The Stolen Crown: The Secret Marriage That Forever Changed the Fate of England (13 page)

“It is madness, your grace. The king was unaware of all this. He was at Nottingham during the battle, and had planned to join forces with Pembroke and Devon. At Northampton, he heard the news. My lord and the Duke of

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Gloucester stayed with him, but most of the rest panicked and deserted him, the whoresons.” The man stopped to excuse himself, but my sister waved her hand. “The king headed toward London. At Olney, he was arrested by the Archbishop of York, acting on his brother Warwick’s orders.”

“And Edward allowed this creature in a bishop’s miter to take him captive? I cannot believe this!”

“The king had no real choice; I was there. The archbishop had troops with him; the king had almost none. He has been taken to Warwick Castle.

My lord and the Duke of Gloucester were released and sent on their way.

They have gone to London.”

“Is there news of my father? My brothers?”

“None, your grace, at least that I have heard.”

“We must go to London ourselves,” Bessie said. She looked at the handful of servants who could fit into our cramped quarters at the Friars Preachers. They were standing still, mouths agape. “Well? It’s time. Start packing. Anne, Elizabeth, go with my men and make our excuses to the mayor. Harry, look after Kate.”

“I don’t need looking after,” I protested. But I didn’t argue when Harry led me from the room, and though I was eleven years of age, that night I was more than happy to sleep with Cecilia’s arms wrapped tightly around me. What would happen to all of us?

When we arrived in London, we found that the council had voted to make the queen a gift of wine. Just in case, Anne said sardonically, we wanted to drown our sorrows.

Bessie had thought the Tower the safest place for us to go. The old King Henry, of course, was lodged there also, and we all wondered if we—or at least Bessie and Edward—would end up prisoners there as well. For what did Warwick intend to do? It was all we talked of at the Tower. Did he plan to rule through Edward as a figurehead, as had been tried before with Henry? Did he plan to put the Duke of Clarence in his place? Had

7 8 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m he conceived of his own claim to the throne? No one knew, and the Kingmaker, at Warwick Castle with England’s other captive king, was not saying, at least not in public. He summoned a Parliament to meet in September—at York, in the heartland of his own supporters. There, we supposed, he would show his hand.

We were still worrying and wondering over Warwick’s plans for the king when, one hot day in mid-August, I saw Cecilia and my sister Anne walking toward me in the garden where I was sitting. I knew when Anne drew me close to her and put her arms around me that something was very, very wrong. “Kate,” she said, “I have news. Very bad news. It concerns Father and John. They have been captured.”

I began to shiver. “Are they safe?” I whispered.

Anne held me tighter, so much that it hurt. “Sweetheart, they are where no man can harm them. They are in the arms of the Savior now.”

Father and John had not wanted to leave the king; they wanted to stay and fight for him. But Edward insisted. So for several weeks, dressed nondescriptly on equally nondescript mounts, they had been roaming the countryside, attended only by one man each, picking up what news they could. Hearing through that means of the defeat of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, at Edgecote, they had made their way to the environs of Chepstow, where they had had the misfortune of being recognized by one of Warwick’s men. They had resisted their captors, but it was futile. They were far outnumbered. From Chepstow, they’d been taken to Coventry, where Warwick and George had ridden to order their deaths and to see them die.

In Coventry, they pleaded for each other’s lives. Father said that John was a mere youth still and had done nothing wrong: why should he die? And John said that his father, a man in his sixties, had served the crown since he was in his teens: why should he die when he had been nothing but loyal to his king? But Warwick and Clarence would have none of it. They allowed them no trial. This pair of murderers gave my brother and my father time

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to confess their sins and to write their wills, and in that they congratulated themselves they were being most generous.

John went first on that evil day of August 12, 1469. He bore himself bravely and said he had lived as Edward’s loyal subject and was dying as the same. My father had to watch as John died, as the headsman bungled the first stroke and had to take another. Then it came his turn. He prayed as he died and was still praying when they took his head.

I did not learn these details until much later, when I was a woman grown and could bear to hear them. At the time I first heard the news, I did not care how or where the deed had been done. I only knew that the men I loved best in the world—Father, and above all others, John, who had never harmed a soul in his life—were gone for good.

With Father and John dead, we waited to hear the worst of Anthony or even the king. Beheading, we were certain, awaited one; death in a remote castle by some mysterious means the other. It was only a matter of time.

Our fears were increased when news came that the Earl of Devon had been captured and killed.

All of England seemed to take the king’s capture and these killings as a signal to go simultaneously mad. John Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, began besieging the Paston family’s castle of Caister. The Berkeleys and the Talbots were feuding; so were the Stanleys and the Harringtons. Some Londoners rioted in favor of the king, some in favor of Warwick, some simply for the sheer fun of rioting. There was even a rising in Hexhamshire by Sir Humphrey Neville, Warwick’s cousin, in favor of the House of Lancaster.

Warwick tried, none too successfully, to control this violence, but he found the leisure to attend to other matters as well. In doing so, he helped distract my family from its misery somewhat, though this was surely not his intention.

He branded my mother a witch.

The accusation did not come directly from Warwick himself. As with

8 0 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m Robin of Redesdale, he acted through a proxy—in this case, one Thomas Wake, whose son had died fighting for Warwick at Edgecote. He produced a leaden image, broken in two, of a man in arms which Wake claimed was supposed to represent the Earl of Warwick. My mother was also reported to have produced leaden images of the king and queen, supposedly at the time the two were courting, and joined them together in an indecent manner.

