Queen of Trial and Sorrow (39 page)

I put my face in my hands and pressed my fingers into my eyes.  From behind that barrier I whispered fiercely: “Sometimes I hate him.  Hate him! 
Hate him!
”

Anne was confused.  “Who do you mean, dearest?  Nesfield?”

“Edward!”

“Oh, Bess, he cannot have known,” she said, sorrow making her voice tremble.

“None of us could have guessed.  The duke was always conspicuously loyal…”

“There were signs, though, in his treatment of the Countesses of Warwick and Oxford, women who were vulnerable, having no male protector.  Edward should have known!  He should never have trusted him, not with our children.” I lowered my hands, gazed at her white pitying face.  “But it’s more than that: Don’t you see?  The only thing to lend credibility to this convenient fable is my husband’s deplorable reputation and his secret marriage to me, which some will see as a predisposition to furtive dealings of that nature.”

“It is indeed a most potent piece of mischief but no one will believe it – ”

“He’s stolen my children’s futures and he’s stolen my past.  The only thing that sweetened those years of danger and strife was my love for my husband his for me.  It was the one certainty in my life. I have so many treasured memories, and when he died I believed that one day I would be able to look back and find comfort in them, but they are spoiled now, ruined by a sense of betrayal and more and more I find myself hating him.  Because, in the end, he failed in a sacred duty: he failed to secure the safe succession of our son.”

  Wise enough to know there was nothing she could say to comfort me, Anne remained silent.

……….

Though it was a fine sunny day, I ordered all the windows closed and the shutters fastened.  I wanted nothing of what was happening outside to drift into the abbot’s house.  I barred the door to the bedchamber and spent the entire day in prayer.  On that dark day, July sixth 1483, Richard of Gloucester was crowned by the man into whose keeping I had given my youngest son less than three weeks earlier. 

How low we had fallen was made plain to me the following Friday when I had a quarrel with the abbot.  Previously, my children and I had bathed once a week in the tub I had brought for the purpose, and the monks had consented to bring us hot water.  Even so, we had to take it in turns sharing the same water and by the time Katherine and Brigit’s turn came, the water was not only dirty but also as cold as if it had come straight from the well.  Still, compromises had to be made.  When I next asked for hot water to be brought, the abbot himself came and told me that it was high time we gave up such foolish vanities as weekly baths!  We were, after all, living on the grounds of a monastery and our constant demands for water were a trial to the monks.  I replied that even if we were living on the grounds of a monastery, we were not monks and did not wish to smell like monks.  We were royal persons and it was our habit to wash our hands before and after each meal, to wash our hands and faces morning and night and to take weekly baths.  And, furthermore, he was as parsimonious with water as a miser with his coins! 

Whereupon, he told me I would be wise to get any idea of our being royalty out of my head, for I had never been a proper wife to the king and my children were no more than the progeny of an illicit union – which was his monkishly temperate way of saying that I was the king’s harlot, no better than Jane Shore, and my children were bastards.  And if we wanted to bathe in the future we could do so in cold water.

“You cannot believe such nonsense,” I said indignantly.

“It matters not what I believe, nor what anyone believes.  It is now Law,” said the abbot, who was a cold man and a harsh shepherd.

“Law!” I said.  “Pray do not speak to me about Law!  How can an assembly of men, with no legal authority, depose the king?  It is laughable.  Only parliament can do that.  And if my son has not been deposed, it follows that Gloucester cannot be king.  Nor can such a body decide the validity of a marriage that lasted, and was accepted as valid for nineteen years.  Even a properly constituted parliament cannot decide such a weighty question.  The matter ought to have been submitted to an ecclesiastical court, but my lord of Gloucester could not take the chance that the church might not find in his favor.”  I would not by any word of mine convey sovereignty on that conscienceless usurper, nor give him any royal honorific.   

“Madam, you do yourself and your cause no good – ”

I did not let him finish; I could feel my fury rising.  “What cause, my lord abbot?  Tell me, what cause?  My children are disinherited!  I am apostrophized as a harlot!  My husband – whom God assoil – has been branded a bastard and a bigamist and his government reviled by him in who the late king reposed his utmost trust, who has better reason than any to be true, but has revealed himself to be an unprincipled and wicked dissembler with no respect for the Law!  So tell me, what cause might I forward by speaking well of the tyrant?”

“I see you are becoming hysterical, Dame Gray, and will not listen to reason.  I shall bid you good day.”

