The White Queen

JANUARY 1485

I am waiting for my girls to come home from court on a frosty afternoon in the middle of January. I expected them in time for dinner and I am striding up and down on my doorstep, blowing on my gloved fingers to keep my hands warm as the sun sets, red as a Lancaster rose, over the hills to the west. I hear hoofbeats and I look down the lane and there they come, a great guard for my three girls, almost a royal guard, and the three bobbing heads and rippling dresses in the middle. In a moment their horses are pulled up and they have tumbled off and I am kissing bright cheeks and cold noses quite indiscriminately and holding their hands and exclaiming at how tall they have grown and how all equally beautiful they are.

They romp into the hall and fall on their dinner as if they are starving, and I watch them as they eat. Elizabeth has never been in better looks. She bloomed, once out of sanctuary and out of fear, as I knew she would. The color is high in her cheeks, her eyes sparkle, and her clothes! I take another disbelieving look at her clothes: the embroidery and the brocade, the insetting of precious stones. These are gowns as good as I wore when I was queen. “Good God, Elizabeth,” I say. “Where do you get your gowns from? This is as fine as anything I had when I was Queen of England.”

Her eyes fly to mine, and her smile dies on her face. Cecily gives an abrupt snort of laughter. Elizabeth rounds on her. “You can shut your mouth. We agreed.”

“Elizabeth!”

“Mother, you don’t know what she has been like. She is not fit to be maid-in-waiting to a queen. All she does is gossip.”

“Now girls, I sent you to court to learn elegance, not to quarrel like fishwives.”

“Ask her if she’s been learning elegance!” Cecily whispers loudly. “Ask Elizabeth how elegant she is.”

“I certainly shall, when we are talking and you two are in bed,” I say firmly. “And that will be early if you cannot speak politely one to another.” I turn from her to Anne. “Now, Anne.” My little Anne looks up at me. “Have you been studying your books? And have you been working at your music?”

“Yes, Lady Mother,” Anne says obediently. “But we were all given a holiday at Christmastide, and I went to court at Westminster with all the others.”

“We had suckling pig here,” Bridget tells her older sisters solemnly. “And Catherine ate so much marchpane she was sick in the night.”

Elizabeth laughs, and that anxious look has gone from her. “I have missed you little monsters,” she says tenderly. “After dinner I shall play, and you can dance, if you like.”

“Or we can play at cards,” Cecily offers. “The court is allowed cards again.”

“Has the king recovered from his grief?” I ask her. “And Queen Anne?”

Cecily shoots a triumphant look at her sister Elizabeth, who blushes deep red. “Oh, he has recovered,” Cecily says, her voice quivering with laughter. “He seems much recovered. We are all quite amazed. Don’t you think, Elizabeth?”

My patience, which never lasts very long with female spite, even when it is my own daughter’s, is exhausted at this point. “Now that is enough,” I say. “Elizabeth, come to my privy chamber now; the rest of you can eat your dinner, and you Cecily can ponder on the proverb that one good word is worth a dozen bad ones.”

I rise from the table and sweep from the room. I can feel Elizabeth’s reluctance as she follows me, and when we get to my room she shuts the door and I say simply to her, “My daughter, what is all this about?”

For a second only she looks as if she would resist and then she quivers like a doe at bay and says, “I have so wanted your advice, but I could not write to you. I had to wait till I saw you. I meant to wait till after dinner. I have not deceived you, Lady Mother…”

I sit down and gesture that she may sit beside me. “It is my uncle Richard,” she says softly. “He is-oh Lady Mother-he is everything to me.”

I find I am sitting very still. Only my hands have moved, and I am gripping them together to keep myself silent.

“He was so kind to me when we first came to court, then he went out of his way to make sure that I was happy with my duties as a maid-in-waiting. The queen is very kind, a very easy mistress to serve, but he would seek me out and ask me how I was doing.” She breaks off. “He asked me if I missed you and told me you would be welcome at court any time, and the court would honor you. He would speak of my father,” she says. “He would remark how proud my father would be of me if he could see me now. He would say that I am like him in some ways. Oh Mother, he is such a fine man, I can’t believe that he…that he…”

“That he?” I echo her, my voice a little thread of an echo.

“That he cares for me.”

“Does he?” I feel icy, as if wintry waters are running down my spine. “Does he care for you?”

She nods eagerly. “He never loved the queen,” she says. “He felt obliged to marry her to save her from his brother George, Duke of Clarence.” She glances at me. “You would remember. You were there, weren’t you? They were going to trap her and send her to a nunnery. George was going to steal her inheritance.”

I nod. I don’t remember it quite like that; but I can see this makes a better story for an impressionable girl.

“He knew that if George took her as his ward then he would take her fortune. She was anxious to be married, and he thought it was the best thing that he could do. He married her to secure her inheritance and for her own safety, and to put her mind at ease.”

