The White Queen

MAY 3, 1471

Queen Margaret and her hapless daughter-in-law, Anne Neville, commandeer a nearby house called Payne’s Place, and wait for the battle that they believe will make them queen and Princess of Wales. Anne Neville spends the night on her knees, praying for the soul of her father, whose body is exposed, for every citizen to see, on the steps before the altar at St. Paul’s in London. She prays for the grief of her mother who, landing in England, learned before her feet had dried that her husband was defeated, killed fleeing from a battle, and that she was a widow. The widowed duchess, Anne of Warwick, refused to go a step farther with the Lancaster army and shut herself up in Beaulieu Abbey, abandoning both her daughters to their opposed husbands: one married to the Lancaster prince and the other to the York duke. Little Anne prays for the fate of her sister Isabel, tied for life to the turncoat George, and now a York countess once more, whose husband will fight on the other side of the battle tomorrow. She prays as she always does that God will send the light of His reason to her young husband Prince Edward of Lancaster, who grows more perverse and vicious every day, and she prays for herself, that she may survive this battle and somehow come home again. She no longer knows quite what her home might be.

Edward’s army is commanded by the men he loves: the brothers he would gladly die beside, if it is God’s will that they should die that day. His fears ride with him; he knows what defeat is like now, and he will never forget it again. But he knows also that there is no avoiding this battle: he has to chase it with the fastest forced march that England has ever seen. He might well be afraid; but if he wants to be king he will have to fight, and fight better than he has ever done before. His brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, orders the troop at the front of them all, leads with his fierce bright loyal courage. Edward takes the battle in the center, and William Hastings, who would lay down his life to block an ambush from reaching the king, defends at the rear. For Anthony Woodville, Edward has a special need.

“Anthony, I want you and George to take a small company of spearmen, and hide in the trees to our left,” Edward says quietly. “You’ll do two tasks there. One, you’ll watch that Somerset sends no troops out from the castle ruins to surprise us on our left, and you will watch the battle and make a charge when you think we need it.”

“You trust me this much?” Anthony asks, thinking of days when the two young men were enemies and not brothers.

“I do,” Edward says. “But, Anthony-you know you are a wise man, a philosopher, and death and life are alike to you?”

Anthony grimaces. “I have only a little learning, but I am very attached to my life, Sire. I have not yet risen to detachment.”

“Me too,” Edward says fervently. “And I am much attached to my cock, brother. Make sure your sister can put another prince in the cradle,” he says baldly. “Save my balls for her, Anthony!”

Anthony laughs and throws a mock salute. “Will you signal in time of need?”

“You will see my need clearly enough. My signal will be when I look like I am losing,” he says flatly. “Don’t leave it till then is all I ask.”

“I’ll do my best, Sire,” Anthony agrees equably, and turns to march his company of two hundred spearmen into hiding.

Edward waits only till he can see they are in position, and invisible to the Lancaster force behind the castle walls on the hill, and then he gives an order to his cannon. “Fire!” At the same time Richard’s troop of archers let loose a rain of arrows. The shot of the cannon hits the crumbling masonry of the old castle and blocks of stone tumble down with the cannonballs on the heads of the men sheltering below. There is a scream as one man gets an arrow agonizingly in his face, and then a dozen more yells as the accurate arrows hail down on them. The castle proves to be more ruin than fortress. There is no shelter behind the walls, and the collapsing arches and falling stone are more of a danger than a refuge. The men scatter out, some of them charging downhill before they are given the command to advance, some of them turning towards Tewkesbury in retreat. Somerset bellows for the army to group and charge down the hill to the king’s troop below them, but already his men are on the run.

Yelling in rage, and helped by the fall of the ground, running faster and faster, the Lancaster troops hurl themselves down and aim at the heart of the York forces, where the tall king, his crown on his helmet, is ready for them. Edward is lit by a bright merciless joy that he has come to know from a boyhood of battles. As soon as the Lancaster men plow towards him through the first rank, he greets them with his broadsword in one hand and an axe in the other. His long hours of training at the joust, on foot in the arena, come into play, and his movements are as swift and as natural as those of a baited lion: a thrust, a snarl, a turn, a stab. The men keep coming at him and he never hesitates. He stabs to unguarded throats, up and under the helmet. He slices cleverly at a man’s sword arm from the unprotected armpit upwards. He kicks a man in the groin and, as the victim doubles up, he brings down the axe on his head, shattering his skull.

