Six of One (5 page)

Chapter Eight

Elizabeth of York Squares the Round Table

As a historian with a Tudor obsession, I think it is fair to describe myself as more than usually familiar with how the Tudor dynasty began when the War of the Roses ended. Up until that night, I had never had any reason to doubt the traditional rendering of the tale: Murderers unknown conveniently dispose of the aforementioned Princes in the Tower, the White Rose contenders for king. Their eligible eldest sister, Elizabeth of York, becomes the White Rose bride of Henry Tudor (aka Henry VII), the ringer for the Red Rose side. Their pink-cheeked progeny unite the two factions, which had been at war for generations, and guarantee peace and happiness in England—at least for a little while.

The monkey-wrench that Elizabeth of York so casually tossed into the backstory of the missing princes was a nuance that was news to me. I knew, of course, that her assertion was not academically supportable. Nevertheless, I decided to play along. It would be amusing to see if this very creditable Elizabeth of York reenactress could give enough plausibility to a nautical backstory for the Tower Princes to make it fly—or, should I say,
sail
.

“I hope you will find my professional interest pardonable,” I said. “Since the princes were never seen alive outside of the tower after 1483, how did they get from tower to port? From which port did they sail, and to what destination?”

Elizabeth settled herself into a seat and addressed my questions. “That spring of 1483, my father, King Edward IV, died. The elder of my two brothers was, of course, to succeed him as Edward V. The new young king was en route to London for his coronation when Uncle Richard intercepted him and placed him under guard in the tower, ostensibly for his own protection. My mother feared that Uncle Richard would try to imprison the rest of the family, as well. For safety’s sake, she took herself and the rest of her children—including me and my little brother Richard—into sanctuary in Westminster Abbey.”

“I can’t say I blame your mother for doing that,” I said. “Evil Uncle Richard was reputed to be a real creepy-crawler.
Was
he really as evil as history has painted him?”

“They didn’t refer to him as ‘evil’ for nothing,” she replied. “My brother, a brand-new king at twelve years old, was certainly no match for him. Neither was my mother.”

“Your mother was Elizabeth Woodville. They say she was very beautiful and very ambitious.”

“Beautiful? Yes. Ambitious? Yes. Able to make a good decision? Perhaps not.”

“Pretty is as pretty does, my mother always used to say.”

“What did your mother say about ambition, Dolly?”

“Something about blind ambition, although
blonde
ambition might be more appropriate to your own mother. After all, she was known as ‘the White Queen.’”

“The White Queen she may have been, but she was a mere pawn when it came to the bishop.”

Elizabeth of York paused for a moment to collect her thoughts. Waiting out the interval, I presumed that the bishop who rooked the queen was none other than John Morton, the Bishop of Ely and a key player in the Tower Princes saga. He was later to become Archbishop of Canterbury under Henry VII. It turned out that I was correct.

“Two months after we went into sanctuary, we were visited by the Bishop of Ely. He persuaded my mother to allow him to remove my younger brother Richard from sanctuary with us and take him to stay with my other brother, the young King Edward, in his tower prison. There was no talking mother out of it: they had told her that my older brother was lonely in the tower by himself and had requested our younger brother’s company. It may have been true as far as it went, but I thought that it was bad policy to let them take yet another brother away from us. Mother wouldn’t listen to me, though.”

“Sounds like a case of
deaf
ambition to me,” I quipped.

“Mother may have been foolish, but, in all fairness, she could hear a pin drop,” Elizabeth rejoined.

“Should we go for
dumb
ambition?”

“Six of one, half a dozen of the other, Dolly. Either way, I could not convince my mother not to send the child out of sanctuary. She insisted on surrendering Little Richard to the bishop.”

“Tutti frutti, all-rooty!” I said. “That must have been an awful moment for you.”

“It was,” Elizabeth acknowledged, “but, in spite of my discomposure, I sweetly asked the bishop for one night’s grace so that Little Richard and I could say our goodbyes. Of course, it was really just a gambit to buy some time to come up with a game plan.”

