The Stolen Crown: The Secret Marriage That Forever Changed the Fate of England (30 page)

George answered, but to little effect. He offered only to prove his case through personal combat with the king, a proposition that might have met with approval in King Arthur’s court but fell flat in the year 1478.

Preordained as its conclusion was, all of this took time. January had passed into February, and February was six days old when a messenger from Brecon Castle accosted me just as I was about to depart for Westminster. “I come from the duchess, my lord. She is doing well.”

“No letter?”

“No, my lord. She told me to tell you that she was too busy.” The man finally cracked a smile. “Three days ago she bore your grace a fine boy.”

I sent messengers to anyone with whom I had even a nodding acquaintance. I even started to send one to my grandmother—recalling just before the messenger departed that she had gone to stay at Brecon with Kate and therefore hardly needed to be told of her great-grandson’s arrival.

1 9 8 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m My good news had preceded me to Parliament, and both the king and Richard were waiting with their congratulations when I arrived there.

“You’ll be wanting to go to Wales, I know,” said Edward, in a kindly tone I’d not heard from him in years. He hesitated. “But there is one service I require of you first.”

I had a brand-new son, and the king had chosen this time of all others to finally discover my merits. But I was in too jovial a mood to quibble.

“Yes, your grace?”

“Parliament will vote on the Duke of Clarence’s fate today,” the king said as matter-of-factly as if speaking of a distant acquaintance. “I’ve no doubt he will be convicted. A high steward must be appointed to pronounce his fate. Normally, my brother Richard would be called upon, but in this situation it is a bit awkward, as you can see. So you will be appointed steward of England in order to pronounce the sentence.”

I gulped. Though the sentence—and I had no doubt what it would be— would not be of my own ordaining, it was still a daunting task to proclaim that a king’s brother must die. Following hard upon the heels of the birth of my son, it also seemed ill-timed and even ill-omened. Yet it was my place and duty, as Duke of Buckingham, to serve as steward, and the bad had to be taken with the good. “Very well,” I said.

“Good. All will be in readiness by tomorrow morning. You can leave immediately afterward to see your son and that pretty wife of yours.” I waited to be dismissed, but the king showed no sign of letting me go.

“Cantref Selyf,” he said after a pause.

“Your grace?”

“Cantref Selyf shall be yours. I’ll have the papers drawn presently.

Run along so we can get this business over with and you back to Wales by tomorrow.”

Cantref Selyf was part of the Bohun inheritance, which I’d not dared to mention to the king in years. Who knew what would come next? I bowed my thanks. As I left (practically skipping), I heard Richard saying, “Now for me, Ned. My son’s to be Earl of Salisbury, right?”

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Clarence’s title. “Why, of course,” the king said as I stepped out of hearing range.

Not surprisingly, the Duke of Clarence was found guilty that afternoon.

He had never put up much of a defense, though he had spoken eloquently (and lengthily) enough—perhaps he had none to put up. The very next morning, I took my seat as steward of England and pronounced the sentence: death, by a method of the duke’s own choosing.

George didn’t blink when I spoke the words. I half expected him to repeat his offer to prove his innocence by combat, but instead he simply said, when invited to speak, “I have no choice but to accept this sentence.

Pray for me, my lords.” Then he was led away.

I watched, thinking of the boy who’d run into the solar at Writtle to glee-fully announce my grandfather’s death, and felt no pity. God forgive me.

Kate had had much less trouble giving birth to Edward, our new son, than to our firstborn, and she looked lovely and serene when I arrived at Brecon several days later. Her chamber was sparkling with plate we’d been sent as christening gifts, to which I added a golden cup, courtesy of the king. It was the red-faced creature who the nurse put in my arms, however, that occupied my attention entirely. “He’s in good health?” I asked for about the sixth time or so since I’d come home.

“Perfect, Harry,” Kate said for the sixth time also.

Elizabeth, having caught wind of my homecoming—she’d been napping in her nursery when I arrived—toddled into Kate’s chamber and bristled at the sight of her new brother and me. “Baby go!”

