The Stolen Crown: The Secret Marriage That Forever Changed the Fate of England (11 page)

My cousin Richard—made the Duke of Gloucester after his brother was crowned king—was there as well. Until recently, he had been staying in the Earl of Warwick’s household, learning the many lessons that mighty man could impart, but he at sixteen was, evidently, now considered old enough to take up some responsibilities for the king, which included helping occasionally with my own knightly training. This time, unlike those days at my grandparents’ manor of Writtle, we became friends.

“Friends” is an understatement, however, for I loved him, as a matter of fact. Why wouldn’t I? Richard was bright, charming, and confident; he was trusted by his brother the king; he had come through Warwick’s schooling (so I heard from the other boys and young men at Westminster) with nothing but acclaim. I was thirteen, three years his junior, raised mostly in the company of women and of my beloved but frail younger brother. Quick in my studies, I knew little of the ways of men. Richard was everything I wanted to be.

I like to think that our friendship was not entirely one-sided. There was that three-year gap between us, to be sure, but I was no longer as insufferable as I had been when I was age four. I was not as nearly as important to the Duchess of Exeter and to the queen and king as I had

t h e s t o l e n C r o w n 6 3

been to my grandmother, and Humphrey’s presence had made me more bearable as well. And I was not without winning qualities myself, I hope.

Be that as it may, Richard must have had some regard for me, for we began to go out riding sometimes even when he was not required to give me instruction.

It was on one of those rides that Richard asked me, “How does it feel, being married?”

I was pleased that this was a matter about which Richard, for once, knew nothing. “Kate will make a good wife, I suppose. She’s pretty and sweet.”

“You don’t mind that she came with no portion? From a family of nobodies?”

“The Duchess of Bedford isn’t a nobody,” I pointed out. “She was married to the fourth Henry’s brother.”

“
Was
is the operative word, Harry.”

“But she’s still a duchess. My grandmother is married now to Sir Walter Blount, Lord Mountjoy, and she’s still a duchess. And they’re our family now anyway—the Woodvilles, that is.”

“If you say so. You could have married one of Warwick’s girls, you know.”

“Yes, Grandmother told me once.” I frowned. “How did you know?”

“The earl told me. He said that he had hoped Isabel or Anne would have married you. What an estate that would have been! Your estates and half of the Countess of Warwick’s Beauchamp and Despenser estates. Of course, the Warwick estates are entailed in the male line, so his nephew will inherit.

Still, that would have been grand for you.”

“Kate will be a beauty one day, I expect. And she’s from good childbearing stock.”

“So is many a peasant.”

I did not much like this conversation, for I was genuinely fond of Kate.

Lowborn on her father’s side she might well be, but she was certainly no peasant. “Well, I like her, and that’s important too. What if I had married one of the Warwick girls and we didn’t get along?”

6 4 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m “Oh, they’re agreeable girls, and pretty too. I’ll probably marry one of them, most likely Anne, as she’s the younger. You would have gotten along. But if you didn’t, it wouldn’t matter if you didn’t like her. You could pack her off to some manor and come back just long enough from time to time to beget a child upon her.”

“I could do that with Kate. I will have sufficient estates.” (It was time, I thought, I reminded Richard of this.) “And I don’t want to pack her off! When she’s old enough, I think I shall like her in my bed.” I blushed as I touched upon a subject I thought about altogether too much lately, though not yet, of course, with little Kate as the object. (At the time, Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, if you must know—and what harm can you knowing possibly do me now?—was the main occupant of my thoughts in that direction.)

“Oh, there are mistresses for that.”

This was too much. “You’re not going to tell me you have a mistress!”

“But I do. Soon I’ll have a bastard, as a matter of fact.”

“She’s with child?”

“That’s the way it works, old man.”

I sat back in my saddle, amazed at the worldliness of the man—I could call him nothing but a man now—at my side. “How do you get one?

A mistress?”

