The Stolen Crown: The Secret Marriage That Forever Changed the Fate of England (36 page)

“I’ve had a long journey, Harry. I’m tir—”

Harry only pulled me against him more tightly, and I deemed it best to let him have his own way. But it was like lying with a stranger, at least for me, and as passively as I lay under Harry as he completed his business, it probably was for him, too.

2 4 2 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m This was on the fifth of June. For a few days afterward, I did believe that all might come right. Preparations were being made for the coronation, I saw, and while there seemed no prospect of having Anthony and the rest released, there was no reason to think that any worse might befall them either.

Then, on June 13, William Hastings was beheaded, and the world was no longer topsy-turvy. It had gone stark raving mad.

xviii

Harry: June 1483

Why? Why?”

“Harry, I had no choice. The man was plotting against me.

You heard Catesby.”

“Couldn’t you have imprisoned him, like you did the Woodvilles?”

“No. He was too popular, too dangerous.”

“He cursed us and our sons.”

“Harry, I’ve heard watermen do the same for people who short them on their price. It hasn’t cut down on water traffic that I’ve seen.”

“Has the king heard of this? He may have seen it, for Christ’s sake!”

“No. I had him taken elsewhere. But he will hear of it in due time, from me personally. So will the entire city, for I’ve drawn up a proclamation explain-ing the treason. Harry, you can’t turn soft on me. The man knew what he was doing, the risks involved. And I shall be generous with his widow. She is, after all, Anne’s aunt.” Lady Hastings was a sister of the Kingmaker. “She shall get her dower, and Hastings won’t be attainted, which is certainly better than he deserves. Why, I’ll even honor Hastings’s wish to be buried at Windsor in a tomb next to Ned’s. They can whore together for all eternity.”

I sighed.

“In the meantime, we have other things to worry about. Dorset has escaped from sanctuary. Probably with the help of that strumpet Mistress Shore, whom I’ve placed under arrest. And with that, it’s high time we brought the Duke of York out of it to stay with his brother.”

We had a long council meeting the next day, and it was decided to

2 4 4 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m send the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Bourchier, and a delegation to Westminster to reason with the queen. The archbishop—my grandfather’s half brother—did not take to the task enthusiastically. He was seventy-two years of age and had largely retired from public life until we’d written to him back in May, ordering him to take custody of the Tower and its treasure.

The archbishop did not know of the Eleanor Butler business. Only a handful of us knew; indeed, those who had met at Westminster on the day of Hastings’s death had been busy working out the details of the coronation.

The human mind can perform majestic acrobatics, and mine was proving particularly adept at this art. I did not think of myself as dishonest as I joined Richard in arguing that the Duke of York should be freed from sanctuary so that he might take part in his older brother’s crowning. In the back of my mind I was still thinking that Richard might decide that his case was too weak or that something might come to light that made his case so strong that there could be no question that Edward was indeed a bastard, in which case we could have no qualms about taking him from his throne. In the meantime, I persuaded myself, there was no shame in going forward as if there would indeed be a coronation on June 22.

So on June 16, a flotilla sailed from the Tower to Westminster, bearing the archbishop and a load of soldiers. We had supplied him with any number of points to raise in argument against the queen. Her refusal to release the boy was inciting the hatred of the people against the nobles of the land, making it difficult for them to govern and making England a laughingstock among nations. The Duke of York, having committed no crime, and being of tender years, had no right or need to take sanctuary. The sanctuary was rife with criminals of the worst sort, with whom it was highly improper for the boy to consort. The king was in need of company of his own age and station.

It was hours before the archbishop returned to Westminster Hall, where I awaited him. The queen, no fool, had met him argument for argument, even in the face of all of the soldiers flanking him. Only when

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the archbishop, exhausted as she was, pledged that no harm would come to the boy, and begged her to let him go voluntarily lest sanctuary be broken and the Lord’s house dishonored, did she finally agree to relinquish her son. The armed men lurking behind the bishop no doubt influenced her decision as well.