As soon as the shock of the impact throws the York troops back, the flank commanded by Richard comes in at the side and starts to hack and stab, a merciless butchery with the young duke at the very heart of the battle, small, vicious, a killer in the field, an apprentice of terror. The determined push of Richard’s men breaks the onward charge of the Lancastrians and they check. As always in the hand-to-hand fighting there is a lull as even the strongest men catch their breath; but in this pause theYorks push forward, headed by the king with Richard at his side, and start to press the Lancastrians back up the hill to their refuge.

There is a yell, a cold terrifying yell of determined men from the wood to the left of the battle, where no one knew that soldiers were hiding. And two hundred, though it looks like two thousand, spearmen, deadly armed but lightly footed, come running rapidly towards the Lancastrians, the greatest knight in England, Anthony Woodville, far ahead in the lead. Their spears are stretched out before them, hungry for a strike, and the Lancastrian soldiers look up from their slugging battle and see them let fly, like a man might see a storm of lightning bolts: death coming too fast to avoid.

They run, they can bear to do nothing else. The spears come at them like two hundred blades on a single lethal weapon. They can hear the howl of them through the air before the screams as they reach their targets. The soldiers thrash themselves to run back up the hill, and Richard’s men follow them and cut them down without a moment’s mercy, Anthony’s men closing on them fast, pulling out swords and knives. The Lancaster soldiers run towards the river and wade across, or swim across or, weighed down by their armor, drown in a frenzy of struggling in the reeds. They run towards the park, and Hasting’s men close up and hack at them as if they were hares at the end of a harvest when the reapers form a circle around the last stand of wheat and scythe down the frightened beasts. They turn to run towards the town, and Edward’s own troop with Edward at their head chases them like exhausted deer, and catches them for butchery. The boy they call Prince Edward, Edward of Lancaster, Prince of Wales, is among them, just outside the city walls, and they cut them all down in the charge, with flashing swords and bloodied blades among screams for mercy, without pity.

“Spare me! Spare me! I am Edward of Lancaster, I am born to be king, my mother-” The rest of it is lost in a gurgle of royal blood, as a foot soldier, a common man, puts his knife into the young prince’s throat and so ends the hopes of Margaret of Anjou and the life of her son and the Lancaster line, for the profit of a handsome belt and engraved sword.

It is no sport for the king; it is a deathly ugly business, and Edward rests on his sword, and cleans his dagger, and watches his men slit throats, cut guts, smash skulls, and break legs until the Lancaster army is crying on the ground, or has run far away, and the battle, this battle at least, is won.

But there is always an aftermath and it is always messy. Edward’s joy in the battle does not extend to killing prisoners or torturing captives. He does not even relish a judicial beheading, unlike most of the other warlords of his time. But Lancaster lords have claimed sanctuary in the Abbey of Tewkesbury and cannot be allowed to stay there or given safe conduct home. “Get them out,” Edward says curtly to Richard his brother, the two united in a desire to finish it. He turns to the Grey boys, his stepsons. “You go and find the living Lancaster lords from the battlefield and take their weapons off them and put them under arrest.”

“They claim sanctuary,” Hastings points out. “They are in the abbey, hanging on to the high altar. Your own wife survives only because sanctuary was honored. Your only son was born safe in sanctuary.”

“A woman. A baby,” Edward says curtly. “Sanctuary is for the helpless. Duke Edmund of Somerset is not helpless. He is a death-dealing traitor and Richard here will pull him out of the abbey and on to the scaffold in Tewkesbury marketplace. Won’t you, Richard?”

“Yes,” Richard says shortly. “I have a greater respect for victory than for any sanctuary,” and he puts his hand on his sword hilt and goes to break down the door of the abbey, though the abbot clings to his sword arm and begs him to fear the will of God and show mercy. The army of York does not listen. It is beyond forgiveness. Richard’s men drag out screaming supplicants, and Richard and Edward watch their men knife prisoners who are begging to be ransomed in the churchyard, where they cling to gravestones, begging the dead to save them, till the abbey steps are slippery with blood and the sacred ground smells like a butcher’s shop, as if nothing were sacred. For nothing is sacred in England anymore.