The Stolen Crown: The Secret Marriage That Forever Changed the Fate of England (28 page)

I prayed fervently that she was right.

God was merciful. Kate did indeed quickly regain her strength, and by the

1 8 4 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m time she was churched a month later looked as fit and hearty as she had ever been—except that now she had a bit of extra padding on her hips, which after consideration I decided suited her wonderful y. We were equal y blessed in that Elizabeth was a healthy baby, suckling vigorously and growing rapidly. To my council I became an utter bore on the topic of her many perfections. Soon, Kate’s ordeal and my fears long forgotten, we began hoping for another child.

There was more pleasant news that spring, for Richard’s return from France a month or so after my own had had the same effect on Anne that mine had had on Kate. Anne gave birth at around the same time Kate was having her churching. Their son—naturally named Edward—was a fine lad, quite worthy, I thought, of marriage to my Elizabeth.

There was a cloud upon my happiness, though, for what I had dreaded in France had come to pass: there was no place for me at Edward’s court.

It was a subtle snub, for outwardly, things were as normal. I’d been sent a silver cup from the king when Elizabeth was born, and the queen and Kate were on good as terms as ever. But when the king set up commissions, I was not on them, and I played no role in the council of the Prince of Wales, even though his household at Ludlow was not all that far from Brecon.

I had sent the king a letter of apology after he returned to England. It took me hours to compose: to grovel, but not to grovel so much as to sound insincere, proved to be no easy matter. The king sent me a genial reply that must have been dashed off in a couple of minutes by one of his most junior clerks. All was forgiven, and I would be welcome at court any time I chose to come there. But as I finished reading the letter, I realized belatedly that it wasn’t the king’s forgiveness that I needed, it was his trust, and that, I feared, I had lost for good—if I with my Beaufort connections and my own royal blood had ever had it in the first place.

I tried to pretend that this did not bother me, and a reasonable voice in my head advised me to let it be for the time being and let time prove my reliability to the king. Instead, I turned my attention to my own affairs, which indeed needed some ordering. First on my priorities was more aggressively pursuing the revenues owed me.

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By nature I am not hard-dealing or cold, though it seems that I have acquired a reputation among my tenants for both. I wanted to be a good lord, and I truly tried to be. But I was in debt and could not afford to be overly indulgent, especially now that I had a daughter who would need to be attended properly and married well. And I have to say that I was not entirely at fault; my estates having been comparatively neglected during my minority by some of the people who had the running of them, my tenants had grown accustomed to thinking that this relaxed state of affairs would continue. Perhaps they would not have minded so much if I had had royal plums to hand out, but being in little favor at court, I had none.

But my problems would soon be as nothing compared to the Duke of Clarence’s.

Unlike me and the more restrained Richard, George had not remonstrated with Edward about the French peace, but I doubt he could have been happy with it. The king had not trusted him with any major responsibility since his antics with the Kingmaker, and George had probably hoped to prove his ability in the French war. If he was disappointed, though, he kept his thoughts to himself. Like me in 1476, he turned his attention to his own affairs.

Then, at the end of the year, his duchess died, followed on New Year’s Day by his infant son.

Whatever else his faults, George had been a good husband, faithful to Isabel even in circumstances like our French expedition when the most uxorious man might have felt justified in taking some pleasure on the side.

She in turn had been a good wife to him, even to the point, common rumor had it, of having played the chief role in persuading him to abandon her own father’s doomed cause for Edward’s. With her gone, George was cast adrift. He began to drink more wine than was good for him, men who did business for both of us told me. At the same time, he was now an eligible widower, and when he was not being maudlin on the subject of poor Isabel, he was weighing up the possibilities of a dazzling new match.

For this we had the Duke of Burgundy, Clarence’s brother-in-law, to thank, for just a few days into the new year of 1477, Burgundy was killed

1 8 6 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m in battle, leaving behind as his heiress Mary, his daughter from an earlier marriage. The Duchess of Burgundy could think of no better thing for her stepdaughter to do than to marry George, her favorite brother. If that wasn’t enough, the Scottish king, James III, proposed that George should marry James’s sister.

Edward thwarted both matches.

It wasn’t hard to see why. Either marriage could offer George an excellent chance for mischief-making, and George had openly rebelled against Edward twice and was suspected of having engaged in more treason on the sly. The Burgundian marriage would have also irritated Louis of France and the Archduke of Hapsburg, Mary’s betrothed. But all of these practical objections were lost on George, as I suppose they would have been lost on me if I had been in his position.

He didn’t take the disappointment well. George’s tongue began to run away from him, making me look almost discreet in comparison. To anyone on his vast lands who would listen, he raked up the old rumor, started back in the day by his late father-in-law, that the king was a bastard, sired by a commoner in a moment of weakness on the Duchess of York’s part. No one seriously believed it that I ever heard of—it was hard enough, frankly, to imagine the pious and austere duchess in bed with her own husband, much less with some obscure churl—but the rumors spread, as rumors will when people run out of other things to gossip about. If those idiot rumors were the worst of it, though, Edward might have shrugged them off, for George talking was something not all that harmful. George acting was another thing altogether, and in April of 1476, he acted about as badly as a man could act.

He hung one of his duchess’s ladies.

Following Isabel’s death, Ankarette Twynho, an older lady in receipt of a modest pension for her services, had returned to her family in Somerset, where one day, out of the blue, Clarence’s men came and dragged her out of her home. It was not until the poor woman arrived at Warwick—the heart of Clarence country—that she found out the charges against her:

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poisoning the duchess. To cap matters off, a local man, John Thursby, was accused of poisoning Isabel’s infant son. In a matter of three hours, both were tried and convicted by a jury that was plainly too scared of Clarence to return any other verdict other than guilty. They were dragged to the gallows straightaway.

