The White Princess Read online

  From this, Henry hopes that his country will learn loyalty. But I recognize—knowing this country as I do, and he does not—that all the people will learn is that good men, wise men, wealthy men, men as privileged as Sir William Stanley, men as knowing and as cunning as the king’s own uncle, are ready to die for the boy. All they will judge from the many deaths and the festering body parts is that many, many good men believed in the boy, and were ready to die for him.

  Stanley goes to the scaffold in silence neither begging for mercy nor offering to unmask other traitors. There is no way that he could declare more loudly that he thinks the boy is the true king and that Tudor is a pretender, that Tudor was always a pretender, today as on the day of the battle of Bosworth Field. Nothing could ring out more clearly than Stanley’s silence, nothing publishes the boy’s claims more strongly than the grinning skulls of his adherents on the gates of every town of England, making everyone wonder at the cause for which these men died so terribly.

  Henry sends out commissions to seek for traitors in every county of England. He thinks they will root out treason. I think that all they will do, wherever they go, is prove to the people that the king thinks there is treason everywhere. All Henry tells the market towns when his yeomen of the guard march in and set up a hearing for the local gossips is that their king is afraid of everyone, even the tongue-waggers in the alehouses. All he demonstrates is that their king is afraid of almost everything, like a child dreading the darkness at bedtime who imagines threats everywhere.

  Jasper Tudor comes back to Westminster after scouring the country for treason, looking exhausted, gray with fatigue. He is a man of sixty-three, who thought he had brought his beloved nephew to the throne in a blaze of courage nearly a decade ago, and that the great task of his life was done. Now he finds that for every man who died on the battlefield fighting against them, there are ten enemies in hiding, twenty, a hundred. York was never defeated, it just stepped back into the shadows. For Jasper, who fought all his life against York, who suffered exile from his own beloved country for nearly twenty-five years, it is as if his great victory over the House of York has never happened. York is stepping forwards again and Jasper has to find his courage, find his power, and ready himself for another battle. But now he is an old man.

  His wife, my aunt Katherine, sends him out on his mission with an obedient curtsey and a hard face. Half the people he will arrest and see hanged are loyal servants of our house and personal friends to her. But My Lady the King’s Mother, who has loved him, I believe, ever since she was a young widow and he was her only friend, looks at him with hollow eyes, as if she would drop to her knees before him and beg him to save her boy again, as he has saved him so often before. They shrink into themselves, the king, his mother and his uncle, trusting no one else now.

  Thomas, Lord Stanley, whose loveless marriage to My Lady the King’s Mother brought him to greatness and brought an army to her son, is excluded from their councils, as if he shares a taint of treason with his dead brother. If they cannot trust the brother-in-law of My Lady the King’s Mother, if they cannot trust her husband, if they cannot trust their own kinsmen that they have loaded with honor and money, then who can they trust?

  They can trust no one, they fear everyone.

  Henry never comes to my rooms in the evenings anymore. Terrified of a boy, he cannot think of making another child. We have the heirs that he needs: our own boy and his little brother. Henry looks at me as if he cannot contemplate making another child on me, one that would be half York, one that would be half traitor by birth. All the warmth, all the tenderness that was growing between us is frozen out by his terror and mistrust. As his mother looks at me askance, as the king puts out his hand to lead me in to dinner but hardly touches my fingers, I walk like the traitor Sir William: with my head up, as if I refuse to feel shame.

  I see the eyes of the court upon me all the time, but I dare not meet their eyes and smile. I cannot judge who might smile at me, thinking that I am the cruelly treated wife of a husband who has lost once again his new habit of kindness, a man who has been told all his life that he should be king and now doubts it more than ever before. Or perhaps they are smiling at me because they are undetected, and think I am hidden too. Perhaps they are plotting treason and think I am with them. Perhaps they are smiling at me because they saw my mother’s seal in the traitor’s sack, and believe that my own seal was hidden away, lower down in the bag.

  I think of the boy in Malines, the boy with golden-brown hair and hazel eyes, and imagine him walking like me, with his head up, as we children of York were taught to do. I think of him learning of the loss of the treasure, of the sack of seals; a crushing blow to his plans, the betrayal of his allies. They say that he expressed regret that Sir Robert had betrayed him, but that he did not curse or swear. He did not gulp as if he might be sick, and order everyone from the room. He behaved like a boy who was taught by a loving mother that the wheel of fortune may well turn against you, and there is no point in railing against it, or wishing it otherwise. He took the bad news like a prince of York, not like a Tudor.

  WORCESTER CASTLE, SUMMER 1495

  Nobody will tell me what is happening. I walk in a circle of silence, as if I am held like a leech in a jar of thick glass. Henry comes to my rooms but hardly speaks to me. He gets into my bed and does his duty as if he were visiting a brothel, a stewhouse; we have lost all the love that was growing between us. Now he wants to make another Tudor to have as a reserve against the boy. He has consulted astronomers and they think that a third Tudor prince would make his throne more secure. It seems that two heirs and one of them proclaimed as the Duke of York is not enough for him. We need to hide behind a wall of babies, and Henry will get them on me for necessity but not for love.

  In July I tell him that I have missed my course and am with child again, and he nods silently; even this news cannot bring him joy. He stops coming to my room as a man released from a duty and I am glad to sleep with the companionship of one of my sisters, or with Margaret, who is at court while her husband scours the east of England for hidden traitors. I have lost the desire to lie with my husband, his touch is cold and his hands are bloody. His mother looks at me as if she would call the yeomen of the guard to arrest me for nothing more than my name.

  Jasper Tudor is never here at court anymore, but is always riding to get reports from the east coast, where they are certain that the boy will land, from the North, where they think the Scots will invade with the white rose on their banners, or from the west, where Henry’s attempts to crush the Irish has rebounded on him and the people are angrier and more rebellious than ever before.

  I spend most of my time in the nursery with my children. Arthur studies with his schoolmasters and every afternoon is ordered out into the tilt yard to master his horse and to learn his skills with lance and sword. Margaret is quick with her lessons and quick in her temper; she will snatch a book from her brothers and run and lock herself in a room before they can shout and chase after her. Elizabeth is as light as a feather, a little baby as pale as snow. They tell me she will fatten up soon, she will be as strong as her brothers and sister, but I don’t believe them. Henry is preparing a betrothal for her, he is desperate to make an alliance with France and will use this little treasure, this child of porcelain, to make a treaty. He will use her as fresh bait to catch the boy. I don’t argue with him. I cannot worry now about her wedding in twelve years’ time, I can only think that this day she has eaten nothing but a little bread and some milk, some fish at dinnertime, no meat at all.

  My little boy Henry is bright and willing, quick to learn but easily distracted, a child born for play. He is to go into the Church, and I seem to be the only one who thinks this is ridiculous. My Lady the King’s Mother plans he will be a cardinal like her great friend and ally John Morton. She prays that he will rise through the Church and become a pope, a Tudor pope. It is pointless to tell her that he is a worldly child who loves sport and play and music and foo