The Stolen Crown: The Secret Marriage That Forever Changed the Fate of England (16 page)

9 8 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m just stare off into space for a moment or so before he would remember that we were still there and continue with the conversation. And he said something very strange to me. Mother liked it, but I didn’t know what to make of it.”

“What?”

“He said I would be king someday.”

“You? With his own son alive and well and getting ready to marry Warwick’s daughter?”

Henry shrugged. “It sounded strange to me too, but that’s what he said.

He just said it in ordinary conversation, too, not as if he were a soothsayer or something.” He glanced at his mother, who was talking to my uncle.

Jasper Tudor was still charming Kate, it appeared. “Mother said we ought to keep it quiet, though. It’s not the sort of thing one would want to get back to Queen Margaret, after all.”

“I can see that,” I said drily.

“I’d be quite content just to get my father’s lands and my title back, and to see my uncle get his own lands restored to him. Mother?”

My aunt had suddenly started weeping. Uncle Henry instantly broke off the conversation he’d been having with Jasper Tudor and Kate.

“Sweetheart? What is wrong?”

“Nothing.” Margaret brushed at her eyes. “I am ashamed of myself. It is just so moving to me. To have so many whom I love in one place. It is what I have wanted for so long—” She began to sniffle again.

Henry Tudor looked mortified, as any lad of our age might, but Jasper Tudor stood and raised his cup, all of us having been sipping wine. “Of course, it is a cause for celebration! Let us raise our cups to our three Henrys—and to their lovely mothers and wives as well.”

I never saw Henry or Jasper Tudor after that day. Soon they traveled with my aunt Margaret to her estate at Woking, then to her other lands, and by late November Jasper and Henry had returned to Wales, where

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Jasper had business. I regretted this, for I had got on quite well with Henry Tudor.

Jasper Tudor was a different matter. Kate on the way home asked me what I had thought of him, and at fifteen I could only tell the truth, that I thought he had been far too flirtatious with her and that she had not sufficiently discouraged him.

Needless to say, Kate did not accept my remark in the constructive way it had been offered. “Flirt? He never flirted with me!”

“Then you’re too young to know a flirtation when you see it.”

“I know perfectly well what one looks like, Harry Stafford! He was merely kind to me—more so than your aunt, who always looks at me as if I were a fly in the room that she wishes she could—could—”

“Swat. She does nothing of the sort. She is very civil to you.”

“I was going to say ‘swat’ if you had given me a blessed moment, Harry!

And if you call saying that I am merely decorative civil, then I suppose she was civil. Why, she never asked about Bessie, and she will be brought to childbed any day, we expect.”

“Did Jasper Tudor ask about her?”

“No, but he is a man. One doesn’t expect men to ask about such things.”

“So what did he ask you about, if he wasn’t flirting and he wasn’t discussing your sister’s lying-in?”

“He asked if all of the Woodville girls were as pretty as I was,” Kate allowed after a moment or two.

“No, no flirting there.” I looked at the men escorting us, who were all making a show of not hearing this quarrel. Plainly, each and every one of them was enjoying it immensely.

“He didn’t mean it like that. And he said other things as well.

Like—like—”

“Like what?” I snapped, before I noticed that Kate’s eyes were filling with tears. There is enough bad that can be said about me now, but it can never be said that I was so base as to enjoy seeing my wife weep. “For God’s sake, don’t cry. What?”

1 0 0 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m “He told me that he thought Warwick had behaved badly in killing John and Papa. He did say that! Do you call that flirting?”

“No, no, Kate. Here.”

Kate blew her nose on my handkerchief almost triumphantly.

Just a few days later, on November 2—a date that meant nothing to me then but that has acquired a certain significance thirteen years later—Queen Elizabeth, meagerly attended in sanctuary, gave birth to a healthy baby boy, whom she defiantly named Edward.

Kate was as smug as if she’d delivered the baby herself. “I said it would be a boy,” she announced. (I remembered her saying no such thing.) “Now the king is sure to come back and claim his throne!”

