The Stolen Crown: The Secret Marriage That Forever Changed the Fate of England (18 page)

1 1 2 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m two required a little coaxing. Only when the king had won them over and jiggled them on his knee for a little while did Bessie nod at me.

I went into the other room and very carefully lifted little Edward out of his cradle. Then I carried him back into the chamber and placed him in his father’s arms.

For the first time, and the last, I saw King Edward lose his composure altogether.

“My son and heir,” he said in a cracking voice, taking the baby’s fingers in his. “Bessie, you have given me the most precious treasure a woman can give a man. Everything I do from here forward will be for him—and for you, my love. The lady of my heart.”

At that point the rest of us had the good sense to make ourselves scarce.

By that evening the king had removed Bessie and his children to Baynard’s Castle, where the king’s mother lived. The Dukes of Clarence and Gloucester were there as well, as were Lord Hastings and my brother Anthony. As Harry was enjoying his reunion with Richard, and I with Anthony and Bessie and the children, we stayed at the Duchess of York’s that evening, too.

After we heard divine service, the entire family gathered in the solar. It was almost as if we were at Greenwich again that night.

Life for the exiles, we discovered as they reminisced for us, had not been entirely without its pleasures. Anthony and even Edward described the wonderful manuscripts in the collection of Louis of Gruuthuse, who had been a generous host to the king and his followers. Even Lord Hastings— whose eye I had hitherto believed was attracted only to a pretty woman— rhapsodized over them. I must have shown my weariness of this topic in my face, for during a pause in Anthony’s discourse, Lord Hastings looked at me and suddenly laughed. “Upon my word, my little duchess! If those masters who paint from the life were to see you now, they would have to depict you with a very sour face. What makes you frown so, your grace?”

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“I have had so much of books lately,” I admitted reluctantly. I looked apologetically at Harry, but he was deep in a conversation with Richard.

“Grandmother Buckingham, you know, is a biblio—biblio—”

“Bibliophile?” suggested Anthony.

“Yes. A bibliophile like you and like the Duchess of Burgundy. When Harry was in the Tower, I would worry, and Grandmother Buckingham would tell me to read, so I would improve my mind and not fret about Harry so much. And I did—but I became so very tired of it, I do not want to be improved anymore!”

“Indeed, I do not believe you can be, in appearance at least,” said Lord Hastings gallantly. I wondered how the ladies in the Low Countries had withstood his charm. Perhaps they had not, and a crop of bastards would soon result. “You have grown lovely since we saw you last, your grace.

Harry will have to guard against poachers.”

I blushed furiously.

Anthony rescued me. “Yet at the risk of boring Kate further, I must say there is someone that fascinates me. Have you ever seen one of these?”

He held up a book. It could not have looked more dull if it tried. We stared, trying to discern whatever quality in it appealed to my brother. Even Harry and Richard were drawn into the mystery.

“I know!” said Harry finally. “It’s printed, isn’t it?”

Anthony nodded and passed the book, which turned out to be in German, to him. “In Cologne. An Englishman I met in Bruges gave this to me. His name is William Caxton—he’s a prominent merchant there—and he plans to start his own printing press in Cologne. I wish he would bring his venture here instead.”

“But what good is it?” I asked. “The illuminators make such pretty books as it is.”

“But they are slow to make. The printing press can produce many copies of the same book, you see. With this, anyone who wanted a book could simply go in a shop and buy it as other things are bought.”

I frowned, not convinced at all that this was a good thing. The king

1 1 4 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m laughed. “So Kate, my bibliophobe, what would you rather be doing than reading?”

“Playing ninepins,” I confessed. “Riding. Dancing. None of which I have had any of lately.” I heaved a martyred sigh.

The king grinned. “Soon, Kate, we shall have all the ninepins and riding and dancing you wish, God willing.”

“After Easter, of course,” the Duchess of York said severely.

“After Easter,” conceded the king. He sighed. “And there are other matters we must attend to first, we men that is. Indeed, I fear you ladies must excuse us now, for we have matters of which we must talk. Warwick’s army was not far behind ours.”

