The Stolen Crown: The Secret Marriage That Forever Changed the Fate of England (17 page)

“But—”

“You must be brave, Kate.” I pulled her a little closer, and she rested her head against my doublet. I felt her tears fall on my chest as I awkwardly patted her back. “Promise me you will be.”

“All right, Harry. I promise.”

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I released Kate, and she took her place beside my grandmother, who patted her on the shoulder and said in the usual kindly tone with which she addressed my wife, “Good girl.”

“The lad speaks the truth,” Walter Blount said jovially as my relieved guard resumed tying my hands. He scooted forward to kiss his own wife on the cheek, then smiled at Kate. “Nothing to fear. You ladies will be glad to have the house to yourselves for a while, I wager.”

They led us off, our duchesses waving goodbye and even managing smiles as if we were on our way to a banquet instead of to a cell in the Tower. When we had passed out of sight of them, my guard shook his head. “Is your lady always like that, my lord?”

Being led away from my grandmother’s house by armed men was beginning to give me pause. For the first time I considered the possibility that Warwick might indeed shut us up for life, or worse. I also realized, to my surprise, that nuisance as she was at times, I was beginning to miss Kate already. “Always like what, man?” I said coldly. “If you mean to ask if she is always loyal to those she loves and concerned about their welfare—yes, then she is always like that.”

Sometimes, I am pleased to say, I have given my wife her due.

The Tower was already teeming with newly made prisoners when we arrived, including my uncle John Stafford, the Earl of Wiltshire. He owed his earldom to King Edward, and probably Warwick had remembered this fact. The three of us were put in a fairly comfortable chamber together, not far from that of my relatives the Bourchiers, whom we often met when allowed out for walks. It was quite a family gathering.

Our guards, we soon found, were rather more inclined to support Edward than Warwick, whose French alliance was not particularly popular, especially with those London merchants who traded with Burgundy. Not that the guards cared much for that; when it came down to it, they simply preferred the robust, free-spending, womanizing Edward to poor Henry.

1 0 6 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m He’d been a prisoner in the Tower for so long, the guards sometimes forgot he was back on the throne, one confessed to us. As a result, we had no difficulty getting news from our captors, and the first piece they brought us was impressive: the Duke of Clarence had assembled a large army—and marched it straight to his brother instead of to his father-in-law.

“Prostrated himself before King Edward, he did,” said Henry Bourchier, the Earl of Essex, stroking his thickening beard—my elders’ barbers had not accompanied them to the Tower—contentedly. “I’d have given much to see that sight. The king pulled the lad upright too soon, in my opinion.

I’d had kept him on his knees a good long while, as they say Margaret of Anjou kept Warwick when he made his peace with her.”

“Was the Duke of Gloucester there?” I asked. The Bourchiers’ guards were considerably more informative than our own, we’d found.

“Oh, yes. All three brothers embraced.”

“Very touching.” Uncle John snorted. “I’d have been checking Clarence for knives if I were King Edward.”

“What brought him back to the king?” (I meant King Edward; captivity at Warwick’s command had turned me into a good Yorkist, though not perhaps as good as Kate would have liked.) “Mainly his women. The Duchess of York, the Duchess of Exeter, and the Duchess of Burgundy all begged him to come back to the fold. I had a hand in it myself before I got shut up in here. We all reminded him of how much his brother had done for him—and how little Warwick was likely to do for him, now that he’s got Beaufort and the rest of them to please, not to mention Margaret of Anjou. Poor Warwick had it much simpler last year.”

“Where do you think they’ll go, the king and his brothers?”

“Straight to London.” He paused. “And I think we ought to be there to join them when they do.”

ix

Kate: April 1471

With the Tower full of suspected Yorkists, the sanctuaries full of unmistakable Yorkists, and all but a handful of the most important Lancastrian leaders having left London to raise troops, London was an eerie place. Business went on as usual, but with a sense of just going through the motions while everyone was waiting to see what would happen next.