“You may well be right, child,” my grandmother said.

Kate had to do most of her gloating that day by herself, however, for Grandmother and I were on our way to see the king—King Henry, that is.

Grandmother, after much deliberating, had decided to pay her respects— she was, after all, the godmother of his son. “And as your grandfather died in his cause, Harry, I know he would like to meet you, too.” It was decided that Kate, as Queen Elizabeth’s sister, was best off staying at home, a decision to which Kate gladly acquiesced. I suspected that she would bat her blue eyes at some of the household men and coax them into taking her to see Elizabeth and the new baby in sanctuary, King Henry having chivalrously insisted that the deposed queen—if that be the proper phrase—be allowed to receive visitors.

As Grandmother and I rode by water to Westminster, we could hear a few church bells bravely pealing, celebrating the birth of little Edward. “What do you think, Grandmother? Do you think Edward will come back?”

“I don’t doubt it for a moment.” Grandmother sighed. “And then all this will begin all over again. My, but I’m feeling too old these days to live through much more of these men trying to push each other off the throne.”

“What do you wish for, Grandmother?”

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She shrugged. “I’m not partial to Warwick, nephew of mine that he is. He’s not the king, and he forgets that. Young Edward—King Henry’s Edward—is a proud, high-tempered lad, they say, and when he comes back to England, he’s not going to be happy to be led around on a chain by Warwick as his poor father is. And I suspect that when Warwick’s old enemies—your uncle Somerset and the rest—return, there will be more trouble. Warwick’s made himself some strange bedfellows, and I for one don’t know if one bed can hold them all.” Grandmother gazed over the Thames. “If King Edward comes back, your uncle John will fight for him, I know. So will my husband. Your uncle Henry—I don’t know. His wife Margaret is a strong-minded woman, and I know she would like to see him fight for King Henry, but your uncle can only be pushed so far before he balks. I suspect he will fight with the rest of the Staffords, and their loyalties are with Edward now.”

“I am looking forward to seeing my Beaufort uncles,” I confessed.

“I know you are, lad. And chances are they will soon be in arms against your Stafford uncles. You realize that, don’t you?”

I nodded, and my grandmother gently ran her hand through my hair, reminding me of the day Grandfather had died. “Either way, you will suffer a loss, I fear. I do not envy you, Harry.”

King Henry’s chambers, where we soon arrived, were nothing like King Edward’s. Whereas Edward’s chambers had been bustling, with people scurrying back and forth and dogs roaming in and out, Henry’s were quiet, with a clerk writing in a corner and a few guards standing silently by.

Edward had sat smack in the middle of the room; Henry’s great chair was in a corner. Henry, indeed, seemed to be an afterthought in the rooms, for they had been decorated to house Queen Elizabeth during her lying-in and still very much reflected the queen’s quite feminine preference in colors and textures. I could even see her emblem, a gillyflower, here and there.

The king was a stooped man, with the prematurely old look of someone who had suffered greatly in his mind, yet he had a very pleasant voice. He even managed an air of gallantry when my grandmother was announced,

1 0 2 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m though I doubt he would have known her had she not been named upon her entrance. “Ah, the Duchess of Buckingham. It seems like only yesterday that my lady and I were in company with you and your dear lord. A brave, loyal man. How I miss him.”

“I too, your grace.”

“And this is your grandson, the present duke. A fine-looking lad. Grow up to be like your grandfather, my boy.”

“I will endeavor to do so, your grace.”

“Good. But where is Margaret? She will never come, I fear. She is not ill?” He looked sharply around him, at no one in particular. “They would tell me if she were ill, would they not?”

“Of course they would, your grace,” said Grandmother softly. “She is quite well, but I believe she has details to attend to before she leaves that have taken much of her time. No woman can move as quickly as a man likes, you know.”

The king suddenly smiled, for a moment appearing entirely rational.

“’Tis true. And we have a boy. I should like to see my boy again.” He looked at me, and for a horrible moment I feared he had mistaken me for Edward of Lancaster. Instead, he said genially, “Perhaps you can come live in his household when he arrives. He would like that. Would you?”

