The White Princess Read online

  “I will protect you now,” Arthur promises. “If they come, they will find us ready. I am not afraid.”

  At my side, I feel My Lady shrink back. She has no such certainties.

  We walk around the walls to the north side, so that we can look down into the streets of the City. The young apprentices are running from house to house, banging on doors and holloaing to summon men to defend the city gates, borrowing weapons from dusty old cupboards, calling for old pikes to be brought out of the cellars. The trained military bands are running down the streets, ready to defend the walls.

  “See?” Arthur points them out.

  “They’re for us,” I observe to My Lady the King’s Mother. “They’re arming against the rebels. They’re running to the city gates to close them.”

  She looks doubtful. I know that she fears that they will throw open the gates as soon as they hear the rebels cry that they will abolish taxes. “Well, anyway, we’re safe in here,” I say. “The Tower gates are shut, the portcullis is down, and we have cannon.”

  “And Henry will be coming with his army to rescue us,” My Lady asserts.

  Margaret, my cousin, exchanges a quick skeptical look with me. “I am sure he will,” I reply.

  In the end it is Lord Daubney, not Henry, who falls on the exhausted Cornishmen as they are resting after their long march from the west. The cavalry go through the sleeping men slashing and hacking as if they were practicing sword thrusts in a hayfield. Some of them carry a mace—a great swinging ball that can knock a man’s head clean from his shoulders, or smash his face into a pulp, even inside a metal helmet. Some of them carry lances and stab and thrust as they go, or battle-axes with a terrible spike at one end that can punch through metal. Henry has planned the battle and put cavalry and archers on the other side of the rebel army so there is no escape for them. The Cornishmen, armed with little more than staves and pitchforks, are like the sheep of their own thin-earth moorland, herded this way and that, rushing in terror trying to get out of the way, hearing the whistle of thousands of arrows, running from the cavalry only to find the infantry, armed with pikes and handguns, stolidly advancing towards them, deaf to all calls of brotherhood.

  They beat the Cornishmen to their knees, they go facedown in the mud before they drop their weapons, raise their hands, and offer their surrender. An Gof, their leader, breaks away from the battle and runs for his life, but is ridden down like a leggy broken-winded stag after a long chase. Lord Audley the rebel leader offers his sword to his friend Lord Daubney, who accepts it grim-faced. Neither lord is quite sure if he has been fighting on the right side; it is a most uncertain surrender, in a most ignoble victory.

  “We’re safe,” I tell the children, when the scouts come to the Tower to tell us that it is all over. “Your father’s army has beaten the bad men and they are going back to their homes.”

  “I wish I had led the army!” Henry says. “I should have fought with a mace. Bash! Swing and bash!” He dances around the room miming holding the reins of a galloping horse with one hand and swinging a mace with his other little fist.

  “Perhaps when you are older,” I say to him. “But I hope that we will be at peace now. They will go back to their homes and we can go back to ours.”

  Arthur waits for the younger children to be distracted and then he comes to my side. “They’re building gallows at Smithfield,” he says quietly. “An awful lot of them won’t be going back to their homes.”

  “It has to be done.” I defend his father to my grave-faced son. “A king cannot tolerate rebels.”

  “But he’s selling some of the Cornishmen into slavery,” Arthur tells me flatly.

  “Slavery?” I am so shocked that I look at his serious face. “Slavery? Who said so? They must be mistaken?”

  “My Lady the King’s Mother told me herself. He’s selling them to barbarian galleys and they’ll be chained to the oars till they die. He’s selling them to be slaves in Ireland. We’ll have no friends in Cornwall for a generation. How can a king sell his people into slavery?”

  I look at my son, I see the inheritance we are preparing for him, and I have no answer.

  It is a victory, but one so reluctantly won that there is little joy. Henry gives out knighthoods grudgingly, and those who are so honored dread the charges that will come with their new titles. Massive punitive taxes are laid on anyone who sympathized with the rebels, and lords and gentry have to pay huge fines to the Exchequer to guarantee their future good behavior. The leaders of the Cornishmen are briskly tried and hanged, their entrails drawn out of them and then they are quartered, hacked alive as they die in agony. Lord Audley loses his head in a prompt execution when the crowd laugh at his grave face as he puts his head on the block for defending his tenants against his king. Henry’s army pursues the Cornishmen all the way back to Cornwall and they disappear into the lanes which are so shielded with hedges that they are like green tunnels in a green land, and nobody can tell where the traitors have gone, nor what they are doing.

  “They’re waiting,” Henry tells me.

  “What are they waiting for?” I ask, as if I don’t know.

  “For the boy.”

  “Where is he now?”

  For the first time in many months Henry smiles. “He thinks he is setting out on campaign, financed by the King of Scotland, supported by him.”

  I wait in silence, knowing that triumphant beam well enough by now.

  “But he is not.”

  “No?”

  “He is being tricked on board a ship. He is to be handed over to me. James of Scotland has finally agreed that I shall have the boy.”

  “You know where he is?”

  “I know where he is and I know the name of the ship that he will set sail in: him and his wife and his son. James of Scotland has utterly betrayed him to me, and my allies the Spanish will pick him up at sea, pretending friendship, and bring him to me. And at last, we will make an end of him.”

  WOODSTOCK PALACE, OXFORDSHIRE, SUMMER 1497

  Then, we lose him again.

  The court behaves as if we are on a summer progress, but really we are trapped in the middle of England, afraid to move in one direction or another, waiting for trouble but not knowing where the boy may land. Henry hardly ever leaves his room. At every place where we stay he creates a headquarters ready for a siege, receiving messages, sending out orders, commanding more arms, mustering soldiers, even getting his own armor fitted new, and he readies himself to wear it on the field of battle. But he does not know where the battle will be, as he has no idea where the boy has gone.

  Arthur cannot return to Ludlow Castle. “I should be in my principality!” he says to me. “I should be with my people.”

  “I know. But your guardian Sir Richard has to command his men in the king’s armies. And while your father does not know where the boy might land, it is safer if we are all together.”

  He looks at me, his brown eyes dark with concern. “Mother, when are we going to be at peace?”

  I can’t answer him.

  One moment the boy was said to be in his love nest with his new bride, beloved of the Scots king, confidently planning another venture; but then we hear that the boy has sailed from Scotland, and disappeared once again, as this boy so skillfully seems to do.

  “D’you think he has gone to your aunt?” Henry asks me. Every day he asks me where I think the boy has gone. I have Mary on my knee, and am sitting in a sunny spot in her nursery in a high tower of the beautiful palace. I hold her a little tighter as her father stamps up and down before us, too loud, too big, too furious for a nursery, a man spoiling for a fight and on the edge of losing control. Mary regards him gravely, not at all afraid of him. She watches him as a baby might watch a bearbaiting: a curious spectacle but not one that threatens her.

  “Of course I don’t know where he’s gone,” I say. “I can’t imagine. I thought you told me that the Holy Roman Emperor himself had ordered the duchess not to support or succor him?”