Jean Plaidy Read online

  “Elizabeth, my darling daughter,” she prayed, “live … live and give us a healthy boy … for the sake of the country, for the sake of us all.”

  The Countess of Richmond was less confident than she appeared to be. Premature births were dangerous and it could not possibly be anything else but a premature birth. Elizabeth would never have taken a lover and Henry would never have forestalled his marriage vows. No … no … the child was coming a month before it was due. It had happened before. The main thing was that it should live and that Elizabeth should go on to give more children to the country. This conflict between York and Lancaster had to end. For thirty years—on and off—those wars had persisted. The strength of King Edward the Fourth had held them at bay but it had been seen how easily they had broken out when he had died. And now … Lancaster was in the ascendancy but the Yorkists were content because though the King was a Lancastrian the Queen was of the house of York. An ideal settlement, but it must stay firm. The Queen must remain the Queen and there must be a child.

  It had all seemed hopeful until the Queen began to give birth prematurely.

  If she died, thought the Countess, and if the child died … what then?

  She had been watching Cecilia. The girl was comely—all Edward the Fourth’s daughters were beauties, with that magnificent golden hair inherited from the mother. It was hardly likely that they could be other than handsome with parents who had been generally proclaimed as the best-looking man and woman in the country.

  If Elizabeth died could Henry marry Cecilia … ? It would be tricky but it had always been the Countess’s custom to be prepared for all eventualities.

  Meanwhile the Queen was awaiting the birth of the child. The pains were intermittent now. She felt very ill and wondered if she were going to die. She had been unprepared when the evidence of the child’s imminent arrival became apparent and she was very alarmed. It could not be yet. It was not due for another month. They had brought her to this darkened chamber and she longed for more light, but it was against royal etiquette, her mother-in-law had said—and it was the Countess who made the rules in this household.

  The King deferred to the Countess and Elizabeth must defer to the King. She was not sure whether she loved her husband. He was not what she had imagined him to be. When the marriage had been suggested she had thought of him as a hero of romance. He was coming to protect her from her Uncle Richard—not that she had ever been greatly in fear of her uncle. She remembered his visiting her father when he was alive and what affection there had been between the two of them, though Uncle Richard had been quite different from her big jovial exuberant father. Quiet, retiring, speaking very little, being intensely serious—that was Uncle Richard. Yet Anne Neville had loved him; and Anne had been a good friend to her.

  The truth was that she was in awe of her husband. He had shown her affection and stressed that he was delighted with his marriage, but there was something she did not understand about him, something withdrawn … aloof. Behind those eyes were secrets she would never discover. Perhaps, she thought, it was better that she did not.

  She was overanxious that she should produce a healthy boy because that was her duty. It seemed, looking back on her life, that it was what she had been born for. All her life she had been buffeted, it seemed, from this one to that… . First one marriage was important … then another. At one time she had been offered to the son of Margaret of Anjou. That came to nothing because he was affianced to Anne Neville when Anne’s father, the Kingmaker Earl of Warwick, turned his coat and went over to Margaret of Anjou, deserting his old friend and ally Elizabeth’s father. Later she was destined for the Dauphin of France. What a grand opinion she had had of herself then. So had her mother, who had insisted that she be called Madame La Dauphine throughout the Court.

  Then of course the King of France had decided to give his son to another bride and that, it was said, so shattered Edward the Fourth that it was one of the causes of his death. And eventually here she was … Queen of England.

  At least that side of her life was settled. She would like to live quietly now … at peace … with many children to occupy her days. That was what she wanted and for once it coincided with most other people’s wishes for her, so perhaps there was a chance of its coming to pass.

