“No, but I can act to safeguard the future, can keep it from being structured on lies. Christ, Véronique, you know what that whoreson Tudor’s saying about Dickon. Usurper, tyrant, child-murderer.”
“Ah, Francis, you mustn’t let it matter so. Richard cannot be hurt now by Tudor’s lies, and none who knew him will ever believe it; they’ll know the truth.”
“And what of those who didn’t know him? What happens, too, when all who knew him are dead, when people know only what they’ve been told? What truth will we be talking about, then? Tudor’s truth. Dickon doesn’t deserve that, Véronique, and I won’t let it happen. I swear to God I won’t.”
She turned away without answering. It all seemed so senseless to her. So much suffering. So many deaths. Richard. Rob Percy. Dick Ratcliffe. John Kendall. Robert Brackenbury. Jack Howard. All dead on that accursed plain with the blood-color clay. And what now? What of the children? The “Little Princes in the Tower,” she’d heard people call them, Edward’s murdered sons. Was George of Clarence’s son doomed, too, to suffer for sins not his? And Johnny…would the day come when Tudor cared not that Johnny was baseborn, cared only that he was Richard’s son?
“Francis…listen to me. I dearly loved Anne Neville and scarcely a day has gone by in these sixteen months since her death that I don’t think of her, that I don’t miss her. But I accept her death, Francis, and I’m thankful that she’s no longer suffering, that she’s at peace.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because your hatred for Tudor has become a mortal sickness, what the doctors call a cancer, eating away at you from within…blinding you to all else. Grieve for Richard by all means; God knows I do. But remember, too, his pain, remember how desperately unhappy he was in those last months of his life. I cannot help thinking, Francis, that for Richard, death was a…a release. Can you not try to see it that way, to accept it as such?”
“No,” he said curtly. “No, I cannot. I do remember Dickon’s pain, his grieving for Anne. But given time…”
She shook her head. “He’d lost more than his wife, his son. He’d lost his…his sense of self, and—”
At that moment, the door opened; Margaret reentered. “Here it is,” she said to Francis, “my mother’s last letter. There is something in it that I want you to read.”
Francis looked down at the beautiful Italic script. “Your lady mother…” he said softly, “how did she take Dickon’s death?”
“My mother is a remarkable woman. She accepted his death as she has all the other griefs that the Almighty has given her. ‘Our blessed Lord is not indifferent to the suffering of His children. In His infinite wisdom, He has called Richard home,’ she wrote, no more than that. And yet…” Margaret frowned, said slowly, “It was almost as if she expected it, Francis, as if she expected Dickon’s death.”
They looked at each other, and then she put her mother’s letter into his hand. “Read that, read what the city of York dared to do when they learned of Dickon’s death. They had every reason for caution, knew their city’s prosperity and well-being now depend upon the whims of Henry Tudor, and yet read what they inscribed into the city records for Tudor to see, for all to remember.”
Francis stared down at the Duchess of York’s letter. He swallowed, then read aloud in a husky voice, “It was showed by John Sponer that King Richard, late mercifully reigning upon us, was through great treason piteously slain and murdered, to the great heaviness of this City.”
As Margaret listened, the embittered grey eyes had softened, misted with sudden tears.
“My brother may lie in an untended grave,” she said, “but he does not lack for an epitaph.”
32
Bermondsey Abbey
June 1492
It was dusk when Grace rode into the confines of the eleventh-century Cluniac abbey. The Abbot himself was there to bid her welcome, for she was the Queen’s half sister, and Bess’s strong sense of family was known to all.
Following her escort through the quiet twilight-shadowed grounds, Grace could not imagine a more unlikely setting for the worldly, ambitious Elizabeth, and yet for more than five years now, Elizabeth’s world had been bounded and circumscribed within the walls of Bermondsey, a life of isolation and enforced tranquillity only occasionally enlivened by brief court visits. It was, Grace thought, the ultimate irony that Elizabeth should have been accorded greater freedom by Dickon, who’d hated her so, than by her own son-in-law.
