I shake my head. I am not going to discuss the dangerous topics of the queen’s remarkable fertility or the success of her child-rearing.
Isabel follows my lead. ‘So – d’you know what is wrong between your husband and mine? Have they quarrelled?’
‘I overheard them,’ I confess. ‘I listened at the door. It’s not the money, Iz, not mother’s inheritance. It’s worse.’ I lower my voice. ‘I am very afraid that George may be preparing to challenge the king.’
She glances behind her at once, but in the noisy court we are alone and cannot be overheard. ‘Did he say so to Richard? Are you sure?’
‘Didn’t you know?’
‘He has men coming to him all the time, he is building up his affinity, he is taking advice from astrologers. But I thought it was for this invasion of France. He has brought more than a thousand men into the field. He and Richard have the greatest of the armies, they outnumber the king’s men. But I thought that George was mustering his men for his brother Edward, for this invasion of France. He surely cannot be thinking of claiming the throne when he has just put an army together to support Edward?’
‘Does he really think that Edward has no true claim to the throne?’ I ask curiously. ‘That’s what he said to Richard.’
Isabel shrugs. ‘We all know what is said,’ she answers shortly. ‘Edward looks nothing like his father, and he was born out of the country, during a time when his father was away fighting the French. There have always been rumours about him.’ She glances over to the royal family, at the queen among her beautiful children, laughing at something her daughter Elizabeth is saying. ‘And come to that, nobody witnessed their wedding. How do we know it was properly done, with a proper priest?’
I can’t bear to speak of invalid weddings with Isabel. ‘My husband won’t hear a word of it,’ I say. ‘I can’t speak of it.’
‘Is your sister telling you all about her new baby?’ the queen interrupts, calling across the room. ‘We have a richness of Edwards, do we not? We all have an Edward now.’
‘Many Edwards, but only one prince,’ my sister replies gracefully. ‘And you and His Grace the king are blessed with a fine nursery of many children.’
Queen Elizabeth looks complacently at the girls who are playing with their brother the Prince of Wales. ‘Well, God bless them all,’ she says pleasantly. ‘I hope to have as many as my mother did, and she gave her husband fourteen children. Let us all hope to be as fertile as our mothers!’
Isabel freezes, the smile vanishing from her face. The queen turns away to speak to someone else, and I say urgently: ‘What’s the matter? What’s the matter, Iz?’
‘She cursed us,’ she whispers to me, her voice a thread. ‘Did you hear her? She cursed us to have children like our mother. Two girls.’
‘She didn’t,’ I say. ‘She was just talking about her mother’s fourteen children.’
Isabel shakes her head. ‘She knows that George would inherit the throne if her sons were to die,’ she says. ‘And she doesn’t want my boy to succeed. I think she just cursed us. She cursed my son, in front of everyone. She wished that I would have the issue that my mother had: two girls. She cursed you too: two girls. She has just ill-wished our boys. She has just wished them dead.’
Isabel is so shaken that I take her out of sight of the queen, behind some people who are learning a new dance. They are making a lot of noise and practising the steps over and over. Nobody pays any attention to us at all.
We stand near an open window until the colour comes back into her cheeks. ‘Iz – you cannot fear the queen like this,’ I say anxiously. ‘You cannot hear curses and witchcraft in everything she says. You cannot suspect her all the time and speak your fears. We are settled now, the king has forgiven George and rides with him at his side. You and I have our fortune. Richard and George may squabble about the future; but we should be at peace.’
She shakes her head, still frightened. ‘You know that we are not at peace. And now I am wondering what is happening in France right now. I thought that my husband had mustered an army to support his brother the king in a foreign war. But he has a thousand men under his command and they will do whatever he wants. What if George plans to turn against the king? What if he has planned it all along? What if he is going to kill Edward in France and come back and take the throne from the Rivers?’
Isabel and I wait for anxious weeks, wondering if the English army, far from fighting the French, has fallen to fighting itself. Her terror and mine is that George is following my father’s plan of marching in the vanguard and then closing in to attack. Then Richard sends me a letter to tell me that their plans have all gone wrong. Their ally, the Duke of Burgundy, has marched out to set a siege, far away, of no use to our campaign at all. His duchess, Margaret of York – Richard’s own sister – has no power to recall him to support her brothers as they land in Calais and march to Reims for Edward’s coronation as King of France. Margaret, born and bred a loyal York girl, is despairing that she cannot make her husband support her three brothers. But the duke seems to have lured them to fight with France so that he can make his own gains; all the allies seem to have their own ambitions. Only my husband would stick to the original plan if he could. He writes me a bitter account:
Burgundy pursues his own way. The queen’s kinsman, our famed ally St Pol, the same. Now we are here ready for battle, we find that my brother has lost his desire to fight, and King Louis has offered him magnificent terms to leave the kingdom of France alone. Gold and the hand of his daughter the Princess Elizabeth so that she will be the next Queen of France turns out to be the price of our withdrawal. They have bought my brother.
