The Stolen Crown: The Secret Marriage That Forever Changed the Fate of England (3 page)

“George, you fool!” Margaret dropped her embroidery. “Harry—”

“Oh.” George winced and looked at me. “Er, sorry.”

“It’s a lie!” I said. “You’re just making that up to tease me.” He often did things like that, and having grown up with no other children in the household until recently, I was particularly vulnerable to such tactics. Hopefully, I looked around for confirmation of my words.

Richard shook his head. “No, Harry. It’s the truth.”

I broke free of Margaret’s consoling hand and ran to my grandmother’s

t h e s t o l e n C r o w n 5

chamber. She was sitting in her cushioned window seat, sobbing. I had not known until then that people of my grandmother’s age—she was nigh on fifty—cried. I had no need to ask her if what I had heard was true. When she saw me, she wrapped her arms around me and held me tight, but she did not stop weeping until my own sobs started. “Get your tears out now, Harry,” Grandmother said, patting me on the back as I huddled against her shoulder. “Don’t let that Yorkist brood of Cecily’s see you cry. And then when you are done, I have something for you.”

After a time, she rang a bell and whispered something into the ear of the page who responded. When he came back, he bore a small box.

Grandmother unlatched the box and showed me the coronet glittering inside it.

“Wear it proudly, my boy, in your grandfather’s memory,” she said, setting the golden coronet on my curling black hair as I brushed at my eyes.

“You are now the second Duke of Buckingham.”

ii

Kate: September 1464

It was on a fine September morning in 1464 that the king married my sister, although I couldn’t tell a soul about it, and in truth I wasn’t supposed to know myself.

I found out the secret when, just after dawn, my older sister kicked me in her sleep. As Joan was a compulsive kicker and I was well used to such awakenings, I normal y would have gone back to sleep, but something made me sit up instead and listen. There appeared to be more life in our manor house at Grafton than usual, a sense of something extra going on besides the usual servants arising.

Disentangling my legs from my sister’s—not only did she kick me, she encroached upon my half of the bed, though she claimed it was purely accidental—I climbed out of bed, took my night robe off its peg, draped it over my shoulders, tucked my favorite doll under my arm for company, and quietly made my way downstairs. Sure enough, there were sounds coming from the chapel—a highly unusual occurrence, for these days my family was in no position to keep its own chaplain. I pulled upon the heavy door.

Inside were a priest, my mother, two gentlewomen of my mother’s acquaintance, a good-natured-looking man whom I guessed to be in his thirties, my sister Elizabeth, and a rather young man—the last two kneeling by the altar. It was obvious even to my six-year-old self that I had interrupted a wedding, but why on earth was my sister getting married at dawn, with none of the family present but Mother? And why was everyone— even the bride and groom—in everyday clothes? Why, the groom might have been going out for a day’s hunting, so casually was he dressed.

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As I stood there, at a loss for words and sensing that I had somehow done a Bad Thing, the groom turned and stood, making me gasp. He was tall— well over six feet—and dazzlingly handsome, with hair of a rich brown.

Small, sallow, and of middling appearance, I was none of those things, and I averted my eyes as if caught gazing into the sun. “Well, now. Who is this young lady?”

“Katherine, sir,” I managed.

“Kate,” the groom said as I thrilled from my head to my toes. How did this man know that I loved to be called “Kate,” only Mother insisted on the more dignified “Katherine”? He turned to my sister. “I’ve changed my mind, I’m afraid.
This
will be my new bride.”

“She’s a trifle young for you,” said my sister a little tensely. (She was, I could not help but notice, several years older than the groom.) “Oh, maybe a bit,” the man conceded. He smiled. “Some other lucky man will have little Kate, then. Lady Kate? Can you keep a great secret?”

“You had better,” my mother warned.

“I know Kate will,” the man said reassuringly. He looked down—a long way down—straight into my eyes. “Kate, I am getting ready to marry your sister. But it is a great secret. No one can know until I announce it personally.”

