The White Queen (13 page)

By the end of the long process of marriage and ennoblement, no man can live in England
without encountering one of my family: you cannot make a trade, plow a field, or try
a case without meeting one of the great Rivers family or their dependants. We are
everywhere; we are where the king has chosen to place us. And should the day come
that everyone turns against him, he will find that we, the Riverses, run deep and
strong, a moat around his castle. When he loses all other allies, we will still be
his friends, and now we are in power.

We are loyal to him and he cleaves to us. I swear to him my faith and my love, and
he knows there is no woman in the world who loves him more than I do. My brothers
and my father, my cousins and my sisters, and all our new husbands and wives promise
him their absolute loyalty, whatever comes, whoever comes against us. We make a new
family neither Lancaster nor York; we are the Woodville family enobled as Riverses,
and we stand behind the king like a wall of water. Half the kingdom can hate us, but
now I have made us so powerful that I do not care.

Edward settles to the business of governing a country that is accustomed to having
no king at all. He appoints justices and sheriffs to replace men killed in battle;
he commands them to impose law and order
in their counties. Men who have seized the chance to make war on their neighbors have
to return to their own bounds. The soldiers discharged from one side or another have
to go back to their homes. The warring bands who have taken their chance to ride out
and terrorize must be hunted down, the roads have to be made safe again. Edward starts
the hard work of making England a country at peace with itself once more. A country
at peace instead of a country at war.

Then, finally, there is an end to the constant warfare when we capture the former
King Henry, half lost and half-witted in the hills of Northumberland, and Edward orders
him to be brought to the Tower of London, for his own safety and for ours. He is not
always in his right mind, God keep him. He moves into the rooms in the Tower and seems
to know where he is; he seems to be glad to be home after his wandering. He lives
quietly, communing with God, a priest at his side night and day. We don’t even know
if he remembers his wife or the son she told him was his; certainly, he never speaks
of them nor asks for them in faraway Anjou. We don’t know for sure if he always remembers
that once he was king. He is lost to the world, poor Henry, and he has forgotten everything
that we have taken from him.

Edward trusts Warwick with an embassy to France, and Warwick seizes the opportunity
to get away from England and away from court. He cannot bear the rising of our tide
and the slow decline of his own hopes. He plans to make a treaty with the King of
France and promises him that the government of England is still in his gift; and that
he is going to choose the husband for the York heiress Margaret. But he is lying,
and everyone knows that his days of power are over. Edward listens to my mother, to
me, and to his other advisors, who say that the dukedom of Burgundy has been a faithful
friend, where France is a constant enemy, and that an alliance with Burgundy could
be made for the good of trade, for the sake of our cousinship, and could be cemented
with the marriage of Edward’s sister Margaret to the new duke himself: Charles, who
has just inherited the rich lands of Burgundy.

Charles is a key friend to England. The Duke of Burgundy owns all the lands of Flanders,
as well as his own dukedom of Burgundy, and so commands all the lowlands of the north,
all the lands between Germany and France, and the rich lands in the south. They are
great buyers of English cloth, merchants and allies to us.
Their ports face ours across the English sea; their usual enemy is France, and they
look to us for alliance. These are traditional friends of England and now—through
me—kinsmen to the English king.

All this is planned without reference to the girl herself, of course; and Margaret
comes to me when I am walking in the garden at Westminster Palace, all in a fluster,
as someone has told her that her betrothal to Dom Pedro of Portugal is to be put aside
and she is now to be sold to the highest bidder, either to Louis of France for one
of the French princes, or to Charles of Burgundy.

“It’ll be all right,” I say to her, tucking her hand in mine so she can walk beside
me. She is only twenty-two, and she was not raised to be the sister of a king. She
is not accustomed to the way that her husband-to-be can change with the needs of the
moment, and her mother, torn between her divided loyalties to her rivalrous sons,
has quite failed to care for her daughters.

When Margaret was a little girl, she thought she would be married to an English lord
and live in an English castle, raising children. She even dreamed of being a nun—she
shares her mother’s enthusiasm for the Church. She did not realize, when her father
claimed the throne and her brother won it, that a price must always be paid for power,
and it will be paid by her as well as the rest of us. She doesn’t realize yet that
though men go to war it is women who suffer—perhaps more than anyone.

“I won’t marry a Frenchman. I hate the French,” she
says hotly. “My father fought them; he would not have wanted me to marry a Frenchman.
My brother should not think of it. I don’t know why my mother considers it. She was
with the English army in France; she knows what the French are like. I am of the House
of York. I don’t want to be a Frenchwoman!”

“You won’t be,” I say steadily. “That is the plan of the Earl of Warwick, and he no
longer has the ear of the king. Yes, he takes French bribes and he favors France;
but my advice to the king is that he should make an alliance with the Duke of Burgundy,
and that will be a better alliance for you. Just think—you will be my kinswoman! You
will marry the Duke of Burgundy and live in the beautiful palace at Lille. Your husband-to-be
is an honored friend of the House of York, and my kinsman through my mother. He is
a good friend, and from his palace you will be able to come on visits home. And when
my daughters are old enough I shall send them to you, to teach them the elegant court
life at Burgundy. There is nowhere more fashionable and more beautiful than the court
of Burgundy. And as Duchess of Burgundy you shall be godmother to my sons. How will
that be?”