Anne, only you will know how bitterly I am shamed by this. I wanted to win English lands in France for England again, I wanted to see our armies victorious in the plains of Picardy. Instead we have become merchants, haggling over the price. There is nothing I can do to stop Edward and George snapping up this treaty, just as there was no way that I could drag my men out of the town of Amiens where King Louis served a feast of meats and an unending supply of wine, knowing that they would drink and eat until they were sick as dogs, and I am mortified that it is my badge on their collars. My men are poisoned with their own gluttony, and I am sick with shame.
I swear I will never trust Edward again. This is not kingly, this is not as Arthur of Camelot. This is behaviour as base as an archer’s bastard and I cannot meet his eyes when I see him stuffing his mouth at King Louis’ table and pocketing the gold forks.
BAYNARD’S CASTLE, LONDON, SEPTEMBER 1475
By September they are all home, richer than they dreamed, loaded with silver plate, jewels, crowns and promises of more to come. The king himself has seventy-five thousand crowns in his treasury as payment for his promise for a peace treaty to last for seven years, and the King of France will pay fifty thousand pounds a year, every year that Edward does not re-state his claim to English lands in France. George Duke of Clarence, who was always at his brother’s side during the haggling, at the ready when there was easy money to be made, is named as the trustworthy councillor to arbitrate on this dishonourable pension, and he too is being paid a fortune. The only dissenting voice comes from my husband – of all the men who rode to France and came back richer, only my husband Richard warns Edward that this is no way to defeat the French king, cautions him that the commons of England will think that their taxes have been wasted, swears that the citizens of London and the gentry in parliament will turn against him for this dishonour, and begs him not to sell England’s birthright for this pension. I think Richard is the only one in all of the great English army to speak against the treaty. Everyone else is too busy counting their own bribes.
‘He knew I advised against it, he knew I wanted war, and yet the French king still gave me half a dozen hunters and a fortune in silver plate!’ Richard exclaims in our private rooms, the door shut against eavesdroppers, his mother – thank God – at Fotheringhay and unable to add her voice to the co
mplaints against the king.
‘Did you accept it?’
‘Of course. Everyone else has taken a fortune. William Hastings is taking two thousand crowns a year. And that’s not all – Edward has agreed to release Margaret of Anjou!’
‘Release the queen?’
‘She’s not to be called queen any more, she’s to renounce her title and her claim on the crown of England. But she is to be released.’
A terrible fear strikes me. ‘She wouldn’t come to us? Richard, I really could not have her at one of our houses.’
He laughs out loud for the first time since his return home. ‘God, no. She is going to France. Louis can take care of her if he wants her so much. They are well-suited. Both dishonourable, both greedy, both liars and both a disgrace to their thrones. If I had been Edward, I would have executed her and defeated him.’ He pauses. ‘But if I had been Edward I would never have stooped to this dishonourable truce.’
I put my hand on his shoulder. ‘You did your duty. You mustered your men and you rode out to fight.’
‘I feel as if my brother is Cain,’ he says miserably. ‘Both of them. Two Cains to sell their birthright for a mess of pottage. I am the only one that cares about honour. They laughed at me and called me a fool for chivalry, they said I dreamed of a better world that could never be; while they put their noses in the trough.’ He turns his head and kisses my wrist. ‘Anne,’ he says quietly.
I bow my head and kiss his neck, his hairline, and then as he draws me into his lap, his closed eyes, his frowning eyebrows and his mouth. As he lies me down on the bed and takes me I reach for him and I pray that we are making another boy.
MIDDLEHAM CASTLE, YORKSHIRE, SUMMER 1476
Edward my son is three years old and released from the nursery, out of his gowns and into proper clothes. I have Richard’s tailor make miniature copies of his father’s dark handsome suits and I dress him myself every morning, threading the laces through the holes at the sleeves, pulling his riding boots on his little feet and telling him to stamp down. Soon his hair will have to be cut, but every morning of this summer I brush his golden-brown curls over his white lace collar and twist them around my fingers. I pray every month that another child comes, to be a brother to him, I even pray for a girl if that is the will of God. But month after month goes by and still my courses come and I never feel sick in the morning, and I never feel that wonderful faintness that tells a woman that she is with child.
I visit a herbalist, I summon a physician. The herbalist gives me the most vile potions to drink and a sachet of herbs to wear around my neck, the physician tells me to eat meat even on Fridays, and warns me that I am cold and dry in disposition and must become hot and moist. My ladies in waiting whisper to me that they know of a wise woman, a woman who has powers not of this world; she can make a baby, she can melt one away, she can call up a storm, whistle up a wind – I stop them there. ‘I don’t believe in such things,’ I say stoutly. ‘I don’t think such things can be. And if they were, they would be against the will of God, and outside the knowledge of man, and I will have nothing to do with them.’
Richard never complains that our next child is a long time coming. But he knows that he is a fertile man; there are two children that I know of, from before we were married, and there may be more. His brother the king has bastards scattered round the three kingdoms and sired seven children with the queen. But Richard and I have only one: our precious Edward, and I have to wonder how the queen gets so many babies from one brother while I get only one; does she know things outside the will of God and the wisdom of man?