“Your family would not approve?” I ventured, as he was being so confiding.

“Indeed no.”

“That is a pity.”

“But they will come to understand in time.” He cleared his throat and looked thoughtful for a moment, then appeared to make up his mind. “But there are other reasons why there are difficulties just now. I suppose you have not seen our King Edward yet, Kate?”

“No.”

“Have you heard much of him?”

I was delighted by his question, for it gave me the opportunity to demonstrate what a good Yorkist I was, a great necessity in our family, since it was not so terribly long ago that Papa and my brothers Anthony and

8 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m Richard had fought for the House of Lancaster. Having gone over to what now all agreed heartily to be the right side, Papa had sternly informed us children that we should always speak well of the House of York. As with all of my father’s advice, I had heeded it dutifully, but I seldom had the chance to put it into practice, for all of my brothers and sisters, being older and much wiser, were naturally much better Yorkists, and never made a mistake I could correct. “No,” I admitted. “But I hear he is very brave.

And very handsome.”

The second man laughed, a sound that made the chapel echo. He was well over a decade older than the groom and less handsome, though his ruddy face was a pleasant one. “Ned, there’s a fine courtier for you!

Shall I?”

The younger man nodded, and the older man reached in a purse and drew out a fine gold chain, then handed it to me. (Later, I was to learn that he always kept one or two on his person, in case of emergencies.) “There’s a reward for your loyalty, Lady Kate.”

“Thank you,” I said vacantly, staring at the chain. It was lovely, and even to my inexpert eyes looked frightfully expensive. Was my sister marrying a highwayman?

The younger man laughed at my expression. “You see, Kate,
I
am the king. And I have come here to marry your sister.”

There were any number of dignified and proper responses I could have made to this announcement. I, of course, made none of them. My mouth gaped open, most unattractively I fear. “
You
?” I asked. “
Her
?”

“Me. Her.” The king nodded. “She will make a lovely queen, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” I admitted feebly. Bessie was indeed lovely; sometimes I thought that she and my brother Anthony had taken so much beauty for themselves that there was not enough left for the other ten of us children, especially me.

“But you must keep this a secret, Kate, as I have said. You will promise?”

“On my life!”

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“Good girl,” the king said. He grinned. “Or I would be obliged to put you in my Tower as a lesson, you know.”

My previous promise was empty compared to the one I made now. “I swear and hope to die if I break my promise,” I vowed, kneeling and making the sign of the cross for good measure. I might have gone further and prostrated myself had Bessie not interrupted.

“Time passes. Ned, I know the child will not tell. Can we please resume the ceremony?”

While my sister and the king are getting married, it seems a good time to explain what sort of family the king was marrying into.

My mother, Jacquetta of Luxembourg, was the daughter of the Count of St. Pol and the second wife of John, Duke of Bedford, brother to Henry V. My mother was but seventeen at the time of their marriage; the duke was in his forties. They had been married only two years when the duke fell ill and died, leaving Mama free to contract her scandalous marriage to my father—the son of the duke’s chamberlain.

Mama could (and did, when roused) trace her ancestry to Charlemagne, but my father, Sir Richard Woodville, was a different matter altogether. He was no more than a knight when he and my mother wed, secretly and without the license of the king, the unfortunate sixth Henry, then a mere youth. The king could not let such a match pass without censure, and he promptly fined my parents a thousand pounds. But he got over it soon enough, and so completely that the marriage was the making of my father, a fact that he was candid enough to admit in the privacy of Grafton. In time my father was made a baron and a Knight of the Garter by King Henry. He and Mama were among those appointed to bring Henry’s bride, Margaret of Anjou, from France for the couple’s marriage, and my mother was soon on the best of terms with Margaret, then a girl of fifteen. When poor Henry went mad (or took ill, as good Lancastrians said) and the

1 0 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m Duke of York claimed the crown, Papa fought for Henry and for Margaret on the side of the House of Lancaster.

