The White Princess (32 page)

I register the color in his cheeks and the brightness of his eyes and realize that I am seeing my husband for the first time without his constant burden of fear. I smile at him; his relief is so powerful that I feel it myself. “We’re safe,” I say.

“We Tudors are safe at last,” he responds. He puts out his hand to me and I understand that he will stay in my bed tonight. I rise to my feet but I am not eager, I feel no desire. I am not unwilling, I am a faithful wife and my husband is safe home from a terrible battle, happier than I have ever seen him, and I cannot help but be glad that he is safe. I welcome him home, I even welcome him to my bed.

Gently, he unties the laces under my chin and takes off my nightcap. He turns me around and pulls my hair from the plait, unties the belt at my waist and the little ties at my shoulders, and drops my gown to the ground, so that I am naked before him, my hair tumbling down. He sighs and put his lips to my bare shoulder.
“I shall crown you as Queen of England,” he says simply, and takes me into his arms.

We go on a progress to celebrate the king’s great victory. My Lady the King’s Mother rides a great warhorse, as if she were caparisoned for battle. I ride the horse that Richard gave me; I feel as if he and I have been through many journeys together, and always riding away from Richard, and never with him as he promised. Henry rides often at my side. I know that he wants to demonstrate to the people who come out to see us that he is married to the York princess, that he has unified the houses and defeated the rebels. But now there is more than this: I know that he likes to be with me. We even laugh together as we ride through the small villages of Lincolnshire and the people come tumbling out of their houses and run across their fields to see us go by.

“Smiling,” Henry says to me, beaming at half a dozen peasants whose opinions—surely—matter not at all, one way or the other.

“Waving,” I coach him, and take my hand from the reins and make a little gesture.

“How do you do it?” He stops his rictus grin at the crowd and turns to me. “That little wave, you look as if it’s easy. You don’t look practiced at all.”

I think for a moment. “My father used to say that you must remember they have turned out to see you, they want to feel that you are their friend. You are among friends and loyal supporters. A smile or a wave is a greeting to people who have only come to admire you. You might not know them—but they think they know you. They deserve to be greeted as friends.”

“But did he never think that they would turn out just as eagerly to greet his enemy? Did he not think that these are false smiles and hollow cheers?”

I consider this for a moment, and then I giggle. “To tell you
the truth, I think it never occurred to him at all,” I say. “He was terribly vain, you know. He always thought that everybody adored him. And mostly, they did. He rode around thinking everyone loved him. He claimed the throne on his merits as a true heir. He always thought he was the finest man in England, he never doubted it.”

He shakes his head, and forgets to wave to someone who calls,
À
Tudor! It is only one voice, no one else takes up the call, and the cry just sounds wrong, strangely unconvincing. “He can’t have been told more often than I that he was born to be king,” he says. “Nobody in the world could be more sure than my mother that her son should be king.”

“He was fighting from boyhood,” I say. “At the age that you were in hiding, he was recruiting men and demanding their allegiance. It was very different for him. He was claiming the throne and drawing on the will of the people. He was the claimant: not his mother. Three suns appeared in the sky over his army. He was certain that he was chosen by God to be king. He was visible, he showed himself, at the same age, you were in hiding. He was fighting, you were running away.”

He nods. I think, but I don’t say, and he was blessed with bravery, he had a great natural courage and you are naturally fearful. And he had a wife that adored him, who married him for irresistible love, and her family embraced him, and his cause was their cause, and all of us—his daughters, his sons, his brothers-in-law, his sisters-in-law—we were all utterly loyal to him. He was at the center of a loving family and every one of them would have laid down their life for him. But you only have your mother and your uncle Jasper, and they are both cold of heart.

Someone ahead of us shouts “Hurrah!” and the yeomen of the guard raise their pikes and shout “Hurrah!” in full-throated reply, and I think that my father would never have created yeomen of the guard to lead the cheers for he always believed that everyone loved him, and he never had need of guarding.

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, AUGUST 1487

We go back to London to prepare for my coronation. Henry makes a royal entry into the city, and attends a service of thanksgiving for his victory in St. Paul’s. He rewards the faithful, even those who had little choice but to be faithful since they were locked up in the Tower, releasing Thomas Howard the Earl of Surrey and my half brother Thomas Grey from their imprisonment.

Archbishop John Morton is made Lord Chancellor, which only makes me and others wonder what assistance a Father of the Church could provide for a king that should lead to so great a reward.

“Spying,” Thomas Grey tells me. “Morton and My Lady the King’s Mother together run the greatest spy network that the world has ever seen, and not a man moves in and out of England but their son and protégé know of it.”

My half brother is seated with me in my presence chamber, and the music for dancing covers our words as my ladies practice new steps in one corner of the room and we talk in another. I hold up my sewing to cover my face so that no one can see my lips. I am so pleased to see him after so long that I cannot keep myself from beaming.

“Have you seen our Lady Mother?” I ask.

He nods.

“Is she well? Does she know I am to be crowned?”

“She’s well, quite happy at the abbey. She sent you her love and best wishes for your coronation.”

