Authors: Philippa Gregory
By tradition, Edward is not even with me. He watches from behind a screen, my young
sons with him: I may not even see him; I cannot catch courage from his smile. I have
to do this all entirely alone, with thousands of strangers watching my every movement.
Nothing is to detract from my rise from gentry woman to Queen of England, from mortal
to a being divine: next to God. When they crown me and anoint me with the holy oil,
I become a new being, one above mortals, only one step below angels, beloved, and
the elect of heaven. I wait for the thrill down my spine of knowing that God has chosen
me to be Queen of England; but I feel nothing but relief that the ceremony is over
and apprehension at the massive banquet to follow.
Three thousand noblemen and their ladies sit down to dine with me and each course
has nearly twenty dishes. I put off my crown to eat, and put it back on
again between every course. It is like a prolonged dance where I have to remember
the steps and it goes on for hours. To shield me from prying eyes, the Countess of
Shrewsbury and the Countess of Kent kneel to hold a veil before me when I eat. I taste
every dish out of courtesy but I eat almost nothing. The crown presses down like a
curse on my head and my temples throb. I know myself to have ascended to the greatest
place in the land and I long only for my husband and my bed.
There is a moment at one point in the evening, probably around the tenth course, when
I actually think that this has been a terrible mistake and I would have been happier
back at Grafton, with no ambitious marriage and no ascent to the rank of royals. But
it is too late for regrets, and even though the finest of dishes taste of nothing
in my weariness, I must still smile and smile, and put my heavy crown back on, and
send out the best dishes to the favorites of the king.
The first go out to his brothers, George the golden young man, Duke of Clarence, and
the youngest York boy, twelve-year-old Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who smiles shyly
at me and dips his head when I send him some braised peacock. He is as unlike his
brothers as is possible, small and shy and dark-haired, slight of build and quiet,
while they are tall and bronze-headed and filled with their own importance. I like
Richard on sight, and I think he will be a good companion and playmate to my boys,
who are only a little younger than him.
At the end of the dinner, when I am escorted back to
my chambers by dozens of noblemen and hundreds of clergy, I hold my head high as if
I am not weary, as if I am not overwhelmed. I know that I have become something more
than a mortal woman today: I have become half a goddess. I have become a divinity
something like my ancestress Melusina, who was born a goddess and became a woman.
She had to forge a hard bargain with the world of men to move from one world to another.
She had to surrender her freedom in the water to earn her feet so that she could walk
beside her husband on the earth. I can’t help but wonder what I will have to lose
in order to be queen.
They put me to bed in Margaret of Anjou’s bed, in the echoing royal bedchamber, and
I wait, the cover of cloth of gold up to my ears, until Edward can get away from the
feasting and join me. He is escorted into my bedroom by half a dozen companions and
menservants, and they formally undress him and leave him only when he is in his nightgown.
He sees my wide-eyed gaze and laughs as he closes the door behind them.
“We are royal now,” he says. “These ceremonies have to be endured, Elizabeth.”
I reach out my arms for him. “As long as you are still you, even underneath the crown.”
He throws off his gown and comes naked to me, his shoulders broad, his skin smooth,
the muscles moving in thigh and belly and flank. “I am yours,” he says simply, and
when he slides into the cold bed beside me, I quite forget that we are queen and king
and think only of his touch and my desire.
The following day
there is a great tournament and the noblemen enter the lists in beautiful costumes,
with poetry bellowed by their squires. My boys are in the royal box with me, their
eyes wide and their mouths open at the ceremony, the flags, the glamour and the crowds,
the enormity of the first great joust they have ever seen. My sisters and Elizabeth—Anthony’s
wife—are seated beside me. We are starting to form a court of beautiful women; already
people are speaking of an elegance that has never before been seen in England.
The Burgundian cousins are out in force, their armor the most stylish, their poetry
the best for meter. But Anthony, my brother, is superb: the court goes mad over him.
He sits a horse with such grace and he carries my favor and breaks the lances of a
dozen men. No one can match his poetry either. He writes in the romantic style of
the southern lands; he tells of joy with a tinge of sadness, a man smiling at tragedy.