So the Duke of York stood in front of me, holding the archbishop’s hand. “Sanctuary was
dull
,” he said chirpily as I conducted him to the Star Chamber where Richard awaited him. “Nobody but Mama and the girls there. I shall enjoy seeing Edward. Has it been dull for him?”

“Indeed, I think it has, your grace.”

“When he’s crowned it won’t be so dull, I imagine. Is it ever dull, being king, do you think, Uncle Harry?”

“I suppose anything could get dull occasionally.”

“That’s when having a lot of minstrels comes in handy, I suppose.

Or mistresses.”

“
Mistresses
?”

“Well, something like that. One day I heard Papa saying that he had three mistresses. One was the merriest, one was the wiliest, and one the holiest in the realm. I suppose they must be a very special sort of minstrel.”

“No doubt,” I said, grateful that we had reached the Star Chamber.

The next day, Richard ordered that the coronation would be postponed again—until November 9.

There would be no more postponements, everyone had started to realize.

There would be no coronation. Not for Edward.

We’d stopped trying to improve our case about Eleanor Butler— Catesby had been right. With Hastings’s death, and rumors that troops from the North would be pouring into the city, we didn’t need much of a case. We could have put a crown on the city rat-catcher and called him a king, and the Londoners probably would have accepted him— sullenly, but without a fight. They remembered what Margaret of Anjou’s

2 4 6 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m unchecked northerners had done to the countryside, and they had visions of their own shops in flames, their sons beaten to a pulp, their wives and daughters despoiled, their own heads lined up in neat rows on London Bridge. They weren’t visions that we did anything to discourage, even as we had to smile at the impossible numbers of troops the Londoners were conjuring up in their heads. Twenty thousand was one of the more modest estimates I heard.

“After I’ve ruled for a while, the people of the South will realize I don’t have horns and a tail,” said Richard. “In the meantime, it won’t hurt to let them think I might be in league with the devil.”

“While keeping the Church on your side, too,” I reminded him. The next day, Sunday, June 22, preachers throughout London were to give sermons on the subject of the king’s bastardy.

“Well, old man, no one said that this was going to be easy.” Richard laughed, then shook his head. “Harry, there’s something I must tell you.”

“You’ve changed your mind.”

“No. Yesterday I sent orders out to Sheriff Hutton, Middleham, and Pontefract. Rivers and the rest of them are to be executed at Pontefract.”

“Richard!”

“I know you didn’t want it done, Harry, so I didn’t consult you. That way, you’ll have a clear conscience.”

It wasn’t clear at all, though. “Wasn’t there some way you could have let them live?”

“Yes, and spend my entire reign fretting about them plotting against me. No, Harry, it’s best to show my claws at first. When things are settled, I can show mercy. That’s where Ned made his mistake. At the beginning of his reign he was merciful to scoundrels like your Beaufort kinsmen—sorry, old man, but it’s true—and it came back to haunt him. If he’d been ruthless from the start we might have been spared a lot of bloodshed.”

He gave the papers he was riffling through a great thump and left the room, leaving me with nothing but my conscience for company.

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I knew Kate mourned the loss of her brother John and her father to this day; for as long as we had been living together, I’d seen her making her way in silence to our chapel every August 12.

But Kate’s father and John Woodville hadn’t been traitors. Anthony and the rest were.

Then where is the proof?
Kate’s voice asked me.
Where is Richard’s proof?

In the end, it was bad enough facing Kate’s voice inside my head without facing Kate herself. I stayed at Westminster that night, and for the next couple of nights after that. Besides, I had a speech to draft, the most important speech I would ever give in my life. It was the one in which I was to urge the leading men of the city to offer Richard the crown—the stage having been set with the Sunday sermons.

Writing it would be a hell of a lot easier than trying to figure out how to tell Kate that her brother was doomed to die.

