The White Princess Read online

  “How could I?” she demands. “How could such a thing ever be done? These are faithless people, these are a heartless people, they run after will-o’-the-wisps, they don’t value true worth.”

  I look at her and I almost pity her, as she sits twisted in her chair, her glorious prie-dieu with its huge Bible and the richly enameled cover behind her, the best rooms in the palace draped with the finest tapestries and a fortune in her strongbox. “You could not make a beloved king, for your boy was not a beloved child,” I say, and it is as if I am condemning her. I feel as hard-hearted, as hard-faced, as the recording angel at the end of days. “You have tried for him, but you have failed him. He was never loved as a child, and he has grown into a man who cannot inspire love nor give love. You have spoiled him utterly.”

  “I loved him!” She leaps up suddenly furious, her dark eyes blazing with rage. “Nobody can deny that I loved him! I have given my life for him! I only ever thought of him! I nearly died giving birth to him and I have sacrificed everything—love, safety, a husband of my choice—just for him.”

  “He was raised by another woman, Lady Herbert, the wife of his guardian, and he loved her,” I say relentlessly. “You called her your enemy, and you took him from her and put him in the care of his uncle. When you were defeated by my father, Jasper took him away from everything he knew, into exile, and you let them go without you. You sent him away, and he knew that. It was for your ambition; he knows that. He knows no lullabies, he knows no bedtime stories, he knows no little games that a mother plays with her sons. He has no trust, he has no tenderness. You worked for him, yes, and you plotted for him and you strove for him—but I doubt that you ever, in all his baby years, held him on your knees and tickled his toes, and made him giggle.”

  She shrinks back from me as if I am cursing her. “I am his mother, not his wet nurse. Why would I caress him? I taught him to be a leader, not a baby.”

  “You are his commander,” I say. “His ally. But there is no true love in it—none at all. And now you see the price you pay for that. There is no true love in him, neither to give nor receive—none at all.”

  Horrifying stories come from the North, of the Scots army coming in like an army of wolves, destroying everything they find. The defenders of the North of England march bravely against them, but before they can join battle, the Scots have melted away, back to their own high hills. It is not a defeat, it is something far worse than that: it is a disappearance. It is a warning which only tells us that they will come again. So Henry is not reassured, and demands money from Parliament—hundreds of thousands of pounds—and raises more in reluctant loans from all his lords and from the merchants of London to pay for men to be armed and stand ready against this invisible threat. Nobody knows what the Scots are planning, if they will raid constantly, destroying our pride and our confidence in the North of England, coming out of the blizzards at the worst time of year; or if they will wait for spring and launch a full invasion.

  “He has a child,” Maggie whispers to me. The court is busy with preparations for Christmas. Maggie and her husband have been at Ludlow Castle with my son Arthur, introducing him to his principality of Wales, but they have come home to Westminster Palace in time to celebrate the Christmas feast. On the way Maggie listens to the gossip in the inns and great houses and abbeys where they stop for hospitality. “They all say that he has a child.”

  At once I think how glad my mother would be, how she would have wanted to see her grandchild. “Girl or boy?” I ask eagerly.

  “A boy. He’s had a boy. The House of York has a new heir.”

  Foolishly, wrongly, I clasp her hands and know that my bright joy is mirrored in her smile. “A boy?”

  “A new white rose, a white rosebud. A new son of York.”

  “Where is he? In Edinburgh?”

  “They say that he’s living with his wife in Falkland, at a royal hunting lodge. They live quietly together with their baby. They say she is very, very beautiful and that he is happy to stay with her, they are so much in love.”

  “He won’t invade?”

  She shrugs. “It’s not the season, but perhaps he wants to live quietly. Newly married, with a beautiful wife and a baby in her arms? Perhaps he thinks this is the best that he can get.”

  “If I could write to him . . . if I could just tell him . . . oh, if I could tell him that this is the best.”

  Slowly, she shakes her head. “Nothing goes across the border but the king knows of it,” she says. “If you sent so much as one word to the boy, the king would see it as the greatest betrayal in the world. He would never forgive you, he would doubt you forever, and he would think you have been his hidden enemy all along.”

  “If only someone could tell the boy to stay where he is, to find joy and keep it, that the throne won’t bring him the happiness he has now.”

  “I can’t tell him,” Maggie says. “I’ve found that truth for myself: a good husband and a place that I can call my home at Ludlow Castle.”

  “Have you really?”

  Smilingly, she nods. “He’s a good man, and I am glad to be married to him. He’s calm and he’s quiet and he is loyal to the king and faithful to me. I’ve seen enough excitement and disloyalty; I can think of nothing better to do in my life than to raise my own son and to help yours to become a prince, to run Ludlow Castle as you would wish, and to welcome your son’s bride into our home, when she comes.”

  “And Arthur?” I ask her.

  She smiles at me. “He is a prince to be proud of,” she says. “He is generous, and fair. When Sir Richard takes him to watch the judges at their work his desire is to be merciful. He rides well and when he goes out he greets people as his friend. He is everything that you would want him to be. And Richard is teaching him all that he knows. He’s a good guardian for your boy. Arthur will make a good king, perhaps even a great king.”

  “If the boy does not claim his throne.”

  “Perhaps the boy will think that loving a woman and loving his child is enough,” Maggie says. “Perhaps he will understand that a prince does not have to become a king. Perhaps he will think that it is more important to be a man, a loving man. Perhaps when he sees his wife with the child in her arms he will know that this is the greatest kingdom a man can wish for.”

  “If I could tell him that!”

  “I can’t get a letter to my own brother, just down the river in the Tower of London. How could we ever get a letter to yours?”

  THE TOWER OF LONDON, SUMMER 1497

  The Cornishmen start by grumbling that the king is taxing them too hard, and then that he has stolen their rights to the tin that they mine. They are a hardworking, bitter set of men who face danger daily, in the tiny cramped conditions underground, speaking their own strange language, living more like barbarians than Christian men. Far away from London, in the utmost west of the country, they are easily persuaded by dreams or rumors. They believe in kings and angels, in appearances and miracles. My father always said that they were Englishmen like no others, Cornishmen, not of English stock at all, and that they had to be ruled with kindness, as if they were the mischievous elves that live alongside them.

  In days, in moments, they are agreed and furious; they go through the west like a summer fire, blazing up, jumping a field or two, raging on faster than a galloping horse. Soon they have the whole of Cornwall up in arms, and then the other western counties join with them, equally angry. They form separate armies led by men from Somerset, Wiltshire, and Cornwall under the command of a Cornish blacksmith, Michael Joseph, An Gof, a man said to be ten feet high who has sworn that he will not be ruined by a king whose father was no king, who is trying new ways, Tudor ways, Welsh ways against good Cornishmen.

  But it is not just a rebellion of ignorant men: yeomen turn out for them, fishermen, farmers, miners, and then, worst of all, a nobleman, Lord Audley, offers to lead them.

  “I’ll leave you and my mother and the children here,” Henry says tersely to me, his horse