Rebellion (18 page)

But she made him promise, too, that he would
say nothing until another month had passed. Not even to his mother. She told her own
mother, of course, to keep her quiet, but she did not want a public announcement as
yet.

The king saw the sense in this, but said
they should give thanks in any case, at Canterbury. No one would question their
pilgrimage to a shrine.

It was at Canterbury that the deputation
came. Sir James Harrington and Sir Thomas Talbot of Bashall, accompanied by one of the
Black Monks of Abingdon, who did not speak but looked at the queen with glittering
eyes.

So there was to be a
celebration, after all. They had made their offerings and hurried back to London, to
witness the degradation of the former king. That night there was to be a feast in the
Tower, while the old king was incarcerated. Her ladies dressed the queen with especial
care; she would be radiant beside her lord.

All the usual congratulatory speeches were
made. Warwick said that he hoped the old king, who had been dressed like a monk or a
hermit, would find his new cell to his liking, although his kingdom was somewhat
reduced.

Then her husband rose. ‘There is more than
one cause for celebration tonight,' he said. And, despite their agreement, he told
everyone present in the hall that they could expect a new heir to the throne.

In the second's silence before the
tumultuous applause she saw the look on Warwick's face.

But the king made her stand with him, and
held her hand high while the cheers resounded, and was so boyishly pleased that she had
to forgive him. It was almost time, after all; by her calculations she was eleven or
twelve weeks pregnant. She could not blame him for capitalizing upon this moment.

But from then on he talked of nothing but
his son. And Warwick almost disappeared from the court.

He was helping to organize his brother's
inauguration as Archbishop of York, he said, when the king sent messages. And when the
king said there could not be so much to organize, he sent back a list.

The inauguration or enthronement at Cawood
Castle would go on all week. Twenty-eight peers, ten abbots and fifty-nine knights would
attend, together with seven bishops, any number of lawyers, esquires and their
attendants. There would be a banquet of 104 oxen, 1,000 sheep, 2,000 pigs, 500 stags, 6
wild bulls, a dozen porpoises and seals, 2,000 geese, 4,000 pigeon, 1,000 capons, 1,000
quail, 304 calves, 204 kids, 4,000 venison pies, 4,000
dishes of
jelly, 608 pikes and bream, 4,000 baked tarts, 2,000 hot custards, 300 tuns of ale and
100 tuns of wine as well as many other birds and beasts.

‘There will be no animals left in
Yorkshire,' Elizabeth said. The king had turned away, but she knew he was angry by the
set of his shoulders.

They did not go themselves, but sent the
king's brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, while they made a procession of their own.
Because it was September, and the queen's pregnancy was showing, and the baby was
kicking in her womb. No one at court talked about anything else. The court astrologers
made their calculations and said it would definitely be a son. Dr de Serigo was
especially loud in his assurances.

The queen did not say that she'd had two
sons already, and this pregnancy felt different; it was not growing in the same way.

Edward talked about naming the child Richard
after his father. The pregnancy had stirred up memories of his father, who had so nearly
been king. And his brother, who'd died with him at the Battle of Wakefield. He still
grew emotional when he spoke of them. But he did not think he would call their son
Edmund. There had been no kings called Edmund, after all.

The queen said nothing, but dreamed of a
daughter.

Soon after Christmas she went into
confinement, for the baby might come early, although the court astrologers had declared
that the new prince would be born on 10 February, which was an auspicious date for a
future king.

Already she felt a little remote from the
world. She had entered that twilight state of late pregnancy in which she felt nothing
but the desire for it to be over. Soon it would be over, but the words
soon
and
over
had lost their meaning.

She was attended only by women, with their
talk of babies and labour, nipples and blood. It was as if she too had entered the
female world of the womb. Then, late on the appointed day, 10 February, her waters did
in fact break.

There was great
excitement, of course.
It will not be long now
,
her ladies cried,
until the new prince is born.

But it took longer than expected. Midnight
came and went, morning came and still the prince was not born.

Finally, past noon on 11 February, she was
delivered of a daughter.

‘A little girl, your majesty,' the midwife
said, then to offset the tone of disappointment, she added, ‘A beautiful baby girl.'

And Elizabeth Woodville sank back into her
bed, disordered and panting, while one of her ladies wiped her face and smoothed back
the strands of hair that were plastered to her forehead.

Another of God's little
ironies
,
she thought.

Wherefore it was after told, that
this Master Dominic, to the intent to have great thanks and reward from the king,
stood in the second chamber where the queen travailed that night that he might be
the first to bring tidings to the king of the birth of the prince; and when he heard
the child cry, he knocked and called at the chamber door, and asked what the queen
had. To whom it was answered by one of the ladies, ‘Whatsoever the queen's grace
hath here within, certain it is that a fool stands without.' And so he departed
without seeing the king.

Robert Fabyan

To the Countess of Richmond, my Mother: I thank you for the psalter, I will keep
it safe. I am to have a different tutor now and my own falcon. I am learning to
joust.

Henry of Richmond

When she received this letter, she sobbed
violently for several minutes. ‘He tells me nothing,' she wept, ‘he does not know
me.'

Her husband read the letter, holding it
close to his eyes and subjecting it to his careful scrutiny. Then he asked her what
nine-year-old boy gave a full account of himself. ‘When I was nine it was as much as my
tutor could do to get me to sign my name.'