“No, Elizabeth, he’s here to stay, but it’s your turn to visit Papa. Come sit here. I’ve brought a new doll for you. All the way from London.”

Elizabeth climbed into my lap and gave the offending baby, whom Kate had taken from me, a triumphant glare. I cuddled her and gave her the new doll, which looked as much like Elizabeth as a doll could look. It was, I know now, the happiest day of my life.

2 0 0 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m Kate did not ask about the Duke of Clarence, and I did not tell her—for all I knew, the sentence might have been carried out by now. That was a topic for another time and for another place. There was no room in this chamber at Brecon Castle, where I sat with my fine new son and my lovely little girl and my beautiful wife, for the ghost of George.

I was wrong, though: George still walked the earth, or at least the small portion of it that was the Tower. “Ned’s dithering,” Richard told me when I reluctantly returned to Westminster. “At this rate, George will outlive all of us.”

“Why does he delay?”

“Conscience, I suppose—it’s not been known to trouble Ned much, but it makes an unwanted appearance now and then.”

“I suppose your mother is pleading with him also.”

“No—she is just praying. Mother doesn’t waste time with ordinary mortals when she can speak to her Maker. I supped with her yesterday, and she said, ‘What will be, will be. The Lord will determine his fate.’”

The Lord finally acted in the person of the Speaker of the Commons, William Allington, who with a delegation asked that the sentence be carried out. Probably the king had been hoping that someone would do just that, for several days later, on February 18, the Duke of Clarence was dead.

George’s execution was a strictly private affair, out of consideration for the Duchess of York more than anyone else. She spent a long time with George before his death; so did Richard. I asked him what their last encounter had been like, and he shrugged. “Damned awkward. But he was in a suitably pious frame of mind, getting all in order, so it wasn’t as bad as I expected. He spent a lot of time enumerating his debts; Ned has agreed to pay them. Oh, and your in-laws did nicely too. George asked that lands be alienated to Anthony Woodville to recompense him for the injuries to his parents.”

“I hardly think that my wife would count that as recompense.” Kate still

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was quiet and pensive on the anniversary of her father’s and her brother John’s deaths. “So how did they do it? I suppose they beheaded him?”

“Now here you have to give George credit for imagination. He asked to be drowned in a barrel of wine. And by God, that’s how they did it. They gave him a little sleeping draught with his last meal, and when he dozed off, they dumped him headfirst into a barrel of malmsey and held him.”

Clarence’s feet sticking up in the air out of a barrel made such an absurd picture in my mind, I did something truly unforgivable. I smiled, or at least I twitched my mouth upward. Richard stared at me, and then he smiled himself.

“Come on, old man,” he said, lifting the cup he was holding. “Let’s get good and soused in memory of Brother Clarence.”

And we did.

As the night wore on and both of us had some difficulty remaining upright, we flopped in front of the fireplace and lay there side by side with our feet propped up, sometimes getting our cups to our mouths, sometimes sloshing them over the rushes. “I remember when you called my brother a whore,” Richard reminisced. For once, he was far drunker than I was.

“Not that again.”

“You should have seen his face.”

“I did see his face.”

“But you were right, Harry. He was a whore. And you know what?

We’re whores, too.”

“How?”

“How are we whores? Hear, Harry, how we hath been whores.”

“
Hic, haec, hoc
,” I intoned. Master Giles, the tutor of my youth, would not have been pleased.

Richard gathered together his dignity. “The Duke of Bedford.”

The Duke of Bedford, a boy in his teens, was John Neville’s son. He had some lands from his mother’s inheritance, but the rich Neville inheritance, which by rights should have been his as it was entailed in the male line, had gone to Richard after John Neville, the Marquess of Montagu, had died

2 0 2 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m at Barnet. I rubbed my forehead, which I found helped to clear my brain.

“Parliament ruled that he wasn’t able to support the dignity of his dukedom anymore. Right?”

