The White Princess by Philippa Gregory
We move out of the city to the Palace of Sheen, but Edward cannot be released from his rooms in the Tower to come too. “How can I take him with us?” Henry demands of me. “Can you doubt for a moment that if he was outside the safety of those walls then someone would get hold of him and next thing we would hear of him would be at the head of an army?”
“He would not!” I say despairingly. I begin to think that my husband will hold my little cousin in prison for life, he is so overly cautious. “You know Edward would not run away from us to lead an army! All he wants is to be in the schoolroom doing his lessons again. All he wants is to be allowed to ride out. All he wants is to be with his sister.”
But Henry looks at me with hard eyes as dark as Welsh coal, and says: “Of course he would lead an army. Anybody would. And besides, they might not give him any choice.”
“He’s twelve!” I exclaim. “He’s a child!”
“He’s old enough to sit on a horse while an army fights for him.”
“This is my cousin,” I say. “This is my own cousin, the son of my father’s brother. Please, be kingly, and release him.”
“You think he should be released because he is the son of your father’s brother? You think your family were so kindly when they had power? Elizabeth, your father held his own brother, Edward’s father, in the Tower and then executed him for treason! Your cousin Edward is the son of a traitor and a rebel, and the traitors shout his name when they muster against me. He won’t come out of the Tower until I know that we are safe, all four of us, my mother, you and me, and the true heir: Prince Arthur.”
He stamps to the door and turns to glower at me. “Don’t ask me again,” he orders. “Don’t dare to ask me again. You don’t know how much I do for love of you, already. More than I should. Far more than I should.”
He slams the door behind him and I hear the rattle as the guards hastily present arms as he marches by.
“How much do you do?” I ask the polished wood panels of the door. “And for love?”
Henry does not come to my room for all of Lent. It is traditional that a devout man would not touch his wife in the weeks before Easter, though the daffodils flood into gold alongside the riverbanks, the blackbirds sing love songs in a penetrating trill every dawn, the swans set about building huge bulky nests on the river path, and every other living thing is filled with joy and seeking a mate; but not us. Henry observes the fast of Lent as an obedient son of his mother and the Church, and so Maggie is my bedfellow and I become accustomed to her kneeling for hours in prayer and whispering her brother’s name over and over again.
One day I realize that she is praying to St. Anthony for her brother, and I quietly turn away. St. Anthony is the saint for missing things, for forlorn hopes and lost causes; she must feel that her brother is near to disappearing—an invisible boy like my own brothers, all three of them lost to their sisters, gone forever.
The court fasts throughout Lent, eating no meat, and there is no dancing or playing. My Lady wears black all the time, as if the ordeal of Christ has a special message for her, as if she alone understands His suffering. She and Henry pray together in private every evening as if they have been called to endure the coldness of the hearts of Englishmen to the Tudors, just as Jesus had to endure the loneliness of the desert and the failure of his disciples. The two of them are as martyrs together; nobody understands what they suffer but themselves.
Around My Lady and her son is a tight little world: the only advisor that she trusts, John Morton, her friend and confessor; Jasper Tudor, Henry’s uncle who raised him in exile; the friend who stood by him, John de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, and the Stanleys, Lord Thomas and his brother Sir William. There are very, very few of them, isolated in such a great court, and they are so afraid of everyone else, it is as if they are always under siege in their own safe home.
I really begin to think that they experience a different world from the rest of us. One day, My Lady and I are walking together by the dazzling river, sun on our faces, white blossom on the hawthorn bushes, and the sweet light scent of nectar on the air, when she remarks that England is indeed a benighted desert of sin. My mother, light-footed on the spring grass, a bunch of dripping-stemmed daffodils sticky in her hand, hears this and cannot stop herself laughing out loud.
I fall back among my ladies to walk beside my mother. “I have to talk to you,” I say. “I have to know what you know.”
Her smile is serene and lovely as always. “A lifetime of learning,” she teases me. “An understanding of four languages, a love of music and appreciation of art, a great interest in printing and in writing in English as well as Latin. I am glad to see that at last you apply yourself to my wisdom.”
“My Lady the King’s Mother is ill with fear,” I point out to her. “She thinks the English springtime is a benighted desert. Her son is all but dumb. They trust no one but their own circle and every day there are more rumors in the outside world. It’s coming, isn’t it? A new rebellion? You know the plans and you know who will lead them.” I pause and lower my voice to a whisper. “He’s on the way, isn’t he?”
My mother says nothing for a moment but walks beside me in silence, graceful as ever. She pauses and turns to me, takes a daffodil bud, and tucks it gently into my hat. “Do you think I have said nothing to you ever since your marriage about these matters because it slipped my mind?” she asks quietly.
“No, of course not.”
“Because I thought you had no interest?”
I shake my head.
“Elizabeth, on your wedding day you promised to love, honor, and obey the king. On the day of your coronation you will have to promise, before God in the most solemn and binding of vows, to be his loyal subject, the first of his loyal subjects. You will take the crown on your head, you will take the holy oil on your breast. You cannot be forsworn then. You cannot know anything that you would have to keep from him. You cannot have secrets from him.”
