The White Princess (46 page)

Once again Henry moves the court to Kenilworth Castle, the safest in England, centrally placed so that he can march out to any coast to meet an invasion, easily defended if everything goes wrong and an invasion sweeps inland to him. This time there is not even the pretence of being a carefree court in summertime; everyone is afraid, certain that they are attached to a king who is facing invasion for the second time in only eight years, convinced that a better claimant to the throne is gathering his forces against Henry Tudor: a pretender now as he always has been.

Jasper Tudor, grim-faced, rides out to the West Country and Wales to uncover the dozens of local conspiracies that are joining together to welcome an invasion. None of the people of the west is for Tudor, they are all looking for the prince over the water. Henry himself opens other inquiries, riding from one place to another, chasing whispers, trying to find those who are behind the constant flow of men and funds to Flanders. Everywhere from Yorkshire to Oxfordshire, from the east to the central counties, Henry’s appointed men hold inquiries trying to root out rebels. And still the reports of treasonous groups, hidden meetings, and musters after dark come in every day.

Henry closes the ports. No one shall set sail to any
destination for fear that they are going to join the boy; even merchants have to apply for a license before they can send out their ships. Not even trade is trusted. Then Henry passes another law: no one is to travel any great distance inland either. People may go to their market towns and back home again, but there is to be no mustering and marching. There are to be no summer gatherings, no haymaking parties, no shearing days, no dancing or beating of the parish bounds, no midsummer revels. The people are not to come together for fear that they make a crowd and raise an army, they are not to raise a glass for fear that they drink a toast to the prince whose family’s court was a byword for merrymaking.

My Lady the King’s Mother is bleached with fear. When she whispers the prayers of the rosary her lips are as pale as the starched wimple around her face. She spends all her time with me, leaving the best rooms, the queen’s apartments, empty all day. She brings her ladies and the members of her immediate family as the only people that she can trust, and she brings her books and her studies, and she sits in my rooms as if she is seeking warmth or comfort or some sort of safety.

I can offer her nothing. Cecily, Anne, and I barely speak to one another, we are so conscious that everything we say is being noted, that everyone is wondering if our brother will come to rescue us from this Tudor court. Maggie, my cousin, goes everywhere with her head down and her eyes on her feet, desperate that no one will say if one York boy is on the loose, then at least the other one could be put to death and so secure the Tudor line from his threat. The guards on Teddy have been doubled and doubled again, and Maggie is sure that he does not get his letters from her. She never hears from him and now she is too afraid to ask after him. We all fear that one day they will get the order to go into his room while he is asleep and strangle him in his bed. Who would countermand the order? Who would stop them?

The ladies in my rooms read and sew, play music and games, but everything is muted and nobody speaks quickly or laughs or
makes a joke. Everyone examines everything they say before they let one word out of their mouths. Everyone is watching their own words for fear of saying something that could be reported against them, everyone is listening to everyone else, in case there is something that they should report. Everyone is silently attentive to me, and whenever there is a loud knock at my door, there is an indrawn breath of terror.

I hide from these terrible afternoons in the children’s nursery, taking Elizabeth onto my lap and stretching out her little hands and feet, singing softly to her, trying to persuade her to show me her faint, enchanting smile.

Arthur, who has to stay with us until we can be certain of the safety of Wales, is torn between his studies and the view from the high window, where he can see his father’s army growing in numbers, drilling every day. Every day too he sees messengers coming from the west, bringing news from Ireland or from Wales, or from the south—from London, where the streets are buzzing with gossip and the apprentices are openly wearing white roses.

In the afternoons I take him riding with me but after a few days Henry forbids us to go out without a fully armed guard. “If they were to snatch Arthur then my life wouldn’t be worth a groat,” he says bitterly. “The day that he and Harry die is the day of my death sentence and the end of everything.”

“Don’t say that!” I put out my hand. “Don’t ill-wish them!”

“You’re tenderhearted,” he says grudgingly, as if it is a fault. “But foolish. You don’t think, you don’t realize what danger you are in. You cannot take the children out of the castle walls without a guard. I am beginning to think that they should be housed separately—so that anyone coming for Arthur couldn’t get Henry.”

“But my lord husband,” I say. I can hear the quaver in my voice, I can hear the whine of reasonableness against the clarity of a madman.

“I think I’ll keep Arthur in the Tower.”

“No!” I scream. I cannot contain my shock. “No, Henry. No! No! No!”

“To keep him safe.”

“No. I won’t consent. I can’t consent. He’s not to go into the Tower. Not like . . .”

“Not like your brothers?” he asks, quick as a striking snake. “Not like Edward of Warwick? Because you think they are all the same? All boys who might hope to be king?”

“He is not to go into the Tower like them. He is the proclaimed prince. He must live freely. I must be allowed to ride out with him. We cannot be in such danger in our own country that we are prisoners in our own castles.”

His head is turned away from me so I cannot see his expression as he listens. But when he turns back I see his handsome face is twisted up with suspicion. He looks at me as if he would flay the skin from my face to see my thoughts.