On Good Friday, men emerged from sanctuary and traveled from their estates in the country to join Edward’s troops. Even Harry’s uncle Henry Stafford joined, probably to the chagrin of his wife and to the great relief of Grandmother Buckingham. She had been much distressed by the prospect of her son John fighting against her son Henry.

The reinforcements came just in time. Late that afternoon, we learned that Warwick’s men were at St. Albans. Doubtlessly they had hoped that the holy days would put Edward off his guard, but they had reckoned ill.

The king had never forgotten that his own father had been killed just days after Christmas, during a supposed truce. So on the Saturday before Easter, the king and his army—Harry among them, for he had begged for the chance to fight—left London to face Warwick.

What would happen if Edward lost this battle? If he survived the fight, he would surely die on the block. Bessie and her little girls might end their days in a convent, her small son as a prisoner. And if… if Harry were to die, I would find myself a virgin widow.

I pulled a ribbon from my gown and handed it to Harry as the men said their last goodbyes. “Wear this, please.”

“Kate, it’s not a tournament.”

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“I know that, Harry! Please. Wear it for luck.”

“All right.” He thought for a moment, then looked around as if afraid of being caught in what he was going to do next. Satisfied that no one was watching, he brushed his lips against mine, then pressed them cautiously a little closer.

A trumpet blared, and we jumped apart. It was the signal for the army to start moving. “Well,” said Harry. “I’ll see you soon, I guess.”

I watched as all of the men I loved slowly passed and drew out of sight, and wondered if I would ever see them again. Then I saw one more familiar figure—King Henry, headed to the battle as Edward’s hostage. Good Yorkist that I was, my heart still ached when I saw this man who had been king since he was nine months of age, seated in a litter and looking like a scared child.

And he was still wearing the same blue gown.

x

Harry: April 1471 to May 1471

When Edward returned to London, i begged to be allowed to fight, not so much for the House of York but for my Stafford and Bourchier relations. Our shared imprisonment had given me a sense of Yorkist solidarity that all my years as a royal ward had not. “You’re but fifteen,” said Edward dubiously. “You’ve not had that much training.”

“Fifteen and a
half
.”

“It’s a strange age,” Edward conceded. “Almost too young to fight, almost too old to sit back with the baggage carts. But when I was fifteen, I’d have wanted to fight, so I shall say yes. You will serve under Lord Mountjoy’s banner.”

Walter Blount did not appear to be very pleased when I told him the news; undoubtedly he dreaded bearing my youthful corpse back home to my grandmother. “For God’s sake, obey my orders and don’t do anything brash. There will be other battles.”

I nodded, happily picturing the glory that would soon be mine.

On the night before Easter, we arrived at Barnet, near which Warwick’s army was encamped. Lord Hastings was commanding our left wing, Richard the right, and Edward, with the dubious aid of Clarence, the center. Warwick commanded his reserve, his brother the Marquess of Montagu the center; on the right was the Earl of Oxford, who’d been made a Knight of the Bath alongside me but had long since fallen astray

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from King Edward’s cause. On Warwick’s left was the Duke of Exeter, who was married to my former guardian, Edward’s eldest sister, but who had not cohabited with her in years. My uncle the Duke of Somerset was on the coast awaiting Margaret of Anjou, whose arrival had been expected for some days now. For that reason, Edward was eager to bring Warwick to battle before more troops arrived, Easter or no Easter. Already he was outnumbered by several thousand, we estimated from our spies.

All that night we heard the rumble of Warwick’s artillery, firing at us noisily but futilely, for we were closer to the Lancastrians than they thought, and they were overshooting. We kept our own guns silent to avoid alerting them to the mistake, and we kept ourselves as silent as we could also. It was eerie. No one could sleep, not even me, though like most lads my age I had a great capacity for doing so. Instead, I sat in my stepgrandfather’s tent and diced wordlessly with him and my Bourchier and Stafford relatives.

