The Stolen Crown: The Secret Marriage That Forever Changed the Fate of England (37 page)

Was my great sadness a foreknowledge of what was to come? I think not; I have not the gift of prophecy.

At last I remember processing back to Baynard’s Castle. There Richard shooed the others out of his chamber. When we were alone, he smiled.

“We’ve changed history, my friend,” he said.

I nodded, wondering if people who changed history always felt a little

2 5 0 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m seasick afterward. Seasick, and drunk with fatigue as well. “So it seems.” I yawned before I could even cover my mouth. “My apolo—”

Richard laughed. “Poor Harry, you’re about to fall over, aren’t you? So I am I, I’m not ashamed to say.” He nodded toward the inner chamber.

“You shall have the privilege of sharing my bed tonight. The first person to be so honored by me as king.”

“No Anne?”

He shrugged. “She didn’t help me to the crown. You did.” I made as if to take his robes off, and he shook his head. “No. We must do this in proper form. Boys!”

A group of pages hastened in and began the work of preparing the king’s bed and undressing us, a ceremony that no doubt would later become more elaborate in the days to come. On this night, however, the task was accomplished briskly. When all had departed and we lay side by side, Richard said, “Do you think I’ll make a good king?”

“If I didn’t, why did I tell half of London you would? You’ll be the best king England could ever have, Richard.”

Richard smiled in the light of the cresset lamp that burned over us.

“Thank you.” His voice dropped a note. “I couldn’t have had a better friend than you in all of this.” He leaned over and kissed my cheek, lightly.

“I love you, Harry.”

Those were, I realized as Richard rolled over in preparation for sleep, the four words I’d been longing to hear since I was thirteen years of age.

xix

Kate: June 1483 to July 1483

Harry tried to justify William Hastings’s death to me. He spoke vaguely of secret meetings, plots, fears for his and Richard’s life. I believed none of it. No one did, really, especially when, just days later, Richard and Harry began to put it out that Edward had been precontracted to Eleanor Butler.

I remembered, faintly, the Duchess of Norfolk tipsily babbling about a romance that her sister had had with the king. I remembered, also faintly, mentioning it to Harry. But a marriage? I could not believe it. Surely if there had been the slightest hint of such a thing, Edward, a loving father and a proud Yorkist, would have done all that he could to protect the crown for his son. He’d obtained papal dispensations for his sister the Duchess of Exeter to annul her marriage to the poor Duke of Exeter on the flimsiest of grounds. He’d helped his mistress Elizabeth Shore annul her marriage to her supposedly impotent husband. Why for the sake of his sons could he not have done the same for himself, if there were such a marriage in his past? I even asked this of Harry, in the early days when I could still hold a conversation with him, but he merely shrugged. The best minds of the Church, he said, were looking into the matter. It was not a woman’s business to meddle.

In the meantime, other rumors swirled, put in motion by the king and his creatures. There was the vile old one that the Duchess of York had committed adultery and that her son the late king was the bastard offspring of their relationship. There was the vile new one that my sister Bessie had

2 5 2 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m taken the royal treasury into sanctuary with her—the amount of her haul grew daily, so that within a week or so the late king (and therefore my sister with her purloined goods) had become as rich as Croesus. Within another week, my brother Edward and my nephew Dorset, and then all of us Woodvilles, shared in the loot.

Mama was a witch, so was Bessie. The ladies of our family gathered each All Hallows’ Eve with our familiars and cast spells over anyone who had slighted us recently. Poor Lionel, who had become the Bishop of Salisbury just the year before, did unspeakable things with the Host. Edward had turned pirate. Even my brother Richard, who had no taste for public life and who was happiest on his manors deep in the country, was said to be lusting after the crown.

During those miserable days, I hardly saw Harry. I did, however, beg him to spare my brother’s life, and those of Richard Grey and Vaughan, for I knew that with Hastings’s death, their own lives hung by the weakest of threads. I got back a reply that any petitioner would get: my request would be considered.