He composes poems about love that can never be fulfilled, of hopes that summon a man
across a desert of sand, a woman across a sea of water. No wonder every lady at court
falls in love with him. Anthony smiles, picks up the flowers that they throw into
the arena, and bows, hand on his heart, without asking any lady for her favor.
“I knew him when he was just my uncle,” Thomas remarks.
“He is the favorite of the day,” I say to my father, who comes to the royal box to
kiss my hand.
“What is he thinking of?” he demands of me, puzzled. “In my day we killed an opponent,
not made a poem about them.”
Anthony’s wife Elizabeth laughs. “This is the Burgundian way.”
“These are chivalrous times,” I tell my father, smiling at his broad-faced puzzlement.
But the winner of the day is Lord Thomas Stanley, a handsome man who lifts his visor
and comes for his prize, pleased to have won. The motto of his family is shown proudly
on his standard:
“Sans Changer.”
“What does it mean?” Richard mutters to his brother.
“Without changing,” Thomas says. “And you would know if you studied rather than wasting
your time.”
“And do you never change?” I ask Lord Stanley. He looks at me: the daughter of a family
that has changed completely, turned from one king to another, a woman who has changed
from being a widow into being a queen, and he bows. “I never change,” he says. “I
support God and the king and my rights, in that order.”
I smile. Pointless to ask him how he knows what God wants, how he knows which king
is rightful, how he can be sure that his rights are just. These are questions for
peace, and our country has been at war too long for complicated questions. “You are
a great man in the jousting arena,” I remark.
He smiles. “I was lucky not to be listed against your brother Anthony. But I am proud
to joust before you, Your Grace.”
I bend from the queen’s box to give him the prize of the tournament, a ruby ring,
and he shows me that it is too small for his big hand.
“You must marry a beautiful lady,” I tease him. “A virtuous woman, whose price is
beyond rubies.”
“The finest lady in the kingdom is married and crowned.” He bows to me. “How shall
we—who are neglected—bear our unhappiness?”
I laugh at this, it is the very language of my kinsmen, the Burgundians who have made
flirtation a form of high art. “You must endeavor,” I say. “So formidable a knight
should found a great house.”
“I will found my house, and you will see me win again,” he says, and at his words,
for some reason, I feel a little shiver. This is a man who is not just strong in the
jousting arena, I think. This is a man who would be strong on the battlefield. This
is a man without scruple who will pursue his own interest. Formidable, indeed. Let
us hope he is true to his motto and never changes from his loyalty to our House of
York.
When the goddess Melusina fell in love with the knight he promised her that she would
be free to be herself if she would only be his wife. They settled it that she would
be his wife and walk on feet but once a month, she might go to her own chamber, fill
a great bath with water, and, for one night only, be her fishy self. And so they lived
in great happiness for many years. For he loved her and he understood that a woman
cannot always live as a man. He understood
that she could not always think as he thought, walk as he walked, breathe the air
that he took in. She would always be a different being from him, listening to a different
music, hearing a different sound, familiar with a different element.
He understood that she needed her time alone. He understood that she had to close
her eyes and sink beneath the glimmer of the water and swish her tail and breathe
through her gills and forget the joys and the trials of being a wife—just for a while,
just once a month. They had children together, and they grew in health and beauty;
he grew more prosperous and their castle was famous for its wealth and grace. It was
famous also for the great beauty and sweetness of its lady, and visitors came from
far away to see the castle, its lord, and his beautiful mysterious wife.
As soon as I am crowned queen I set about establishing my family, and my mother and
I become the greatest matchmakers in the kingdom.
“Will this not cause more enmity?” I ask Edward. “My mother has a list of lords for
my sisters to marry.”
“You have to do it,” he assures me. “They complain that you are a poor widow from
a family of unknowns. You have to improve your family by marrying them to the nobility.”
“We are so many, I have so many sisters, I swear we will take up all the eligible
young men. We will leave you with a dearth of lords.”
He shrugs. “This country has been divided into either York or Lancaster for too long.