“I can’t get him to release her to court,” I admit. “But he knows he can’t hold her there forever. He has no cause.”

“Yes but he
does
have cause,” my half brother says with a wry smile. “He knows that she sent money to Francis Lovell and John de la Pole. He knows that she has united all of the Yorkists who plot against him. Under Henry’s nose, under your nose, she was running a spy network of her own, from Scotland to Flanders. He knows that she has been linking all of them, in turn, to Duchess Margaret in Flanders. But what drives him quite mad is that he can’t say that out loud. He can’t accuse her, because to do so would be to admit that there was a plot against him, inspired by our mother, funded by your aunt, and assisted by your grandmother, Duchess Cecily. He can’t admit to England that the surviving House of York is completely united against him. By exposing the conspiracy, he shows the threat they are. It looks far too much like a conspiracy of women in favor of a child of their household. It is overwhelming evidence for the one thing that Henry wants to deny.”

“What is that?” I ask.

Thomas leans his chin on his hand so his fingers cover his mouth. No one can read his lips as he whispers, “It looks as though those women are working together for a York prince.”

“But Henry says that since no York prince came to England, ready for the victory, he cannot exist.”

“Such a boy would be a precious boy,” Thomas objects. “You wouldn’t bring him to England until the victory was won and the coast secure.”

“A precious boy?” I echo. “You mean a pretend prince, a false token. A counterfeit.”

He smiles at me. Thomas has been under arrest in one place or another for two long years: in France since before the battle of
Bosworth, and more recently in the Tower of London. He’s not going to say anything that will put him back behind bars again.

“A pretender. Of course, that is all that he could possibly be.”

Henry stays in London only long enough to assure everyone that his victory over the rebels was total, that he was never in any danger, and that the crowned king that they paraded in Dublin is now a frightened boy in prison; then he takes his most trusted lords and goes north again, to one great house after another where he holds inquiries and learns which lords failed to secure the roads, who whispered to someone else that there was no need to support the king, those who looked the other way while the rebel army stormed by, and those who saddled up, sharpened their swords, and treasonously went out to join them. Relentlessly, dealing in details and whispers, gatepost gossip and alehouse insults, Henry tracks down every single man whose loyalty wavered when the cry went up for York. He is determined that those men who joined the rebels should be punished, some put to death as traitors but most fined to the point of ruin, and the profit paid to the royal treasury. He ventures as far north as Newcastle, deep into the York heartlands, and sends ambassadors to the court of James III of Scotland with proposals for a peace treaty and for marriages to make the treaties hold firm. Then he turns and rides home to London, a conquering hero, leaving the North reeling with death and debt.

He summons the boy Lambert Simnel to his presence chamber and commands the attendance of his whole court: My Lady the King’s Mother, an eager spectator of her son’s doings; myself with my ladies headed by my two sisters, my cousin Maggie at my side; my aunt Katherine, smilingly accompanying her victorious husband, Jasper Tudor; all the faithful lords and those who have managed to pass as faithful. The double doors slam open, and the yeomen guard ground their pikes with a bang and shout
the name, “John Lambert Simnel!” and everyone turns to see a skinny boy, frozen in the doorway until someone pushes him inwards and he takes a few steps into the room and then sinks on his knees to the king.

My first thought is that he does indeed look very like my brother looked, when I last saw him. This is a blond, pretty boy of about ten years old, and when my mother and I smuggled my brother out of sanctuary that dark evening, he was as bright and as slender as this. Now, if he is alive somewhere, he would be about fourteen, he would be growing into a young man. This child could never have passed for him.

“Does he remind you of anybody?” The king takes my hand and leads me from my chair beside his to walk down the long room to where the boy is kneeling, his head bowed, the nape of his neck exposed, as if he expects to be beheaded here and now. Everyone is silent. There are about a hundred people in the privy chamber and everyone turns to look at the boy as Henry approaches him, and the child droops lower and his ears burn.

“Anyone think he looks familiar?” Henry’s hard gaze rakes my family, my sisters with their heads down as if they are guilty, my cousin Maggie with her eyes on the little boy who looks so like her brother, my half brother Thomas who is gazing around indifferently, determined that no one shall see him flinch.

“No,” I say shortly. He is slight like my brother Richard and has cropped blond hair like his. I can’t see his face but I caught a glimpse of hazel eyes like my brother’s, and at the back of his head there are a few childish curls on the nape of the neck, just like Richard’s. When he used to sit at my mother’s feet, she would twist his curls around her fingers as if they were bright golden rings, and she would read to him until he was sleepy and ready for bed. The sight of the little boy, on his knees, makes me think once more of my brother Richard, and of the page that we sent into the Tower to take his place, of my missing brother Prince Edward, and of my cousin Edward of Warwick—Maggie’s
brother—in the Tower alone. It is as if there is a succession of boys, York boys, all bright, all charming, all filled with promise; but nobody can be sure where they are tonight, or even if they are alive or dead, or if they are unreal, flights of fancy and pretenders like this one.