In February of 1487, Elizabeth had suddenly fallen into disgrace; she’d been stripped of her possessions and banished to Bermondsey. There was some suspicion that Elizabeth, an inveterate intriguer, had involved herself in Francis Lovell’s rebellion, a suspicion strengthened when Tudor abruptly arrested Thomas Grey and confined him to the Tower, kept him there until after Francis and Jack de la Pole were defeated at the battle of Stoke Field on June 17, 1487. Grace, however, never believed it. Elizabeth’s entire life had been shaped by the dictates of self-interest, and it strained credibility that Elizabeth should have wished to see her own daughter dethroned and George of Clarence’s son crowned in Tudor’s stead. The truth, Grace thought, was far simpler—that Tudor had seized the opportunity to rid himself of a woman he little liked and trusted less.
She was met in Elizabeth’s antechamber by a beautiful woman in her late thirties, recognized Katherine Woodville. Katherine looked disappointed at sight of her, said, “You came alone? None of Lisbet’s daughters be with you?”
Grace shook her head. “Bess’s lying-in has begun. And Cecily is on her husband’s estates in the West Country. I doubt she knows yet that her mother be ill.” She made no mention of the three younger girls, not knowing what to say. Bridget was now eleven, Katherine thirteen, and Anne sixteen, and they were virtual strangers to Elizabeth, having been separated from her during the most formative years of their lives.
“I see,” Katherine said, her mouth thinning.
“How ill is she?”
“She’s dying,” Katherine said flatly and Grace gasped.
“Her doctor holds out no hope, says it be only a matter of days.” Katherine’s eyes filled with tears. “He says she’s not fighting it, says she wants to die….”
Grace did not fully believe Katherine until she was ushered into Elizabeth’s bedchamber. She had seen her own mother die, had been at Edward’s bedside during his last hours, had watched Anne suffer the ravages of consumption, and she recognized the aura of death, saw it indelibly imprinted upon Elizabeth’s face. She leaned over the bed, shocked by the frailness, the feeble clasp of the hand she grasped between her own, and said, “It’s me, Madame…. Grace.”
Elizabeth’s lashes lifted. “You came alone?” Her voice was husky, uneven, but the green eyes were quite lucid.
“Bess’s time is nigh, Madame. But we’ve sent for your other daughters.”
Elizabeth closed her eyes again. “They’ll not come,” she whispered. “Tom, either. He fears Tudor, you see….”
Grace was at a loss for words. She’d always thought that her Uncle Dickon and Anne Neville’s courtship and marriage was a love story as touching as any celebrated in the courtly love ballads she’d doted on as a child. It occurred to her now that her father’s relationship with Elizabeth was no less romantic a tale: the handsome Yorkist King and the beautiful Lancastrian widow…. So how, then, had it come to this? Her father dead at forty, a gutted candle flame, burned out with his wenching, his excesses, and Elizabeth dying alone and unmourned.
“Madame…. Bess asked me to give you this.” Grace dropped a rosary of silver and turquoise down on the pillow; Elizabeth’s eyes flicked toward it, then away, without interest.
“Passing strange,” she said after some moments of silence, “that you should show yourself to be more loyal than my own blood….”
“You were good to me, Madame.”
“Was I?” Elizabeth sounded faintly surprised. “I suppose I was….”
Grace leaned over, squeezed El
izabeth’s hand. “Madame, I…” She hesitated and then concluded simply, “I’m so sorry, for so much.”
“So,” Elizabeth said, “am I.” She sighed. “God spare you the regrets I’ve lived with, Grace. So much I’d have done differently, so much….”
That Grace could well believe, thinking of the mistakes Elizabeth had made, her failures as a wife, a mother, a Queen. “What do you regret most, Madame?” she asked softly.
Elizabeth’s eyes came up to Grace’s face. “The truth? My greatest regret is that I heeded Ned’s threats, that I didn’t dare act on my own to silence Stillington….”
She saw Grace’s shock, and the corner of her mouth twisted into something much like a smile. “Deathbed honesty, Grace. But my soul be safe; I’ll repent it all when the priest comes.”
She was obviously tiring, and Grace started to rise. But as she did, Elizabeth’s hand tightened on hers.