The Archbishop of York, George Neville, who was Warwick’s younger brother, tried his best to raise some Lancastrian enthusiasm by parading poor mad King Henry through the streets, accompanied by the archbishop himself and by Ralph Butler, Lord Sudeley. As I had not seen Henry before, I begged Grandmother Buckingham for permission to see this show, and she consented immediately—probably as it got me out from underfoot for a while. Although I was trying to be brave, as a great lady should be, I found it rather hard. I could not resist the temptation to ask, three or four times a day, whether there had been news of Harry and the other prisoners.

Showing King Henry to the people was a mistake, as even I at thirteen saw. Harry had told me how oddly he had acted during their meeting, down to his prophecy that Margaret Beaufort’s spotty-faced son would be crowned king, and the stress of recent days had evidently done nothing to help his state of mind. Stooped and bewildered-looking, he hardly seemed aware of the crowds around him as he sat his horse, and a small child next to me went so far as to whimper in fright at his strange appearance. He was wearing what I knew from Harry was his usual blue gown, an item at

1 0 8 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m which a draper standing near me clucked his tongue in disgust and muttered, “My dog wouldn’t piss on it!”

Poor Henry had been a respectable horseman in his younger days, people said, but having been a prisoner for so long, he appeared to have forgotten how to manage even the gentle mare on which he rode. He clearly needed the pages who were leading the animal along.

If a man with presence, like the Earl of Warwick on his black charger or the Duke of Somerset, who was said to be of a handsome, dashing appearance, were with the king, it might have helped—it couldn’t have hurt.

But the Archbishop of York, a plump man, however solemn and grand a figure he might have cut in a church procession, looked simply silly on his own horse, and Lord Sudeley, who had no doubt been a fine man in his prime, was long, long past it. The attendants who came before and after this unhappy trio looked as if they would rather be doing almost anything else in the world, like shoveling out the royal garderobes.

The bystanders were polite. There was too much gentleness in Henry’s ravaged face for anyone to want to mock the king, but there was nothing in it to inspire anyone either. Motherly-looking women here and there called, “God bless you, your grace,” but no one could manage a more enthusiastic response than that.

When the procession disappeared from sight—heading, I was glad to see, toward the bishop’s palace at St. Paul’s, where Henry was better off than anywhere else and where poor Lord Sudeley could take a much needed nap— there was a general sense of relief. I wended my way home with the pages who had accompanied me. We were on Bread Street when one of my pages suddenly grabbed my sleeve. “My lady! It’s your lord, and Walter Blount!”

“Harry?” I stared. Sure enough, my husband was being ushered into his grandmother’s house. I hoisted up my skirts and raced down the street, heedless of anyone unfortunate enough to be in my path. “Harry!” I threw myself upon my husband and hugged him tight. Nearby, Walter Blount was receiving similar attention from Grandmother Buckingham, normally not a demonstrative woman. “You’re safe!”

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He kissed me gingerly. “Well, of course. I told you I would be.”

I stepped back and dabbed at my eyes. “But how did you come here?”

“We escaped,” said Harry laconically. I could have strangled him.

Instead, I turned to the more communicative Walter Blount.

“The lad’s right. We prisoners there overpowered our guards—with the help and connivance of some of our other guards—and took over the Tower. It’s in the hands of York now.”

“But how?”

“Coordination, Kate, coordination. The friendly guards had been smuggling us weapons for several days in advance, so we were well armed. As the others made their rounds, we seized them and locked them in our own cells. Bit by bit, we got farther and farther. Some guards who hadn’t shown support for our cause before suddenly turned in our favor too. When that happened, the game was up for Lancaster.” Walter Blount nodded at Harry.

“Your husband’s got a strong arm on him, lass. He knocked one of the blackguards senseless, though he was coming to himself when we left him.”

Harry, despite his nonchalance, was visibly pleased at the compliment. I clapped my hands before adding piously, “I hope there was no bloodshed.”

