The White Queen

MAY 14, 1471

We are waiting for news in the Tower when the sound of cheering tells me that my husband is coming home. I run down the stone stairs, my heels clacking, the girls behind me, but when the gate opens and the horses rattle in, it is not my husband but my brother Anthony at the head of the troop, smiling at me.

“Sister, give you joy, your husband is well and has won a great battle. Mother, give me your blessing, I have need of it.”

He jumps from his horse and bows to me, and then turns to our mother and doffs his cap and kneels to her as she puts her hand on his head. There is a moment of quietness as she touches him. This is a real blessing, not the empty gesture that most families make. Her heart goes out to him, her most talented child, and he bows his fair head to her. Then he gets up and turns to me.

“I’ll tell you all about it later, but be sure he won a great victory. Margaret of Anjou is in our keeping, our prisoner. Her son is dead: she has no heir. The hopes of Lancaster are down in blood and mud. Edward would be with you, but he has marched north where there are more uprisings for Neville and Lancaster. Your sons are with him and are well and in good heart. Me, he sent here to guard you and London. The men of Kent are up against us, and Thomas Neville is supporting them. Half of them are good men, ill led, but the other half are nothing but thieves looking for plunder. The smallest and most dangerous part are those who think they can free King Henry and capture you, and they are sworn to do so. Neville is on his way to London with a small fleet of ships. I’m to see the mayor and the city fathers and organize the defense.”

“We are to be attacked here?”

He nods. “They are defeated, their heir is dead, but still they take the war onwards. They will be choosing another heir for Lancaster: Henry Tudor. They will be swearing for revenge. Edward has sent me to your defense. At the worst I am to organize your retreat.”

“Are we in real danger?”

He nods. “I am sorry, sister. They have ships and the support of France, and Edward has taken the whole army north.” He bows to me and he turns, and marches into the Tower bellowing to the constable that the mayor shall be admitted at once and that he wants a report on the Tower’s preparedness for siege.

The men come in and confirm that Thomas Neville has ships in the sea off Kent, and he has sworn he will support a march by the men of Kent by sailing up the Thames and taking London. We have just won a dramatic battle, and killed a boy, the heir to the claim, and should be safe; but we are still endangered. “Why would he do it?” I demand. “It is over. Edward of Lancaster is dead, his cousin Warwick is dead, Margaret of Anjou is captive, Henry is our prisoner held here in this very Tower? Why would a Neville have ships off Gravesend and hope to take London?”

“Because it is not over,” my mother observes. We are walking on the leads of the Tower, Baby in my arms to take the air, the girls walking with us. Mother and I, looking down, can see Anthony supervising the rolling out of cannon to face downriver, and ordering sacks of river sand to stack behind the doors and windows of the White Tower. Looking downriver we can see the men working in the docks piling sandbags and putting water buckets at the ready, fearful of fire in the warehouses when Neville brings his ships upriver.

“If Neville takes the Tower, and Edward were to be defeated in the north, then it all starts again,” my mother points out. “Neville can release King Henry. Margaret can reunite with her husband, perhaps they can make another son. The only way to end their line for sure, the only way to end these wars forever, is death. The death of Henry. We have scotched the heir; now we have to kill the father.”

“But Henry has other heirs,” I say. “Even though he has lost his son. Margaret Beaufort, for one. The House of Beaufort goes on with her son, Henry Tudor.”

My mother shrugs. “A woman,” she says. “Nobody is going to ride out to put a queen on this throne. Who could hold England but a soldier?”

“She has a son, the Tudor boy.”

My mother shrugs. “Nobody is going to ride out for a stripling. Henry Tudor doesn’t matter. Henry Tudor could never be King of England. Nobody would fight for a Tudor against a Plantagenet king. The Tudors are only half royal, and that from the French royal family. He is no threat to you.” She glances down the white wall to the barred window, where the forgotten King Henry has been returned to his prayers again. “No, once he is dead, the Lancaster line is over and we are all safe.”

“But who could bring themselves to kill him? He is a helpless man, a half-wit. Who could have such a hard heart as to kill him when he is our prisoner?” I lower my voice-his rooms are just below us. “He spends his days on his knees before a prie-dieu and gazing without speaking out of the window. To kill him would be like massacring a fool. And there are those who say he is a holy fool. There are those who say he is a saint. Who would dare murder a saint?”