Easter announced itself not with an angel from heaven, but with a mist so thick that I could not imagine how we were to walk in it, much less fight in it. Edward, however, determined that we should fight in it. So at around five in the morning on April 14, 1471, I joined my first battle, fighting in the troops commanded by the king in the center.

I could hear arrows whizzing by me, the men near me breathing hard, the thud of bodies clashing and falling, but I could scarcely see beyond my own hand in the fog. Someone—I could only hope that it was a Lancastrian—suddenly hove in front of me, and we began fighting hand to hand, as all around us were fighting.

To my shock, the man went down, whether felled by my own mace or someone else’s I shall never know. Before I could congratulate myself, another rose in his place. He laid me a blow that sent me reeling backward, but the force of someone pressing behind me kept me upright and allowed me to strike back.

Then something crashed against my helm, causing a pain that first blinded me, then invited me to sink into the darkness. After making one last attempt to swing my mace, I accepted the invitation.

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To my great irritation, someone was jerking on my helm and sloshing water on my face. “Stop,” I mumbled. I turned my head and found myself looking into the face of my uncle John.

“Well, you’re alive, at least.” He completed pulling off my helm, this time without protest from me, and gently touched my temple. I flinched and yelped. “Nasty-looking bruise, but that looks to be the worst of it. I wasn’t so sure when I found you whether you’d wake again. You’re lucky no one decided to finish you off after you fell.”

I frowned groggily. Something was missing. There were voices around me, shouting orders to and fro, some groans here and there, and footsteps going back and forth, but there was no fighting. No mist, either; it had turned into a perfect April day. “Is it over, then?”

“Over for Warwick’s men. Victory for us.” He and my page helped me to a sitting position. “Easy there. Just wait until you get your bearings a little more before you try to stand. It was anyone’s battle there for a while. Oxford’s men routed Hastings’s troops, but the fools decided to go toward London and loot to celebrate. Oxford finally got them back in order, but when they returned, they ran into Montagu’s men instead of the king’s. It was still damnably foggy, and the Marquess’s men started attacking Oxford’s. Oxford’s men started screaming, ‘Treason!’ and that’s when all started coming undone. Montagu was killed, and Warwick’s men got spooked and began breaking rank. Oxford escaped, we think. No one knows what became of the Duke of Exeter. Warwick—”

My still muzzy head was having difficulty following this. Less out of rudeness than out of my dazed condition, I interrupted. “The Duke of Gloucester?”

“Slightly wounded. He made a fine name for himself today, the ones who could see him in the mist say.”

Proud as I was to hear this about my friend, I could not help but contrast it with my own less glorious performance. The mighty Kingmaker had been defeated, and what would I tell my sons? That I had spent most of

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the battle lying unconscious on the field. Scowling, I touched my forehead, hoping for blood, and found none, only a pulpy welt. So I would likely not even have a scar to show off. Then I remembered the words my uncle had said when he first saw me conscious. “Who of our people died?”

John sighed and crossed himself. “Lord Mountjoy’s eldest son was killed.

So was Sir Humphrey Bourchier.”

I winced. Hours ago, I’d been playing dice with these men. They’d lost at that game, too.

“Our Henry’s alive, but badly wounded.” John’s good-humored voice cracked a bit. “I don’t know if he’ll recover. I’m going to look after him now that I know you’re in no danger.” My uncle helped me to my feet.

“Try it now.”

I was a trifle dizzy, but no worse, and I had my page to lean on. As I got my bearings back, I asked, “And what of Warwick?”

John pointed to the woods where Warwick’s men had kept their horses and baggage. “You’ll find him over there.”

Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, the mightiest man in England, lay stripped of his armor, his underclothing dark with his own blood. I joined the Duke of Gloucester in staring down at the body.

“They say that once he realized all was up, he tried to reach his horse and flee, but he couldn’t move fast enough. Some blackguards killed him, even though Ned had given orders that his life be spared.” Richard pointed to the earl’s hand, bare of the costly rings that usually adorned it. “They stripped him and cleared out before anyone knew what was happening, I suppose.”