darkness.

“It would be such a good thing if George, a young man without good advisors, could hear from someone, in private, in secret, that he could come back safely to his brother,” my mother observes at random, looking out of the window at the scudding clouds. “Sometimes a young man needs good advice. Sometimes he needs to be told that he has taken a wrong turning but that he can come back to the high road. A young man such as George should not be fighting for Lancaster, dying with a red rose on his collar. A young man like George should be with his family, with his brothers who love him.” She pauses to let his mother think this through. It is really beautifully done.

“If only someone could tell him that he was welcome at home, then you would have your son back, the brothers would be reunited, York would fight for York once more, and George would lose nothing. He would be brother to the King of England, and he would be Duke of Clarence as he has always been. We could undertake that Edward would restore him. There lies his future. This other way he is-what would one call him?” She pauses to wonder what one would call Cecily’s favorite son, then she finds the words: “An utter numpty.”

The king’s mother rises to her feet; my mother gets up too. I stay seated, smiling up at her, letting her stand before me. “I always so enjoy talking with you both,” she says, her voice trembling with anger.

Now I rise, my hand on my spreading belly, and I wait for her to curtsey to me. “Oh, me too. Good day, My Lady Mother,” I say pleasantly.

And so it is done, as easily as an enchantment. Without another word said, without Edward even knowing, a lady from the king’s mother’s court decides to visit her great friend, George’s wife, poor Isabel Neville. The lady, heavily veiled, takes a boat, goes to Angers, finds Isabel, wastes no time on her crying in her room, finds George, tells him of his mother’s tender love and her concerns for him. George tells her in return of his increasing discomfort with the allies to whom he is not only sworn but also married. God, he thinks, does not bless their union since their baby died in the storm, and nothing has gone right for him since he married Isabel. Surely, nothing as unpleasant as this should ever happen to George? Now he finds himself in the company of his family’s enemies and-far worse for him-in second place again. Turncoat George says that he will come to England with the invading army of Lancaster, but as soon as he sets foot in his beloved brother’s kingdom he will tell us where they have landed, and what is their strength. He will seem to stand by them as brother-in-law to the Lancaster Prince of Wales until the battle is joined, and then he will attack them from behind, and fight his way through to his brothers once more. He will be a son ofYork, one of the three sons of York again. We can rely on him. He will destroy his present friends, and his wife’s own family. He is loyal to York. In his innermost heart, he has always been loyal to York.

My husband brings this encouraging news to me, unaware that this is the doing of women, spinning their toils around men. I am resting on my daybed, one hand on my belly, feeling the baby move.

“Isn’t this wonderful?” he asks me, truly delighted. “George will come back to us!”

“I know that you love George,” I say. “But even you have to admit he is an absolute crawling thing, loyal to no one.”

My generous-hearted husband smiles. “Oh, he is George,” he says kindly. “You can’t be too hard on him. He has always been everyone’s favorite; he has always been one to please himself.”

I find a smile in return. “I am not too hard on him,” I say. “I am glad he has come back to you.” And inwardly, I say to myself: But he is a dead man.