“She was right. Indeed, Richard was so grateful—”
“And perhaps foolishly naive,” Bessie interjected.
“—that he created Lord Stanley his wife’s only jailer. All Margaret Beaufort’s confiscated properties were forfeited not to the state, but given over to Stanley. In fact, though hard to believe, King Richard named him Constable of England!”
“A blunder he would live to regret,” Bessie added.
“How very peculiar,” said Harry, sincerely perplexed. “If Henry Tudor’s invasion failed”—he looked at his mother—“and your marriage with him never took place, then how is it that he became king and you his wife, and I your child?”
“I’m sure you’ve heard of the battle of Bosworth Field,” said Nell, “and how King Richard the Third was slain and your father took his crown?”
“Everyone has heard that story,” said Harry. “But what of my other grandmother, Queen Elizabeth Woodville? I don’t remember her.”
“She died when you were a year old,” Bessie answered evenly, “in the nunnery where your father confined her at the end of her life.”
“She ended up in a nunnery?”
There was a brisk knock on the chamber door and a moment later Lady Margaret swept into the room.
Prince Harry stifled a gasp. Nell and Bessie regarded her with the properly sad smile of women grieving for a lost prince.
“Harry, Nell, ’tis time to take your leave. I must insist.
You’ve been keeping the queen talking for too long. She needs her rest.”
“You’re quite right, Lady Margaret,” Nell agreed. She rose and gave Bessie a kiss on the cheek, whispering, “She won’t keep me away so long next time.”
Harry was next, embracing his mother so fervently that Lady Margaret’s wrinkled old mouth pursed with displeasure. It appeared that Lady Margaret would be taking Harry with her, so
when Nell bent to kiss him, she said very quietly, “Next time you will hear about the second invasion.” Margaret herded Nell from the room, but not before the two friends exchanged a warm, knowing smile. Then the queen mother, no taller than her ten-year-old grandson, took his hand in hers and led him away. Nell could hear her words fading as they moved down the corridor. “You must learn to be more thoughtful, Harry. ’Tis wicked to tire your mother so.” And his obedient reply, “Yes, Grandmother, I will.” Just before they began descending the stairs, Harry turned back and fixed Nell with a conspiratorial smile. She sighed contentedly. The true story of the little princes’ disappearance had never been told before. Bessie’s and her rendition of it had been quite masterful, she had to admit. If she hadn’t cared about living a long, healthy life, Nell thought, she would like to have written it as a book to be published, for it was well that people knew the truth.
But Henry Tudor was king, and Margaret Beaufort the first lady of the land. With such despots at the helm of the ship of state, truth was a rare commodity, and the spreading of it a deadly endeavor.
As usual, Nell would keep her counsel.
hen the royal carriage clattered across London WBridge, the bridge ’twas all but deserted, the shops long closed, only the lights of the merchants’ houses above glittering over the Thames. Nell tried to pay the driver, but Bessie had clearly ordered him to take no money from her friend.
Nell was weary, but there was still work that needed attending to. Inside the dark mercantile it was peaceful, and the smell of the cloth that nearly always evoked sweet memories of early
childhood and her father’s own mercantile in Bruges this night brought forth memories both bitter and sweet. Her chest tight-ened at the thought of Antony, for it was in that shop in Burgundy that she had first met him. Nell was swept back in time.
She was five, and still small enough to be dandled on his knee. She had thought Master Antony the handsomest man in the world, even then, and had told him so. She remembered his laugh at her very serious declaration, and his beautiful smile. Time shifted suddenly and there he was Governor of Wales at Ludlow, a whole royal court revolving round him. How deeply she had fallen in love with him! She knew the memory of those few kisses had to last a lifetime. There’d been promise of so much more in those kisses. There had been promise too in “Edward Quintus,” the shining hope of England for three short months.
How, if he had reigned, she wondered, would England have been different?
England without the wretched Tudors! The soulless mother and son.
Perhaps Bessie, after Anne’s death, would have married her beloved Richard. Nell would be married still to Antony. Perhaps the potent Woodville blood would have triumphed over her barrenness. She might have had children of her own.
But as it had actually come to pass, Bessie was queen of the country she adored. If her fate, like Nell’s, was to lose her life’s truest love, then even the cost of an unhappy marriage was not too high. Three beautiful children, and a son whose heart was sweet and pure. Prince Harry was a rare gift.
Mayhaps the seer had been right. Mayhaps the Tudors would reign glorious for a hundred years. They were a family of mixed blood of Lancaster and York, yet all blood ofthe same ancestor. They might indeed be destined to produce greatness.
But to see them now—the mad king, the wicked mother, the grieving queen in her loveless marriage—such a resplendent future seemed no more than the ravings of a mad, blind prophet.