Dame Grey: That’s who I was before becoming queen and that’s who I had become again.  Dame Grey, a widowed gentlewoman of no great standing and no pretensions to royalty.  The abbot could turn his back on me and walk from my presence without so much as an inclination of his narrow head.  And how typical that he should accuse me of becoming hysterical because he had no better answer.  I am not and never have been prone to hysteria.

Bessie said: “Mama, you ought not to argue with him.  It will make no difference.  He is not a kind man.”   

She was right.  It made me feel no better to give the abbot a taste of the sharp edge of my tongue.  Indeed, I feared I would never feel better again, that I would go to my grave filled with a poisonous mélange of murderous rage and hatred, of grief and sorrow and remorse and impotence and terror. 

……….

I used to think that when I am an old, old woman, with deep wrinkles and few teeth; when my sluggish mind wanders to times gone by as old people are wont to do, I would remember summer evenings at Greenwich as the best of times.  We often took the royal barge upon the river, and floated between patches of sunlight that looked as if gold dust had been scattered on the water, and deep green reflective patches where trees grew close to the banks.  We would pass fair meadows where cows stood lowing, and on Sundays we saw boys kicking a ball around.  Football was an illegal practice, for parliament had passed a bill forbidding the sport and encouraging instead the practice of archery so there would never be a shortage of bowmen for the king’s armies.  But no act of parliament could stop boys at play, and they ran to the riverbank when they saw the barge going by and jumped up and down in excitement and waved their hands.  Those upon the towpath snatched their hats off and bowed low, for the royal standard flew from the stern of the boat.

Flawless evenings on the river.  Summer breezes stirring the air, rippling the water.  Midges hovering, kingfishers darting, ducks swimming away from the prow, hovering nervously in the shallows, birds singing in the overhanging branches. 

Some would do a little fishing, but mostly we just ate fruit, listened to the music of minstrels, and forgot our cares for a while.  I would recline upon some cushions and Edward would sprawl out full length with his head in my lap.  I often wondered if anyone else could feel the sexual tension between us; to me it was so palpable whenever we were together.  He had only to smile at me in a certain way from across a room to ignite a flame in me.

We had been enduring a heat wave, no rain for two weeks and a blistering sun in a deep cloudless sky.  It was that kind of day, the kind that not so very long ago and yet in a different life, Edward would have dismissed his secretaries, told the petitioners to come back tomorrow and taken the royal barge onto the river.  But I didn’t dwell upon such memories.  I couldn’t prevent them entering my mind from time to time but whenever they did I routed them at once. 

The house was hot and I took my sewing out into the garden.  It wasn’t much of a garden, a patch of grass, a few bordering bushes, enclosed by the blank stone walls of abbey buildings, a place for quiet reflection.  At the far end was a gate that led to the river but it was kept locked.  To one side was a stone bench that was cast in shade after the sun had passed its zenith.  I sat down and put my sewing basket on the grass and forgot all about it.  I sat there wrapped in misery, reliving my quarrel with the abbot.  I was on the point of giving way to tears, when Anne appeared in the open door to say I had a visitor: Sir Thomas St. Leger.  My first instinct was to make some excuse for not seeing him.  I didn’t want to talk to anyone.  I certainly didn’t want to relive the last three months with him.  But he had been one of Edward’s household knights and I believed he and the others had transferred their devotion from the father to the son. 

Thomas had not married again after the death of his duchess.  The good looks that had won her heart so many years ago were scarcely impaired by age.  The sprinkle of silver at his temples and the lines scored across his brow only made him more distinguished-looking.  Sweat beaded on his brow and upper lip.  Pulling off his cap, holding it to his breast, he knelt before me and I gave him my hand, which he kissed reverently.

“Your Grace.”

To him I was still royal.  I patted the rough stone beside me.  “It’s good to see you again, Sir Thomas.  Come and sit with me and tell me what brings you here.  My visitors are few since…” I couldn’t even bring myself to say the words: the coronation. 

“Madam, I came to beg you not to despair.  Your royal son has not been abandoned.” He took a quick, furtive look around the garden and lowered his voice.  “There will be a rising, very soon.  Many men have pledged their support and once we are in arms and declare our intent we have no doubt many more will join us.”

“I am glad to hear of it,” I said, while thinking: It’s too late!  Unseating a king is very different from stopping a would-be usurper. “Were you there?  Were you at Westminster that day?”  He nodded his dark head slowly, reluctantly.  “What happened?  Why did no one speak out?”

“We all thought we had been summoned to hear the reason for Lord Hastings’ execution, and what we heard instead shocked and stunned us.”