Every morning that I walk along the outer wall to the tower where Edward has his nursery I hear my heart beat a little faster for fear that he may be ill. He has gone through the childhood ailments, his little white teeth have come in, he grows, yet I always worry for him. He is never going to be a big-boned man, like his uncle the king. He is going to take after his father, lithe, short, slight of build. His father has made himself strong and powerful through constant practice and hard living, so perhaps Edward too can become strong. I love him completely, and I could not love him more than I do if we happened to be a poor family with nothing to leave to a son. But we are not. We are a great family, the greatest in the North, and I can never forget that he is our only heir. If we were to lose him, then we would lose not only our son but also our step into the future, and the massive fortune that Richard has put together by matching the grants from his brother the king with my vast inheritance would all be wasted, scattered among our kinsmen.
Isabel is far luckier than me. I cannot deny my jealousy of her easy conception of children, and the robust health of her babies. I cannot bear her to excel me in this. She writes to me that she had feared that our line was a weak one – our mother had only two girls, and that after a long wait. She reminds me that the queen cursed us, wishing our mother’s weak seed on us. But the curse does not fix on Isabel, who already has two children, the pretty girl Margaret, and a son Edward, and she writes exultantly that she is pregnant again, and this time she is certain it will be another boy.
Her letter, scrawled in her wide hand, blotted with excessive ink in her joy, tells me that she is carrying the baby high, which is a certain sign of a boy, and that it kicks as strongly as a young lord. She asks me to tell our mother her good news and I write coldly in reply that while I am glad for her, and look forward to seeing her new baby, I do not visit our mother in her part of the castle, and that if Isabel wants her to have the good news she should tell her herself. She can write a letter to me and I will have it delivered for – as Isabel well knows – our Lady Mother is not allowed to receive any letters that we do not see first, and is not allowed to reply at all. As Isabel well knows, our Lady Mother is dead in the eyes of the law. Does Isabel want to challenge this now?
That silences her, as I knew it would. She is ashamed, as I am ashamed, that we have imprisoned our mother and stolen our inheritance from her. I never speak of Isabel to my mother, I never speak to her at all. I cannot bring myself to admit that she lives quite alone, our prisoner, in her rooms in the tower and that I never visit her, and she never sends for me.
I would always have had to keep her in strict confinement, there was no other choice. She could not be out in the world, leading a normal life as a widowed countess – it would have been to make a mockery of the act of parliament that declared her dead as Richard and George agreed. She could not be allowed to meet people and complain to them that she had been robbed. She could not be allowed to go on writing, as she did from Beaulieu Abbey, to every lady of the royal household calling on them as fellow ladies, in sisterhood, to defend her. We would never have been able to risk her living out in the world, challenging my inheritance and the very basis of our wealth, our ownership of this castle, the vast acres of our lands, my husband’s great fortune. Besides – what would she have lived on after George and Richard took everything? Where would have been her home since George and Richard took all her houses? But since she spoke to me, so terribly, so disturbingly, since she told me that she believes my marriage is invalid, since she named me, her own daughter, as a whore, since that day I cannot bear even to see her.
I never go to her room; I inquire after her health once a week from her lady in waiting. I ensure that she has the best dishes from the kitchen, the best wine from the cellar. She can walk in the courtyard before her tower, which is walled all round, and I keep a guard on the door. She can command musicians as long as I know who they are and they are searched when they arrive and leave. She goes to the chapel and takes mass, she goes to confession only with our priest, and he would tell me if she made any accusations. She has no cause to complain of her circumstances, and no-one can hear her complaint. But I make sure that I am never in the chapel when she comes in, I never walk in her garden. If I look down from the high window in the privy chamber and see her dully circling on the stony paths, I turn my head away. She is indeed as a dead woman, she is almost buried alive.
She is – as I once feared she was – walled up.
I never tell Richard what she said about him, I never ask him is our marriage valid, is our son legitimate? And I never ask her if she is certain, or was she just speaking from spite to frighten me? I am never going to hear her say again that she thinks my marriage is invalid and that my husband tricked me into a false service and that I live with him now balanced on his goodwill, that he married me only for my fortune to him, and has made cold-hearted preparations to keep my fortune and lose me. To avoid her repeating this I am prepared to never hear her speak again. I will never let her say that to me – or to anyone else – as long as she lives.
I wish she had never said it, or that I had never heard it, or that having heard it I could simply forget it. I am sickened that she should say such a thing to me and I am unable to refute it. I am sickened that I should know, in my heart of hearts, that it is true. It eats away at my love for Richard. Not that he should marry me without a papal dispensation in the first place – I don’t forget that we were so much in love and so steeped in desire that we could not wait. But that he should not apply for dispensation after our wedding, that he should keep that decision from me, and that – most chillingly and worst of all, far and away the worst thing – he should secure his rights to my inheritance even if he were to put me aside and deny his marriage to me.
I am bound to him, by my love, by my submission to his will, by my first passion, and since he is the father of my son and he is my lord. But what am I to him? That is what I want to know and what I can now – thanks to my mother – never confidently ask him.
In May Richard comes to me and says that he wants us to leave Edward at Middleham with his tutor and the lady of his household, and go to York to start the procession to Fotheringhay, for a solemn service: the reburial of his father.