My husband comes bustling from the stables, and he and Arthur sweep me into the great hall where the court bows to me and I walk through the hundreds of men of our household to my place of honor between my husband and the Prince of Wales, at the high table.
Later that night I go to Arthur’s bedchamber to hear him say his prayers. His chaplain is there, kneeling at the prie-dieu beside him, listening to the careful recitation in Latin of the collect for the day and the prayer for the night. He reads a passage from one of the psalms and Arthur bows his head to pray for the safety of his father and mother, the King and Queen of England. “And for My Lady the King’s Mother, the Countess of Richmond,” he adds, reciting her title so that God will not forget how high she has risen, and how worthy her claim to His attention. I bow my head when he says “Amen,” and then the chaplain gathers up his things and Arthur takes a leap into his big bed.
“Lady Margaret, d’you know if I am to be married this year?”
“Nobody has told me a date,” I say. I sit on the side of his bed and look at his bright face, the soft down on his upper lip that he loves to stroke as if it will encourage it to grow. “But there can be no objection to the wedding now.”
At once, he puts his hand out to touch mine. He knows that the monarchs of Spain swore they would send their daughter to be his bride only when they were assured that there were no rival heirs to the throne of England. They meant not only my brother Edward, but also the pretender who went by the name of the queen’s brother, Richard of York. Determined that the betrothal should go ahead, the king entrapped both young men together, as if they were equally heirs, as if they were equally guilty, and ordered them both killed. The pretender claimed a most dangerous name, took arms against Henry, and died for it. My brother denied his own name, never raised his voice, let alone an army, and still died. I have to try not to sour my own life with bitterness. I have to put away resentment as if it were a forgotten badge. I have to forget I am a sister, I have to forget the only boy that I have ever truly loved: my brother, the White Rose.
“You know I would never have asked for it,” Arthur says, his voice very low. “His death. I didn’t ask for it.”
“I know you didn’t,” I say. “It’s nothing to do with you or me. It was out of our hands. There was nothing that either of us could have done.”
“But I did do one thing,” he says, with a shy sideways glance at me. “It wasn’t any good; but I did ask my father for mercy.”
“That was good of you,” I say. I don’t tell him that I was on my knees before the king, my headdress off, my hair let down, my tears falling on the floor, my cupped hands under the heel of his boot, until they lifted me up and carried me away, and my husband begged me not to speak again for fear of reminding the king that I once had the name Plantagenet and that now I have sons with dangerous royal blood. “Nothing could be done. I am sure His Grace, your father, did only what he thought was right.”
“Can you . . .” He hesitates. “Can you forgive him?”
He cannot even look at me with this question, and his gaze is on our clasped hands. Gently, he turns the new ring I am wearing on my finger, a mourning ring with a W for Warwick, my brother.
I cover his hand with my own. “I have nothing to forgive,” I say firmly. “It was not an angry act or a vengeful act by your father against my brother. It was something that he felt he had to do in order to secure his throne. He did not do it with passion. He could not be swayed by an appeal. He calculated that the monarchs of Spain would not send the Infanta if my brother were alive. He calculated that the commons of England would always rise for someone who was a Plantagenet. Your father is a thoughtful man, a careful man; he will have looked at the chances almost like a clerk drawing up an account in one of those new ledgers with the gains on one side and the losses on the other. That’s how your father thinks. That’s how kings have to think these days. It’s not about honor and loyalty anymore. It’s about calculation. It’s my loss that my brother counted as a danger, and your father had him crossed out of the book.”
“But he was no danger!” Arthur exclaims. “And in all honor . . .”
“He was never a danger; it was his name. His name was the danger.”
“But it’s your name?”
“Oh no. My name is Margaret Pole,” I say dryly. “You know that. And I try to forget I was born with any other.”
WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, AUTUMN 1501
Arthur’s bride does not come to England till she is fifteen. At the end of summer we travel to London, and Arthur, his mother, and I have two months of ordering clothes, commanding tailors, jewelers, glove makers, hatmakers, and seamstresses to put together a wardrobe of clothes for the young prince and a handsome suit for his wedding day.
He is nervous. He has written to her regularly, stilted letters in Latin, the only language they share. My cousin the queen has urged that she be taught English and French. “It’s barbaric to marry a stranger, and not even be able to speak together,” she mutters to me, as we embroider Arthur’s new shirts in her chamber. “Are they to sit down to breakfast with an ambassador to translate between them?”
I smile in reply. It is a rare woman who can speak freely with a loving husband, and we both know this. “She’ll learn,” I say. “She’ll have to learn our ways.”
“The king is going to ride down to the south coast to meet her,” Elizabeth says. “I have asked him to wait and greet her here in London, but he says he will take Arthur with him and ride like a knight errant to surprise her.”
“You know, I don’t think that the Spanish like surprises,” I remark. Everyone knows they are a most formal people; the Infanta has been living almost in seclusion, in the former harem of the Alhambra Palace.
“She is promised, she has been promised for twelve years, and now she is delivered,” Elizabeth says dryly. “What she likes or does not like is of little matter. Not to the king, and perhaps not even to her mother and father now.”
“Poor child,” I say. “But she could have no more handsome or good-natured bridegroom than Arthur.”
“He is a good young man, isn’t he?” His mother’s face warms at his praise. “And he has grown again. What are you feeding him? He is taller than me now; I think he will be as tall as my father.” She nips off her words as if it is treason to name her father, King Edward.
“He will be as tall as King Henry,” I amend. “And God willing she will make as good a queen as you have been.”
Elizabeth gives me one of her fleeting smiles. “Perhaps she will. Perhaps we will become friends. I think she may be a little like me. She has been raised to be a queen, just as I was. And she has a mother of determination and courage just like mine was.”
We wait in the nursery for the bridegroom and his father to ride home from their mission of knight errantry. Little Prince Harry, ten years old, is excited by the adventure. “Will he ride up and capture her?”
“Oh no.” His mother draws her youngest child, five-year-old Mary, onto her lap. “That wouldn’t do at all. They will go to wherever she is staying, and ask to be admitted. Then they will pay their compliments, and perhaps dine with her, and then leave the following morning.”
“I would ride up and capture her!” Harry boasts, raising his hand as if holding a pair of reins, and cantering around the room on an imaginary horse. “I would ride up and marry her on the spot. She’s taken long enough to come to England. I would brook no delay.”
“Brook?” I ask. “What sort of word is brook? What on earth have you been reading?”
“He reads all the time,” his mother says fondly. “He is such a scholar. He reads romances and theology and prayers and the lives of the saints. In French and Latin and English. He’s starting Greek.”