Then, in 1461, there was the dreadful battle of Towton. My father and my oldest brother, Anthony, were on the queen’s side—by this time poor Henry was in such a state that no one thought of him as the person they were fighting for—and the queen lost the battle, horribly, on a blindingly snowy day. The Woodville men were captured, and the queen, the king, and their young son fled to Scotland. All seemed lost for the House of Lancaster, so when Father and Anthony were given the chance to make their peace with our new, young king, the fourth Edward, they took it gladly. So faithfully did my father discharge his new allegiance that within two years, he became a member of the king’s council.

It was not all war and advancement with my parents since their marriage, however. There was the matter of begetting children—and that, my parents often said fondly, was a pursuit in which God had richly blessed them. Some died quite young, to everyone’s sorrow, but by September of 1464 there were twelve of us living, seven girls and five boys, Anthony at seven-and-twenty being the oldest and me at six being the youngest.

I knew my parents worried about how they were going to provide for all of us when we grew older. My father’s wealth came chiefly from my mother’s dower lands, and because of England’s reversals in France, Mother no longer enjoyed the revenues from her estates there. We were by no means poor, but she had to manage our household carefully. Yet as shabby as some of our everyday furnishings were, our house was full of beautiful objects from my mother’s days as the wife of a king’s son: sparkling gold cups, lushly illuminated manuscripts, my mother’s coronet.

They were too steeped in family history to be sold, but they hardly fit in with our modest existence at Grafton either. Still, my parents had managed to make matches for three of us: Bessie with Sir John Grey, Anthony with Elizabeth, Lady Scales, and Jacquetta with Lord Strange.

They were good marriages, all agreed, and at six I was not much worried about whether a similarly suitable husband would be found for me when

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my time came. There were, after all, many sisters to get through before I became anyone’s concern.

Poor Bessie, though, had not been married for long when her husband— just barely knighted, poor man—was killed in the second battle at St.

Albans in 1461, leaving her with two boys, Thomas and Richard. Bessie’s husband, though of good family, had not been rich, and my sister was left with a small income and a fear that her husband’s family would take what was due to her sons. She came back to us at Grafton, and with us she had been living for the past three years. Lovely as my sister was, no one had offered for her since; I suppose in those uncertain days more than just beauty and virtue was needed to attract a man.

Until the king came along.

When the ceremony ended, there were none of the usual festivities.

The priest went to my sister’s chamber—being widowed, Bessie had been given one to herself when she came back to Grafton—and blessed the bed, practically mumbling so as not to wake the rest of the household. Then we all left, leaving the king and Bessie to consummate their marriage, the king’s friend to go for a ride (“A very long ride. Eh, Ned?” I’d heard him hiss to the king), and my mother and I (though I do not think she was anticipating my assistance) to figure out how to keep the secret from spreading through the household. Some contrivance was certainly necessary, as the king was going to have to emerge from my sister’s chamber sooner or later, and at six feet tall and with his dazzling looks, he did not exactly blend into his surroundings. I was full of helpful suggestions—dressing up the king in Father’s clothes, dressing up the king in Mother’s clothes, dressing him up in a monk’s habit, having him use a rope ladder to crawl out the window, drugging the entire household with a sleeping potion—but in the end, my mother settled for confiding in the most trustworthy of the servants and the eldest of my brothers and sisters, who found various ways to occupy the uninitiated outside the house. This solution rather disgusted me, for I was

1 2 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m certain I could have obtained a monk’s habit if someone had just given me the chance.

With this problem solved, though not as ingeniously as I would have preferred, the newlyweds tarried in my sister’s chamber for several hours while the rest of us went around the daily business of the manor, keeping as well away from the bridal chamber as we could. I had to pass it a couple of times (I couldn’t help it, truly) and found that the sounds within were pretty much of the sort that emanated from my parents’