The White Queen: A Novel Read online

  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.

  He smiles. “I was lucky not to be listed against your brother Anthony. But I am proud to joust before you, Your Grace.”

  I bend from the queen’s box to give him the prize of the tournament, a ruby ring, and he shows me that it is too small for his big hand.

  “You must marry a beautiful lady,” I tease him. “A virtuous woman, whose price is beyond rubies.”

  “The finest lady in the kingdom is married and crowned.” He bows to me. “How shall we—who are neglected—bear our unhappiness?”

  I laugh at this, it is the very language of my kinsmen, the Burgundians who have made flirtation a form of high art. “You must endeavor,” I say. “So formidable a knight should found a great house.”

  “I will found my house, and you will see me win again,” he says, and at his words, for some reason, I feel a little shiver. This is a man who is not just strong in the jousting arena, I think. This is a man who would be strong on the battlefield. This is a man without scruple who will pursue his own interest. Formidable, indeed. Let us hope he is true to his motto and never changes from his loyalty to our House of York.

  When the goddess Melusina fell in love with the knight he promised her that she would be free to be herself if she would only be his wife. They settled it that she would be his wife and walk on feet but once a month, she might go to her own chamber, fill a great bath with water, and, for one night only, be her fishy self. And so they lived in great happiness for many years. For he loved her and he understood that a woman cannot always live as a man. He understood that she could not always think as he thought, walk as he walked, breathe the air that he took in. She would always be a different being from him, listening to a different music, hearing a different sound, familiar with a different element.

  He understood that she needed her time alone. He understood that she had to close her eyes and sink beneath the glimmer of the water and swish her tail and breathe through her gills and forget the joys and the trials of being a wife—just for a while, just once a month. They had children together, and they grew in health and beauty; he grew more prosperous and their castle was famous for its wealth and grace. It was famous also for the great beauty and sweetness of its lady, and visitors came from far away to see the castle, its lord, and his beautiful mysterious wife.

  As soon as I am crowned queen I set about establishing my family, and my mother and I become the greatest matchmakers in the kingdom.

  “Will this not cause more enmity?” I ask Edward. “My mother has a list of lords for my sisters to marry.”

  “You have to do it,” he assures me. “They complain that you are a poor widow from a family of unknowns. You have to improve your family by marrying them to the nobility.”

  “We are so many, I have so many sisters, I swear we will take up all the eligible young men. We will leave you with a dearth of lords.”

  He shrugs. “This country has been divided into either York or Lancaster for too long. Make me another great family that will support me when York wavers, or when Lancaster threatens. You and I need to link ourselves to the nobility, Elizabeth. Give your mother free rein, we need cousins and in-laws in every county in the land. I shall ennoble your brothers, and your Grey sons. We need to create a great family around you, both for your position and for your defense.”

  I take him at his word and I go to my mother and find her seated at the great table in my rooms, with pedigrees and contracts and maps all around her, like a commander raising troops.

  “I see you are the goddess of love,” I observe.

  She glances up at me, frowning in concentration. “This is not love; this is business,” she says. “You have your family to provide for, Elizabeth, and you had better marry them to wealthy husbands or wives. You have a lineage to create. Your task as queen is to watch and order the nobility of your country: no man must grow too great, no lady can fall too low. I know this: my own marriage to your father was forbidden, and we had to beg pardon from the king, and pay a fine.”

  “I would have thought that would have put you on the side of freedom and true love?”

  She laughs shortly. “When it was my freedom and my love affair: yes. When it is the proper ordering of your court: no.”

  “You must be sorry that Anthony is already married now that we could command a great match for him?”

  My mother frowns. “I am sorry that she is barren and in poor health,” she says bluntly. “You can keep her at court as a lady-in-waiting and she is of the best family; but I don’t think she will give us sons and heirs.”

  “You will have dozens of sons and heirs,” I predict, looking at her long lists of names and the boldly drawn arrows between the names of my sisters and the names of English noblemen.

  “I should do,” she says with satisfaction. “And not one of them less than a lord.”

  So we have a month of weddings. Every sister of mine is married to a lord, except for Katherine, where I go one better and betroth her to a duke. He is not yet ten years old, a sulky child, Henry Stafford, the little Duke of Buckingham. Warwick had him in mind for his daughter Isabel. But as the boy is a royal ward since the death of his father, he is at my disposal. I am paid a fee to guard him, and I can do with him what I want. He is an arrogant rude boy to me; he thinks he is of such a great family, he is so filled with pride in himself that I take a pleasure in forcing this young pretender to the throne into marriage with Katherine. He regards her, and all of us, as unbearably beneath him. He thinks he is demeaned by marriage to us, and I hear he tells his friends, boasting like a boy, that he will have his revenge, and we will fear him one day, he will make me sorry that I insulted him, one day. This makes me laugh; and Katherine is glad to be a duchess even with a sulky child for a husband.