“My mother used to say that ‘the best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.’”

“Was your mother Scottish, Dolly?”

“No, Polish. But tell me more about what happened with
your
mother—and your plan,” I entreated. “The suspense is killing me.”

“Well, before I could do anything else, I had to calm my little brother down. He asked me to tell him a story, so I told him all about Camelot and King Arthur.”

“Camelot! I know it sounds a bit bizarre, but my mom used to tell me stories about Camelot quite a lot.”

“Dolly, how I would have enjoyed talking to your mother! You see, I, too, loved the Arthurian legends; in fact, I made quite a study of them. Over the years, I immersed myself in the lore and the characters.”

“I’m not surprised to hear it,” I said. “After all, you named your first son Arthur. But I think I am getting ahead of myself—or rather, ahead of you.”

Elizabeth was flattered at my enthusiasm, if her smile was any indication. She continued her tale. “I was obsessed with the legends. I especially loved the story of Excalibur. Who could fail to be stirred by the hand of Vivian, the Lady in the Lake, emerging upright from the water and handing the Sword in the Stone to the young Prince Arthur?”

Putting aside the psychosexual connotations of the Lady in the Lake imagery, I had to agree that it was one of the great set pieces of all time.

“And how could I possibly fail to regale with the tale of the Holy Grail?” asked Elizabeth. I congratulated her on her rhyme.

“Thank you, Dolly,” she said. “I am sure you recall the story of the Holy Grail: The Fisher King, crippled and incapacitated, guarding the secret of the Grail. His daughter, the Lady Elaine, catalyzing the Grail quest and making its successful accomplishment possible.”

I complimented Elizabeth again, this time on a mighty fine feminist interpretation of the Grail story. I thought she took Lady Elaine from casualty to causality very neatly, and I liked her take-charge Lady Elaine much better than Tennyson’s put-upon Lady of Astolat.

“
My
favorite character in the story,” confided Elizabeth, “was the sea nymph Morgan le Fay, King Arthur’s sister.”

“She was a bitch on wheels—or, maybe I should say, a bitch on
foam
—wasn’t she?” I said.

“That perception of Morgan focuses on the
means
and not the end!” cried Elizabeth. “It’s true that her behavior in the earlier parts of the legends
seems
indefensible.”

Let me see now
, I thought.
Seduction by false pretenses, connivance, betrayal, attempted murder, hooching around the Round Table
. I thought “indefensible” about covered it, and I said so. Elizabeth redirected me masterfully.

“Dolly, focus on the conclusion of the Arthurian legend. For all her faults, Morgan le Fay was the most powerful of mystic healers. She was the one who arranged for her brother, Arthur, to be transported across the water to the Isle of Avalon when he was fatally wounded after his last battle. Once he was there, she could work her healing magic and restore him to life, and through him, restore England to glory when the appointed time came for Arthur’s return. She had to set him to sea in order to effect her healing and to start to make things right.”

I liked Elizabeth’s take on the female denizens of Camelot. “I can just see Little Richard on his last night with you, listening to you tell the tale. He must have been absolutely enraptured.”

“Well, if I do say so myself, I had quite a way with the telling of the tale. So it was that on our last night together, Little Richard and I went to Camelot in our imaginations. I spun stories of the adventures of the fair ladies and their knights until I could see that the child was getting sleepy. Eventually, we got to King Arthur, grievously wounded at the Battle of Camlann. I told of how Morgan le Fay saw to it that after the battle, Arthur sailed into the mist to the uncharted Isle of Avalon. There she could help him to heal and to return one day in glory to rule England once more. Before Little Richard could finish saying that
he
would like to sail off to Avalon and bring King Arthur back, I had formulated my plan.”

I have always had the greatest respect for my mother’s borrowed wisdom on the best-laid plans of mice and men. But what my mother and the poet Burns failed to articulate about the matter was that the eleventh-hour plans of sisters in sanctuary absolutely rock on the water.