“Easy enough when you’re a king’s brother. Or even just an ordinary duke, maybe,” he said kindly, to give me hope. “Women push themselves forward. It’s just a matter of picking one who’s the most fair and personable. I suppose you don’t even have to pick just one, but more than one can get complicated, not to say expensive.”

I nodded in what I hoped was a jaded manner. “Richard, when—I mean, can—”

He was good at guessing my thoughts back then. “You’re a bit young, I think, to taste the pleasures of life. When you’re older, there’s some houses I can take you to.”

“In Southwark,” I said, eager to prove that I was not entirely ignorant.

t h e s t o l e n C r o w n 6 5

“Yes, that’s the place. I’ll take you there when you’re sixteen.” He snorted. “If Ned hasn’t already taken you by then.”

During my thirteenth year, my mind was not always preoccupied with carnal matters. I spent a great deal of time thinking about my family—the family I’d been born into, not the one into which I’d married.

My Beaufort grandfather died in battle while I was still in my mother’s womb, as I have said earlier, but he left behind three sons, my uncles. The eldest, Henry, the second Duke of Somerset, had been carried off half dead from the first battle of St. Albans, after which he had waged war against the House of York and the Earl of Warwick for years until finally making his peace with Edward. The king, at least, had been sincere in his desire for reconciliation; he’d hunted with my uncle, arranged a tournament in his honor, even done him the great honor of allowing him to sleep beside him. But Henry Beaufort had either been planning to rebel all along or undergone a change of heart. He soon fell back in with some of his old comrades, who rose against the king. It was a fateful choice. John Neville, the Kingmaker’s younger brother, defeated the Duke of Somerset’s troops at Hexham in 1464. My uncle and thirty others were executed straightaway. No one in the Duchess of Exeter’s household, where I was living at the time, saw fit to tell me the news; I found out later when I heard some servants gossiping.

There were two other Beaufort uncles left to me after that: Edmund (who called himself the third Duke of Somerset, though the king said that he had no right to do so) and the youngest, John. They had fled abroad after the defeat at Hexham and were now living under the protection of Charles, the Duke of Burgundy—much to the irritation of Edward, whose sister Margaret was Charles’s duchess.

I, of course, had never met any of these uncles, which gave them all a certain glamour to me. No one spoke to me of them, save for my mother when Humphrey died; it was as if I were not supposed to know that they

6 6 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m existed. One day, Kate and I were playing at bowls in the queen’s chambers when the king stormed in, muttering about Duke Charles sheltering the whoreson Edmund Beaufort, the Duke of Sowshit, and then he noticed me and hastily changed the subject, saving his rant for a more private time, I suppose. Fortunately, others were less circumspect than the king, and I picked up information about my Beaufort uncles here and there. I wondered if I looked like them or had any of their mannerisms.

My Stafford uncles were another matter. There were two of them, Henry and John, and both had made their peace with York. Owing to that, I saw them now and then, so neither, of course, interested me nearly as much as the Beauforts.

With half of my family for Lancaster and the other half for York, I naturally spent, as I said earlier, a lot of time thinking about the subject.

My mind should have been made up for me, I suppose, as I was married to the queen’s sister and was being raised at Edward’s court. But it was not. Edward was affable enough to me back then, when he noticed me, and I adored Richard and tolerated George. But I was named for King Henry, and I could not forget that or my relatives who had died fighting for his cause.

King Henry had been in the Tower since 1465, having been a fugitive for months before finally being captured and taken there. I would look at the fortress when my travels brought me by it and wonder what it was like for a man who had been king since he was nine months old to be a prisoner there. Once or twice, I even wondered about getting permission to visit him. I said as much one day to Richard, who replied, “Are you daft, Harry?

How much of a Lancastrian are you, anyway?”

“I was named after him, after all. And Grandmother Buckingham was godmother to his son. Grandfather presented his baby son to King Henry after Henry had been ill for all of that time.”

Richard snorted. “Ill, Harry? Mad as midsummer, you mean. I’d not brag about that connection if I were you.”

