The Lady of the Rivers (27 page)

At first she is lucky. She meets the king and they like each other on sight – why would they not? He is a handsome boyish man of twenty-three, still somehow fragile, with a delicacy inherited from his French mother, and she is a strong-willed beauty eight years his junior. The Earl of Suffolk, William de la Pole, escorting her to her new country and enchanted with her, predicts that they will make a good match: her fire and passion will be softened by his sweetness; he will learn determination and courage from her.

They are married at the abbey at Titchfield in a service that reflects the young king’s quiet seriousness. I suspect that Margaret would have preferred something more showy and more grand but there is no money for a great wedding, and anyway, the king said that the wedding should be between him, his bride, and God.

Disastrously, his fool of a confessor, Bishop Ayscough, performs the wedding and warns the serious young king that he should not succumb to lust. He warns him that he should only go to the bride’s bed for the purpose of getting heirs to the throne, and not for their pleasure. The boy, who has been cautiously raised by men anxious to protect his innocence, takes the advice like a novice monk and stays away from her bed for a full week. Margaret is not a young woman to deal patiently with such a husband. She summons me to her room the morning after her wedding and drags me into a window bay. ‘He does not like me,’ she whispers urgently. ‘He got up from my bed as soon as everyone had left the room and spent half the night in prayer, and then he crept in beside me like a mouse and slept all the night without so much as touching me. I am as much a maid as ever I was, the wedding was for nothing.’

I take her hands. ‘It will happen,’ I say. ‘You must be patient.’

‘How is the marriage to be binding if it is not consummated?’ she demands.

‘It will be consummated, he will do the act, Your Grace, and we should be glad that he is not forceful.’

‘Is he even a man?’ she hisses scornfully, not glad at all.

‘He is a man, he is your husband, and he is your king,’ I say. ‘It will happen. He will do it within the week.’ As long as it is not a saint’s day, or a holy day, I think to myself, if he can confess straight after the deed. Not in the morning before Mass, never in daylight. He is indeed extremely pious. ‘And, Your Grace, when he approaches you, you must accept him without comment, without complaint.’

She tosses her head. ‘But I want to be loved. I have always been loved. I want my husband to love me with passion, like in a troubadour tale, like a knight.’

‘He does love you, he will love you. But he is not a lustful man.’

The anger goes from her as quickly as it came and the face she turns to me is puzzled. ‘Why would he not desire me on the first night, on our wedding night?’

I shrug. ‘Your Grace, he is a thoughtful young man, and very spiritual. He will come to you when he thinks the time is right, and then you must be kind to him.’

‘But who will be kind to me?’ she asks pitifully.

I smile and pat her cheek as if she were my younger sister and not my queen. ‘We will all be kind to you,’ I promise. ‘And you will be happy.’

LONDON, SUMMER 1445–1448

Margaret is lucky in that she is young and beautiful and the Londoners take to her on sight and cheer her coronation. She is lucky in that she is endearing – I am not the only one who comes to love her and watch for her safety. Around her little court she gathers a collection of people who adore her. Me, she keeps close, her dearest friend and confidante. She loves Alice, William de la Pole’s wife, too, and the three of us are inseperable in these early years of her marriage except for when I go to Grafton for my confinements, a new baby, John, and one who comes early and is especially small and precious on that account: Richard.

But she makes some mistakes and they are grave ones. Her liking for William de la Pole leads her to insist that he be consulted in the king’s councils, and he – already a great man – rises to even higher importance through her favour. The two of them speak against the king’s uncle, Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, and they whip up suspicion against him so powerfully that he is accused of trying for the throne on his own account, treason against his own nephew. The shock is too great for the duke and he dies before they can bring him to trial. At once there is a storm of gossip which declares that the good duke was murdered, and people point the finger of blame at William de la Pole. After the loss of this, his last uncle, the king leans yet more on his other advisors, and consults the opinion of his young wife. This is a terrible choice. She is little more than a girl, she knows nothing about England, in truth she knows nothing about anything.

The king’s other favourite is Edmund Beaufort, the Duke of Somerset, and Margaret is dazzled by the dashing penniless duke who calls her cousin and kisses her on the mouth in greeting. He is the most handsome man at court, always beautifully dressed in velvet studded with jewels, always riding a big black horse, though they say he has not a penny in the world and is sworn up and down from his handsome dark head to his best leather soles to the moneylenders of London and Antwerp. He brings the queen little gifts, fairings that he picks up in the market, and they delight her, as he pins a little brooch to the hem of her dress, or offers her a piece of candied peel, popping it in her mouth as if she were a child. He speaks to her in rapid intimate French, and tucks a blossom behind her ear. He teases her as if she were a pretty maid and not a queen, he brings musicians in, and dancers; the court is always merry when Edmund Beaufort is in attendance and the king and queen command him to stay at court all the time.