The sermons went well. As hoped, they put everyone in London in a thoughtful mood, and gave them the rest of Sunday and all of Monday to recall the old king’s sexual proclivities. They were, after all, better known to Londoners than anyone, Edward having had a pronounced liking for merchants’ wives and daughters, as they were not so lowborn to be dis-agreeable to the senses and not so highborn as to be a nuisance. There were even hints in the speeches that the old king himself was a bastard—not a text of my making or of Richard’s, to do us justice, but a holdover from the Warwick days slipped in by the overenthusiastic Ralph Shaa, who’d not much cared for the old king. Warwick’s house full of meat, free to anyone who asked, and his slanders about the king were well remembered, it seemed.

With the sermons out of the way, I set myself to practicing my speech in any spare moment I had—sometimes with my pages as my audience, sometimes with Catesby as an audience, sometimes with only the ravens flapping outside my chamber window as an audience. I was not entirely a

2 4 8 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m novice at such things. As a boy, I had been given some training in rhetoric.

I’d done well, my tutor always said. Though by nature I was reserved and rather quiet, I knew my voice was pleasing, and I could project it well so as to be heard—there had been no difficulty in hearing me at Clarence’s trial, the last time I’d had to make a pronouncement to a large audience.

But I was still a bundle of nerves, because this speech had to be perfect. On it rested Richard’s future, and mine as well. For if anything happened to arrest the momentum in which London was moving, our lives would not be worth the purchase when young Edward came of age.

On Tuesday I proceeded to the Guildhall, where the mayor and the leading men had been summoned. There, I reiterated the story—what there was of it—of the precontract between Edward and Eleanor Butler.

For good measure, I dropped vague hints that Edward might have been involved in marriage negotiations abroad before his secret marriage to Elizabeth Woodville—quite possibly, I reasoned, there could have been a betrothal that had never been revealed to us in England. Then I moved on to the subject of Richard’s virtues.

I wish Richard had been there to hear me. Men afterward told me that it was an eloquent speech, uttered with an angelic countenance, and who am I to gainsay them? I spoke of Richard’s years of faithful service to his brother, who, I hinted, was not entirely worthy of such dogged devotion. I spoke of his bravery at Barnet and Tewkesbury and about his triumph over the Scots. I spoke of his piety, his generosity to the Church, his munifi-cence to the poor. I spoke of how the North had come to love him, a child of the South, and how when the South saw more of him, they would soon do the same. By the time I finished, I was choking with tears, so convinced had I become myself that the country could not flourish without Richard.

When I at last finished, I cried out, “And now, gentlemen, will you take this good man as your king?”

There was a silence, which continued for an agonizing moment too long before a group of my men, primed for such an eventuality, shouted, “Yea!

Yea!” Then, much to my relief, the mayor and the rest joined in, their

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voices firm if not enthusiastic. It was not the rapt acceptance I had hoped for, but it was enough.

On Wednesday Stillington, aided by Catesby, put the final touches on the petition we were to present to Richard, urging him to take the throne.

On Thursday the lords of the land, spiritual and temporal, rode to Baynard’s Castle, the Duchess of York’s London home, where Richard was staying.

I was at the head of the procession.

That day, June 26, 1483, is a blur to me now. I remember kneeling before Richard with the petition, tears streaming down my face, and I remember Richard raising me, then telling the assembly that yes, he would take on the duty of kingship for the sake of the realm. I remember riding from Baynard’s Castle to Westminster, where Richard, putting on royal robes with my assistance, and taking the scepter handed to him, sat in the marble chair at the King’s Bench. I remember Richard’s speech—one that put my effort to shame—in which he said that he would administer the law without delay or favor and that he would pardon those who had offended against him. (Did I think, then, of Anthony Woodville, Richard Grey, and Thomas Vaughan, lying in a common grave at Pontefract Castle since the day before, having been given but a show of a trial? Probably not.) I remember John Fogge, an elderly cousin of the queen who had taken sanctuary at Westminster, being brought out to Richard, who took his hand in friendship. I remember processing into the abbey, where Richard took Edward the Confessor’s scepter in his hand, and then another procession back to the city, and a procession to St. Paul’s. I remember a great joy, and yet underneath it all a great sadness, at the thought that my dearest friend now belonged not only to me and a few others, but to all of England.