Then, the day after Richard, Duke of Gloucester, became the King of England, the news arrived that Anthony, Richard Grey, and Thomas Vaughan had been beheaded at Pontefract. Harry had not told me; I learned it when the news was cried out by Gloucester’s heralds.

“I’m sorry, Kate. I know you’re upset.”

Upset
, as if three men’s deaths were no more than a spoiled bolt of fabric or an overcooked piece of meat. “You knew all along he planned to kill them.”

“I did not! Kate, you have to understand, they were plotting against Richard—and even me as well. They wanted to destroy us. Richard had to order their deaths. It wasn’t a decision he made lightly.”

“They wanted to take my nephew to London and crown him, as his father wished! You and Gloucester swore your allegiance to the boy!”

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“That was when we believed that he was the rightful heir to the throne.

Kate, you’re hardly unbiased, being Elizabeth Woodville’s sister.”

“And you’re unbiased, being Gloucester’s friend?”

“I told him of the story about Eleanor Butler—the story you told me— and the Duchess of Norfolk confirmed it, as best she could. The king did nothing to influence her. If she had denied it, we would not be having this conversation.”

I gave up, realizing what a hopelessly circular conversation this would turn into. Harry would justify anything his idol, Richard, did. “I have asked my tailor to have mourning robes made for me. I trust you will at least allow me to wear them, and for me to have masses said for my brother’s soul, and those of the rest?”

“Well, of course,” said Harry. He touched my face, and for a moment I almost recognized the remnants of my husband in what had become Richard’s creature. “I am sorry, Kate, truly. Perhaps Anthony felt that he was acting for the best. It is—unfortunate that he’s gone.”

“Yes. But I still have three other brothers, don’t I? We Woodvilles are so very expendable.”

Harry shifted on his feet uncomfortably. “I am sorry for your brother’s death, sincerely, whether you think it or not. But now there is something else I must say to you. I am afraid you will not be allowed to take part in the coronation as one of the queen’s attendants. It would be very awkward— your being a Woodville, you see, and so bitter toward the king.”

“Indeed. There is no telling what I might do, lawless wretch that I am.” I inspected my sleeve. “Yes, I could fit a dagger right here, and stab Gloucester when he walks by.”

“I am sure, though, that in time, you will be welcome at Richard’s court, as of course, will our children.” I closed my eyes, sick at the very thought of my darlings at that man’s court. Harry continued, “But for now, I think it best that you stay away.”

“But it is such a pity. I had already planned my robes, with matching ones for my familiar. It would have been quite charming.”

2 5 4 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m “Kate, those rumors. I didn’t st—”

“Go to the devil, Harry.” I turned away, then looked back over my shoulder. “But you already have, haven’t you?”

There is nothing quite like being in a city preparing day and night for something in which you can take no part, and that you pray every night the Lord will work a miracle to prevent. A day or so after this last exchange, Harry returned to his quarters at Westminster in order to superintend the preparations for the coronation, of which he had the ordering. Though many of his servants had followed him there, others remained by necessity in our Bread Street home, and I watched with amusement in those days as the poor things scurried around, frantically doing their part to ensure that all was ready for July 6, the date that had been set for the crowning. For, as I was fond of saying to anyone who would listen, time was of no object to the usurper.

My own servants did nothing to assist Harry’s in the days that followed.

Indeed, they hindered them in what small ways they could, while I smiled blandly. I am half—but only half—ashamed to say that I thoroughly enjoyed the difficulties we caused them.

But despite the lack of cooperation from the distaff side of Harry’s household and my fervent, unanswered prayers—evidently even the Lord himself had been corrupted by Gloucester—the preparations went ahead on schedule. Poor Harry was more efficient than the fourth Edward had ever realized, it appeared. So when it was apparent that the coronation was inevitable, I gave in to the lure of curiosity and decided to watch the procession from the Tower to Westminster that would take place the day before the crowning. After all, Harry had not said that I could not do that, and it might be my only chance to see what the devil looked like in his royal robes.