  My twenty-year-old brother John, who is luckily still single, will be married to Lord Warwick’s aunt, Lady Catherine Neville. She is dowager Duchess of Norfolk, having wedded and bedded and buried a duke. This is a slap in the face to Warwick, and that alone gives me mischievous joy, and, since his aunt is all but one hundred years old, marriage to her is a jest of the most cruel sort. Warwick will learn who makes the alliances in England now. Besides, she must soon die, and then my brother will be free again and wealthy beyond belief.

  For my son, my darling Thomas Grey, I buy little Anne Holland. Her mother, the Duchess of Exeter, my husband’s own sister, charges me four thousand marks for the privilege, and I note the price of her pride and pay it so that Thomas can inherit the Holland fortune. My son will be as wealthy as any prince in Christendom. I rob the Earl of Warwick of this prize too—he wanted Anne Holland for his nephew and it was all but signed and sealed; but I outbid him by a thousand marks—a fortune, a king’s fortune, which I can command and Warwick cannot. Edward makes Thomas the Marquis of Dorset to match his prospects. I shall have a match for my son Richard
Grey as soon as I can see a girl who will bring him a fortune; in the meantime he will be knighted.

  My father becomes an earl; Anthony does not gain the dukedom that he joked about, but he does get the lordship of the Isle of Wight; and my other brothers get their places in royal service or in the church. Lionel will be a bishop as he wanted. I use my great position as queen to put my family into power, as any woman would do, and indeed as any woman risen to greatness from nothing would be advised to do. We will have our enemies—we have to make connections and allies. We have to be everywhere.

  By the end of the long process of marriage and ennoblement, no man can live in England without encountering one of my family: you cannot make a trade, plow a field, or try a case without meeting one of the great Rivers family or their dependants. We are everywhere; we are where the king has chosen to place us. And should the day come that everyone turns against him, he will find that we, the Riverses, run deep and strong, a moat around his castle. When he loses all other allies, we will still be his friends, and now we are in power.

  We are loyal to him and he cleaves to us. I swear to him my faith and my love, and he knows there is no woman in the world who loves him more than I do. My brothers and my father, my cousins and my sisters, and all our new husbands and wives promise him their absolute loyalty, whatever comes, whoever comes against us. We make a new family neither Lancaster nor York; we are the Woodville family enobled as Riverses, and we stand behind the king like a wall of water. Half the kingdom can hate us, but now I have made us so powerful that I do not care.

  Edward settles to the business of governing a country that is accustomed to having no king at all. He appoints justices and sheriffs to replace men killed in battle; he commands them to impose law and order in their counties. Men who have seized the chance to make war on their neighbors have to return to their own bounds. The soldiers discharged from one side or another have to go back to their homes. The warring bands who have taken their chance to ride out and terrorize must be hunted down, the roads have to be made safe again. Edward starts the hard work of making England a country at peace with itself once more. A country at peace instead of a country at war.

  Then, finally, there is an end to the constant warfare when we capture the former King Henry, half lost and half-witted in the hills of Northumberland, and Edward orders him to be brought to the Tower of London, for his own safety and for ours. He is not always in his right mind, God keep him. He moves into the rooms in the Tower and seems to know where he is; he seems to be glad to be home after his wandering. He lives quietly, communing with God, a priest at his side night and day. We don’t even know if he remembers his wife or the son she told him was his; certainly, he never speaks of them nor asks for them in faraway Anjou. We don’t know for sure if he always remembers that once he was king. He is lost to the world, poor Henry, and he has forgotten everything that we have taken from him.

  SUMMER 1468

  Edward trusts Warwick with an embassy to France, and Warwick seizes the opportunity to get away from England and away from court. He cannot bear the rising of our tide and the slow decline of his own hopes. He plans to make a treaty with the King of France and promises him that the government of England is still in his gift; and that he is going to choose the husband for the York heiress Margaret. But he is lying, and everyone knows that his days of power are over. Edward listens to my mother, to me, and to his other advisors, who say that the dukedom of Burgundy has been a faithful friend, where France is a constant enemy, and that an alliance with Burgundy could be made for the good of trade, for the sake of our cousinship, and could be cemented with the marriage of Edward’s sister Margaret to the new duke himself: Charles, who has just inherited the rich lands of Burgundy.

  Charles is a key friend to England. The Duke of Burgundy owns all the lands of Flanders, as well as his own dukedom of Burgundy, and so commands all the lowlands of the north, all the lands between Germany and France, and the rich lands in the south. They are great buyers of English cloth, merchants and allies to us. Their ports face ours across the English sea; their usual enemy is France, and they look to us for alliance. These are traditional friends of England and now—through me—kinsmen to the English king.