Chapter Nine

Whereby the Ocean’s Roll Rocks Dolly’s World

“So,” continued Elizabeth of York, “the scheme came to me there and then—and literally ‘out of the mouths of babes.’”

“You mean the Arthurian babes: Morgan, Elaine, Vivian, and all the rest?”

“No, Dolly, the allusion is to Little Richard, of course.”

“I should have known,” I said.

“I pictured my little brothers being part of King Arthur’s triumphant return from Avalon. Even more breathtaking, I pictured
myself
as part of it. Even more breathtaking than
that
, I realized that
I
could be the author of England’s return to glory through the consummation of the legend.
I
could finish what Morgan le Fay had started.”

“By?” I asked.

“By the simple expedient of sending my brothers on a sea voyage in search of Avalon. Such a voyage would suit twin purposes.”

“Those being?”

“First, it would remove my brothers both from the fray that surrounded the disputed English throne and from immediate danger. If they stayed in England, Uncle Richard or his henchmen would have them killed. If Uncle Richard did not do it, Henry Tudor’s partisans would. On land in England, the boys were sitting ducks. On the sea, with all its perils, they had a fighting chance of staying alive. While they were away, I would arrange to marry Henry Tudor. That way, if they never returned, our family bloodline would retain its place in the English monarchy through me.”

I could see that this plan had its advantages. Then I recollected that this whole thing really was just a pageant of some kind, a prenuptial production for a Tudor-obsessed bride, arranged by my mischievous, female friends. There was no denying, though, that the level of historical detail these performers were able to provide was prodigious, so much so in fact that I couldn’t find it in myself to do anything except listen to the second of the twin reasons that Elizabeth of York’s plan absolutely rocked.

“Second,” Elizabeth continued, “I thought that there was a real chance that my brothers might find the legendary Avalon, Isle of the Seven Cities, and upon it, the living King Arthur. I believed that Avalon was real. I believed that Arthur was there, on Avalon, healed by Morgan le Fay and whole. I believed he was just waiting for the right moment and the means to return to England. I believed that my brothers could be that means and that the time for Arthur’s return had finally come.”

“Believing something doesn’t make it so,” I reminded Elizabeth. “Ask anyone who invested with Bernie Madoff.”

“I had more than my belief in the legends to back my scheme!” she countered. “John Jay, a merchant of Bristol, had sailed from that seaport three years earlier in 1480. He set off in search of the Isle of the Seven Cities, as Avalon was also known. After Jay’s return, there was a lot of sailing activity out of Bristol seaport for parts unknown or for a nebulous ‘New Found Land.’ A lot was going on, but no one was saying very much about it. Knowledge of the Bristol expeditions was very contained.”

“Kept below the waterline, so to speak,” I said.

“Not far enough below the waterline that I didn’t cotton on to the fact that
something
big was going on,” said Elizabeth.

Maybe something big
was
going on in Bristol, I thought. Like the fate of the Princes in the Tower, those Bristol expeditions of the same period are shrouded in speculation and mystery. Christopher Columbus knew of them. He encountered one such expedition himself in the late 1470s, in the vicinity of Iceland. He also received clandestine letters reporting on the Bristol activity in the decade prior to his own 1492 expedition to the New World. There is no shortage of documentation on the British expeditions out of Bristol by John Cabot in 1496 and by his son, Sebastian, in 1499; not so the prequel voyages that seem to have taken place in the 1480s.
Were
those jolly Jack Tars from Bristol trying to hide something—something like the fact that they were onto the whole Avalon thing? I knew, in my professorial heart of hearts, that all this just had to be mere fantasy and speculation. Still, I could not keep myself from ruminating on this food for thought.

“Okay, Elizabeth,” I said. “You had two brothers you wanted to put on a slow boat to Avalon, and a port full of seamen you suspected of having found the way there, if they would but admit it. Is that an accurate recap of events so far?”

“Quite accurate, Dolly.”

“Great! So what happened next?” I asked.

“Next,” croaked Margaret’s voice from across the room, “she sent a messenger to
me
.”