The White Queen

SPRING 1478

“You cannot dream of executing him.” His mother sweeps past me into Edward’s privy chamber in her haste to speak to her son.

I rise and sweep her the smallest curtsey. “My Lady Mother,” I say.

“Mother, I don’t know what I should do.” Edward goes on one knee for her blessing and she rests her hand on his head absentmindedly, by rote. There is no tenderness in her for Edward; she is thinking of no one but George. She dips a tiny curtsey to me and turns back to Edward.

“He is your brother. Remember it.”

Edward shrugs, his face miserable.

“Actually, he himself says he is not,” I point out. “George claims that he is only Edward’s half brother since he says that Edward is a bastard to an English archer on you. He traduces you as well as us. He is generous in his slanders. He does not balk at libeling any of us. He calls me a witch, but he calls you a whore.”

“I don’t believe he says any such thing,” she declares roundly.

“Mother, he does,” Edward replies. “And he insults me and Elizabeth.”

She looks as if this is not such a bad thing.

“He undermines the House of York with his libels,” I say. “And he employed a wizard to ill-wish the king.”

“He is your brother; you will have to forgive him,” she declares to Edward.

“He is a traitor; he will have to die,” I say simply. “What else? Is it forgivable to plot the death of the king? Then why shouldn’t the defeated House of Lancaster do it? Why shouldn’t the spies from France? Why shouldn’t any scum from the highway come with a knife against your finest son?”

“George has been disappointed,” she says urgently to Edward, ignoring me. “If you had let him marry the Burgundy girl, as he wanted, or let him have the Scots princess, none of this would have happened.”

“I couldn’t trust him,” Edward says simply. “Mother, there is no doubt in my mind that if he had his own kingdom, he would invade mine. If he had a fortune, he would only use it to raise an army to take my throne.”

“He was born to greatness,” she says.

“He was born a third son,” Edward says, finally roused to tell her the truth. “He can only rule England if I die, and my son and heir dies too, then my second son Richard, and then my new son George. Is that what you would have preferred, Mother? Do you wish me dead, and my three precious sons too? Do you favor George so much? Do you ill-wish me as his hired wizard did? Will you order ground glass in my meat and foxglove powder in my wine?”

“No,” she says. “No, of course not. You are your father’s son and heir, and you won your throne. Your son must come after you. But George is my son. I feel for him.”

Edward grits his teeth on a hasty reply, and turns to the fireplace and stands in silence, his shoulders hunched. We all wait in silence until the king finally speaks. “All I can do for you and for him is to let him choose the means of his death. He has to die, but if he wants a French swordsman I will send for one. It doesn’t have to be the headsman for him. It can be poison if he wants it; he can take it in private. It can be a dagger on his dinner table, and he can do it himself. And it will be in private: there will be no crowd, not even witnesses. It can be in his room in the Tower if he wishes. He can put himself to bed and open his wrists. There can be nobody there but the priest, if he wishes.”

She gasps. She did not expect this. I am very still, watching them both. I did not think Edward would go so far.

He looks at her stricken face. “Mother, I am sorry for your loss.”

She is white. “You will forgive him.”

“You can see yourself that I cannot.”

“I command it. I am your mother. You will obey me.”

“I am the king. He cannot oppose me. He must die.”

She rounds on me. “This is your doing!”

I spread out my hands. “George has killed himself, Lady Mother. You cannot blame me, nor Edward. He leaves the king no choice. He is a traitor to our rule and a danger to us and our children. You know what must happen to claimants to the throne. This is the way of the House of York.”

She is silent. She walks to the window and leans her head against the thick glass. I look at her back and at the rigid set of her shoulders and wonder what it must be like to know that your son will die. I once promised her the pain of a mother who knows that she has lost her son. I see it now.

“I cannot bear it,” she says, her voice strained with grief. “This is my son, my dearest son. How can you take him from me? I would rather have died myself than see this day. This is my George, my most precious son. I cannot believe you would send him to his death!”

“I am sorry,” Edward says grimly. “But I can see no way out of this but his death.”

“He can choose the means?” she confirms. “You will not expose him to the headsman?”

“He can choose the means, but he has to die,” Edward says. “He has made it a matter of him or me. Of course he will have to die.”

She turns without another word and goes from the room. For a moment, for a moment only, I am sorry for her.

George, the fool, chooses a fool’s death.

“He wants to be drowned in a barrel of wine.” Anthony, my brother, comes from the Privy Council meeting to find me rocking in the chair in the nursery, my baby George in my arms, and wishing that it was all over and my little prince’s namesake was dead and gone.

“You are trying to be funny?”

“No, I think he is trying to be funny.”

“What does he mean?”

“I suppose what he says. He wants to be drowned in a barrel of wine.”

“He really said that? He really means it?”

“I have come from the Privy Council just now. He wants to drown in wine, if he has to die.”

“A sot’s death,” I say, hating the thought of it.

“I suppose that is his joke against his brother.”

I raise my baby to my shoulder and stroke his back as if I would shield him from the cruelty of the world.

“I can think of worse ways to die,” Anthony observes.

“I can think of better. I would rather be hanged than held down in wine.”

He shrugs his shoulders. “Perhaps he thinks he can make mock of Edward, and of the death sentence. Perhaps he thinks he will force Edward to forgive him rather than execute this drunkard’s end. Perhaps he thinks the Church will protest and cause a delay and he will get away.”

“Not this time,” I say. “His sot’s luck has run out; he might as well have a drunkard’s end. Where will they do it?”

“In his chamber, at the Tower of London.”

I shudder. “God forgive him,” I say quietly. “That is an awful way to die.”

The headsman does it, leaving his axe to one side but wearing his black mask over his face. He is a big man with strong big hands, and he takes his apprentice with him. The two of them roll a barrel of malmsey wine into George’s room, and George the fool makes a joke of it and laughs with his mouth open wide as if already gasping for air, as his face bleaches white with fear.

They lever open the lid and find a box for George to stand on so he can lean over the top of the barrel and see his frightened face reflected back at him in the slopping surface of the wine. The smell of it fills the room. He mutters “Amen” to the prayers of the priest, as if he does not know what he is hearing.

He puts his head down to the ruby surface of the wine as if he were putting his head on the block, and he sucks great gulps of it as if he would drink the danger away, then he thrusts out his hands in the signal of assent, and the two men take his head and, holding him by the hair and the collar, plunge him down below the surface, half lifting him from the floor so his legs kick as if he is swimming, and the wine is slopped on the floor as he writhes, trying to escape. The wine cascades around their feet as the air bubbles out of him in great retching whoops. The priest steps back from the red puddle and goes on reading the last rites, his voice steady and reverent, while the two executioners hold the flailing head of the most stupid son of York deep into the barrel until his feet hang slack and there are no more bubbles of air, and the room smells like an old taproom.

That night at midnight I get up from my bed in the Palace of Westminster and go to my dressing room. On the top of a long cupboard for my furs is a little box with my private things. I open it. Inside is an old locket of silver so tarnished with age that it is black as ebony. I open the catch, and there is the old scrap of paper, torn from the bottom of my father’s letter. On it, written in blood, my blood, is the name George, Duke of Clarence. I screw the paper up in my fingers and I throw it on the embers of the fire and watch it twist in the heat of the ashes and then suddenly spring into flame.

“So go,” I say as George’s name goes up in smoke and my curse on him is completed. “But let you be the last York who dies in the Tower of London. Let it end here, as I promised my mother it would. Let it finish here.”

I wish I had remembered, as she taught me, that it is easier to unleash evil than call it back again. Any fool can blow up a wind, but who can know where it will blow or when it will stop?