The White Princess by Philippa Gregory
Next is a dining table and six chairs, wine and water in beautiful Venetian glass jugs on the table, gold plates ready for serving dinner, a box with pastries in case of hunger.
Nearest to us is a grand bed, with thick oak posts and rich curtains and tester. On an impulse I open the chest at the foot of the bed and there, neatly folded and interspersed with dried lavender flowers, are my favorite gowns and my best linen, ready for me to wear when they fit me again. There is a day bed, next to the chest, and a beautifully carved and engraved royal cradle, all ready with linen beside the bed.
“What is this?” I ask as if I don’t know. “What is this? What is this?”
“You are in confinement,” Lady Margaret says patiently, as if speaking to an idiot. “For your health and for the health of your child.”
“What about Teddy?”
“He has been taken to the Tower for his own safety. He was in danger here. He needs to be carefully guarded. But I will speak to the king about your cousin. I will tell you what he says. Without question, he will judge rightly.”
“I want to see the king now!”
She pauses. “Now, daughter, you know that you cannot see him, or any man, until you come out of confinement,” she says reasonably. “But I will give him any message or take him any letter you wish to write.”
“When I have given birth you will have to let me out,” I say breathlessly. It is as if the room is airless and I am struggling to breathe. “Then I will see the king and tell him that I have been imprisoned in here.”
She sighs as if I am very foolish. “Really, Your Grace! You must be calm. We all agreed you were entering your confinement this evening, you knew full well that you were doing this today.”
“What about the dinner and bidding farewell to the court?”
“Your health was not strong enough. You said so yourself.”
I am so amazed by her lie that I gape at her. “When did I say that?”
“You said you were distressed. You said you were troubled. Here there is neither distress nor trouble. You will stay here, under my guidance, until you have safely given birth to the child.”
“I will see my mother, I will see her at once!” I say. I am furious to hear my voice tremble. But I am afraid of My Lady in this darkened room, and I feel powerless. My earliest memory is of being confined, in sanctuary, in a damp warren of cold rooms under the chapel at Westminster Abbey. I have a horror of confined spaces and dark places, and now I am trembling with anger and fear. “I will see my mother. The king said that I should see her. The king promised me that she would be with me in here.”
“She will come into confinement with you,” she concedes. “Of course.” She pauses. “And she will stay with you until you come out. When the baby is born. She will share your confinement.”
I just gape at her. She has all the power and I have none. I have been as good as imprisoned by her and by the convention of royal births which she has codified and to which I agreed. Now I am locked in one shadowy room for weeks, and she has the key.
“I am free,” I say boldly. “I’m not a prisoner. I am here to give birth. I chose to come in here. I am not held against my will. I am free. If I want to walk out, I can just walk out. Nobody can stop me, I am the wife of the King of England.”
“Of course you are,” she says, and then she goes out through the door and turns the key in the lock from the outside, and leaves me. I am locked in.
My mother comes in at dinnertime, holding Maggie’s hand. “We’ve come to join you,” she says.
Maggie is white as if she were deathly sick, her eyes red-rimmed from crying.
“What about Teddy?”
My mother shakes her head. “They took him to the Tower.”
“Why would they do that?”
“They shouted À Warwick when they fought Jasper Tudor in the North. They carried the standard of the ragged staff in London,” my mother says, as if this is reason enough.
“They were fighting for Teddy,” Maggie tells me. “Even though he didn’t ask them to—even though he would never ask them to. He knows not to say such things. I’ve taught him. He knows that King Henry is the king. He knows to say nothing about the House of York.”
“There’s no charge against him,” my mother says briefly. “He’s not charged with treason. Not charged with anything. The king says he is only acting to protect Teddy. He says that Teddy might be seized by rebels and used by them as a figurehead. He says that Teddy is safer in the Tower for now.”
My laughter at this extraordinary lie turns into a sob. “Safer in the Tower! Were my brothers safer in the Tower?”
My mother grimaces.
“I’m sorry,” I say at once. “Forgive me, I’m sorry. Did the king say how long he will keep Teddy there?”
Maggie goes quietly to the fireside and sinks down onto a footstool, her head turned away. “Poor child,” my mother says. To me she replies, “He didn’t say. I didn’t ask. They took Teddy’s clothes and his books. I think we have to assume that His Grace will keep him there until he feels safe from rebellion.”