In my scheme I found a willing accomplice: my page, Richard Wingfield, a boy of around thirteen whom I had long suspected of harboring a bad case of calf love, with myself as the object. At an old-clothes market he procured

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me suitably shabby garments, with what turned out to be a resident colony of fleas, which made me itch for days afterward. “You look terrible, my lady,” he said approvingly as we footed it toward Cheapside.

“And so do you,” I said. We looked like the perfect laboring brother and sister, honest poor folk come to get a glimpse of royalty. Perhaps we might even catch some coins the king’s servants threw our way.

As a duchess I was ill accustomed to the press of the crowds around me, for someone had always been there to clear the way to let my party pass.

Without Richard Wingfield’s help, I would have given up early on. But he, the eleventh of twelve living sons, was well used to pushing his way about, and through his judicious use of elbows and his yanking me through spots where I would never have dreamed I could fit, we at last arrived at a fair vantage point. Had Harry looked straight at me at that moment—my feet aching and blistered, my head covering awry and my hair tangled underneath it, my face smudged with the grime that seemed peculiar to London, my skirt stained with substances that I decided would not bear close analysis—I doubt he would have recognized me as his wife.

We had arrived there early, so we had a long wait. Richard manfully guarded our precious places so that none could press in front of us and obstruct our view. At last, however, the sound of a moving procession reached our ears.

Richard protected me from the push of the people behind us as I watched impatiently, shifting on my uncomfortable pattens, while the first wave of the procession—various lords, knights, aldermen, royal heralds, and royal officials—made its way past us at a stately pace. I knew many of the men, at least by sight, from Edward’s court. Some of the older ones had been present for my sister’s coronation. Maybe those two squires who had borne Harry and me on that day were in this procession too, wearing the new king’s badge with that cruel white boar, while I stood in my stinking old clothes gazing at them. It was unreal.

At last the mayor of London came into view. After him came John Howard, a rich lord in his late fifties whom I had always thought a man

2 5 6 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m of honor. Yet he had sided with Richard throughout the last few weeks, never raising a word in favor of my nephew the young king, never blinking, it was said, when Hastings was murdered. In return he had been made the Duke of Norfolk, there being no more Mowbrays of the male line to inherit that title. His son Thomas Howard—riding next to him bearing the king’s sword—had been made the Earl of Surrey.
Bought and sold, both of
you
, I thought.

And on the other side of Surrey rode a man I knew very well. Nearby, a woman clucked her tongue. “Fine-looking man, the Duke of Buckingham.

Wouldn’t I like to warm his bed.”

I instinctively moved to slap her for her impertinence, then fortunately stopped myself.

Not a man who smiled easily, Harry on this occasion was beaming, turning his head graciously from side to side as he moved past the onlookers.

My neighbor was right: he did look handsome in his blue velvet robe, embroidered with golden, burning carts, and for an aching moment I desired him myself. He was on his finest palfrey, a chestnut that matched my own favorite steed. In better days, before the world went mad, we’d ridden them side by side.

I could not brood long on this, though, for just behind the sword of state, underneath a canopy carried by four knights, rode the devil himself, a vision in purple.

He must have practiced the expression he wore. It wouldn’t do, after all, to look too terribly happy about having snatched the crown from a twelve-year-old boy, one whom he had sworn to protect. So instead of a smile, like Harry, he’d plastered a look of benevolence onto his face, mixed with humility.

I wore a dinner knife at my waist. I could have bolted into the road and stabbed Gloucester in the thigh; perhaps I could have even swung upon his horse and thrust my blade into his chest or, better yet, into the neck below that odious visage. But I would have been killed in the doing of it, even if I had the strength to force my knife in deep enough, and I could