Nell climbed the stairs to her apartment. All the maids had retired but one, who offered her mistress a late supper.
“A cold meat pie and some ale,” she told the girl. “I’ll have it upstairs, if you please.”
Nell took one of the lanterns that lit her great room and sought the stairway to the floor above. She’d taken pains to have the heavy oak stairs built well, the banisters sturdy, for halfway up they split—one set of steps leading to her bedchamber above the mercantile, the other to the wing above the haberdashers.
A fresh-faced young man carrying a leather pouch met her coming down. “Mistress Caxton, good evening!”
“Good evening, Will. Are you off to Plymouth, then?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And has Martin left for Calais?”
“Soon. His ship sails tomorrow evening.”
“Ride safely,” she said.
“I will. And God protect you, Mistress Caxton.” His boots clattered on the stairs.
Will was bright. And his heart was in the right place. She would see to it he went far.
At the landing Nell held the lantern up. Tonight, the sight of the intricately carven wood door made her stop and smile. She could hear John’s voice within, calling good-natured orders to her couriers, secretaries, and scribes.
And her spies. Hers and her patron Queen Bessie’s spies.
The invisible web. Nell, with Bessie’s help, had spun it very wide indeed. Bessie, the weak and powerless queen, and her mercer friend Nell Caxton of London Bridge, had more of a grip on the world than it appeared to the naked eye. They had, through their intelligence network, treated with many heads of state, from Burgundy to Scotland to Spain, and the great Earls of Ireland, and had a hand in fomenting a rebellion or two. In all, they’d been a
sharp thorn in Henry Tudor’s side. And he had never, in all these years, been the wiser.
Her dear friend Bessie, Elizabeth of York, would likely go down in history as a cipher, lacking all influence, more a pawn than a queen. But she was stronger than anyone knew, more courageous, and had worked diligently in the shadows for the true blood of England.
Prince Harry, who already knew of his mother’s goodness, today had learned of her power. But there was more to know.
Much more. ’Twas fitting for the future King of England to hold the truth of history in his hands. Nell and Bessie would, in the coming months, provide it.
With a great sigh of contentment, she pushed open the carven door.
Author’s note
There is no more enduring nor acrimoniously argued mystery in English history than that of the little princes’ disappearance from the Tower of London. Since the boys vanished without a trace in 1483, countless books, articles, and novels have been published on the subject. Thanks to William Shakespeare’s characterization of Richard in his Tragedy of King Richard III, the princes’ uncle is remembered by most as the withered-armed, crookbacked monster who murdered his brother’s two sons.
Today, international organizations such as The Richard III Society passionately defend his innocence.
The debate is stymied by several widely read fifteenth-century chronicles, all of which are seriously flawed by bias, factual error, and incompleteness. Modern-day “traditionalists” line up behind Shakespeare, and “Ricardians” claim as guilty everyone from Henry Tudor to Harry Buckingham. But none of them has fashioned a wholly satisfying conclusion.
A perfect example of the confusion is Sir Thomas More’s History of King Richard III, a frequently quoted source, the one upon which Shakespeare based his popular play. Universally respected for his integrity, More enjoyed, for centuries, unquestioned authority on the subject. In fact, More’s History is not even a contemporary account. He was five years old at the time
of the princes’ disappearance. Further, his credentials are tainted, young Thomas having lived during his formative years as a ward of King Richard’s avowed enemy, Bishop Morton.
This clergyman was one of the fifteenth century’s greatest Lancastrian plotters and power brokers, an intimate of Lady Margaret Beaufort, and later, high counselor to her son, King Henry the Seventh. Prejudiced as he must have been, Morton was More’s primary source. Some even believe that Morton wrote parts of The History of King Richard III himself.
More’s version, lionizing the ruling Tudor king and naming Richard as the boys’ murderer, is in several important ways flawed. Sir Thomas placed long, melodramatic passages of dialogue into the mouths of the main figures, as though they were characters in a play. He never actually finished his history of the period, leaving out some of the mystery’s most vital information. Most interestingly, More refused to allow his manuscript to be published in his lifetime. Twenty years after his death, his nephew edited the book and had it published. It occurred to me that More might have realized, after beginning the work, that his theory of “Richard as monster” was deeply flawed, even wrong, causing him to shelve the misleading manuscript. This, in itself, is a mystery worth considering.
Neither do the histories speak much about the women who were central to this story. Queen Elizabeth Woodville and her daughter Princess Elizabeth of York (Princess Bessie) rate exactly one book each, and I found none about Anne Neville, King Richard’s wife.
Margaret Beaufort’s biographers do nothing but exalt “the Venerable Margaret” for her piousness, learning, and charity.