“I hope your husband will do it,” my mother says bluntly. “For the only way to make the English throne safe is to hold a pillow on his face and help him to lasting sleep.”

A shadow goes across the sun, and I hold my baby Edward to me, as if to prevent his hearing such bitter counsel. I shudder as if it is my own death that my mother is foreseeing.

“What’s the matter?” she asks me. “Are you chilled? Shall we go in?”

“It’s the Tower,” I say irritably. “I have always hated the Tower. And you: saying such vile things, as to murder a prisoner in the Tower, who has no defense! You shouldn’t even speak of such things, especially not before Baby. I wish this was over and we could go back to Whitehall Palace.”

From far below my brother Anthony looks up and waves to me to signal that the cannon are in place and we are ready.

“Soon we will be able to go,” my mother says comfortingly. “And Edward will come home, and you will be safe again with Baby.”

But that night the alarm sounds and we all jump from our beds and I snatch up Baby and the girls come running to me, and Anthony throws open my bedchamber door and says, “Be brave, they are coming upriver and there will be firing. Keep away from the windows.”

I slam and bar the shutters on the windows, draw the curtains around the big bed, and jump inside with the girls and Baby, and listen. We can hear the crump of the cannons firing and the whistle of cannonballs in the air, and then we hear the thud as they hit the walls of the Tower, and Elizabeth, my oldest daughter, looks at me, white-faced, her little lower lip trembling, and whispers, “Is it the bad queen?”

“Your father has beaten the bad queen and she is our prisoner, as the old king is too,” I say, thinking of Henry in the rooms below us and wondering if anyone will have thought to close his shutters or keep him away from the windows. It would serve Neville right and save us all a great deal of trouble if he were to kill his own king with a cannon shot tonight.

There is a roar from our cannons on their mountings before the Tower, and the windows light up briefly with the blaze of the firing. Elizabeth shrinks back against me. “That is our cannon, shooting the bad men’s ships,” I say cheerfully. “It is a cousin of Warwick, Thomas Neville, who is too stupid to know that the war is over and that we have won.”

“What does he want?” Elizabeth asks.

“He wants to start it all again,” I say bitterly. “But your uncle Anthony is ready for him, and he has the London-trained bands ready on the walls of London, and all the apprentice boys-they like a fight-are ready to defend the city. And then your father will come home.”

She looks at me with her huge gray eyes. She always thinks more than she says, my little Elizabeth. She has been at war since she was a baby; she knows even now that she is a piece on the chessboard of England. She knows that she is to be traded, she knows that she has a value, she knows that she has been in danger all her life. “And will it end then?” she asks me.

“Yes,” I promise her doubtful little face. “It will end then.”

Three days we are under siege, three days of shelling and then the assaults from the men of Kent and the Neville ships with Anthony and our kinsman, Henry Bourchier, the Earl of Essex, organizing the defense. Each day more of my family and kin stream into the Tower, my sisters and their husbands, Anthony’s wife, my former ladies-in-waiting, all thinking it the safest place in a city under siege, until Anthony decrees we have enough officers and enough men for a counterattack.

“How far away is Edward?” I ask nervously.

“Last I heard, he was four days away,” he says. “Too far. We don’t dare wait for him to come. And I think we can beat them with the forces I have.”

“What if you lose?” I ask nervously.

He laughs. “Then, Sister Queen, you must be queen militant and command the defense of the Tower yourself. You can hold out for days. What we have to do is drive them back now, before they start to come any closer. If they tighten the siege on the Tower or increase the cannon fire, or if, God forbid, they get in somehow, you could die before Edward gets home.”

I nod. “Go on then,” I say grimly. “Attack them.”

He bows. “Spoken like a true Yorkist,” he says. “All the York family are a bloodthirsty lot, born and raised on the battlefield. Let us hope that when we finally have peace, they don’t kill each other out of sheer habit.”

“Let’s get peace first before we worry about the York brothers spoiling it,” I say.

At dawn Anthony is ready. The London-trained bands are well armed and well drilled. This is a city that has been at war for sixteen years, and every apprentice has a weapon and knows how to use it. The men of Kent, under the command of the Neville forces, are encamped all around the Tower and the city walls but they are sleeping when the postern gate to the Tower opens and Anthony and his men quietly file out. I hold the gate for them; Henry Bourchier is the last to go. “Your Grace, my cousin, bolt it behind us and get you into safety,” he says to me.