  Perhaps she was wrong to be afraid of her cold-eyed husband. Perhaps she felt so because having lived close to a father like Edward the Fourth, she had expected to have a husband like him—full of good humor, full of laughter, handsome, dressed extravagantly, charming everyone with his smiles and well-chosen words. She remembered an occasion when the Lord of Grauthuse visited the Court and her father wished to do honor to him. There had been a great many entertainments and at one of the balls her father had led her out onto the floor and danced with her. She must have looked tiny beside his great bulk, but how exalted she had felt—particularly when the dance was over and he had lifted her up before them all and kissed her. That must have been one of the happiest moments in her life. She remembered her mother, so beautiful that she seemed like a being from another world, looking on at the scene and smiling benignly—oh yes indeed, the happiest little girl in all the Court … in all the world perhaps. But one quickly learned that happiness was a fleeting moment … here … and gone … but it did leave something behind … a memory to bring out now and then and glory in.

  Now, lying in her bed in this darkened room with so many people about her, listening to the whispering voices, waiting for the next bout of pain, events from the past would keep coming into her mind.

  She was thinking of her young brother Edward’s birth, which had taken place on a dark November day in the Sanctuary at Westminster where she with her mother and her sisters were sheltering from their enemies. She would never forget the exultation when it was learned that the new baby was a boy. Her mother had said: “This is the best news the King could have. Now he will regain his throne.” She remembered the little boy’s baptism in that grim place. There was no royal ceremony then, and yet that little boy was the King’s son, the heir to the throne.

  Little Edward, she thought. Where are you now? Where is my brother Richard? Little Edward, true King of England, what happened to you?

  One must not think of the boys, her mother had said. They must have died… . It is the only explanation.

  Of course it was the only explanation, for if they lived and were not illegitimate as her Uncle Richard had proclaimed them to be, then Henry had no right to the throne and she was not the true Queen. And he must declare them legitimate for how could the King of England marry a bastard, for she must be one if her brothers were.

  One certainly must not think of such things, particularly when one was about to bring a child into the world.

  But the thoughts would keep intruding … terrible thoughts. There had been a rumor when her aunt, Queen Anne, wife of Uncle Richard was near to death that she, Elizabeth, and the King had conspired together to poison her. It was monstrous. It was absurd. Her Uncle Richard had never shown anything but devotion toward his wife and never never had she, Elizabeth, considered marriage to him. Her own uncle! It was criminal. And all for the sake of being Queen of England!

  He must have felt the same horror for when the Queen died he sent her away from Court, and she had been more or less a prisoner at his castle of Sheriff Hutton in the North because he knew that there had been a secret betrothal to Henry Tudor.

  That was her life—buffeted from one situation to another. Never was she consulted as to her wishes. They would do with her as best suited them. Received at Court one day, petted and pampered; and the next, banished to exile in what was more or less a prison.

  At Sheriff Hutton she had been very much in the company of her cousin Edward, Earl of Warwick, who was the son of the Duke of Clarence—that brother of her father’s who had died in the Tower of London by drowning in a butt of malmsey. Poor Edward, his lot had been very sad. He had been only three years old when his father had died; his mother was alread
y dead and poor little orphan that he was he was happy for a while in the care of his aunt Anne, then Duchess of Gloucester soon to be Queen of England. There had been a time, after the death of King Richard’s son, when Richard had thought to make young Edward his heir but the boy had continued at Sheriff Hutton, so that when Elizabeth had come there, she had found him already installed and a friendship grew up between them.

  There they had been together at the time of the fateful battle of Bosworth, which was to change the lives of so many, among them the two who were virtually prisoners at Sheriff Hutton.

  Elizabeth had come to Court to marry the new King; and the young Earl of Warwick for no other reason than he was a threat to the new King’s position was brought to London and lodged in the Tower.

  Elizabeth was concerned for him; she would have liked to visit him, to ask her husband—or her husband’s mother—for what reason her young cousin Edward was confined in the Tower. What had he done—apart from being the son of the Duke of Clarence who might be said to have claim to the throne?

  When she had broached the subject with Henry, that cold veiled look, which she was beginning to know so well, had come into his eyes.

  “He is best there,” he had said with a note of finality in his voice.