“Indeed, your grace.”

“Then it shall be arranged!” The king nodded before his face started to cloud again. “Henry… I saw another boy named Henry just a few days before. Do you know him, son?”

“Henry Tudor?” I ventured.

“Indeed. He shall be king, you know.” King Henry nodded at me cheerfully. “I do not know how or even why, but I know it.” He settled back into his chair, and I realized that this brief conversation had exhausted him.

In a moment, he had begun to doze, and a servant led us off.

I was deeply affected by poor King Henry’s plight at first, but as the days passed and our encounter became less vivid in my mind, my boyish callousness reasserted itself. I decided that if I ever saw Richard again—and

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however torn my loyalties were during this period, I always prayed for his safety and his prosperity—I would tell him about this madman’s wild prophecy. It was something that would no doubt amuse him.

Christmas came and went, rather sadly for Kate, who had held ill-concealed hopes that some disaster might befall the Earl of Warwick and place Edward back on the throne. My grandmother, her husband Walter Blount, and I dined occasionally at Westminster, but we never had another private audience with King Henry, who made only the briefest of public appearances. Rumor had it that he wore the same blue gown he’d been wearing as a captive in the Tower and that he adamantly refused to change into something more suitable for a king, though his servants did manage to clean it while he was abed. It was certainly what he had been wearing when I saw him.

Rather to my excitement, my uncle Edmund Beaufort, the Duke of Somerset—at least, he styled himself so—returned to England at the end of January. I was eager to meet him, having never known my mother’s kin except for my aunt Margaret, but events dictated otherwise, leaving Somerset no time to bother with a nephew in his teens who, as a ward, couldn’t raise troops. For raising troops suddenly became of the utmost urgency. France was at war with Burgundy, and when Warwick sided with France, the Duke of Burgundy gave in to Edward’s pleadings and lent his assistance. By mid-March, Edward was back in England, and armies were once again on the move in our country.

I too was on the move, in one respect. For two weeks after Edward landed, I was a prisoner in the Tower.

It was nothing personal, the soldiers at Grandmother’s Bread Street house told Walter Blount, Grandmother’s husband, as they tied his hands behind his back, then started on mine. But these were dangerous times, and the Earl of Warwick could not risk having potential enemies at large.

As Bread Street was hardly in a good state of defense and a dozen armed

1 0 4 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m men had come to arrest us, we were not in the best position to argue.

Instead, Blount, who in any case had never manifested more than resigned tolerance for Warwick’s regime, nodded grimly. “But why the boy? He’s no danger to Warwick.” (Normally, I would have bristled at being called a boy, but I gave Blount credit for good intentions here.) “He’s old enough to fight if need be, and he’s married to a Woodville and is in your care. That’s enough, says my lord. No harm shall come to him.”

I was not fearful—in fact, I was oddly excited, thinking that at last I would be sharing in some of the danger that Richard had faced. Kate was a different matter altogether. “You can’t take Harry! He’s done nothing.

He’s not even a good Yorkist. Harry, tell them you’re not!” Kate grabbed the arms of the man who was attempting to tie me. “Let him go!”

“Kate, it’s all right,” I said, turning to comfort her and only further frustrating the efforts of my guard. “It’s only temporary.”

“You don’t know that, do you? You know what that evil man did to my father and to John!” Kate threw herself on the back of the guard and began pummeling him with very little effect. The other guards looked at her open-mouthed, either reluctant to use force against a young girl or finding the scene too amusing to interrupt, I do not know.

My grandmother caught Kate by her dress and yanked her backward, then dealt her one smart slap on the face. “You are disgracing your title, girl, to carry on so. Stop it immediately or you shall be whipped.”

Kate stared open-mouthed at my grandmother. I knew then that Grandmother herself must have been frightened for us, or she’d never have treated Kate so. I turned to Kate and took her into my arms—clumsily, not being accustomed to marital embraces. She was trembling, poor creature, from head to toe. “Kate. There is nothing to fear. I am sure of it.”