“He doesn’t trust me!” I burst out. “Without you ever telling me a word he already suspects me of knowing a whole conspiracy and keeping it secret. Over and over again he asks me what I know, over and over again he warns me that he is making allowances for us. His mother is certain that I am a traitor to him, and I believe that he thinks so too.”
“He will come to trust you, perhaps,” she says. “If you have years together. You may grow to be a loving husband and wife, if you have long enough. And if I never tell you anything, then there will never be a moment where you have to lie to him. Or worse—never a moment when you have to choose where your loyalties lie. I wouldn’t want you to have to choose between your father’s family and your husband’s. I wouldn’t want you to have to choose between the claims of your little son and another.”
I am horrified at the thought of having to choose between Tudor and York. “But if I know nothing, then I am like a leaf on the water, I go wherever the current takes me. I don’t act, I do nothing.”
She smiles. “Yes. Why don’t you let the river take you? And we’ll see what she says.”
We turn in silence and head back along the riverbank to Sheen, the beautiful palace of many towers which dominates the curve of the river. As we walk towards the palace I see half a dozen horses gallop up to the king’s private door. The men dismount, and one pulls off his hat and goes inside.
My mother leads the ladies past the men-at-arms, and graciously acknowledges their salute. “You look weary,” she says pleasantly. “Come far?”
“Without stopping for sleep, all the way from Flanders,” one boasts. “We rode as if the devil was behind us.”
“Did you?”
“But he’s not behind us, he’s before us,” he confides quietly. “Ahead of us, and ahead of His Grace, and out and about raising an army while the rest of us are amazed.”
“That’s enough,” another man says. He pulls off his hat to me and to my mother. “I apologize, Your Grace. He’s been breathless for so long he has to talk now.”
Within an hour the king has called a meeting of his inner council, the men he turns to when he is in danger. Jasper Tudor is there, his red head bowed, his grizzled eyebrows knitting together with worry at the threat to his nephew, to his line. The Earl of Oxford walks arm in arm with Henry, discussing mustering men, and which counties can be trusted and which must not be alarmed. John de la Pole comes into the council chamber on the heels of his fiercely loyal father, and the other friends and family follow: the Stanleys, the Courtenays, John Morton the archbishop, Reginald Bray, who is My Lady’s steward—all the men who put Henry Tudor on the throne and now find it is hard to keep him there.
I go to the nursery. I find My Lady the King’s Mother sitting in the big chair in the corner, watching the nurse changing the baby’s clout and wrapping him tight in his swaddling clothes. It is unusual for her to come here, but I see from her strained face and the beads in her hand that she is praying for his safety.
“Is it bad news?” I ask quietly.
She looks at me reproachfully, as if it is all my fault. “They say that the Duchess of Burgundy, your aunt, has found a general who will take her pay and do her bidding,” she says. “They say he is all but unbeatable.”
“A general?”
“And he is recruiting an army.”
“Will they come here?” I whisper. I look out of the window to the river and the quiet fields beyond.
“No,” she says determinedly. “For Jasper will stop them, Henry will stop them, and God Himself will stop them.”
On my way to my mother’s chambers, I hurry past the king’s rooms, but the door to the great presence chamber is still closed. He has most of the lords gathered together, and they will be frantically trying to judge what new threat this presents to the Tudor throne, how much they should fear, what they should do.
I find I am quickening my pace, my hand to my mouth. I am afraid of what is threatening us, and I am also afraid of the defense that Henry will mount against his own people that might be more violent and deadly than an actual invasion.
My mother’s rooms are closed too, the doors tightly shut, and there is no servant waiting outside to swing open the doors for me. The place is quiet—too quiet. I push open the door myself, and look at the empty room spread out in front of me like a tableau in a pageant before the actors arrive. None of her ladies is here, her musicians are absent, a lute leaning against a wall. All her things are untouched: her chairs, her tapestries, her book on a table, her sewing in a box; but she is missing. It seems as if she has gone.
Like a child, I can’t believe it. I say, “Mother? Lady Mother?” and I step into the quiet sunny presence chamber and look all around me.
I open the door to her privy chamber and it is empty too. There is a scrap of sewing left on one of the chairs, and a ribbon on the window seat, but nothing else. Helplessly, I pick up the ribbon as if it might be a sign, I twist it in my fingers. I cannot believe how quiet it is. The corner of a tapestry stirs in the draft from the door, the only movement in the room. Outside a wood pigeon coos, but that is the only sound. I say again: “Mama? Lady Mother?”
I tap on the door to her bedroom and swing it open, but I don’t expect to find her there. Her bed is stripped of her linen, the mattress lies bare. The wooden posts are stripped of her bed curtains. Wherever she has gone, she has taken her bedding with her. I open the chest at the foot of her bed, and find her clothes have gone too. I turn to the table where she sits while her maid combs her hair; her silvered mirror has gone, her ivory combs, her golden hairpins, her cut-glass phial of oil of lilies.
