The Kingmaker's Daughter Read online

  I shake my head. I am not going to discuss the dangerous topics of the queen’s remarkable fertility or the success of her child-rearing.

  Isabel follows my lead. ‘So – d’you know what is wrong between your husband and mine? Have they quarrelled?’

  ‘I overheard them,’ I confess. ‘I listened at the door. It’s not the money, Iz, not mother’s inheritance. It’s worse.’ I lower my voice. ‘I am very afraid that George may be preparing to challenge the king.’

  She glances behind her at once, but in the noisy court we are alone and cannot be overheard. ‘Did he say so to Richard? Are you sure?’

  ‘Didn’t you know?’

  ‘He has men coming to him all the time, he is building up his affinity, he is taking advice from astrologers. But I thought it was for this invasion of France. He has brought more than a thousand men into the field. He and Richard have the greatest of the armies, they outnumber the king’s men. But I thought that George was mustering his men for his brother Edward, for this invasion of France. He surely cannot be thinking of claiming the throne when he has just put an army together to support Edward?’

  ‘Does he really think that Edward has no true claim to the throne?’ I ask curiously. ‘That’s what he said to Richard.’

  Isabel shrugs. ‘We all know what is said,’ she answers shortly. ‘Edward looks nothing like his father, and he was born out of the country, during a time when his father was away fighting the French. There have always been rumours about him.’ She glances over to the royal family, at the queen among her beautiful children, laughing at something her daughter Elizabeth is saying. ‘And come to that, nobody witnessed their wedding. How do we know it was properly done, with a proper priest?’

  I can’t bear to speak of invalid weddings with Isabel. ‘My husband won’t hear a word of it,’ I say. ‘I can’t speak of it.’

  ‘Is your sister telling you all about her new baby?’ the queen interrupts, calling across the room. ‘We have a richness of Edwards, do we not? We all have an Edward now.’

  ‘Many Edwards, but only one prince,’ my sister replies gracefully. ‘And you and His Grace the king are blessed with a fine nursery of many children.’

  Queen Elizabeth looks complacently at the girls who are playing with their brother the Prince of Wales. ‘Well, God bless them all,’ she says pleasantly. ‘I hope to have as many as my mother did, and she gave her husband fourteen children. Let us all hope to be as fertile as our mothers!’

  Isabel freezes, the smile vanishing from her face. The queen turns away to speak to someone else, and I say urgently: ‘What’s the matter? What’s the matter, Iz?’

  ‘She cursed us,’ she whispers to me, her voice a thread. ‘Did you hear her? She cursed us to have children like our mother. Two girls.’

  ‘She didn’t,’ I say. ‘She was just talking about her mother’s fourteen children.’

  Isabel shakes her head. ‘She knows that George would inherit the throne if her sons were to die,’ she says. ‘And she doesn’t want my boy to succeed. I think she just cursed us. She cursed my son, in front of everyone. She wished that I would have the issue that my mother had: two girls. She cursed you too: two girls. She has just ill-wished our boys. She has just wished them dead.’

  Isabel is so shaken that I take her out of sight of the queen, behind some people who are learning a new dance. They are making a lot of noise and practising the steps over and over. Nobody pays any attention to us at all.

  We stand near an open window until the colour comes back into her cheeks. ‘Iz – you cannot fear the queen like this,’ I say anxiously. ‘You cannot hear curses and witchcraft in everything she says. You cannot suspect her all the time and speak your fears. We are settled now, the king has forgiven George and rides with him at his side. You and I have our fortune. Richard and George may squabble about the future; but we should be at peace.’

  She shakes her head, still frightened. ‘You know that we are not at peace. And now I am wondering what is happening in France right now. I thought that my husband had mustered an army to support his brother the king in a foreign war. But he has a thousand men under his command and they will do whatever he wants. What if George plans to turn against the king? What if he has planned it all along? What if he is going to kill Edward in France and come back and take the throne from the Rivers?’

  Isabel and I wait for anxious weeks, wondering if the English army, far from fighting the French, has fallen to fighting itself. Her terror and mine is that George is following my father’s plan of marching in the vanguard and then closing in to attack. Then Richard sends me a letter to tell me that their plans have all gone wrong. Their ally, the Duke of Burgundy, has marched out to set a siege, far away, of no use to our campaign at all. His duchess, Margaret of York – Richard’s own sister – has no power to recall him to support her brothers as they land in Calais and march to Reims for Edward’s coronation as King of France. Margaret, born and bred a loyal York girl, is despairing that she cannot make her husband support her three brothers. But the duke seems to have lured them to fight with France so that he can make his own gains; all the allies seem to have their own ambitions. Only my husband would stick to the original plan if he could. He writes me a bitter account:

  Burgundy pursues his own way. The queen’s kinsman, our famed ally St Pol, the same. Now we are here ready for battle, we find that my brother has lost his desire to fight, and King Louis has offered him magnificent terms to leave the kingdom of France alone. Gold and the hand of his daughter the Princess Elizabeth so that she will be the next Queen of France turns out to be the price of our withdrawal. They have bought my brother.

  Anne, only you will know how bitterly I am shamed by this. I wanted to win English lands in France for England again, I wanted to see our armies victorious in the plains of Picardy. Instead we have become merchants, haggling over the price. There is nothing I can do to stop Edward and George snapping up this treaty, just as there was no way that I could drag my men out of the town of Amiens where King Louis served a feast of meats and an unending supply of wine, knowing that they would drink and eat until they were sick as dogs, and I am mortified that it is my badge on their collars. My men are poisoned with their own gluttony, and I am sick with shame.

  I swear I will never trust Edward again. This is not kingly, this is not as Arthur of Camelot. This is behaviour as base as an archer’s bastard and I cannot meet his eyes when I see him stuffing his mouth at King Louis’ table and pocketing the gold forks.

  BAYNARD’S CASTLE, LONDON, SEPTEMBER 1475

  By September they are all home, richer than they dreamed, loaded with silver plate, jewels, crowns and promises of more to come. The king himself has seventy-five thousand crowns in his treasury as payment for his promise for a peace treaty to last for seven years, and the King of France will pay fifty thousand pounds a year, every year that Edward does not re-state his claim to English lands in France. George Duke of Clarence, who was always at his brother’s side during the haggling, at the ready when there was easy money to be made, is named as the trustworthy councillor to arbitrate on this dishonourable pension, and he too is being paid a fortune. The only dissenting voice comes from my husband – of all the men who rode to France and came back richer, only my husband Richard warns Edward that this is no way to defeat the French king, cautions him that the commons of England will think that their taxes have been wasted, swears that the citizens of London and the gentry in parliament will turn against him for this dishonour, and begs him not to sell England’s birthright for this pension. I think Richard is the only one in all of the great English army to speak against the treaty. Everyone else is too busy counting their own bribes.

  ‘He knew I advised against it, he knew I wanted war, and yet the French king still gave me half a dozen hunters and a fortune in silver plate!’ Richard exclaims in our private rooms, the door shut against eavesdroppers, his mother – thank God – at Fotheringhay and unable to add her voice to the co