The White Princess (59 page)

I look at my son, I see the inheritance we are preparing for him, and I have no answer.

It is a victory, but one so reluctantly won that there is little joy. Henry gives out knighthoods grudgingly, and those who are so honored dread the charges that will come with their new titles. Massive punitive taxes are laid on anyone who sympathized with the rebels, and lords and gentry have to pay huge fines to the Exchequer to guarantee their future good behavior. The leaders of the Cornishmen are briskly tried and hanged, their entrails drawn out of them and then they are quartered, hacked alive as they die in agony. Lord Audley loses his head in a prompt execution when the crowd laugh at his grave face as he puts his head on the block for defending his tenants against his king. Henry’s army pursues the Cornishmen all the way back to Cornwall and they disappear into the lanes which are so shielded with hedges that they are like green tunnels in a green land, and nobody can tell where the traitors have gone, nor what they are doing.

“They’re waiting,” Henry tells me.

“What are they waiting for?” I ask, as if I don’t know.

“For the boy.”

“Where is he now?”

For the first time in many months Henry smiles. “He thinks he is setting out on campaign, financed by the King of Scotland, supported by him.”

I wait in silence, knowing that triumphant beam well enough by now.

“But he is not.”

“No?”

“He is being tricked on board a ship. He is to be handed over to me. James of Scotland has finally agreed that I shall have the boy.”

“You know where he is?”

“I know where he is and I know the name of the ship that he will set sail in: him and his wife and his son. James of Scotland has utterly betrayed him to me, and my allies the Spanish will pick him up at sea, pretending friendship, and bring him to me. And at last, we will make an end of him.”

WOODSTOCK PALACE, OXFORDSHIRE, SUMMER 1497

Then, we lose him again.

The court behaves as if we are on a summer progress, but really we are trapped in the middle of England, afraid to move in one direction or another, waiting for trouble but not knowing where the boy may land. Henry hardly ever leaves his room. At every place where we stay he creates a headquarters ready for a siege, receiving messages, sending out orders, commanding more arms, mustering soldiers, even getting his own armor fitted new, and he readies himself to wear it on the field of battle. But he does not know where the battle will be, as he has no idea where the boy has gone.

Arthur cannot return to Ludlow Castle. “I should be in my principality!” he says to me. “I should be with my people.”

“I know. But your guardian Sir Richard has to command his men in the king’s armies. And while your father does not know where the boy might land, it is safer if we are all together.”

He looks at me, his brown eyes dark with concern. “Mother, when are we going to be at peace?”

I can’t answer him.

One moment the boy was said to be in his love nest with his new bride, beloved of the Scots king, confidently planning another venture; but then we hear that the boy has sailed from Scotland, and disappeared once again, as this boy so skillfully seems to do.

“D’you think he has gone to your aunt?” Henry asks me. Every day he asks me where I think the boy has gone. I have Mary on my knee, and am sitting in a sunny spot in her nursery in a high tower of the beautiful palace. I hold her a little tighter as her father stamps up and down before us, too loud, too big, too furious for a nursery, a man spoiling for a fight and on the edge of losing control. Mary regards him gravely, not at all afraid of him. She watches him as a baby might watch a bearbaiting: a curious spectacle but not one that threatens her.

“Of course I don’t know where he’s gone,” I say. “I can’t imagine. I thought you told me that the Holy Roman Emperor himself had ordered the duchess not to support or succor him?”

“Why would she ever do as she is told?” Henry rounds on me. “Faithless as she is to anything but the House of York? Faithless as she is to anything but ruining my life and destroying my rightful hold on my own kingdom!”

This is too loud for Mary and her lower lip turns down, her face trembles. I turn her towards me and show her a smile. “There,” I say. “Hush. Nothing’s wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong?” Henry repeats incredulously.

“Nothing for Mary,” I say. “Don’t distress her.”

His angry glance falls on her as if he would shout to warn her that she is in danger, her house on the brink of collapse, thanks to an enemy like a will-o’-the-wisp. “Where is he?” he asks again.

“Surely, you have all the ports watched?”

“Costs me a fortune, but there is not an inch of the coast that is not patrolled.”

“Then if he comes, you will know. Perhaps he has gone back to Ireland.”

“Ireland? What d’you know about Ireland?” he demands, swift as a snake.

“I don’t know!” I protest. “How should I know? It’s just that he was there before. He has friends there.”

“Who? What friends?”

I stand up to face him, holding Mary close. “My lord, I don’t know. If I knew anything, I would tell you. But I know nothing. All I ever hear is what you tell me, yourself. No one else speaks to me of him, and anyway, I would not listen if they did.”