With the exception of a brief and inconclusive paragraph in Jeremy Potter’s Good King Richard, no historians—medieval through modern—for one moment consider the pathologically
ambitious Margaret a suspect. Josephine Tey’s classic novel on the subject, Daughter of Time, diverts the blame from Richard and places it squarely at the feet of Henry the Seventh. A sensible approach on first glance, it falters when one remembers that the exiled Henry Tudor hadn’t set foot on English soil for seventeen years at the time of the princes’ disappearance. It never occurs to Tey that Henry’s mother—the convicted financier and master conspirator in both Buckingham’s rebellion and her son’s invasion attempts—had both the clearest motive and the greatest opportunity to have the royal boys snatched. Though punished for her treason and placed under close house arrest, Margaret nevertheless launched a second invasion, this one so successful that Henry was able to steal the crown and found the great Tudor dynasty.
Margaret as the villain of this story seemed most logical to me.
Nell Caxton was my other most exciting find. William Caxton did have one child—a daughter named Elizabeth, whose nickname might well have been Nell. London records document her divorce from Gerard Croppe, and this was the seed from which her character grew. William Caxton, with his shop steps away from Westminster Palace, held an extraordinary position within the inner circle of the courts of three kings—
Edward the Fourth, Richard the Third, and Henry the Seventh, as well as Duchess Margaret of Burgundy. Later, during Henry’s reign, Margaret Beaufort became Caxton’s greatest patron.
Surely this enlightened man would have provided his only child with a stellar education, as well as entrée into his world of royal connections. Beloved as Caxton was by each of these rulers, Nell must have known Princess (and later Queen) Bessie, and a friendship between them would certainly have been smiled upon by all.
The little princes’ mysterious disappearance is not so much
a blank in the historical record, or even a wide chasm, as a cosmic-size black hole in which one can easily become lost. In fact, there is no consensus on whether the princes were murdered at all.
In virtually every history on the subject, even the most virulent anti-Richard author admits that the boys may not have died, but simply have been kidnapped out of the Tower by one of the interested factions. It has been variously suggested that they were abducted and locked away in a dungeon, snatched in 1483
and held captive in various castles in England, and only murdered later. Another theory holds that they were smuggled out of England to be raised by their aunt Margaret of Burgundy. In this scenario, Edward eventually died, but Dickon (Prince Richard of York) lived to young manhood, and with the support of most of the heads of state of Europe, led a serious rebellion against Henry Tudor. Most believe the young man in question was not Prince Richard, but an impostor named Perkin Warbeck, though I find the idea of Dickon’s survival quite plausible.
Of course there is the question of the bones.
In the year 1674, what amounted to two sets of bones were found under a stairwell in the Tower of London, in a place where Thomas More had suggested the princes’ bodies had been interred after their murder by King Richard’s henchmen.
In 1933 they were exhumed, examined, and determined to be the skeletons of two children, aged approximately nine and twelve. The bones were reinterred in a marble urn, which to this day resides at Westminster Abbey. The problem is, Sir Thomas More also claims in his History that the bones were removed from the stairwell by Richard’s henchmen at a later date. There are actually several other children’s skeletons found in excava-tions of the Tower, one of which has been carbon-dated to the Stone Age.
There has never been a modern, scientific analysis or a DNA study performed on the bones in question, and it has never been conclusively proven that these are the earthly remains of the York brothers. Yet they are often cited as “proof ” of Richard’s guilt.
My theory of Margaret Beaufort as mastermind of the boys’
kidnapping is, as far as I know, altogether original. I hope it provokes further debate in this already spirited controversy.
Main Sources
On Richard:
Richard III, Michael Hicks
Richard the Third, Paul Murray Kendall Richard the Third, England’s Black Legend, Desmond Seward On Margaret Beaufort:
The King’s Mother, Michael K. Jones and Malcolm G. Under-wood
Of Virtue Rare, Linda Simon
On the little-princes mystery:
Royal Blood, Bertram Fields
The Princes in the Tower, Elizabeth Jenkins The Princes in the Tower, Alison Weir The Perfect Prince, Ann Wroe
On William and Elizabeth (Nell) Caxton: Caxton and his World, N. F. Blake William Caxton, a Portrait in a Background, Edmund Childs England in the Age of Caxton,Geoffrey Hindly
On Elizabeth Woodville:
Elizabeth Woodville, Mother of the Princes in the Tower, David Baldwin
On Henry Tudor:
The History of the Reign of King Henry VII, Francis Bacon Henry VII, the First Tudor King, Bryan Bevan On Elizabeth (Bessie) of York:
“Privy Purse Expenses of Elizabeth of York: Wardrobe Accounts of Edward IV, and ‘Memoirs’of Elizabeth of York,” The ORB: The On-line Reference Book for Medieval Studies (www.the-orb.net) and The Richard III Society, American Branch (www.r3.org)
On Henry the Eighth:
Great Harry, Carolly Erickson