Make me another great family that will support me when York wavers, or when Lancaster
threatens. You and I need to link ourselves to the nobility, Elizabeth. Give your
mother free rein, we need cousins and in-laws in every county in the land. I shall
ennoble your brothers, and your Grey sons. We need to create a great family around
you, both for your position and for your defense.”
I take him at his word and I go to my mother and find her seated at the great table
in my rooms, with pedigrees and contracts and maps all around her, like a commander
raising troops.
“I see you are the goddess of love,” I observe.
She glances up at me, frowning in concentration. “This is not love; this is business,”
she says. “You have your family to provide for, Elizabeth, and you had better marry
them to wealthy husbands or wives. You have a lineage to create. Your task as queen
is to watch and order the nobility of your country: no man must grow too great, no
lady can fall too low. I know this: my own marriage to your father was forbidden,
and we had to beg pardon from the king, and pay a fine.”
“I would have thought that would have put you on the side of freedom and true love?”
She laughs shortly. “When it was my freedom and my love affair: yes. When it is the
proper ordering of your court: no.”
“You must be sorry that Anthony is already married now that we could command a great
match for him?”
My mother frowns. “I am sorry that she is barren and in poor health,” she says bluntly.
“You can keep her at court as a lady-in-waiting and she is of the best family; but
I don’t think she will give us sons and heirs.”
“You will have dozens of sons and heirs,” I predict, looking at her long lists of
names and the boldly drawn arrows between the names of my sisters and the names of
English noblemen.
“I should do,” she says with satisfaction. “And not one of them less than a lord.”
So we have a month of weddings. Every sister of mine is married to a lord, except
for Katherine, where I go one better and betroth her to a duke. He is not yet ten
years old, a sulky child, Henry Stafford, the little Duke of Buckingham. Warwick had
him in mind for his daughter Isabel. But as the boy is a royal ward since the death
of his father, he is at my disposal. I am paid a fee to guard him, and I can do with
him what I want. He is an arrogant rude boy to me; he thinks he is of such a great
family, he is so filled with pride in himself that I take a pleasure in forcing this
young pretender to the throne into marriage with Katherine. He regards her, and all
of us, as unbearably beneath him. He thinks he is demeaned by marriage to us, and
I hear he tells his friends, boasting like a boy, that he will have his revenge, and
we will fear him one day, he will make me sorry that I insulted him, one day. This
makes me laugh; and Katherine is glad to be a duchess even with a sulky child for
a husband.
My twenty-year-old brother John, who is luckily still
single, will be married to Lord Warwick’s aunt, Lady Catherine Neville. She is dowager
Duchess of Norfolk, having wedded and bedded and buried a duke. This is a slap in
the face to Warwick, and that alone gives me mischievous joy, and, since his aunt
is all but one hundred years old, marriage to her is a jest of the most cruel sort.
Warwick will learn who makes the alliances in England now. Besides, she must soon
die, and then my brother will be free again and wealthy beyond belief.
For my son, my darling Thomas Grey, I buy little Anne Holland. Her mother, the Duchess
of Exeter, my husband’s own sister, charges me four thousand marks for the privilege,
and I note the price of her pride and pay it so that Thomas can inherit the Holland
fortune. My son will be as wealthy as any prince in Christendom. I rob the Earl of
Warwick of this prize too—he wanted Anne Holland for his nephew and it was all but
signed and sealed; but I outbid him by a thousand marks—a fortune, a king’s fortune,
which I can command and Warwick cannot. Edward makes Thomas the Marquis of Dorset
to match his prospects. I shall have a match for my son Richard Grey as soon as I
can see a girl who will bring him a fortune; in the meantime he will be knighted.
My father becomes an earl; Anthony does not gain the dukedom that he joked about,
but he does get the lordship of the Isle of Wight; and my other brothers get their
places in royal service or in the church. Lionel will be a bishop as he wanted. I
use my great position
as queen to put my family into power, as any woman would do, and indeed as any woman
risen to greatness from nothing would be advised to do. We will have our enemies—we
have to make connections and allies. We have to be everywhere.