“The Spanish may yet take him,” Henry says, more to himself than to me. “They have promised him their friendship and they will capture him for me. They have promised me that they have ships waiting off the coast for him and he has agreed to meet with them. Perhaps they will—”

There is a sudden loud hammering on the door, Mary cries out, and I clutch her tighter to me and stride across the room, away from the door, towards the bedroom, as if I am running away, suddenly afraid. Henry spins on his heel, his face white. I pause on the threshold of the bedroom door, Henry just a step before me so that when the messenger walks in, dirty from the road, he sees the two of us, pale with fear, as if we are expecting attack. He drops to his knee. “Your Grace.”

“What is it?” Henry demands roughly. “You frightened Her Grace, coming in so loudly.”

“It’s an invasion,” he says.

Henry sways and clutches at the back of the chair. “The boy?”

“No. The Scots. The King of Scots is marching.”

We have to trust Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, my sister Anne’s husband, to save England for Henry. We, who trust nothing and fear everything, have to trust to him; but it is the rain that serves us best. Both the English and the Scots set sieges and are all but destroyed by the unceasing rain. The English troops, camped on wet ground before stoical castles, fall ill, and melt away in the driving mist to their own homes, to warm fires
and dry clothes. Thomas Howard cannot keep them loyal, cannot even keep them in their ranks. They don’t want to fight, they don’t care that Henry is defending his kingdom against England’s oldest enemy. They don’t care about him at all.

Thomas Howard stands before Henry in the privy chamber. I am at one side of Henry’s great chair, his mother at the other, as Henry rages at him, accusing him of dishonesty, treachery, faithlessness.

“I could not make the men stay,” Thomas says miserably. “I could not even make their leaders stay. They had no appetite for the fight and there were scant rewards. You don’t know what it was like.”

“Are you saying I don’t go to war?” Henry bursts out.

Thomas shoots a quick horrified glance at me, his sister-in-law. “No, Your Grace, of course not. I only meant that I cannot describe to you how hard this campaign is. It’s very wet and very cold in this part of your country. The food is scanty and it’s hard to get firewood in some places. Some nights the men had to sleep without anything to eat in the cold rain, and wake without breakfast. It’s hard to supply an army and the men had no passion for the fight. Nobody doubts Your Grace’s courage. That has been shown. But it is hard to make the men stand firm in this country in this weather.”

“Enough of this. Can you take the field again?” Henry is biting his lips, his face dark and furious.

“If you command me, Sire,” Surrey says miserably. He knows, as we all do, that any hint of refusal will see him back in the Tower, named as a traitor, his marriage to Anne not enough to save him. Again he glances quickly at me, and sees at once, from my impassive expression, that I cannot help him. “I should be proud to lead your men. I will do my best. But they have gone home. We will have to muster them all over again.”

“I can’t keep hiring men,” Henry decides abruptly. “They won’t serve, and I have no funds to pay them. I shall have to make peace with Scotland. I hear that James is down to the last
coin in his treasury too. I shall make peace. And I shall move what men I have left away from the borders. They must come south to be ready.”

“Ready for what?” his mother asks.

I don’t know why she asks, except to hear her own fears in words.

“Ready for the boy.”

WOODSTOCK PALACE, OXFORDSHIRE, AUTUMN 1497

A team of dirty, exhausted messengers rides post, passing the message from one station to another, changing horses as they tire and fall lame, one man pantingly passing a scroll sealed in sheepskin to another. “For the king, at Woodstock Palace!” is all they say, and a new horse and a new man plunges on along the dusty autumn roads, little more than dirt tracks, to ride from dawn till it grows too dark for him to tell the deep sloughs of mud on the road from the overgrown grass of the verge, until he has to sleep, sometimes wrapped in his cloak, under a tree, restlessly waiting for the first light of dawn to thunder to the next post with the precious packet: “For the king, at Woodstock Palace!”

The court is preparing to go out hawking, the riders mounting, the hawk carts with the rows of hooded hawks rolling out of the mews, the falconers running alongside the carts speaking soothingly to the blind birds, promising them sport and feeding if they will be good birds, be steady and patient now, stand proudly on their perches: don’t bate, don’t flap.

Henry is dressed handsomely in dark green velvet with dark green leather riding boots and green leather gloves. He is trying so hard to look like a king living on his own fortune, comfortable with his court, happy in his kingdom, beloved of his people. Only
the new lines around his pinched mouth betray him as a man living with gritted teeth.