“Why are you so determined upon this?” he asks slowly. Almost, I can see his suspicions gathering. “Why are you so determined to keep your sons here? Are you riding out with Arthur to meet with them? Are you hoodwinking me with this talk of safety and riding out? Are you planning to take my son out to hand him over? Are you are working with the Yorks to steal my son from me? Have you made an agreement? Forged a deal? Your brother as king, Arthur as his heir? Will you put Arthur in his keeping now, and tell him to invade as soon as the wind turns against me and he can sail?”

There is a long silence as I realize what he has said. Slowly, the horror of his mistrust opens like a chasm below my feet. “Henry, you cannot think that I am your enemy?”

“I am watching you,” he says, not answering. “My mother is watching you. And you will not have my son and heir in your keeping. If you want to go anywhere with him, you will go with men that I can trust.”

My rage leaps up and I round on him, shaking. “Men you can trust? Name one!” I spit. “Can you? Can you name even one?”

He puts his hand to his heart as if I have rammed him in the chest. “What do you know?” he whispers.

“I know that you can trust no one. I know that you are in a lonely hell of your own making.”

NORTHAMPTON, AUTUMN 1493

We move to Northampton and Henry receives the courtiers that he had sent to negotiate with my aunt, the dowager duchess. All trade is to be banned between England and Flanders, nobody can come and go, and Flanders shall have no English wool while the boy, the one boy, holds his little court, and the determined woman who claims he is her nephew writes urgently to other kings and queens, pressing his claims.

Henry’s representatives gleefully report that they have insulted my aunt. At her very court, in her presence, they suggested that she scrapes the countryside of bastard boys to send against Henry Tudor. They made a scurrilous joke suggesting that the boy is her love child. They say she is like many older women: mad for sex, or maddened by sex, or simply mad because she is a woman and everyone knows that women’s grasp of reason is a weak one. They say that she is a mad woman from a mad family and so my grandmother Cecily Duchess of York, nearly eighty years old, and my dead mother and I, and all my sisters and my cousin Margaret are insulted too. Henry lets all these things be said by his ambassadors, and repeated in my hearing, as if he does not care what filth is thrown at York, as long as something sticks which besmirches the boy.

I hear this gossip flinty-faced, I don’t demean myself to complain. Henry is stooping very low, he has lost all judgment.
To insult the boy, to insult my aunt, he will say anything. I see his mother watching me, bright-eyed with her own delirious fears, and I turn my head away as if I do not want to see her, nor hear the abuse her son commands.

But the ambassador William Warham did not waste his time in Flanders in slandering my aunt; he had his clerks and his men search the country for families who are missing a boy. Hundreds of people responded, people who now say that twenty years ago they lost a newborn from the cradle; could this be the boy? People who say that their child wandered off and never returned; did the duchess steal him? People whose beloved child fell into the river and was swept downstream and the body never found—is he alive and pretending to be Richard Duke of York? One applicant after another comes forwards to tell their sad stories of missing children; but there is nothing to link even one of them to the boy who behaves so courteously in his little palace, who speaks so warmly of his father, and who visits his aunt Margaret so comfortably.

“You don’t know who he is,” I say flatly to Henry. “You have spent a small fortune and had Sir William pay half the mourning mothers in Christendom for their stories, and you still don’t know who he is. You have no idea who he is.”

“I will have his history,” he says simply. “I will have his history even if I have to write it myself. I can tell you some of it already. He turns up somewhere, into some family somewhere, ten years ago. He’s with them for something like four years. Then Sir Edward Brampton happens by, and takes him to Portugal—Sir Edward admits that himself. In Portugal they call the boy Richard Duke of York, and he’s known in the Portuguese court as the missing prince. Then, he’s dismissed by Sir Edward, it doesn’t matter why, and the boy travels with Pregent Meno—Meno admits that too, I have it in writing. Meno takes him to Ireland, the Irish rise up for him, they call him Richard Duke of York—I have their confessions—and he escapes to France. King Charles of France accepts him as the York prince, but just when he is to be handed over to me, he escapes to your aunt.”

“You have all this written down?” I ask.

“I have signed reports from witnesses. I can trace him every moment of every day from Portugal,” Henry says.

“But nothing before then. Nothing to show that he is born and bred into the family somewhere,” I point out. “You say yourself that he turns up there. He himself will say that he turns up there from England, rescued from the Tower. Everything that you have written down, sworn to for certain, does nothing to disprove his claim. Everything you have collected as evidence only confirms him as a son of York.”

He crosses the room in one swift stride and snatches up my hand, holding it so tightly that the bones are crushed together. I flinch but I won’t cry out.

“That’s all I have for now,” he says through gritted teeth. “As I said. What I don’t have I will write myself. I will write this boy’s parentage into his story, I will create it: common people, nasty people. The father a bit of a drunk, the mother a bit of a fool, the boy a bit of a runaway, a wastrel, a good-for-nothing. D’you think I can’t write this and get someone—a drunk married to a fool—to swear to it? Do you think I can’t set up as historian? As storyteller? D’you think I can’t write a history which years from now, everyone will believe as the truth? I am the king. Who shall write the record of my reign if not me?”

“You can say anything you like,” I say levelly. “Of course you can. You’re the King of England. But it doesn’t make it true.”

A few days later Maggie, my cousin, comes to me. Her husband has been made Arthur’s Lord Chamberlain, but they cannot take up residence in Wales while the west is threatened by a rival prince. “My husband, Sir Richard, tells me that the king has found a name for the boy.”