“But you must have known.  By then it was widely suspected that Gloucester intended to make a grab for the crown.”

“Often, though, even when something is expected, it doesn’t negate the shock when it actually happens.  I can only add that the death of Lord Hastings and the knowledge that northern troops were coming filled us with fear.  Every man feared for his own life if he should do or even say anything against the protector.  No one wanted to be first to speak out.  That would have marked him as the ringleader of a conspiracy.  Your own kin have been put to death for no better reason than their loyalty to…Madam?”

I felt my heart stop for a moment, stutter, and stumble on.  I said faintly: “Put to death?”

His face was full of anguish and he flung himself to the ground at my feet.  “Oh, dearest lady, forgive me for my clumsiness.  I thought you knew.”

“Ah, Sir Thomas, I think all my tears are spent.  Sit down again and tell me about it.  Painful as it is, I need to know.”

Reclaiming his seat, he told me they had all been brought together at Pontefract, that gloomy fortress where Richard II had been left to starve to death.  There was some consolation in knowing they had been together that last day and night.  Anthony would have helped Richard to die with dignity.  “It was the day following the Feast of the Baptist.  The Earl of Northumberland was there, as well as Richard Ratcliffe, who probably brought the order of execution.  They were accused of plotting the death of the Duke of Gloucester.  There was no trial.  Their pleas of innocence were ignored.  They were beheaded in the courtyard and none were allowed to speak.”

He fell silent.  Together we watched a bright butterfly fluttering around a rhododendron bush.  My poor, poor son, slain like his grandfather and uncle fifteen years earlier, for no crime but the blood in his veins.  I was dry-eyed.  The blow hadn’t fallen so hard, perhaps because I had feared since the day they were taken captive that execution must be their eventual fate and that fear had grown to a certainty after Hastings’ death. 

It was believed they were buried in a common grave in a monastery in Pontefract and that when the bodies were stripped for burial Anthony had been found to be wearing a hair shirt.  Such was his devotion to God.  He was a good man, one of the best I ever knew, honorable and decent, and having a far greater interest in learning and the arts than in politics.  In our court, he was always something of an oddity.  Edward objected that he had his head in the rarified air above the clouds all the time, offering no practical help or advice.  Edward would say to him: ‘What are you reading in that book?’ And no matter the subject, quicker than a cutpurse can despoil your purse, he would bring it around to some abstract and abstruse thought, and belabor it until, sooner than later, our eyes glazed over. 

Once Edward said to Hastings:  ‘Should I be so imprudent as to ask again, get him out of here as quickly as you can.  Get a couple of your men to drop a hood over his head and carry him off.’

When he left me that day I think Sir Thomas was disappointed that I didn’t show more interest in, or eagerness for, his rebellion, but the truth is I was sick with grief.  It is not true that we become inured to grief, never, no matter how thick and fast the blows fall.  I prayed for the souls of my dear son and brother and old Sir Thomas Vaughan, whose gray hairs and many years of service to the house of York ought to have spared him the axe.  And I prayed also, most fervently, for the strength to withstand the further blows that I believed were coming.  Three sons I had left.  I’d had no word about Dorset, didn’t know if he lived or if he had made it safely to his uncle in Brittany.  As for my two younger boys: they couldn’t have been in greater danger.  History teaches us that the first step down from the throne is the first step toward the grave.  Like Edward II, Richard II and Henry VI, my Ned was now a deposed king.  Only his father had survived deposition to reign again.

……….

I employed my pen to encourage those still loyal to join with my husband’s household men, and as the summer wore on, there were risings in the southern and western counties, but they came to nothing because there was no cohesive action.  I suspect the reason for that was because no strong and capable leader had emerged.  Gloucester went on a progress in an effort to win the hearts of the common people who feared and mistrusted him and the northern men he had promoted to high places in the government.  Such is one of the dilemmas that face a usurper: He had no choice but to reward those who had supported him in his wicked campaign, and he wanted in his government only men he could trust.  The men of the south, particularly the Londoners, hated ‘northernmen’ who they lumped together with the horde Queen Margaret had led on a vicious and bloody rampage through the shires of England to threaten London itself.  More than twenty years ago, but the people had not forgotten their terror and nowhere is that more true than in the capital, where he must make his government. 

One of the first to be rewarded after the coronation was Lord Howard, who was made Duke of Norfolk, with half the Mowbray estates being transferred to him and the other half to Lord Berkeley.  Howard’s son, Thomas, the man assigned to make sure Hastings went to the Tower to meet his cruel fate, was created Earl of Surrey.