Her rooms are empty. It is like an enchantment; she has silently disappeared, in the space of a morning, and all in a moment.
I turn on my heel at once and go to the best rooms, the queen’s rooms, where My Lady the King’s Mother spends her days among her women, running her great estates, maintaining her power while her women sew shirts for the poor and listen to readings from the Bible. Her rooms are busy with people coming and going; I can hear the buzz of happy noise through the doors as I walk towards them, and when they are swung open and I am announced, I enter to see My Lady, seated under a cloth of gold like a queen, while around her are her own ladies and among them my mother’s companions, merged into one great court. My mother’s ladies look at me wide-eyed, as if they would whisper secrets to me; but whoever has taken my mother has made sure that they are silent.
“My Lady,” I say, sweeping her the smallest of curtseys due to my mother-in-law and mother to the king. She rises and executes the tiniest of bobs, and then we kiss each other’s cold cheeks. Her lips barely touch me, as I hold my breath as if I don’t want to inhale the smoky smell of incense that always hangs in her veiled headdress. We step back and take the measure of the other.
“Where is my mother?” I ask flatly.
She looks grave as if she were not ready to dance for joy. “Perhaps you should speak with my son the king.”
“He is in his chambers with his council. I don’t want to disturb him. But I shall do so and tell him that you sent me, if that is what you wish. Or can you tell me where my mother is. Or don’t you know? Are you just pretending to knowledge?”
“Of course I know!” she says, instantly affronted. She looks around at the avid faces and gestures to me that we should go through to an inner chamber, where we can talk alone. I follow her. As I go by my mother’s ladies I see that some of them are missing; my half sister Grace, my father’s bastard, is not here. I hope she has gone with my mother, wherever she is.
My Lady the King’s Mother closes the door herself, and gestures that I should sit. Careful of protocol, even now, we sit simultaneously.
“Where is my mother?” I say again.
“She was responsible for the rebellion,” My Lady says quietly. “She sent money and servants to Francis Lovell, she had messages from him. She knew what he was doing and she advised and supported him. She told him which households would hide him and give him men and arms outside York. While I was planning the king’s royal progress, she was planning a rebellion against him, planning to ambush him on his very route. She is the enemy of your husband and your son. I am very sorry for you, Elizabeth.”
I bristle, hardly hearing her. “I don’t need your pity!”
“You do,” she presses on. “For it is you and your husband that your own mother is plotting against. It is your death and downfall she is planning. She worked for Lovell’s rebellion and now she writes secretly to her sister-in-law in Flanders urging her to invade.”
“No. She would not.”
“We have proof,” she says. “There’s no doubt. I am sorry for it. This is a great shame to fall on you and your family. A disgrace to your family name.”
“Where is she?” I ask. My greatest fear is that they have taken her to the Tower, that she will be kept where her sons were held, and that she won’t come out either.
“She has retired from the world,” Lady Margaret says solemnly.
“What?”
“She has seen the error of her ways and gone to confess her sins and live with the good sisters at Bermondsey Abbey. She has chosen to live there. When my son put the evidence of her conspiracy before her, she accepted that she had sinned and that she would have to go.”
“I want to see her.”
“Certainly, you can go to see her,” Lady Margaret says quietly. “Of course.” I see a little hope flare in her veiled eyes. “You could stay with her.”
“Of course I’m not going to stay in Bermondsey Abbey. I shall visit her, and I shall speak with Henry, as she must come back to court.”
“She cannot have wealth and influence,” Lady Margaret says. “She would use it against your husband and your son. I know that you love her dearly, but, Elizabeth—she has become your enemy. She is no mother to you and your sisters anymore. She was providing funds to the men who hope to throw down the T
I rise from my chair and go to the window. Outside the first swallows of summer are skimming along the surface of the river, twisting and turning in flight, their bellies a flash of cream as if they are glad to be dipping their beaks into their own reflections, playing with the sweet water of the Thames. I turn back. “Lady Margaret, my mother is not dishonorable. And she would never do anything to hurt me.”
Slowly she shakes her head. “She insisted that you marry my son,” she says. “She demanded it, as the price of her loyalty. She was present at the birth of the prince. She was honored at his christening, she is his godmother. We have honored her and housed her and paid her. But now she plots against her own grandson’s inheritance and strives to put another on his throne. This is dishonorable, Elizabeth. You cannot deny that she is playing a double game, a shameful game.”
I put my hands over my face, so that I can shut out her expression. If she looked triumphant I would simply hate her, but she looks horrified, as if she feels, like me, that everything we have been trying to do is going to be pulled apart.
“She and I have not always agreed.” She appeals to me. “But I did not see her leave court with any pleasure. This is a disaster for us as well as for her. I hoped we would make one family, one royal family standing together. But she was always pretending. She has been untrue to us.”
I can’t defend her; I bow my head and a little moan of horror escapes through my gritted teeth.