  As the Countess of Richmond had said: “The King will know how best to act.”

  But it is wrong … wrong … she thought … to imprison him just because …

  She tried not to think beyond that, but the thoughts would persist: Just because he has a greater claim to the throne than Henry Tudor… . After the sons of Edward the Fourth there is the son of his brother George Duke of Clarence… . But where are the sons of Edward the Fourth? Where are my little brothers Edward and Richard?

  It was amazing how her thoughts came back and back to that question.

  But the pains were starting again, and there was nothing else she could think of.

  The King was out hunting when he heard the disturbing news that the child was on the point of being born. He was alarmed. It was too soon. Not only must this child be a boy, he must live. He was sure that if this could come about he would be secure upon the throne.

  It meant everything to him. He believed he had all the gifts necessary to kingship. He believed he knew what England needed to make her a great country and he could bring this about. He hated war, which he was sure brought little profit to any concerned in it. He had seen what the Hundred Years War and the Wars of the Roses had done to England. He wanted peace. He wanted trade. Edward the Fourth had seen the virtue of that and it was obvious that the country has prospered under him. He wanted to encourage the arts for he felt they enriched a nation; he wanted to accumulate wealth, for if the coffers of the exchequer were fuller a country lost its vulnerability and the money could be used to encourage commerce and exploration, which would result in new markets; he could enrich the country through architecture and learning; the taxes enforced on the people should be used for its prosperity, not squandered on useless wars and other futile extravagances.

  He knew what the country wanted and he knew he could give it. He knew too that he had reached the throne through good luck. The battle of Bosworth might so easily have gone the other way and probably would have done so but for the defection of his father-in-law’s brother, Sir William Stanley. Then he had his mother to thank for so much. She should always be near him … cherished, revered. Well, here he was and here he intended to stay; but he must never forget that his position could not be firm, coming down through bastardy as it did. Many would say that his grandfather Owen Tudor had never been married to Katherine of Valois and therefore their children were bastards—part royal bastards though they might be. Then even his mother, daughter of John Beaufort, first Earl of Somerset, and his sole heir, descended from John of Gaunt, could not be completely free from the taint of bastardy. He would have been the first to admit that his claim to the throne was a very flimsy one, which was the reason why he must be very careful and ever watchful that those who might be said to have a greater claim were in no position to rise against him.

  He was uneasy about Edward, Earl of Warwick, but he was safely in the Tower and there he must remain. It was fortunate that the only legitimate son of Richard the Third had died. The Yorkists would say that Elizabeth of York was the heiress to the throne. Well, she was his wife. That had been the only possible marriage for him and he had to thank his good fortune that he had been able to bring it about. Elizabeth not only had a claim to the throne but she was also a good wife. His mother had said: “She will bring you great joy and little trouble.” That was what he needed. So he had his gentle Elizabeth, the legitimate daughter of Edward the Fourth, who had already shown that she could be fertile.

  There was the core of his anxieties. If she were legitimate then so were her brothers.

  He did not want to think of those boys who had been lodged in the Tower. He kept telling himself that he need not worry anymore about them. Richard had been a fool to remove them from the public eye after those rumors of their death. He had made one or two mistakes in his lifetime—the thoughtful Richard. Trusting the Stanleys was one—that had cost him his crown; and removing the Princes into obscurity had lost him his reputation.

  “I am not by nature a cruel man,” mused the King. “I am not a natural murderer. But sometimes what would seem to be evil deeds are necessary for the good of many. Then surely they cease to be evil. And what are the lives of two little boys compared with the prosperity, well-being and lives maybe of an entire kingdom?”

  He must put unpleasant thoughts behind him. That would be easy enough if it were not for the constant fear that ghosts could arise from the past to confront a man when he least expected them; and if that man were a king, the results could be disastrous. But it was folly to see trouble where it had not yet raised its head. Time enough for that when the moment of danger arose.

