The White Princess (31 page)

“You are preparing to lose?” I ask incredulously. I take his hands and I can feel the tight sinews in his fingers; he is rigid with anxiety from head to toe.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Nobody can know. If the country rises up for them then we will be outnumbered. The Irish will fight to the death and the mercenaries are well paid and have pledged themselves to this. All I have now is the men who will stand by me. My army at Bosworth has been paid off and gone home. And I can’t inspire a new army with the promise of fresh gains, or rewards. If the rebels have a true prince to put at their head, then I am probably lost.”

“A true prince?” I repeat.

We step out of the shadow of the great arch of the portcullis gate and his army raises a deep cheer as they see him. Henry waves at them and then turns to me.

“I shall kiss you,” he warns me, to ensure that we make an encouraging picture for his men. He puts his arms around me and he draws me to him. His light battle armor is hard against me; it is like hugging a man of metal. I look up into his scowling face and he brings his head down and kisses me. For a moment, uncomfortably pinioned in his arms, I am overwhelmed with pity for him.

“God bless you, my husband, and bring you safe home to me,” I say shakily.

There is a roar of pleasure from the army at the kiss, but he does not even hear it. His attention is all on me. “You mean it? I go with your blessing?”

“You do,” I say in sudden earnestness. “You do. And I shall pray that you come safely home to me. And I shall guard our son, and I shall protect your mother.”

For a moment he looks as if he would stay and speak with me. As if he wants to speak gently and truthfully to me, for the first time ever. “I have to go,” he says unwillingly.

“You go,” I say. “Send me news as soon as you can. I shall be looking for news from you, and praying that it is good.”

They bring his great warhorse, and they help him into the saddle, his standard bearer riding up beside him so the white and green flag with the Tudor red dragon ripples out over his head. The other flag is unfurled: the royal standard. Last time I saw that above an army, the man I loved, Richard, rode beneath it; and I put my hand to my heart to ease the sudden thud of pain.

“God bless you, my wife,” Henry says, but I have no smile for him anymore. He is riding the warhorse he rode at Bosworth when he stood on a hill and Richard rode to his death. He is under the Tudor flag he unfurled there, that Richard cut down in his last fatal charge.

I raise my hand to say farewell, but I am choked, and can’t repeat my blessing, and Henry wheels his horse around and leads his army out, east to where his spies tell him the great York army has taken up their position, just beyond Newark.

KENILWORTH CASTLE, WARWICKSHIRE, 17 JUNE 1487

The ladies gather in my chamber to wait for news without the king’s mother, who is on her knees in the beautiful Kenilworth chapel. We can hear a horseman on the road, and then the grinding noise of the portcullis going up and the drawbridge coming down to admit him. Cecily flies to the window and cranes her neck to look out. “A messenger,” she says. “The king’s messenger.”

I rise to my feet to wait for him, then I realize that My Lady will intercept him before he gets to me, so I say, “Wait here!” to my ladies and slip from the room and down the stairs to the stable yard. Just as I thought, My Lady is there in her black gown striding across the yard, as the messenger swings down from the saddle.

“I was told to report to you and to Her Grace the Queen,” he is saying.

“The king’s wife,” she corrects him. “She is not yet crowned. You can tell me everything, I will pass on the news to her.”

“I’m here,” I say quickly. “I’ll hear him myself. What’s the news?”

He turns to me. “It started badly,” he says. “They recruited as they marched. They marched fast, faster than we thought they could have gone. The Irishmen are lightly armed, they carry almost nothing, the German soldiers are unstoppable.”

My Lady the King’s Mother blanches white and totters slightly, as if she will faint. But I have received messengers from battles before. “Never mind all that,” I say sharply. “Tell me the end of the message, not the beginning. Is the king alive or dead?”

“Alive,” he says.

“Did he win?”

“His commanders won.”

I disregard this too. “Are the Irish and the German mercenaries defeated?”

He nods.

“John de la Pole?”

“Dead.”

I take a breath at the death of my cousin.

“And Francis Lovell?” My Lady interrupts eagerly.

“Run away. Probably drowned in the river.”

“Now, you can tell me how it was,” I say.

This is the speech he has prepared. “They marched fast,” he says. “Past York, had a few running battles, but drew up at a village called East Stoke, outside Newark. People came out to support them, and they were recruiting right up to the last moment before the battle.”

“How many were they?” My Lady demands.

“We thought about eight thousand.”

“How many men did the king have by then?”

“We were twice their number. We should have felt safe. But we did not.” He shakes his head at the memory of their fear. “We did not.

“Anyway, they charged early, down from the hill, almost as soon as the battle began, and so all of them came against the Earl of Oxford who was commanding about six thousand men. He took the brunt of the fighting and his men held firm. They pushed back, and forced the Irish into a valley, and they couldn’t get out.”

“They were trapped?” I ask.

“We think they decided to fight to the death. They call the valley the Red Gutter now. It was very bad.”

I turn my head from the thought of it. “Where was the king during this massacre?”

“Safely in the rear of his army.” The messenger nods to his mother, who sees no shame in this. “But they brought the pretender to him when it was over.”

“He’s safe?” My Lady confirms. “You are certain that the king is safe?”

“Safe as ever.”

I swallow an exclamation. “And who is the pretender?” I ask as calmly as possible.

The man looks at me curiously. I realize I am gritting my teeth, and I try to breathe normally. “Is he a poor imposter as my lord thought?”