If the earl and Wake thought that my mother, newly widowed and mourning the loss of John as well, would be too unstrung by grief to fight her accusers, they reckoned wrong. Mama sent an impassioned note to the mayor and aldermen of London, proclaiming her innocence and reminding them, not at all subtly, of the good services she and Grandmother Buckingham had performed for the city years before by interceding on its citizens’ behalf with Margaret of Anjou, whose troops it was feared would wreak destruction upon them and their goods. The city officials agreed to assist her in putting her case before the king’s council—which, of course, was essentially Warwick’s council at the time—and Mama, who had been placed under guard by Thomas Wake, was allowed to travel to join us at the Tower.

I think some effort was made to keep the news of this latest family disaster from me, but it must have failed miserably. Already crying myself to sleep each night with thoughts of John and Papa, I now had the worry that Mama—as pious a lady as any I knew, though not ostentatious about it—would be found guilty of witchcraft. Would she be burned alive? Or would she merely be forced to walk barefoot through the streets and then be imprisoned for life, like Eleanor Cobham, the wife of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, had been, less than thirty years before? Would my remaining brothers be accused with her, and sentenced to the horrid death of a traitor?

Would my sisters suffer? Would I?

Harry was no comfort to me during this time. It was not for lack of effort on his part—he tried to distract me in sundry ways, and he even shunned Richard’s company on one or two occasions for my own—but his very status as my husband only added to my misery. I knew that my marriage

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to Harry had angered Warwick, and it was perfectly logical to my eleven-year-old self to deduce that had Harry not married me, Papa and John might still be alive and Mama would not be branded as a witch.

I was still in this unenviable state of mind when our fortunes shifted yet again. Charles, Duke of Burgundy, had used his considerable influence with the merchant classes in London to calm the situation there, but he was no friend to Warwick, who in the meantime was attempting to cope with Humphrey Neville’s rising but was finding that no one would answer his call for troops, a kingmaker being a very different thing from a king. Only with Edward at liberty would men respond, so in September—all thoughts of holding a Parliament being put aside—the king was allowed to travel in due state to York and then to Pontefract, after which Humphrey Neville was duly caught and executed. Having let Edward out of his cage, the Earl of Warwick could hardly now put him in again, especially since the episode had reminded everyone that Edward could be quite effective when the occasion demanded it. The upshot was that in October, the king rode triumphantly back to London, surrounded by the cream of the nobility of England and the mayor and aldermen.

It was not a sight I saw, for with the kingdom having returned somewhat to normal, I had been sent from the Tower to pretty Greenwich. I had been listless and pale since the news came of my father’s and my brother’s deaths, and it was thought that there I might recover my spirits. With the king back in London, my sister and her daughters returned to the comfort of Greenwich as well, and soon the king had left Westminster to join us there for a family evening, as had been his wont. Only one thing had changed in Bessie’s chamber since then: the window seat on which John had liked to perch was empty. No one dared sit in it.

We were all gathered there—all of us Woodvilles, that is, for John’s widow, said to be feeling her age these days, was at one of her manors outside the city—when Edward came in. A few months ago, I would have run to him and embraced him, for I was a demonstrative child and Edward not one to stand on ceremony with his family. Now I curtseyed and returned

8 2 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m to my seat, where I was working on the same piece of embroidery that had occupied my hands for weeks now. It was my only pastime then. It was deadly dull, a biblical scene instead of the bright flowers and cheerful birds I preferred, but it was complex enough to occupy my thoughts so I did not have to think of the picture that haunted my mind at all other times: my father and handsome, lively John, headless and lying tangled together in a heap of dirt near Coventry.

“Kate.”

I blinked and realized that the king had been speaking to me. “Yes, your grace?”

“I asked how you had been occupying your time lately. It must have been dull for you at the Tower; I know you are fond of Greenwich.”

“I have had this, your grace,” I said, and looked at my embroidery. So did the king. All of a sudden, I saw what he saw: a hideous mishmash of stitches that would have shamed even my little niece the Lady Elizabeth had she produced them. “It’s horrid,” I said, clapping my hand to my mouth.

“Isn’t it?” Then my tears began falling fast.

The king hauled me to my feet. “Come. We need to have a talk.”

“Bessie is very worried about you, Kate. She says you hardly eat or speak and want to do nothing but sit and attend to that needlework of yours.”

“I do not mean to worry her. I am sorry, your grace.”

“Stop calling me ‘your grace.’ We are brother and sister, are we not?” His voice was very gentle. “I know you are grieving for your father and for your brother. So am I, for they were good men. And I can understand your grief, for I have grieved for my father and my brother too, you know. My father was all I wanted to be, and my brother Edmund was my closest companion.”

“Yes.”

“I suspect it was easier for me than it is for you, for after they died I had no time to mourn; I had to carry on their fight.”

“But no one is carrying on Papa and John’s fight. They have been forgotten.”

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“Kate?”

I stared at the floor and felt my tears start to fall again. “They say the Earl of Warwick and the Duke of Clarence will be coming back to court soon, and that you shall forgive them.”

“That is true. And what would you have me do to them?”

“Kill them, as they killed Papa and John.”

I waited for lightning, or Edward, to strike me dead.

The king shook his head. “Do you know how it chills my blood to see a pretty child like yourself standing there saying that? It is not that easy. For one thing, George is my brother.”

“But the Earl of Warwick isn’t.”

“No. But it is not as simple as that. The truth is, Kate, I couldn’t kill him either, even if I could forget his years of service to me, which I cannot. It is not a good time for me or anyone else on my behalf to take vengeance, even though it might please some. I myself have little love for them; did you know that they have even spread rumors that I am a bastard? The offspring of my mother and some archer she fancied?” Edward stared off into space, his face hardening. “For George to slander his own mother so, and Warwick his aunt! But for now, I must work with them.”

“But you are king!”