“I don’t. I just get curious.”

t h e s t o l e n C r o w n 6 7

“Ned wonders about you, you know, with your Beaufort blood, whether it will out. And it doesn’t help that you are always asking all and sundry about those uncles of yours.”

I flushed. I thought I had been more subtle. “Well, what I am supposed to do? Pretend they don’t exist, as does everyone else?”

“At the moment, that might be a good idea. Have you forgotten what happened last autumn to Poynings and Alford?”

I had not forgotten. Though you couldn’t have guessed it from life at Greenwich or Sheen, Edward had never been all that secure on his throne. Each time one threat to it was removed, another popped up, and last year had been a particularly bad one. That summer, Thomas Cook, a rich draper who had been the mayor of London for a time, had been convicted of misprision of treason for not revealing a Lancastrian plot to kill the king. He’d been fined eight thousand marks, and he should have been grateful that was all that had happened to him; that same autumn, Henry Courtenay, Thomas Hungerford, and the Earl of Oxford had been arrested.

The earl had gone free—it helped that he had wed Warwick’s sister—but perhaps terrified of the fate that had claimed his father and his brother, he had implicated John Poynings and William Alford, servants of the Duke of Norfolk. When in Burgundy in the Duchess of Norfolk’s train, they had taken the opportunity to communicate with my uncle Edmund Beaufort, who frequented the Duke of Burgundy’s court. For that, Poynings and Alford had lost their heads in November. Other deaths had followed; it had been a fine season for London’s executioners. “I suppose you’re right.

I shouldn’t mention my Beaufort uncles.”

“That would be wise indeed. Especially because, if you ask me, more treason will soon be afoot.”

“Oh? I thought the king had taken care of his enemies.”

“For the time being, but Ned’s shortsighted. He doesn’t realize how the Earl of Warwick and others detest his favorites. Your Woodville in-laws and that lot. Or if he does realize, he can’t be bothered to worry about it.”

6 8 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m “They’re your in-laws too. And what have they done that’s so offensive?”

“It’s not so much what they’ve done as who they are. Upstarts. Warwick feels pushed aside, especially after the king made that alliance with Burgundy when Warwick was pressing for France. And Ned isn’t as popular as he once was. His taxes have irritated people; trade isn’t all that it could be. The laws aren’t enforced properly; order isn’t kept. Sometimes I think Ned’s a little lazy, to be honest. If I were—” He stopped and looked me full in the face. “I’ve been speaking to you very frankly of Ned and his faults. Too frankly, really. Don’t say anything of this conversation, Harry, will you?”

“Of course not,” I said.

And I kept my promise. Only on one occasion have I ever been untrue to Richard.

vii

Kate: March 1469 to December 1469

In 1467 Bessie bore the king another daughter, Mary. in March of 1469, she gave birth to the king’s third child—yet another daughter, named Cecily after the king’s mother, who naturally was the baby’s godmother. If Edward was bothered by the lack of a son, he did not make it apparent, and we had another grand christening, with a festive churching a month later.

Not long after Bessie’s churching in April, word arose of a rising up north. (I have never been to the North, by the way. I cannot say that I regret this.) It was led by someone who gave himself the absurd name of Robin Mend-All, and John Neville, who had recently been made Earl of Northumberland for his loyalty to the king, handily put it down.

Then yet another group of northern malcontents appeared. This group wished to restore Henry Percy, a youth who had been long imprisoned in the Tower, to his family’s earldom—the earldom, in fact, that had been given to John Neville. Neville put this rising down as efficiently as the last, and beheaded the leader—who was yet another person calling himself Robin, this one Robin of Holderness—for good measure.

Then Robin Mend-All surfaced again in June.

The king decided that traveling to the North himself would be the best way to deal with the problem, but neither he nor anyone else saw any reason to rush. Instead, he went ahead with plans to go on a pilgrimage to Bury St. Edmunds and to Walsingham, then to make his way north.

7 0 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m My father and my brothers Anthony and John accompanied him, as did Richard, Duke of Gloucester.