“Lambert Simnel: a lad trained to do the bidding of others, a schoolboy from Oxford, a handsome boy. His Grace has him under arrest, and the schoolmaster who taught him, and many of the other leaders.”

“And Francis Lovell?” My Lady demands, her voice hard. “Did anyone see him drown?”

He shakes his head. “His horse plunged into the river with him and they were swept away together.”

I cross myself. My Lady Mother makes the sign but her face is dark. “We had to capture him,” she says. “We had to take him and John de la Pole alive. We had to know what they planned. It was essential. We had to have them so that we could know what they know.”

“The heat of the battle . . .” The man shrugs. “It’s harder to capture a man than to kill him. It was a close thing. Even though we outnumbered them by so many, it was a very close thing. They fought like men possessed. They were ready to die for their cause and we were—”

“You were what?” I ask curiously.

“We did as we were ordered,” he says carefully. “We did enough. We did the job.”

I pause at that. I have heard reports from many battles, though none in which the victory was described so calmly. But then I have never heard a report from a battle where the chief commander, the king himself, sat at the rear of his army, an army twice the size of his enemy, and refused to parlay with defeated men but let them be slaughtered like dumb cattle.

“But they’re dead,” My Lady says to comfort herself. “And my son is alive.”

“He’s well. Not a scratch on him. How could they touch him? He was so far back they couldn’t see him!”

“You can dine in the hall,” My Lady rules, “and this is for you.” I see a piece of gold pass from her hand to his. She must be grateful for the good news to pay so highly for it. She turns to me. “So it is over.”

“Praise be to God,” I say devoutly.

She nods. “His will be done,” she says, and I know that this victory will make her more certain than ever that her son was born to be king.

LINCOLN CASTLE, LINCOLN, JULY 1487

The king commands that we meet him at Lincoln and he and I go hand in hand into the great cathedral for a service of thanksgiving. Behind us, half a step behind, wearing a coronal, like a queen herself, comes My Lady the King’s Mother and either side of her are the king’s commanders, his uncle Jasper Tudor, who planned the battle, and his most loyal friend, John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, whose men took the brunt of the fighting.

The archbishop, John Morton, is trembling at the nearness of the escape, his face flushed, his hands shaking as he distributes the Host. My Lady is in floods of tears of joy. Henry himself is profoundly moved, as if this is his first victory, fought all over again. Winning this means more to him than winning at Bosworth; it doubles his confidence.

“I am relieved,” he says to me when we are in our private room at the end of the day. “I cannot easily say how deeply I am relieved.”

“Because you won?” I ask. I am sitting at the window, looking east where the high spires of the cathedral pierce the low cloudy skies, but as he comes in my room I turn and look at his flushed complexion.

“Not just that,” he says. “Once I knew that we outnumbered them I thought we were almost certain to win, and the Irish were
practically unarmed—when they turned and faced us they were all but naked. I knew they couldn’t stand against archery—they had no shields, they had no padded jackets, nobody had chain mail, poor fools—no, what made it so wonderful was capturing the boy.”

“The boy they said was my cousin Teddy?”

“Yes, because now I can show him. Now everyone can see that he is no heir to York. He’s a schoolboy, a lad of ten years old, name of Lambert Simnel, nothing special about him but his looks . . .” He glances at me. “Handsome, charming, like all the Yorks.”

I nod as if this is a reasonable complaint against us.

“And better than that.” He smiles to himself, he is all but hugging himself with joy. “No one else landed, no one else came. Even though they marched all the way across England, there was no one anchored off the east coast, there was no one waiting for them at Newark.”

“What d’you mean?”

He gets to his feet and stretches himself as if he would spread his arms to hug all of the kingdom. “If they had a pretender, a better likeness than the little schoolboy, they would have had him nearby, waiting. So that when they claimed victory they could produce him, exchange him for the little lad, and take him to London for a second coronation.”

I wait.

“Like with players!” He is almost laughing with joy. “When they make a switch in a play. Like the Easter play—there’s the body in the tomb, someone flicks a cape and there’s the risen Lord. You have to have your switch ready, you have to have your player in the wings. But when they didn’t have a boy waiting to take the place of the Simnel lad—that’s when I knew that they were defeated. They don’t have anyone!” He cracks into a laugh. “See? They don’t have anyone. Nobody was landed to meet them at Newark. Nobody came in from Flanders, nobody sailed up the Thames and arrived in London to wait for the triumphant procession. Nobody arrived in Wales, nobody came down from
Scotland. Don’t you see?” He laughs in my face. “All they have is an impersonator, the schoolboy. They don’t have the real thing.”

“The real thing?”

In his relief he speaks his fear clearly for the first time. “They don’t have one of your brothers. They don’t have Edward Prince of Wales, they don’t have Richard Duke of York, his brother and heir. If they had either one of them, they would have had him ready, standing by to take the throne as soon as the battle was won. If either one of your brothers was alive they would have had him, ready to claim the throne, as soon as I was dead. But they don’t! They don’t!

“It’s all been gossip, and rumors, and false sightings and lying reports. They did all this for a bluff. They fooled me—I don’t mind telling you that they frightened me—but it was a May game, a nothing. They made rumors about a boy in Portugal, they whispered about a boy who got out of the Tower alive; but it was all nothing. I have had men hunting all over Christendom for a boy and now I see he is nothing more than a dream. I am content now, that it was all nothing.”