He said all the old words to her, that her
son was being well educated and taken care of. The Herberts would not waste the money
they had spent on buying his wardship. ‘Look how neat his handwriting is,' he said. ‘And
he is to have his own falcon.'

‘He will love to joust,' he added.

She allowed herself to be comforted. She
tried not to think about all the things her son's letters never told her: how tall was
he, had the colour of his hair changed, what did he like best about his day?

Did he still wake sometimes in the dark
unable to breathe and, if so, who held his hand?

There was no answer to
these questions, and no point crying over them. Margaret passed her hand swiftly over
her cheeks and eyes. ‘I will write back to him,' she said.

And she did write back at once, with
injunctions to take care when jousting, and to remember her in his prayers. But she felt
as though she was writing into a void; she did not know if words could breach the
distance between them. So her mood was not improved by writing, and it deteriorated
further at the thought that she had to accompany her mother that day to Crowland
Abbey.

Her mother, too, was in a querulous mood.
She complained about the weather – it was a fine spring day but the turn of the season
made her joints ache. There was the cost of repairing roads and fences after the winter
floods, and she was sure she had heard mice in the wainscoting of her room. The soup was
salty, the meat tough, Margaret's shoulders were becoming quite hunched, she would never
learn to carry herself like a lady. Also she mumbled when reading and spent too much
time thinking about her son.

Not like you then
,
Margaret did not say.

She tried not to respond badly when her
mother was in this mood. She knew her well enough to understand that something else lay
beneath the aggravated tone. The set of her head and shoulders, the stiffness of her
walk, all spoke of some other, hidden grievance.

Maybe it was the amount of paperwork spread
on the table, for her mother had inherited a long-standing dispute over the reclaimed
land of Goggisland Marsh. She was consulting Margaret rather than any of her other
children over this dispute, partly because she lived nearby and partly because it had
been inherited from Margaret's father.

Margaret's father had extended his boundary
rights to the north-east of Maxey Castle, leaving a legacy of unrest and acrimony
between the tenants of Deeping and the tenants of
Crowland Abbey. An
embankment had been breached by the people of Crowland, and this had caused the flooding
of several acres of land. Stones marking the boundary had been pulled down; Margaret's
mother would have to employ several men to repair the damage. And more, perhaps, to keep
guard over the boundary from now on. And she could not go ahead with either repairs or
improvements until it was established where exactly that boundary was. The abbey claimed
to own Goggisland Marsh, which cut across the boundary, in which case they should be
responsible for its drainage and reclamation. So nothing could be done by either party,
and the land remained subject to regular flooding, which affected Margaret's mother's
right of way.

This, then, was the source of her grievance.
Or not this alone, but the fact that all she had left from three marriages was a series
of legal disputes and responsibilities. Documents were strewn in uncharacteristic
disorder across the table.

But here her mother could find no fault in
Margaret, whose paperwork was rigorous and meticulous. She took a certain pride in being
consulted, preferred to her older half-brothers and even to the lawyers. Here, at least,
she was indispensable to her mother.

More than an hour later she had extracted
the relevant documents and was ready to do battle with the abbot.

They set off in her mother's carriage into
watery sunshine and the insistent calling of birds. But her mother's voice drowned out
all other sounds.

‘See how we have to take the longest way?'
she said.

The marshland was flooded as usual and the
bridge inaccessible. And she would swear that more marker stones had been shifted. She
would not put it past the monks themselves to have done it – nothing exceeded the
avarice of monks. Had she not donated regularly and generously to the abbey? Only last
year she and Margaret had been admitted to the confraternity, and this had been
accompanied by a generous bequest. It would ruin her, this dispute; they were trying to
ruin her, she said.

Margaret wondered what her
role would be at this meeting; whether she would get to say anything at all.

The abbot welcomed them in a conciliatory
way and listened carefully to her mother's complaints. The marker stones had not gone,
he said; they had merely been removed as a preparatory step towards drainage. But
Margaret's mother said they were not responsible for the drainage and instructed
Margaret to show him the map.

But the abbot had other maps, showing a
different boundary.

Margaret's mother, the Dowager Duchess of
Somerset, drew herself up to her not very impressive height. ‘Then we will go to the
lawyers,' she said.

The abbot pressed the tips of his fingers
together. He had already consulted lawyers, he said mildly, and was convinced it would
not be in her best interests to go to court.

Margaret assumed he meant that the courts
were presided over by the king and their family was not in favour with King Edward. Her
mother's third husband had been posthumously attainted, after Towton, and many of his
lands had reverted to the crown. But the next words the abbot said made her think
again.

‘Certain facts may come to light regarding
your late husband, the duke.'

Margaret's mother turned to her and said,
‘Leave us for a moment. I wish to speak to the abbot.'

Margaret was startled, and wanted to
protest. She was not a child any more but a woman of almost twenty-three. Her mother
regularly called on her to help with legal problems. But the look on her mother's face
was terrible, while the abbot's expression, of careful regret, was unchanged.

After a moment's hesitation she left the
room.

She sat initially on a bench in the hallway.
Monks passed her as she sat; it would not do to be seen with her ear pressed to the
door. But then a monk came out of a different doorway, leading to a small chapel.