“It did, because Ned knew I wanted it to do so. He didn’t want me to make a fuss about Brother George, you see. So now thanks to Ned, young Neville can’t come to Parliament to complain about his inheritance, can he?

He won’t even inherit his father’s barony. Oh, and Ned gave me other things as well. The earldom of Salisbury for my boy, some better lands—anything to keep me happy. And I am. I’m a happy whore, Harry. And so are you, because he gave you Cantref Selyf. Part of your Bohun inheritance, right?”

“Someone had to pronounce sentence on George. It could have been anyone.”

“But it was you, old man, wasn’t it?”

“All right, then. I’m a whore.” I raised my cup and managed to get it to glance against Richard’s. “To us whores.”

“To Ned.”

“And to George.”

“Rest in peace, brother.” Richard raised his cup high in the air, then let it fall with a crash. “Christ, Harry, what have I done? I could have saved him if I’d begged Ned for his life. Could have if—”

He staggered to his feet and kicked his cup into the fireplace. “If I’d wanted to,” he finished.

Two days later, George’s body, borne on a black-draped hearse, began making its way to Tewkesbury Abbey, where his wife had been buried.

That same day, Richard got a license to found colleges at Barnard and Middleham Castles.

The next five years can be disposed of quickly. Kate bore me three more children: two sons, Henry and Humphrey, and one daughter, Anne. Poor

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Humphrey, like his namesake my own brother, was frail. He never thrived, but still it broke our hearts when he died in our arms.

Grandmother died in 1480, full of years. I wish she had lived long enough to see her little namesake, and I wish she had lived long enough to give me the wisdom of her counsel when I needed it most—but I anticipate myself. With her death and the release of the lands she’d held in dower, I became truly rich, second only to the king himself and Richard.

With my newfound wealth, I thought that my influence at court might grow accordingly, but of course I was wrong. It took me a long time to realize it, but the king was not hostile toward me. He probably even liked me well enough—after all, I’d not insulted him in years—but there was no place in his grand scheme of things for me. There did not have to be, for England was at peace. Trouble-making George was dead. The Earl of Oxford was locked up tight in Hamnes Castle. Margaret of Anjou, poor lady, was dead; her most valuable possessions—her hunting pack—having gone to Louis of France. Jasper Tudor, that aging Lancastrian, and his nephew Henry were exiled in Brittany and would probably die as old men there. The Scots caused their usual trouble but were handily subdued by Richard. Everything was working in perfect harmony. Why disturb the balance? Why take a chance on an untried young man like myself, with a history of saying the wrong thing? As 1483 approached, I could almost see the king’s point.

Almost.

xv

January 1483 to May 1483

War was in the air again in 1483, when Edward called a Parliament. There had been a to-do between Burgundy and France, which ended in the Treaty of Arras in December 1482. Poor Elizabeth, Edward’s eldest daughter, had been the chief sufferer by it. As part of the Treaty of Picquigny, she’d been affianced to the Dauphin of France, and Edward had even insisted that she be addressed as Madame la Dauphine, a title that for a while had tied many a good English courtier’s tongue into knots. But now that her title finally slid off everyone’s lips with ease, it was no more, for the Dauphin was to marry Margaret of Austria, daughter to Burgundy’s regent, and poor Elizabeth was back to “the Lady Elizabeth.”

“I was right all along,” I told Richard breezily as we supped that evening, having arrived in London for Parliament. “I knew Picquigny would never last. And Edward even lost his pension! So, do you think we’ll be going to war with France?”

“You’d like to think so, wouldn’t you, Harry? Don’t get your hopes up.”

“I’m not the fool I was at nineteen, if that’s what you think,” I said. “I know it could all come to naught. But he did wage a war in Scotland.”

“No. I waged it for him while he sat back in England and amused himself with Mistress Shore.”

Elizabeth Shore was a London mercer’s wife who had caught the king’s eye some years back. With help from the king, it was generally supposed, she had had her marriage annulled on the ground of impotency (her husband’s, needless to say). Since then, she had lived in a comfortable house

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