The White Queen (14 page)

I am not concerned until my brother John comes to me, his face grave, and swears that
there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of men in arms, and it has to be the Earl of
Warwick about his old business of making mischief, as no one else could muster so
many. He is kingmaking again. Last time he made Edward to replace King Henry; this
time he wants to make George, Duke of Clarence, brother to the king, the son of no
importance, to replace my husband Edward. And so to replace me and mine as well.

Edward meets me at Fotheringhay, as we had arranged, quietly furious. We had planned
to enjoy the beautiful house and grounds in the midsummer weather and then travel
on to the prosperous town of Norwich together, for a great ceremonial entry to this
most wealthy city. Our plan was to knit ourselves into the pilgrimages and feasts
of the country towns, to dispense justice and patronage, to be seen as the king and
queen at the heart of their people—nothing like the mad king in the Tower and his
madder queen in France.

“But now I have to go north and deal with this,” Edward complains to me. “There are
new rebellions coming up like springs in a flood. I thought it was one discontented
squire, but the whole of the north seems to be taking up arms again. It is Warwick,
it must be Warwick, though he has said not a word to me. But
I asked him to come to me, and he has not come. I thought that was odd—but I knew
he was angry with me—and now this very day I hear that he and George have taken ship.
They have gone to Calais together. Goddamn them, Elizabeth, I have been a trusting
fool. Warwick has fled from England, George with him; they have gone to the strongest
English garrison, they are inseparable, and all the men who say they are out for Robin
of Redesdale are really paid servants of George or Warwick.”

I am aghast. Suddenly the kingdom that had seemed quiet in our hands is falling apart.

“It must be Warwick’s plan to use all the tricks against me that he and I used against
Henry.” Edward is thinking aloud. “He is backing George now, as he once backed me.
If he goes on with this, if he uses the fortress of Calais as his jumping point to
invade England, it will be a brothers’ war as it was once a cousins’ war. This is
damnable, Elizabeth. And this is the man I thought of as my brother. This is the man
who all but put me on the throne. This is my kinsman and my first ally. This was my
greatest friend!”

He turns from me so I cannot see the anger and the distress in his face, and I can
hardly breathe at the thought of this great man, this tremendous commander of men,
coming against us. “You are sure? George is with him? And they have gone to Calais
together? He wants the throne for George?”

“I am sure of nothing,” he shouts in exasperation. “This is my first and foremost
friend and with him is
my own brother. We have been shoulder to shoulder on the battlefield; we have been
brothers in arms as well as kinsmen. At the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross, there were
three suns in the sky—I saw them myself, three suns: everyone said that was a sign
from God for me and for George and for Richard, the three sons of York. How can one
son leave the others? And who else betrays me with him? If I cannot trust my own brother,
who will stand by me? My mother must know of this: George is her darling. He will
have told her he is plotting against me and she has kept his secret. How can he betray
me? How can she?”

“Your mother?” I repeat. “Your mother, backing George against you? Why would she do
such a thing?”

He shrugs. “The old story. Whether I am my father’s son. Whether I am legitimate,
born and bred a York. George is saying that I am a bastard, and that makes him the
true heir. God knows why she would support this. She must hate me for marrying you
and taking your part more than I even dreamed.”

“How dare she!”

“I can trust no one but you and yours,” Edward exclaims. “Everyone else I trust is
cut out from under my feet, and now I hear that this Robin in Yorkshire has a list
of demands that he wants me to meet, and that Warwick has announced to the people
that he thinks they are reasonable. Reasonable! He promises that he and George will
land with an army to remonstrate with me. Remonstrate! I know what he means by that!
Is this not the very thing we did to Henry? Do I not know
how a king is destroyed? Did Warwick’s father not take my very own father to remonstrate
with King Henry, planning to cut him from his wife and from his allies? Did he not
teach my father how to cut off a king from his wife, from his allies? And now he thinks
to destroy me with the same trick. Does he think that I am a fool?”

“And Richard?” I ask anxiously, thinking of his other brother, the shy boy who has
become a quiet and thoughtful young man. “Where are Richard’s loyalties? Does he side
with his mother?”