I look at her, the only one of us who may know how many rebels are biding their time, waiting for a call to rise for York, seeing the last skirmish as a stepping-stone to another, and from that to another—not as a defeat. She is a woman who never sees defeat. I wonder if she is their leader, if it is her determined optimism that drives them on. “Is something going to happen?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”
PRIOR’S GREAT HALL, WINCHESTER, 19 SEPTEMBER 1486
I have to endure my confinement in a state of frightened misery. It is so like the long months in the darkness of the crypt below the chapel at Westminster that I wake every morning gasping for air and clinging to the carved headboard to stop myself jumping out of bed and screaming for help. I still have nightmares about darkness and the crowded rooms. My mother was pregnant, my father had fled overseas, our enemy was on the throne, I was four years old and Mary, my darling little sister now in heaven, and Cecily cried all the time for their toys, for their pets, for their father, not really knowing what they were crying for, only that our whole life was plunged into darkness, cold, and want. I used to look at my mother’s bleak white face and wonder if she would ever smile at me again. I knew that we were in terrible danger, but I was only four, I didn’t know what the danger was, or how this damp prison could keep us safe. Half a year we spent inside the walls of the crypt, half a year and we never saw the sun, never walked outside, never took a breath of fresh air. We became accustomed to a life in prison, as convicts become accustomed to the limits of their cell. Mother gave birth to Edward inside those damp walls, and we were filled with joy that at last we had a boy, an heir; but we knew we had no way of getting him to the throne—not even of getting him into the sun and air of his own country. Six months is a long, long time for a little girl of only four years old. I thought that we would never get out, I thought I would grow up taller and taller like a thin pale weed and die blanched like asparagus by the darkness. I had a dream that we were all turning into white-faced worms and that we would live underground forever. That was when I grew to hate confined spaces, hate the smell of damp, even hate the sound of the river lapping against the walls at nighttime, as I feared the waters would rise and rise and seep into my bed and drown me.
When my father came home, won two battles one after the other, saved us, rescued us like a knight in a storybook, we emerged from the crypt, out of the darkness like the risen Lord Himself coming into light. Then I swore to myself a childish oath that I would never be confined again.
This is fortune’s wheel—as my grandmother Jacquetta would say. Fortune’s wheel that takes you very high and then throws you very low, and there is nothing you can do but face the turn of it with courage. I remember clearly enough that as a little girl I could not find that courage.
When I was seventeen and the favorite of my father’s court, the most beautiful princess in Engla
My pains start at midnight. “It’s too early,” one of my women breathes in fear. “It’s at least a month too early.” I see a swift glance between those habitual conspirators, my mother and My Lady the King’s Mother. “It is a month too early,” My Lady confirms loudly for anyone who is counting. “We will have to pray.”
“My Lady, would you go to your own chapel and pray for our daughter?” my mother asks quickly and cleverly. “An early baby needs intercession with the saints. If you would be so good as to pray for her in her time of travail?”
My Lady hesitates, torn between God and curiosity. “I had thought to help her here. I thought I should witness . . .”
My mother shrugs at the room, the midwives, my sisters, the ladies-in-waiting. “Earthly tasks,” she says simply. “But who can pray like you?”
“I’ll get the priest, and the choir,” My Lady says. “Send me news throughout the night. I’ll get them to wake the archbishop. Our Lady will hear my prayers.”
They open the door for her and she goes out, excited by her mission. My mother does not even smile as she turns back to me and says, “Now, let’s get you walking.”
While My Lady labors on her knees, I labor all the night, until at dawn I turn my sweating face to my mother and say, “I feel strange, Lady Mother. I feel strange, like nothing I have felt before. I feel as if something terrible is about to happen. I’m afraid, Mama.”
She has laid aside her headdress, her hair is in a plait down her back, she has walked all the night beside me and now her tired face beams. “Lean on the women,” is all she says.
I had thought it would be a struggle, having heard all the terrible stories that women tell each other about screaming pain and babies that have to be turned, or babies that cannot be born and sometimes, fatally, have to be cut out; but my mother orders two of the midwives to stand on either side of me to bear me up, and she takes my face in her cool hands and looks into my eyes with her gray gaze and says quietly, “I am going to count for you. Be very still, beloved, and listen to my voice. I am going to count from one to ten and as I count you will find your limbs get heavier and your breathing gets deeper and all you can hear is my voice. You will feel as if you are floating, as if you are Melusina on the water, and you are floating down a river of sweet water and you will feel no pain, only a deep restfulness like sleep.”
I am watching her eyes and then I can see nothing but her steady expression and hear nothing but her quiet counting. The pains come and go in my belly, but it feels like a long way away and I float, as she promised that I would, as if on a current of sweet water.
I can see the steadiness of her gaze, and the illumination of her face, and I feel that we are in a time of unreality, as if she is making magic around us with her reliable quiet count which seemed to go slowly and take an eternity.
“There is nothing to fear,” she says to me softly. “There is never anything to fear. The worst fear is of fear itself, and you can conquer that.”
“How?” I murmur. It feels as if I am talking in my sleep, floating down a stream of sleep. “How can I conquer the worst fear?”
“You just decide,” she says simply. “Just decide that you are not going to be a fearful woman and when you come to something that makes you apprehensive, you face it and walk towards it. Remember—anything you fear, you walk slowly and steadily towards it. And smile.”
Her certainty and the description of her own courage make me smile even though my pains are coming and then easing, faster now, every few minutes or so, and I see her beloved beam in reply as her eyes crinkle.