“No, I’ll wait here,” I say. “If it goes wrong for you, I shall be here to let my brother in and you all with him.”

He smiles at that. “Well, I hope we will come back with a victory,” he says.

“God speed,” I reply.

I should close and bolt the gate behind them, but I do not. I stand in the gateway to watch. I think of myself as a heroine in a story, the beautiful queen who sends out her knights to battle and then watches over them like an angel.

At first, it looks like that. My brother, bareheaded, in his beautifully engraved breastplate, goes quietly towards the camp, his broadsword in his hand, followed by his men, our loyal friends and those of our affinity. In the moonlight they look like cavaliers on a quest, the river gleaming behind them, the night sky dark above them. The rebels are camped in the field by the river; more of them are quartered in the narrow dirty streets around. They are poor men; there are a few with tents and shelters, but most are sleeping on the ground beside campfires. The streets outside the city walls are full of alehouses and whorehouses, and half the men are drunk. Anthony’s force forms into three, and then at the whispered word everything changes. They put their helmets on their heads, they drop their visors over their kindly eyes, they draw their swords, they release the heavy ball of their maces, they turn from mortals into men of metal.

I somehow sense the change that comes over them as I stand at the gate watching, and even though I have sent them out to battle and it is me they are defending, I have a feeling that something bad and bloody is about to happen. “No,” I whisper, as if I would stop them as they start to run forward, their swords drawn, their axes swinging.

Sleeping men stumble up with a cry of fright and get a blade in the heart or an axe through the head. There is no warning: they come out of dreams of victory, or dreams of home, into a cold blade and an agonizing death. The dozing sentries jump awake and scream the alarm, silenced by a dagger through the throat. They flail about. One man falls into the flames of the fire and screams in agony, but nobody stops to help him. Our men kick the campfire embers and some of the tents and the blankets catch fire and the horses rear up and neigh in fear as their fodder blazes up before them. At once the whole camp is awake and running in panic as Anthony’s men go through them like silent killers, stabbing men on the ground as they roll over and try to wake, pushing men down as they rise up, slitting an unarmed man’s belly, clubbing a man as he reaches for his sword. The army from Kent rolls out of sleep and starts to run. Those who are not brought down grab what they can and dash away. They rouse the men in the streets beside the Tower, and some come running towards the field. Anthony’s men turn on them with a roar and charge at them, their swords already red with blood, and the rebels, country boys most of them, turn and run.

Anthony’s men give chase but he calls them back: he won’t leave the Tower undefended. A group he sends down to the quayside to capture the Neville ships; the rest head back to the Tower, their voices loud and excited in the coldness of the morning. They shout at each other of a man stabbed in his sleep, of a woman rolling over to be beheaded, of a horse breaking its own neck, rearing from the fire.

I open the sally-port gate for them. I don’t want to greet them, I don’t want to see any more, I don’t want to hear any more. I go up to my rooms, gather my mother, my girls, and Baby, and bolt our bedroom door in silence, as if I fear my own army. I have heard men tell of many battles in this cousins’ war, and they always spoke of heroism, of the courage of men, of the power of their comradeship, of the fierce anger of battle, and of the brotherhood of survival. I have heard ballads about great battles, and poems about the beauty of a charge and the grace of the leader. But I did not know that war was nothing more than butchery, as savage and unskilled as sticking a pig in the throat and leaving it to bleed to make the meat tender. I did not know that the style and nobility of the jousting arena had nothing to do with this thrust and stab. Just like killing a screaming piglet for bacon after chasing it round the sty. And I did not know that war thrilled men so: they come home like laughing schoolboys filled with excitement after a prank; but they have blood on their hands and a smear of something on their cloaks and the smell of smoke in their hair and a terrible ugly excitement in their faces.

I understand now why they break into convents, force women against their will, defy sanctuary to finish the killing chase. They arouse in themselves a wild vicious hunger more like animals than men. I did not know that war was like this. I feel I have been a fool not to know, since I was raised in a kingdom at war and am the daughter of a man captured in battle, the widow of a knight, the wife of a merciless soldier. But I know now.