  All this is planned without reference to the girl herself, of course; and Margaret comes to me when I am walking in the garden at Westminster Palace, all in a fluster, as someone has told her that her betrothal to Dom Pedro of Portugal is to be put aside and she is now to be sold to the highest bidder, either to Louis of France for one of the French princes, or to Charles of Burgundy.

  “It’ll be all right,” I say to her, tucking her hand in mine so she can walk beside me. She is only twenty-two, and she was not raised to be the sister of a king. She is not accustomed to the way that her husband-to-be can change with the needs of the moment, and her mother, torn between her divided loyalties to her rivalrous sons, has quite failed to care for her daughters.

  When Margaret was a little girl, she thought she would be married to an English lord and live in an English castle, raising children. She even dreamed of being a nun—she shares her mother’s enthusiasm for the Church. She did not realize, when her father claimed the throne and her brother won it, that a price must always be paid for power, and it will be paid by her as well as the rest of us. She doesn’t realize yet that though men go to war it is women who suffer—perhaps more than anyone.

  “I won’t marry a Frenchman. I hate the French,” she says hotly. “My father fought them; he would not have wanted me to marry a Frenchman. My brother should not think of it. I don’t know why my mother considers it. She was with the English army in France; she knows what the French are like. I am of the House of York. I don’t want to be a Frenchwoman!”

  “You won’t be,” I say steadily. “That is the plan of the Earl of Warwick, and he no longer has the ear of the king. Yes, he takes French bribes and he favors France; but my advice to the king is that he should make an alliance with the Duke of Burgundy, and that will be a better alliance for you. Just think—you will be my kinswoman! You will marry the Duke of Burgundy and live in the beautiful palace at Lille. Your husband-to-be is an honored friend of the House of York, and my kinsman through my mother. He is a good friend, and from his palace you will be able to come on visits home. And when my daughters are old enough I shall send them to you, to teach them the elegant court life at Burgundy. There is nowhere more fashionable and more beautiful than the court of Burgundy. And as Duchess of Burgundy you shall be godmother to my sons. How will that be?”

  She is partly comforted. “But I am of the House of York,” she says again. “I want to stay in England. At least until we have finally defeated the Lancastrians, and I want to see the christening of your son, the first York prince. Then I shall want to see him made Prince of Wales…”

  “You shall come to his christening, whenever he comes to us,” I promise her. “And he will know his aunt is his good guardian. But you can further the needs of the House of York in Burgundy. You will keep Burgundy a friend to York and to England, and if ever Edward is in trouble, he will know that he can call on the Burgundy wealth and arms. And if ever again he is in danger from a false friend, he can come to you for help. You will like to be our ally over the sea. You will be our haven.”

  She drops her little head on my shoulder. “Your Grace, my sister,” she says. “It is hard for me to go away. I have lost a father and I am not sure that my brother is not still in danger. I am not sure that he and George are true friends; I am not certain that George does not envy Edward, and I am afraid of what my lord Warwick might do. I want to stay here. I want to be with Edward and with you. I love my brother George; I don’t want to leave him at this time. I don’t want to leave my mother. I don’t want to leave home.”

  “I know,” I say gently. “But you can be a powerful and good sister to Edward and to George as the Duchess of Burgundy. We will know that there is always one country that we can depend on to stand our friend. We will
know that there is a beautiful duchess who is a Yorkist through and through. You can go to Burgundy and have sons, York sons.”

  “D’you think I can found a House of York overseas?”

  “You will found a new line,” I assure her. “And we will be glad to know that you are there, and we will visit you.”

  She puts a brave face on it, and Warwick puts a two-faced face on it and escorts her to the port of Margate, and we wave her away, our little duchess, and I know that of all of Edward’s brothers and sisters, George the unfaithful and Richard the boy, we have just sent away the most loving, the most loyal, the most reliable Yorkist of them all.

  To Warwick, this is another defeat at my hands and at the hands of my family. He promised that Margaret would have a French husband, but he has to take her to the Duke of Burgundy. He planned to make an alliance with France and he said that he had control of the decision making in England. Instead, we are to marry into the royal House of Burgundy: my mother’s family. And everyone can see that England is commanded by the Rivers family and that the king listens only to us. Warwick escorts Margaret on her wedding journey with a face as if he is sucking lemons, and I laugh behind my hand to see him overpowered and outnumbered by us, and think myself safe from his ambition and his malice.

  SUMMER 1469

  I am wrong, I am so wrong. We are not so powerful, we are not powerful enough. And I should have taken more care. I did not think, and I, of all people, who was afraid of Warwick before I had even met him, should have thought of his envy and his enmity. I did not foresee—and I of all queens with growing sons of my own should have foreseen—that Warwick and Edward’s bitter mother might come together and think to place another York boy on the throne in place of the first boy they had chosen, that the Kingmaker would make a new king.