  There was one big threat to the throne and that could come through Clarence’s son. Henry’s enemies might decide to strike at him and use the boy as a figurehead. There would always be those to remember that Henry was a Lancastrian and the Earl of Warwick a Yorkist heir to the throne—providing the young sons of Edward the Fourth were truly no more. But unless it was absolutely necessary the boy must not die yet. There must not be too many deaths.

  These were uneasy thoughts, but a king’s thoughts were often uneasy, and he had always been prepared for that. Life had never been smooth. How many times had he believed his to be at an end? And how grateful he should be now that he had a chance to reach his destiny!

  His good friend John Morton, Bishop of Ely, had assured him that God had chosen him. Morton should have the Archbishopric of Canterbury. He deserved it, and Henry was going to bestow it on him next month. He owed his life to Morton and that was something he would never forget. He promised himself that he would be ruthless toward his enemies, but every man who had shown friendship to him should have his gratitude.

  His Uncle Jasper and Morton were the best friends he had ever had—not counting his mother, of course, but complete devotion was something which came naturally from a mother … perhaps an uncle too. Morton though—without ties of blood—had been his greatest friend.

  He did, however, owe a great deal to his uncle Jasper Tudor. Jasper had been true to the Lancastrian cause even when its fortunes were at their very lowest. His mother had told him how very alarmed she was to be left alone with a young baby and she could not imagine what might have befallen them but for his uncle Jasper.

  “I remember the day he came to me,” she had told her son. “He embraced me. He told me that he looked upon you as a sacred charge. The Tudors always stood together and as you had lost your father he was going to do for you all that a father should. I never forgot that. And he did, Henry. He carried out his word. Never forget what you owe to your uncle Jasper.”

  No, he would never forget Jasper. As soon as he had come to power he had created him Duke of Bedford and made him a Privy Council
lor; he had restored the earldom of Pembroke to him and made him Chief Justice of South Wales. No, he would never forget Jasper.

  His education had been supervised by his uncle who had provided him with the best tutors.

  “We have a boy here,” Jasper had said, “who loves learning. It would be a sin not to let him have the best.”

  His mother had fully agreed with these sentiments, so he had become immersed in his lessons, particularly stories about the Kings Arthur and Cadwallader whom he claimed as his ancestors. He had quickly become aware of the uncertainty of life, for his uncle Jasper was constantly engaged in battles as the war raged, with the Lancastrians victorious one day and the Yorkists the next. After one heavy defeat, when Henry was only five years old, Jasper had been obliged to fly to Scotland; the boy had been taken from Pembroke Castle to the fortress of Harlech where he had remained in Lancastrian hands until he was nine years old.

  That had been a terrifying time. Henry hated war. He would do so all his life. He was not going to be one of those warrior kings like Henry the Fifth and the First and Third Edwards who, it seemed to him, sought to make war when it was not necessary to do so and when it would have been so much better for them and their countries to have lived in peace. He could not say the same of his family’s arch enemy, Edward the Fourth, for he had fought only when war was forced upon him, when he had to make it or risk losing his crown. Henry could understand that a crown was something well worth fighting for.

  When he was nine years old William Herbert had come and taken the castle of Harlech for the Yorkists—and young Henry with it. Then Henry had a new guardian and he was amazed that he could quickly grow fond of the Herberts, particularly Lady Herbert who treated him as he had never been treated before—as a child. Oddly enough he enjoyed that. She scolded him and looked to his comforts and was as affectionate toward him as though he were her own son. Lord Herbert had been given the title of Earl of Pembroke for this had been taken away from Jasper. Henry and young Maud Herbert did their lessons together, rode together, quarreled together and in truth found each other’s company very agreeable. Lady Herbert watching, thought that one day they might enter into an even closer relationship. Then there had been a new development in the war. Fortunes had been reversed. The newly created Earl of Pembroke was killed in battle, the Lancastrians were restored to power, Edward the Fourth fled the country, and Uncle Jasper returned.