“Grace, wait…. You must tell Bess for me…”
Her urgency was compelling. “I will, Madame. Gladly will I give her your love, whatever message you wish. I promise.”
“Tell her…I want to be buried at Windsor, to be buried with Ned…as a Queen.”
Bess sought without success to make herself comfortable in the bed. This was her fourth pregnancy in six years of marriage, and she looked to her coming confinement with secret dread, for childbirth was a painful and prolonged ordeal for her. It was, she thought, a grim jest of God that she conceived easily and delivered hard. She gratefully accepted Grace’s assistance now, shifted so that her sister could position a pillow behind her back.
“Poor Mama,” she said, and sighed. “How it would have vexed her, to be buried with so little ceremony….”
Elizabeth had died that past Friday. Grace alone had accompanied the coffin to Windsor, and late Sunday night Elizabeth had been laid to rest in Edward’s tomb, again with only Grace in attendance. A few days later Elizabeth’s younger daughters and Thomas Grey arrived for a brief memorial service. There was something both shabby and surreptitious about the entire proceedings, and Grace looked at Bess with sympathetic eyes, knowing that Bess was reproaching herself for her inability to fulfill her mother’s dying request, to be buried with the dignity and pageantry befitting a Queen.
“She’s with Papa now, Bess, as she wanted,” she said consolingly. “That be what’s truly important.”
“I suppose….” Bess said, and sighed again. Grace felt a throb of pity. Rarely had a Queen been as popular as her sister; Bess was beloved by her subjects as her husband was not, as her mother had never been. But rarely had a Queen been so powerless, either.
Bess was allowed no voice in Tudor’s government, had no part in his life beyond a shared bed. Grace thought now that if Bess had married Tudor hoping to draw the protective mantle of queenship over her family, her disappointment must be bitter, indeed. She’d not even been crowned until more than two years after their marriage, and Henry himself had not bothered to attend the ceremony. She’d so far borne him two sons and a daughter, but that had not kept him from briefly imprisoning her half-brother Thomas, from immuring her mother in Bermondsey, from forcing her sister Cecily into a miserable marriage with his uncle, a man much Cecily’s senior. Her cousin Jack de la Pole was five years dead, slain at Stoke Field. Her cousin Johnny lived in the deepening shadows of Tudor’s suspicions, and the most tragic figure of all, Edward of Warwick, still languished in the Tower; he was seventeen now and for seven years had been a prisoner of state, condemned for the sin of birth, for the Plantagenet blood that gave Henry Tudor such constant unease.
He be a ruthless man, in truth, Grace thought, with a shiver of dislike. And yet to be fair, he does treat Bess more decently than not. He doesn’t argue with her in public, spares her pride before others, has never beaten her. He’s faithful to her, too, has never shamed her with court favorites the way Papa did, the way most Kings do. And for a man as tight-fisted and miserly as Papa and Uncle Dickon were free-spending, he doesn’t stint Bess’s wants, pays her debts without too much grumbling, and even indulges her generosities. No, there be wives far less lucky…. Cecily, for one. Her wretched marriage to Viscount Welles has so far brought her naught but grief and two dead babies.
“Henry is quite pleased about the coming birth of this babe. He even went so far as to say that if it be a girl, I may choose the name,” Bess said, without apparent irony; she was no longer the young girl whose vulnerabilities and emotions were open for all to see. “I think if it is a daughter, I shall name her Elizabeth. Mama would have liked that.”
“And if it be a boy?”
Bess shrugged. “In that case, Henry will insist upon naming him.” A faint smile touched her lips. “Even if he didn’t, he’d never allow either of the names I would like to give my sons…Edward and Richard.”
Their eyes met, held. “No,” Grace agreed slowly, “I don’t suppose he would.”
“Grace…have you ever heard of a man named John Rous?”
Grace was startled. “Yes,” she admitted. “He was a chantry priest in Warwickshire, and a year or so ago wrote what purported to be a history of our times…a despicable collection of lies, slanders, and preposterous myths. You…you’ve read it, Bess?”