“Choose to be brave,” she urges me. “All the women of your family are as brave as lions. We don’t whimper and we don’t regret.”
My stomach seems to grip and turn. “I think the baby is coming,” I say, and I breathe deeply.
“I think so too,” she says, and turns to the midwives who hold me up, one under each arm, while the third kneels before me and listens with her ear against my straining belly.
“Now,” she says.
My mother says to me: “Your baby is ready, let him come into the world.”
“She needs to push,” one of the midwives says sharply. “She needs to struggle. He has to be born in travail and pain.”
My mother overrules her. “You don’t need to struggle,” she says. “Your baby is coming. Help him come to us, open your body and let him come into the world. You give birth, you don’t force birth or besiege it. It’s not a battle, it’s an act of love. You give birth to your child and you can do it gently.”
I can feel the sinews of my body opening and stretching. “It’s coming!” I say, suddenly alert. “I can feel . . .”
And then there is a rush and a thrust and an inescapable sense of movement, and then the sharp crying noise of a child and my mother smiling, though her eyes are filled with tears, and she says to me: “You have a baby. Well done, Elizabeth. Your father would be proud of your courage.”
They release me from the grip they have taken on my arms, and I lie down on the day bed and turn to where the woman is wrapping a little wriggling bloody bundle and I hold out my arms, saying impatiently: “Give me my baby!” I take it, with a sense of wonder that it is a baby, so perfectly formed, with brown hair and a rosy mouth open to bellow, and a cross flushed face. But my mother pulls back the linen that they have wrapped it in, and shows me the perfect little body.
“A boy,” she says, and there is neither triumph nor joy in her voice, just a deep wonder, though her voice is hoarse with weariness. “God has answered Lady Margaret’s prayers again. His ways are mysterious indeed. You have given the Tudors what they need: a boy.”
The king himself has been waiting all night outside the door for the news, like a loving husband who cannot wait for a messenger. My mother throws her robe over her stained linen shift and goes out to tell him of our triumph, her head high with pride. They send word to My Lady the King’s Mother in the chapel that her prayers have been answered and God has secured the Tudor line. She comes in as the women are helping me into the great state bed to rest, and washing and swaddling the baby. His wet nurse curtseys and shows him to My Lady, who reaches for him greedily, as if he were a crown in a hawthorn bush. She snatches him up and holds him to her heart.
“A boy,” she says like a miser might breathe “God.” “God has answered my prayers.”
I nod. I am too tired to speak to her. My mother holds a cup of spiced hot ale to my lips and I smell the sugar and the brandy and drink deep. I feel as if I am floating, dreamy with exhaustion and the ending of pain, drunk on the birthing ale, triumphant at a successful birth, and dizzy with the thought that I have a baby, a son, and that he is perfect.
“Bring him here,” I command.
She does as I tell her and hands him to me. He is tiny, small as a doll, but every detail of him is perfect as if he has been handcrafted with endless care. He has hands like plump little starfish and tiny fingernails like the smallest of shells. As I hold him he opens his eyes of the most surprising dark blue, like a sea at midnight. He looks at me gravely, as if he too is surprised. He looks at me as if he understands all that is to be, as if he knows that he has been born to a great destiny and must fulfill it.
“Give him to the wet nurse,” My Lady prompts.
“In a moment.” I don’t care what she tells me to do. She may have command of her son, but I shall have command of mine. This is my baby, not hers, this is my son, not hers; he is an heir to the
He is the Tudor heir that makes the throne safe, that will start a dynasty that will last forever. “We will call him Arthur,” My Lady declares. I knew this was coming. They dragged me to Winchester for the birth so that we could claim the legacy of Arthur, so the baby could be born all but on the famous Round Table of the knights of Camelot, so the Tudors could claim to be the heirs of that miraculous kingdom, the greatness of England revived, and the beautiful chivalry of the country springing again from their noble line.
“I know,” I say. I have no objection. How can I? It was the very name that Richard had chosen for a son with me. He too dreamed of Camelot and chivalry, but unlike the Tudors he really tried to make a court of noble knights; unlike the Tudors he lived his life by the precepts of being a perfect gentle knight. I close my eyes at the ridiculous thought that Richard would have loved this baby, that he chose his name, that he wished him into being with me, that this is our child.
“Prince Arthur,” My Lady rules.
“I know,” I say again. It is as if everything I do with my husband, Henry, is a sad parody of the dreams I had with my lover, Richard.
“Why are you crying?” she demands impatiently.
I lift the sheet of my bed and wipe my eyes. “I’m not,” I say.
PRIOR’S GREAT HALL, WINCHESTER, 24 SEPTEMBER 1486
The christening of the flower of England, the rose of chivalry, is as grand and exaggerated as a regime newly come to power can devise. My Lady has been planning it for the past nine months, everything is done as ostentatiously as possible.