It is his first smile. “My Richard stays true to me, thank God,” he says briefly.
“Richard is always true to me. I know you think him an awkward, sulky boy. I know
your sisters laugh at him, but he is honest and faithful to me. Whereas George can
be bribed to left or to right. He is a greedy child, not a man. God only knows what
Warwick has promised him.”

“I can tell you that,” I reply fiercely. “It’s easy. Your throne. And my daughters’
inheritance.”

“I shall keep them all.” He takes my hands and kisses them. “I swear I shall keep
them all. You go to the city of Norwich as we planned. Do your duty, play the queen,
look as if you are untroubled. Show them a smiling and confident face. And I will
go and scotch this snakes’ plot before it gets out of the ground.”

“Do they admit that they hope to overthrow you? Or do they insist they just want to
remonstrate with you?”

He grimaces. “It is more that they will overthrow you, sweetheart. They want your
family and your advisors exiled from my court. Their great complaint is
that I am ill advised and that your family are destroying me.”

I gasp. “They are slandering me?”

“It is a cover, a mumming,” he says. “Don’t regard it. It is the usual song of this
not being a rebellion against the king but against his evil advisors. I sang this
song myself as did my father, as did Warwick against Henry. Then, we said that it
was all the fault of the queen and the Duke of Somerset. Now, they say it is your
fault and your family around you. It is easy to blame the wife. It is always easier
to accuse the queen of being a bad influence than to declare yourself against the
king. They want to destroy you and your family, of course. Then, once I am alone before
them, without friends and family, they will destroy me. They will force me to declare
our marriage a sham, our girls all bastards. They will make me name George as my heir,
perhaps to cede my throne to him. I have to drive them to open opposition, where I
can defeat them. Trust me, I will keep you safe.”

I put my forehead to his. “I wish I had given you a son,” I say very low. “Then they
would know that there could be only one heir. I wish I had given you a prince.”

“Time enough for that,” he says steadily. “And I love our girls. A son will come,
I don’t doubt it, beloved. And I will keep the throne safe for him. Trust me.”

I let him go. We both have work to do. He rides out from Fotheringhay behind a harshly
rippling standard and surrounded by a guard ready for battle to go to Nottingham to
the great castle there, and wait for the
enemy to show himself. I go on to Norwich with my daughters, to act as if England
is all mine, as if it is all still a fair garden for the rose of York, and I fear
nothing. I take my Grey sons with me. Edward offered to have them ride with him, for
a first taste of battle, but I am fearful for them and I take them with me and the
girls. So I have two very sulky young men, aged fifteen and thirteen, as I make my
progress to Norwich, and nothing will please them, as they are missing their first
battle.

I have a state entry and choirs singing and flowers thrown down before me, and plays
extolling my virtue and welcoming my girls. Edward bides his time in Nottingham, summoning
his soldiers again, waiting for his enemy to land.

While we wait, playing our different parts, wondering when our enemies will come,
and where they will land, we hear more news. In the city of Calais, with special permission
from the pope—which must have been sought and gained in secret by our own archbishops—George
has married Warwick’s daughter, Isabel Neville. He is now Warwick’s son-in-law and,
if Warwick can put George on Edward’s throne, Warwick will make his own daughter queen,
and she will take my crown.

I spit like a cat at the thought of our turncoat archbishops writing to the pope in
secret to aid our enemies, of George before the altar with Warwick’s girl, and of
Warwick’s long slow-burning ambition. I think of the pale-faced girl, one of the only
two Neville girls, for
Warwick has no son of his own and cannot seem to get any more children, and I swear
that she will never wear the crown of England while I live. I think of George, turning
his coat like the spoiled boy he is, and falling in with Warwick’s plans like the
stupid child he is, and I swear vengeance on them both. I am so certain that it will
come to a battle, and a bitter battle between my husband and his former tutor in war
Warwick, that I am taken by surprise, just as Edward is taken by surprise, when Warwick
lands without warning, and meets and smashes the gathering royal army at Edgecote
Moor near Banbury, before Edward is even out of Nottingham Castle.

