Next day is my coronation at Westminster Abbey. For the court herald, bellowing names of dukes and duchesses and earls, it is a roster of the greatest and most noble families in England and Christendom. For my mother, carrying my train with the king’s sisters Elizabeth and Margaret, it is her triumph; for Anthony, a man so much of the world and yet so detached from it, I think it is a ship of fools and he would wish himself far away; and for Edward it is a vivid statement of his wealth and power to a country hungry for a royal family of wealth and power. For me it is a blur of ceremonial in which I feel nothing but anxiety: desperate only to walk at the right speed, to remember to slip off my shoes and go barefoot at the brocade carpet, to accept the two scepters in each hand, to bare my breast for the holy oil, to hold my head steady for the weight of the crown.
It takes three archbishops to crown me, including Thomas Bourchier, and an abbot, a couple of hundred clergy, and a full thousand choristers to sing my praises and call down God’s blessing on me. My kinswomen escort me; it turns out I have hundreds of them. The king’s family come first, then my own sisters, my sister-in-law Elizabeth Scales, my cousins, my Burgundy cousins, my kinswomen that only my mother can trace, and every other beautiful lady who can scrape an introduction. Everyone wants to be a lady at my coronation; everyone wants a place at my court.
By tradition, Edward is not even with me. He watches from behind a screen, my young sons with him: I may not even see him; I cannot catch courage from his smile. I have to do this all entirely alone, with thousands of strangers watching my every movement. Nothing is to detract from my rise from gentry woman to Queen of England, from mortal to a being divine: next to God. When they crown me and anoint me with the holy oil, I become a new being, one above mortals, only one step below angels, beloved, and the elect of heaven. I wait for the thrill down my spine of knowing that God has chosen me to be Queen of England; but I feel nothing but relief that the ceremony is over and apprehension at the massive banquet to follow.
Three thousand noblemen and their ladies sit down to dine with me and each course has nearly twenty dishes. I put off my crown to eat, and put it back on again between every course. It is like a prolonged dance where I have to remember the steps and it goes on for hours. To shield me from prying eyes, the Countess of Shrewsbury and the Countess of Kent kneel to hold a veil before me when I eat. I taste every dish out of courtesy but I eat almost nothing. The crown presses down like a curse on my head and my temples throb. I know myself to have ascended to the greatest place in the land and I long only for my husband and my bed.
There is a moment at one point in the evening, probably around the tenth course, when I actually think that this has been a terrible mistake and I would have been happier back at Grafton, with no ambitious marriage and no ascent to the rank of royals. But it is too late for regrets, and even though the finest of dishes taste of nothing in my weariness, I must still smile and smile, and put my heavy crown back on, and send out the best dishes to the favorites of the king.
The first go out to his brothers, George the golden young man, Duke of Clarence, and the youngest York boy, twelve-year-old Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who smiles shyly at me and dips his head when I send him some braised peacock. He is as unlike his brothers as is possible, small and shy and dark-haired, slight of build and quiet, while they are tall and bronze-headed and filled with their own importance. I like Richard on sight, and I think he will be a good companion and playmate to my boys, who are only a little younger than him.
At the end of the dinner, when I am escorted back to my chambers by dozens of noblemen and hundreds of clergy, I hold my head high as if I am not weary, as if I am not overwhelmed. I know that I have become something more than a mortal woman today: I have become half a goddess. I have become a divinity something like my ancestress Melusina, who was born a goddess and became a woman. She had to forge a hard bargain with the world of men to move from one world to another. She had to surrender her freedom in the water to earn her feet so that she could walk beside her husband on the earth. I can’t help but wonder what I will have to lose in order to be queen.
They put me to bed in Margaret of Anjou’s bed, in the echoing royal bedchamber, and I wait, the cover of cloth of gold up to my ears, until Edward can get away from the feasting and join me. He is escorted into my bedroom by half a dozen companions and menservants, and they formally undress him and leave him only when he is in his nightgown. He sees my wide-eyed gaze and laughs as he closes the door behind them.
“We are royal now,” he says. “These ceremonies have to be endured, Elizabeth.”
I reach out my arms for him. “As long as you are still you, even underneath the crown.”
He throws off his gown and comes naked to me, his shoulders broad, his skin smooth, the muscles moving in thigh and belly and flank. “I am yours,” he says simply, and when he slides into the cold bed beside me, I quite forget that we are queen and king and think only of his touch and my desire.
The following day there is a great tournament and the noblemen enter the lists in beautiful costumes, with poetry bellowed by their squires. My boys are in the royal box with me, their eyes wide and their mouths open at the ceremony, the flags, the glamour and the crowds, the enormity of the first great joust they have ever seen. My sisters and Elizabeth-Anthony’s wife-are seated beside me. We are starting to form a court of beautiful women; already people are speaking of an elegance that has never before been seen in England.
The Burgundian cousins are out in force, their armor the most stylish, their poetry the best for meter. But Anthony, my brother, is superb: the court goes mad over him. He sits a horse with such grace and he carries my favor and breaks the lances of a dozen men. No one can match his poetry either. He writes in the romantic style of the southern lands; he tells of joy with a tinge of sadness, a man smiling at tragedy. He composes poems about love that can never be fulfilled, of hopes that summon a man across a desert of sand, a woman across a sea of water. No wonder every lady at court falls in love with him. Anthony smiles, picks up the flowers that they throw into the arena, and bows, hand on his heart, without asking any lady for her favor.
“I knew him when he was just my uncle,” Thomas remarks.
“He is the favorite of the day,” I say to my father, who comes to the royal box to kiss my hand.
“What is he thinking of?” he demands of me, puzzled. “In my day we killed an opponent, not made a poem about them.”
Anthony’s wife Elizabeth laughs. “This is the Burgundian way.”
“These are chivalrous times,” I tell my father, smiling at his broad-faced puzzlement.
But the winner of the day is Lord Thomas Stanley, a handsome man who lifts his visor and comes for his prize, pleased to have won. The motto of his family is shown proudly on his standard: “Sans Changer.”
“What does it mean?” Richard mutters to his brother.
“Without changing,” Thomas says. “And you would know if you studied rather than wasting your time.”
“And do you never change?” I ask Lord Stanley. He looks at me: the daughter of a family that has changed completely, turned from one king to another, a woman who has changed from being a widow into being a queen, and he bows. “I never change,” he says. “I support God and the king and my rights, in that order.”
I smile. Pointless to ask him how he knows what God wants, how he knows which king is rightful, how he can be sure that his rights are just. These are questions for peace, and our country has been at war too long for complicated questions. “You are a great man in the jousting arena,” I remark.