The White Princess Read online

  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 ar