It is a disaster. Sir William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, lies dead on the field,
a thousand Welshmen around him, his ward the Lancaster boy Henry Tudor left without
a guardian. Edward is on the road to London, riding as fast as he can to arm the city
for siege, about to warn them that Warwick is in England, when armed figures block
the road before him.

Archbishop Neville, Warwick’s kinsman appointed by us, steps up and takes Edward his
own king prisoner, telling him, as he is surrounded, that Warwick and George are already
in the kingdom, and the royal army has already been defeated. It is over, Edward is
beaten, even before battle is declared, even before he had his warhorse harnessed.
The wars, which I thought had ended in peace, our peace, are over with our defeat,
without Edward even drawing his sword, and the
House of York will be founded on the puppet plaything George and not on my unborn
son.

I am at Norwich, pretending to confidence, pretending to queenly grace, when they
bring me a mud-stained messenger from my husband. I open the letter:

Dearest wife,

Prepare yourself for bad news.

Your father and your brother were taken at a battle near Edgecote fighting for our
cause and Warwick has them. I too am a prisoner, held at Warwick’s castle of Middleham.
They took me on the road on my way to you. I am unhurt, as are they.

Warwick has named your mother as a sorceress and he says that our marriage was an
act of witchcraft by you and her. So be warned: both of you are in grave danger. She
must leave the country at once: they will have her strangled as a witch if they can.
You too should prepare for exile.

Get yourself and our daughters to London as fast as you can, arm the Tower for a siege,
and raise the city. As soon as the city is set for siege you must take the girls and
go to safety to Flanders. The charge of witchcraft is very grave, beloved. They will
execute you if they think they can make it stick. Keep yourself safe above anything
else.

If you think it best, send the girls away at once, secretly, and place them with humble
people in hiding. Don’t be proud, Elizabeth, choose a refuge where no
one will look. We have to live through this if we want to fight to claim our own again.

I am more grieved at bringing you and them into danger than anything else in the world.
I have written to Warwick to demand to know the ransom that he wants for the safe
return of your father and your brother John. I don’t doubt he will send them back
to you and you can pay whatever he demands from the Treasury.

Your husband,

The one and only King of England,

Edward

A knock at the door of my presence chamber and the flinging open of the door makes
me leap to my feet, expecting, I don’t know, the Earl of Warwick himself, with a bundle
of greenwood stakes for burning my mother and me; but it is the Mayor of Norwich,
who greeted me with such rich ceremony only days before.

“Your Grace, I have urgent news,” he says. “Bad news. I am sorry.”

I take a little breath to steady myself. “Tell me.”

“It is your father and your brother.”

I know what he is going to say. Not from foreknowledge, but from the way his round
face is creased with worry at the thought of the pain he is bringing me. I know it
from the way that the men behind him gather together, awkward as people who bring
the worst tidings. I know it from the way that my own ladies-in-waiting sigh like
a breeze of mourning and gather behind my chair.

“No,” I say. “No. They are prisoners. They are held by Englishmen of honor. They must
be ransomed.”

“Shall I leave you?” he asks. He looks at me as if I am sick. He does not know what
to say to a queen who came into his town in glory and will leave it in mortal danger.
“Shall I go, and come back later, Your Grace?”

“Tell me,” I say. “Tell me now, the worst there is, and I will bear it somehow.”

He glances at my women for help, and then his dark eyes come back to me. “I am sorry,
Your Grace. Sorrier than I can rightly say. Your father Earl Rivers and your brother
Sir John Woodville were taken in battle—a new battle between new enemies—the king’s
army against the king’s own brother George, the Duke of Clarence. The duke seems to
be in alliance now with the Earl of Warwick against your husband—perhaps you knew?
In alliance against your gracious husband and you. Your father and brother were taken
fighting for Your Grace, and they have been executed. They were beheaded.” He snatches
one quick look at me. “They would not have suffered,” he volunteers. “I am sure it
was quick.”