She is partly comforted. “But I am of the House of York,” she says again. “I want
to stay in England. At least until we have finally defeated the Lancastrians, and
I want to see the christening of your son, the first York prince. Then I shall want
to see him made Prince of Wales . . .”

“You shall come to his christening, whenever he
comes to us,” I promise her. “And he will know his aunt is his good guardian. But
you can further the needs of the House of York in Burgundy. You will keep Burgundy
a friend to York and to England, and if ever Edward is in trouble, he will know that
he can call on the Burgundy wealth and arms. And if ever again he is in danger from
a false friend, he can come to you for help. You will like to be our ally over the
sea. You will be our haven.”

She drops her little head on my shoulder. “Your Grace, my sister,” she says. “It is
hard for me to go away. I have lost a father and I am not sure that my brother is
not still in danger. I am not sure that he and George are true friends; I am not certain
that George does not envy Edward, and I am afraid of what my lord Warwick might do.
I want to stay here. I want to be with Edward and with you. I love my brother George;
I don’t want to leave him at this time. I don’t want to leave my mother. I don’t want
to leave home.”

“I know,” I say gently. “But you can be a powerful and good sister to Edward and to
George as the Duchess of Burgundy. We will know that there is always one country that
we can depend on to stand our friend. We will know that there is a beautiful duchess
who is a Yorkist through and through. You can go to Burgundy and have sons, York sons.”

“D’you think I can found a House of York overseas?”

“You will found a new line,” I assure her. “And we will be glad to know that you are
there, and we will visit you.”

She puts a brave face on it, and Warwick puts a two-faced face on it and escorts her
to the port of Margate, and we wave her away, our little duchess, and I know that
of all of Edward’s brothers and sisters, George the unfaithful and Richard the boy,
we have just sent away the most loving, the most loyal, the most reliable Yorkist
of them all.

To Warwick, this is another defeat at my hands and at the hands of my family. He promised
that Margaret would have a French husband, but he has to take her to the Duke of Burgundy.
He planned to make an alliance with France and he said that he had control of the
decision making in England. Instead, we are to marry into the royal House of Burgundy:
my mother’s family. And everyone can see that England is commanded by the Rivers family
and that the king listens only to us. Warwick escorts Margaret on her wedding journey
with a face as if he is sucking lemons, and I laugh behind my hand to see him overpowered
and outnumbered by us, and think myself safe from his ambition and his malice.

I am wrong, I am so wrong. We are not so powerful, we are not powerful enough. And
I should have taken more care. I did not think, and I, of all people, who was afraid
of Warwick before I had even met him, should have thought of his envy and his enmity.
I did not foresee—and I of all queens with growing sons of my own should have foreseen—that
Warwick and Edward’s bitter mother might come together and think to place another
York boy on the throne in place of the first boy they had chosen, that the Kingmaker
would make a new king.

I should have been more aware of Warwick, as my family pushed him out of his offices
and won the lands that he might have wanted for himself. I should have seen also that
George, the young Duke of Clarence, was bound to interest him. George is a son of
York like Edward, but malleable, easily tempted, and above all unmarried. Warwick
looked at Edward and me and the growing strength and wealth of the Riverses that I
have put around Edward, and began to think that perhaps he might make another king,
another king again, a king who would be more obedient to him.

Three beautiful daughters, we have, one newborn,
and we are hoping—with rising anxiety—for a son, when Edward gets news of a rebel
in Yorkshire calling himself Robin. Robin of Redesdale, a fanciful name meaning nothing,
a petty rebel hiding himself behind a legendary name, raising troops, slandering my
family, and demanding justice and freedom and the usual nonsense by which good men
are tempted from minding their fields to go to their deaths. Edward pays little attention
at first, and I, foolishly, think nothing of it at all. Edward is on pilgrimage with
my family, my Grey sons Richard and Thomas and his young brother Richard, showing
himself to the people and giving thanks to God, and I am traveling to meet him with
the girls and, though we write every day, we think so little of the uprising that
he does not even mention it in his letters.

Even when my father remarks to me that someone is paying these men—they are not armed
with pitchforks, they have good boots, and they are marching in good order—I pay him
no attention. Even when he says, a few days later, that these are men who belong to
someone: peasants or tenants or men sworn to a lord, I hardly listen to his hard-won
wisdom. Even when he points out to me that no man takes up his scythe and thinks he
will go and fight in a war; someone, his lord, has to give the order. Even then, I
pay him no attention. When my brother John says that this is Warwick’s country and
most likely the rebels are raised by Warwick’s men, I still think nothing of it. I
have a new baby and my world revolves around her carved gold-painted crib. We are
on progress in southeast England where
we are beloved, the summer is fine, and I think, when I think at all, that the rebels
will most likely go home in time to bring in the harvest, and the unrest will go quiet
of its own accord.