Bess nodded. “He dedicated it to Henry, after all.” She was frowning down at her hands, twisting her wedding band. “Never have I read anything so poisonous, Grace; every page be saturated with venom. He accuses Dickon of the most heinous crimes, not only of murdering our brothers, but of poisoning Anne, even of stabbing Harry of Lancaster with his own hand!”
“Not to mention claiming that Dickon was a monster, a tyrant, born under an evil star and two full years in his mother’s womb!” Grace said, and grimaced. Rous was a charlatan, the most contemptible sort of lickspittle, for when Dickon was alive Rous had described him in glowing terms of praise, as a ruler concerned with justice and fair play. But the true blame must lie with Tudor, who encouraged such slanders, Tudor, who seemed obsessed with making a monster of the man he’d dethroned but could not defeat. That was not something, however, she meant to say to Bess.
“Grace, you live in the North now, in York. How do they remember Dickon there? Is he still mourned?”
“After what befell the Earl of Northumberland, need you even ask?”
They both fell silent, remembering. The North would have risen up in rebellion after Redmore Plain had Tudor not at once issued a false report that Jack de la Pole and Francis Lovell were slain, too, on the field, but for months afterward, the North Country seethed with resentment and none was more hated than Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland. Three years ago, he’d been sent into Yorkshire to quell protests over a Tudor-imposed tax. At Cocklodge near the town of Thirsk, he encountered a large, angry crowd. His order to disperse had been refused, tempers flared, insults were traded, until Richard’s name was thrown at Northumberland, the accusation that Richard’s blood was on Northumberland’s hands. And it took no more than that. Northumberland’s escort fled. Northumberland was dragged from his horse and murdered by men who had not forgotten Redmore Plain.
“Dickon loved the North,” Bess said at last. “I’m glad they’ve not forgotten him, that these ugly stories have not taken root in Yorkshire.”
“Nor will they, not in the North; but in London, in those parts of the realm where Dickon was not known…”
Bess was frowning again. “You think that there be people who do believe what Henry’s been saying of Dickon, people who can be fed the lies of a man like Rous and take them as true?”
“Yes,” Grace said reluctantly, “I do. All do know by now that our brothers have not been seen for nigh on nine years, that they disappeared while in our uncle’s care. Moreover, for seven years, your husband has been doing all he can to discredit Dickon’s memory, and if lies be repeated often enough, people become accustomed to hearing them, even begin to believe them to be true. I think the day might come, Bess, when all men will know of Dickon is what they were told by
Tudor historians like Rous.”
“Jesú, no!” Bess sounded both appalled and emphatic. “You mustn’t think that. Whatever the lies being told about Dickon now, surely the truth will eventually win out. Scriptures does say that ‘Great is truth and it prevails,’ and I believe that, Grace.”
Bess straightened up in the bed, shoved yet another pillow against her back. “I have to believe that,” she said quietly. “Not just for Dickon’s sake, but for us all. For when all is said and done, the truth be all we have.”
Afterword
With the backing of Margaret of York, Francis Lovell sought to invade England in June 1487. He was joined by Jack de la Pole, Richard’s nephew, and they faced Tudor across a battlefield at Stoke. Jack died on the field; Francis was never seen alive after the battle, and the most likely story told is that he drowned swimming his horse across the River Trent.
John Scrope had been dispatched by Richard to keep watch over the English Channel, and, like the men of York, he didn’t get to Redmore Plain in time. Probably for this reason, he was not attainted. But he then implicated himself in Francis Lovell’s rebellion and, as a result, was under house arrest until 1488. It may be that he escaped further punishment because of his wife’s kinship to Tudor. Elizabeth Scrope (here renamed Alison to avoid a confusion of Elizabeths) was a half sister to Tudor’s mother, Margaret Beaufort.
William Catesby did not take part in Richard’s fatal charge down Ambien Hill. He was captured after the battle and executed three days later at Leicester. He hoped the Stanleys might speak for him. They did not.
Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells, was incarcerated immediately after Redmore Plain (now called Bosworth Field). He was pardoned by Tudor’s parliament for “horrible and heinous offenses imagined and done” against the King. He was arrested again after involving himself in Francis Lovell’s rebellion, and died in prison in 1491.