One of Ankarette’s relations did business for me as well as Clarence, and he said that Isabel and her babe had been ailing since the birth. And what, after all, would either of the defendants have to gain by poisoning either of them? Whether this ever occurred to George, I do not know, just as I do not know whether George ever believed the truth of his accusations.

Perhaps it was simply a matter of wanting to believe them. I suppose George had to find someone in corporeal form to blame; one couldn’t hale God to Warwick and hang Him high.

But the play was not yet finished, for during that same mad spring, an Oxford astronomer, John Stacy, was accused of using his arts to bring about the king’s death. His confession, extracted by means that were said to have been none too gentle, implicated Thomas Blake, another Oxford astronomer, and—more sensationally—Thomas Burdett, a member of George’s household. A commission was formed to try them—needless to say, I was not on it, which for once I was happy about—and it found all three guilty.

After they were convicted, they were hung at Tyburn.

Burdett and Stacy had maintained their innocence to the end; whether they were or not is beyond me to say. Their heads had been perching on London Bridge for but a day or so when the Duke of Clarence stormed into the king’s council chamber at Westminster, dragging a preacher with him. The man—the same man who had proclaimed the sixth Henry’s claim to the throne back in the fall of 1470—was made to read out Burdett’s gallows-side protestation of innocence. Then Clarence, having made his point, swept out of the room, leaving the council agape.

It was Clarence’s last great scene, and Edward’s last straw. By late June, George, Duke of Clarence, was a prisoner in the Tower.

1 8 8 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m One thing Edward could not be accused of with regard to Clarence was summary justice. He remained shut up, with all the comforts due to a king’s brother, but shut up all of the same, while the king dithered for the next few months about what to do with him.

Meanwhile, in November 1477 I came to London, where the seven-year-old Prince of Wales, paying a visit to his father’s court, was to host a great dinner and take homage from the various lords of the land. It promised to be a busy couple of months, for a royal wedding was in store: that of Richard, Duke of York, to little Anne Mowbray, who was heiress to the deceased John Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk. She was a rich little girl, or would be once the elderly but still spry dowager Duchess of Norfolk, who had been married to Kate’s brother John, died and finally freed up her dower lands. Edward spared no expense for the wedding, which he decided should took place the following January, to coincide with Parliament.

“How’s your wife?” Richard asked me as we settled ourselves in for a com-panionable evening at Baynard’s Castle, one of the Duchess of York’s homes.

Richard was staying there while in London; I’d borrowed Grandmother’s Bread Street residence. Our goods had scarcely been unpacked when I’d decided to pay a visit to Richard. “Is she here in London?”

“Yes. She’s with child again, did I tell you? We expect the baby around February.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t leave her in Wales.”

“She’s in good health, and she wanted to come to the wedding. We figured she might as well come up now instead of having to travel later when she’s heavier with child. I suppose Anne’s here?”

“No. I wish she had come, but she didn’t want to leave our son. She frets too much over him when she’s away from him, although he’s been of good health. She’s become worse about it since her sister died.” He took a sip of wine.

“So, tell me. Is the king going to bring George to trial?”

“Most likely. It looks as if he’s going to be the main business at Parliament.

Edward’s been assembling quite the case against him.”

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“What do you think will happen to him?”

“Execution.”

He spoke as casually as if we were speaking of slaughtering a pig. “Are you serious, man? Do you think the king would put his own brother to death?”

Richard shrugged. “He’s been rather more than your ordinary nuisance, don’t you think? Aside from hanging his servants on a whim, he’s been spreading rumors about the king’s bastardy, associating with the likes of Burdett and Stacy… There’s even talk that he was behind that Earl of Oxford imposter last summer.”

The Earl of Oxford’s luck had finally run out. The earl was safely locked up in Hammes Castle near Calais, but the summer before, a person claiming to be him had been stirring up unrest in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire. “The king could simply keep George locked up.”

“Yes. But it’s safer to put him to silence. Of course, our mother will likely have a go at talking him out of it, but my money’s not on her.

Edward the king will prevail over Edward the son and brother.”

The Prince of Wales’s feast a few days later in November was the first great dinner the seven-year-old had ever hosted. Though his father the king was fairly informal in private, he liked a great deal of pomp and circumstance in public, and the dinner was accordingly a rather stiff affair. It was made even more so by everyone being on his best behavior for the child host, a dire necessity, for the king guarded the virtue of his son most strictly, leaving nothing to chance. I knew from Kate that Edward had drawn up a series of ordinances sternly prohibiting swearers, brawlers, backbiters, and gamblers from coming into the young boy’s presence at Ludlow, and ribald words were absolutely forbidden. The ordinances might have been drawn up by the ghost of the late Henry VI.

After a performance by a decorous juggler, followed by some stately tunes, it was time for those of us who held lands of the prince to give

1 9 0 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m him homage as he perched in a great chair with his four-year-old brother, Richard, Duke of York, seated nearby. We lined up to pay our respects.

The Duke of Gloucester, natural y, went first. Young Edward watched Richard solemnly as, bareheaded and with his belt ungirded, he knelt, put his hands between those of the prince, spoke the words of homage, and kissed him on the cheek. “We thank you that you do this so humbly,” Edward said.

With Clarence in the Tower, I was next. I placed my hands between the prince’s. They were fine and delicate, and I could not help but think of the son I hoped that Kate was carrying in her belly. “I become your liege man of life and limb and truth and earthly honors, bearing to you against all men that love, move, or die, so help me God and the Holy Dame.”

A lot of trouble and grief for a lot of people could have been averted then and there if the Lord had sent a convenient bolt of lightning to strike Richard and me dead at that moment. He did not, and so I move on.