“Really,” I say. My recollection is that George had one Neville heiress and Richard snapped up the other, and they quarreled like stray dogs over the inheritance. But I see that Richard has told my daughter the more chivalrous version of the story.

“Queen Anne is not well.” Elizabeth bows her head to whisper. “She cannot have another child, he is certain of it. He has asked the doctors, and they are sure she will not conceive. He has to have an heir for England. He asked me if I thought it possible that one of our boys had got away safely.”

My mind suddenly sharpens like a sword throwing sparks on a whetstone. “And what did you say?”

She smiles up at me. “I would trust him with the truth, I would trust him with anything; but I knew you would want me to lie,” she says sweetly. “I said we knew nothing but what he had told us. And he said again that it had broken his heart but he did not know where our boys are. He said if he knew now, he would make them his heirs. Mother, think of it. He said that. He said that if he knew where our boys were, he would rescue them and make them his heirs.”

Oh would he? I think. But what guarantee do I have that he does not send an assassin? “That’s good,” I say steadily. “But even so, you must not tell him about Richard. I cannot trust him yet, even if you can.”

“I do!” she exclaims. “I do trust him. I would trust him with my life itself-I have never known such a man.”

I pause. Pointless to remind her that she has known no men. Most of her life she has been a princess kept like a statue of porcelain in a box of gold. She came of age as a prisoner, living with her mother and her sisters. The only men she ever saw were priests and servants. She has had no preparation for an attractive man working on her emotions, seducing her, urging her to love.

“How far has this gone?” I ask bluntly. “How far has this gone between the two of you?”

She turns her head away. “It’s complicated,” she says. “And I feel so sorry for Queen Anne.”

I nod. My girl’s pity for Queen Anne will not stop her from taking her husband is my guess. After all, she is my daughter. And nothing stopped me when I named my heart’s desire.

“How far has this gone?” I ask her again. “From Cecily, I take it that there is gossip.”

She flushes. “Cecily doesn’t know anything. She sees what everyone sees, and she is jealous of me getting all the attention. She sees the queen favoring me, and lending me her gowns and her jewels. Treating me as a daughter and telling me to dance with Richard, urging him to walk with me, to ride with me when she is too ill to go out. Truly, Mother, it is the queen herself who commands me to go and keep him company. She says that no one can divert him and cheer him as I do, and so the court says that she favors me overmuch. That he favors me overmuch. That I am nothing more than a maid-in-waiting but I am treated as…”

“As what?”

She bows her head to whisper. “The first lady at court.”

“Because of your gowns?”

She nods. “They are the queen’s own gowns; she has mine made to her pattern. She likes us to dress the same.”

“It is she who dresses you like this?”

Elizabeth nods. She has no idea that this fills me with unease. “You mean she has gowns for you made from her own material? To her own style?”

My girl hesitates. “And, of course, she does not look well in them.” She says no more but I think of Anne Neville, grief-stricken, weary, ill, side by side with this blooming girl.

“And you are first into the room behind her? You have precedence?”

“No one speaks of the law which made us bastards. Everyone calls me princess. And when the queen does not dine, and often she does not, then I go into dinner as the first lady and I sit beside the king.”

“So, it is Queen Anne who puts you into his company, even into her own place, and the world sees this. Not Richard? Then what happens?”

“He says that he loves me,” she says quietly. She is trying to be modest, but her pride and her joy blaze in her eyes. “He says that I am the first love of his life and will be the last.”

I rise from my chair and go to the window and pull back the thick curtain so I can look out at the bright cold stars over the dark land of the Wiltshire down. I think I know what Richard is doing, and I don’t for one minute think that he has fallen in love with my daughter, nor that the queen is making gowns for her out of love.

Richard is playing a hard game with my daughter as pawn, to dishonor her, and me, and to make a fool of Henry Tudor, who has vowed to make her his wife. Tudor will hear-as quickly as his mother’s spies can take ship-that his bride to be is in love with his enemy and is known throughout the court as his mistress while his wife looks on smiling. Richard would do this to damage Henry Tudor even though he dishonors his own niece. Queen Anne would be compliant rather than stand up to Richard. Both Neville girls were boot-scrapers to their men: Anne has been an obedient servant from the first day of her marriage. And besides, she cannot refuse him. He is King of England without a male heir, and she is barren. She will be praying that he does not put her aside. She has no power at all: no son and heir, no baby in the cradle, no chance of conception; she has no cards to play at all. She is a barren woman with no fortune of her own-she is fit for nothing but the nunnery or the grave. She has to smile and obey; protests will get her nowhere. Even helping in the destruction of my daughter’s reputation will probably earn Anne nothing more than an honorable annulment.

“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.