“No. There’s a few whose heads will hurt, but they’ll get over it.” Harry grinned, a rare thing with him.

Walter Blount snorted. “We heard of that farce that took place just now—parading poor Henry about. It’s no good, and George Neville knows it. Rumor has it that King Edward is encamped at St. Albans and will be entering London tomorrow. From what we heard coming over here, he’ll not meet any resistance in London. The merchants for one will be more than glad to have him back—some so they can have their debts paid, some so the king can run up more debts. Henry hasn’t been good for business, they say.”

“Not in that blue gown,” I said, giggling, and again felt quite ashamed of myself. By way of repentance, I said three extra Hail Marys that evening as I prayed—but I also prayed long and hard for Edward’s safe coming into

1 1 0 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m the city, having long been convinced that God was as good a Yorkist as I.

He had just been testing us lately.

I could hardly concentrate on anything the next day—Maundy Thursday—and neither could anyone else, not even Grandmother Buckingham. She squirmed through morning prayers almost as much as I.

No one in the city could go about his business as usual, it seemed. By noon, we gave up trying and went to Bishopsgate, where it was considered most likely that the king would make his entrance. The guards at the gate had been sent home to dinner, and fresh ones had not been put in their place.

Some men had been seen that morning wearing Warwick’s badge of the ragged staff, but they had disappeared from the streets—gone back to hide in bed, the crowd at the gate jested.

The church bells of the city rang out one o’clock, then two o’clock. And then a roar came from outside the city gate, and I saw one of the finest spectacles I have ever seen in my life.

King Edward was on a splendid horse—a white one, if you please—and in the months that the people had not seen him, they had forgotten just how handsome he was. After poor King Henry’s ride the day before, he could not have been more of a welcome sight. Soon the ground underneath him was a mass of blossoms, all of the women and girls in the crowd, including myself, having brought flowers to throw the king’s way. They might have run up to the king had not he and his entourage—the king’s brothers, my own brother Anthony, and Lord William Hastings among them—been flanked by the Flemish soldiers who had accompanied the king from abroad.

Edward rode on, smiling and waving and blowing a kiss to a particularly pretty woman now and then. Beside him was the eighteen-year-old Duke of Gloucester, whose smile and wave were somewhat stiffer than that of his older brother. The Duke of Clarence, who so recently had been allied with Lancaster, fixed a smile on his lips and kept it there, but stared straight

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ahead, probably hoping that no one remembered that he had ridden into the city not too many months ago under Warwick’s banner. Lord Hastings acted as his dearest friend, the king, did, and my brother Anthony, while acknowledging the crowd, looked a tiny bit removed from his surroundings, as if his body was all there but his mind was not.

Even though Harry and I, as Duke and Duchess of Buckingham, had been afforded a good vantage point from which to see the king, I doubted he could see us and Harry’s Stafford relations, so thick was the press of the crowd and so protective the Flemings of the master they had been hired to serve. But I hoped he could hear me. “Long live King Edward!” I shouted.

“Our rightful king!”

The bystanders near me took up the cry. “Long live King Edward! Our rightful king!”

The cry carried the king to St. Paul’s.

At St. Paul’s, the king and his entourage heard mass, after which—so I heard from Anthony later—Edward went to the Bishop’s Palace and greeted the man whose occupancy of the throne had just ended for all practical purposes. Henry, poor man, ignored Edward’s proffered hand and embraced him, saying, “My cousin of York, you are very welcome. I believe that in your hands my life will not be in danger.” Edward assured Henry of his kind intentions, and then consigned him to the Tower.

Then he went to Westminster, where the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had been imprisoned in the Tower with Harry and the others, hastily recrowned him.

During all of this, Bessie and her children had remained in sanctuary, and it was there the king next proceeded. In the interval, Harry and I had arrived there ourselves.

As Edward walked into Bessie’s lodgings, Bessie ran into his arms. They kissed for what must have been a solid five minutes. Then Mama led in the little girls. Bess, the oldest, hugged her father straightaway, but the younger