Perhaps it would have been better if they had not done so. But the handsome young duke is ambitious and he asks and gets the command of the English forces in Normandy, as if they were toy soldiers for his amusement. The young king and queen can refuse him nothing. They load all their favourites with offices and money, and the court becomes a hen-house of strutting jealousy.

We all do well out of this. They are prodigal with titles and posts, they give away their own lands, the places at court for free, the opportunities for trade and bribery, licences to import, licences to export. Crown lands, which are supposed to pay for the king’s living throughout his reign, get thrust into greedy hands, in a helter-skelter of generosity. William de la Pole finds himself ennobled beyond his dreams, made into a duke, the first man without royal blood ever to take such a title. Edmund Beaufort gets a dukedom too, it is a hiring fair of honours. The king and queen take it into their heads that Edmund Beaufort should be given a fortune to match his title, he should be given a fortune to match the famously wealthy Richard Duke of York, a royal kinsman. No – better still – he should overmatch the great Duke of York, and the young king and queen say they will give him whatever it takes to do so.

Even Richard and I are swept along on this torrent of gifts. They give us a great London house, and then my husband comes to me and says, smiling, ‘Tell me, my darling, what name d’you think I should have?’

‘Name?’ I ask, and then I realise what he is saying. ‘Oh! Richard! Is the king to give you a title as well?’

‘I think it is more the favour of the queen to you,’ he says. ‘But at any rate I am to be a baron. I am to be awarded an order of nobility for great service to my country – or at least, because the queen likes my wife. What d’you think of that?’

I gasp. ‘Oh, I am so pleased. I am so very pleased for you. And for our children too! We will be so very grand.’ I pause uncertainly. ‘Can the king just make up titles like this?’

‘The two of them think they can and, what is more dangerous: they do. Never was a young couple with so little power and money in more of a hurry to give it all away. And they will drive the rest of the court mad. Anyone that she likes, or that he trusts, gets loaded with favours; but good men are excluded. Richard, Duke of York, gets nothing, not even a civil hearing. They say they won’t have him in the council now; though he is known as a good man and the best advisor they could have. But he is ignored and worse men than he are praised to the skies. I shall be made a baron for no better reason than you keep her company.’

‘And what name shall we have, my lord? You will be Sir Richard Woodville, Baron – what?’

He pauses for a moment. ‘Baron Grafton?’ he asks.

‘Baron Grafton,’ I repeat, listening to the sounds. Even after all these years in England I still have a strong accent. ‘I really can’t say it.’

‘But I wondered if you would like a title which came from your family. One of your family names?’

I think for a moment. ‘I don’t really wantremind everyone that I am a daughter of Luxembourg, that I am French,’ I say cautiously. ‘The mood is more and more against the French. I was telling the queen, only the other day, that she should speak English in public. I am an English dowager duchess and I am a good Englishwoman now. Give me an English name and let our children have English titles.’

‘Water!’ he exclaims. ‘For your ancestor.’

I laugh. ‘You can’t be Baron Water. But what about Baron Rivers?’

‘Rivers . . . ’ He rolls the word over in his mouth. ‘That’s fine. Rivers. It’s a good English name, and yet it is a tribute to your family. Baron Rivers I shall be and, please God, one day I shall be an earl.’

‘No, really, would they ever make you an earl? Would they give away so much?’

‘My dear, I am afraid they would give away the kingdom itself. They are not careful monarchs and they are advised by rogues.’

I mention my husband’s anxiety about their extravagance as tactfully as I can to the queen but she tosses her head. ‘We have to keep our friends satisfied,’ she says to me. ‘We cannot rule the country without William de la Pole: he is the greatest man in the land. And Edmund Beaufort is in such debt! We have to help him.’

‘Richard Duke of York?’ I suggest as a man they should reward.

‘We cannot hold France without Edmund Beaufort. He is the only man we could trust to hold our French lands, and to restore those lands that we should return to their true owner.’

‘Your Grace?’ I am dumbfounded at the suggestion that we should restore our lands to the French, and she flushes, as guilty as a child. ‘To hold our lands,’ she corrects herself. ‘Edmund Beaufort is the only man we can trust.’

‘I think that Richard, Duke of York, is the only man to succesfully hold French lands since my first husband, the Duke of Bedford,’ I observe.

She throws her hands in the air. ‘Perhaps, perhaps, but I can trust no-one but Edmund Beaufort and William de la Pole. The king himself can neither take decisions nor lead an army. These men are everything to me. They are the father and’ – she breaks off and blushes – ‘friend that I need. They both deserve the highest of honours, and we will give honours where they are due.’

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON,
SUMMER 1449

I can tell at once that something terrible has happened. Richard comes into our private rooms and takes my hands, his face grim. ‘Jacquetta, you must be brave.’