Has one of our loyal friends stooped to such a dark sin as to kill a ten-year-old boy and his twelve-year-old brother while they were in our keeping? While they slept? And worse – has someone done it thinking to please us? Has someone done it thinking it was my wish? Thinking that I walked with him in the quadrangle of the Oxford college, and then and there actually asked him to do it?
MIDDLEHAM CASTLE, YORKSHIRE, WINTER 1483
We wait for news, and Richard writes to me almost daily, knowing how anxious I am. He tells me of the mustering of his forces; men are flocking to serve him, and the great nobles of the realm are turning out to support their king against the duke who was once at his side. His childhood friend Francis Lovell never leaves him, Thomas, Lord Stanley, though his own wife Margaret Beaufort plotted with Elizabeth Woodville, joins Richard and promises his loyalty. This shows, I think, how little the former queen can appeal to good men. She may have won over Margaret Beaufort – ambitious for her son and hoping for the throne – but she cannot win Thomas, Lord Stanley, who stays true to us. I don’t forget that Thomas Stanley is a bellwether, leading the flock where everyone follows. That he is on our side shows that he calculates we are likely to win. John Howard, our good friend, stays faithful too, and Richard writes to me that Howard is holding down rebels in Sussex and Kent to stop war breaking out against us.
And then God blesses us. It is as simple as that. God is on our side. He sends down the rain that washes the treason out of people’s minds, and the anger out of their hearts as day after day it pours with cold wintry water as hard as sleet, and the men who were mustering in Kent go home to dry fires, the men who thought they would march out of Sussex learn that the roads are impassable, and the citizens of London are flooded from their riverside homes and can spare no thought for anything but the rising waters that threaten the low-lying sanctuary where Elizabeth Woodville has to wait, without news of her rebellion, her messengers stuck where they are, on roads that have churned into mires, gradually losing hope.
God sends rain on Wales and all the little mountain streams that play so prettily through the meadows in midsummer get faster and rougher as the dark waters pour off the mountains into the bigger streams and then into the rivers. The torrents flood and break their banks and pour into the Severn river, which rises and rises until it breaches all the river walls, spreads for miles in the valley, maroons one town after another, drowns the riverside villages and – best of all – holds the false Duke of Buckingham in Wales, while his men melt away as if they were sugar men in the wet, and his hopes become sodden, and he himself runs away from the men that he said he would lead, and his own servant turns him in to us as a traitor for a small reward.
God sends the rain on the narrow seas so they are dark and menacing and Henry Tudor cannot set sail. I know what it is to look out from port and see dark moving water and white caps on the waves and I laugh, in the warmth and dryness of landlocked Middleham Castle, to think of Henry Tudor, standing on the quayside and praying for fine weather while it rains down unstoppably on his young auburn head, and not even the woman he hopes will be his mother-in-law, the witch Elizabeth, can hold back the storm.
There is a break in the weather and he sets sail bravely enough, crossing the rough seas, but his hopes have been chilled by the long wait and he does not even land. He takes a look at the coast that he plans to call his own and he cannot even find within himself the courage to set foot on the wet sand. He reefs his sodden sails and turns his boat for home and runs before a cold wind back to Brittany, where he should stay forever, if he would take my advice, and die like all pretenders, in exile. Richard writes to me from London.
It is over. It is over but for naming of the traitors and ordering their punishment. It is a joy to me that Wales was true to me, that the south coast offered no safe haven to Henry Tudor, not a single town opened its gates to a rebel force, not one baron or earl defied me. My kingdom is loyal to me and I shall punish lightly or not at all those who were drawn to this reckless last gasp of the Rivers and their new-found, ill-chosen ally, Henry Tudor. The boy’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, cannot be expected to deny the cause of her son but she will live the rest of her days under house arrest – in the charge of her husband, Thomas, Lord Stanley. I have put her fortune in his keeping, which for a grasping ambitious woman will – I think – be punishment enough. He will keep her close, she has been stripped of her servants and her friends, not even her confessor can attend her. I have broken her affinity as I have broken the alliances around the Rivers.
I am victorious without raising my sword. This is my vindication as well as an easy victory. The country does not seek to restore the Rivers, they certainly don’t want the stranger, Henry Tudor. Margaret Beaufort and Elizabeth Woodville are seen as foolish mothers conspiring together for their children, nothing more than that. The Duke of Buckingham is despised as a traitor and a false friend. I shall take care whom I befriend in future, but you can see this as an easy victory and – though a hard few weeks – part of our ascension to our throne. Please God we shall look back on this and be glad that we came to our royal estate so easily.
Come to London, we shall keep Christmas as royally as Edward and Elizabeth ever did, with true friends and loyal servants.
WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, NOVEMBER 1483
Just as we are readying ourselves for the Christmas feast – a feast which Richard swears will be the grandest that London has ever seen – just as people start to arrive at court and are allocated their rooms, told their parts in the entertainments, and learn the new dances, Richard comes looking for me and finds me in the great rooms of the wardrobe, looking over the gowns that belonged to the other queens, and now belong to me. I am planning to take apart two beautiful old-fashioned gowns of cloth of gold and deep purple to make a new one, layered in a new pattern with purple sleeves slashed to show the gold beneath, gathered with a gold braid at the wrist. On either side of me are great bales of cloth for more new gowns, and furs and velvets for new capes and jackets for Richard himself. He looks ill at ease, but he always looks ill at ease, these days. The crown sits heavily on him, and he can trust no-one.
‘Can you leave this?’ Richard asks, looking doubtfully at the mountains of priceless cloth.
‘Oh yes,’ I say, lifting my gown and picking my way over the cuttings on the floor. ‘My lady wardrobe mistress knows far better than I what is to be done.’
He takes me by the arm and draws me to the little area off the main wardrobe room, where the wardrobe mistress usually sits to make her audit of the furs, gowns, robes and shoes in her keeping. There is a warm fire burning in the grate and Richard takes the seat by the table and I perch on the window seat and wait.
‘I have taken a decision,’ he says heavily. ‘I did not take it lightly, and still I want to talk it over with you.’
I wait. It will be about the Woodville woman, I know it. I can tell by the way he is holding his right arm, between the elbow and the shoulder. This is a constant pain for him now, and no physician can tell him what is wrong. I know, though I have no proof, that the pain is of her doing. I imagine her knotting a rag around her own arm, feeling it prickle and go numb, and then wishing the pain on him.