The Stolen Crown: The Secret Marriage That Forever Changed the Fate of England (5 page)

“Your grace, I bring word from the king. His grace has informed his council at Reading of his marriage. He wishes your grace to proceed to Reading so that your grace might be introduced to the council and to others of importance.” Even in the midst of all these “your graces,” Bessie looked down at her dress, which was far from new, with such a look of horror that the man came close to smiling as he guessed my sister’s thoughts. “The king wishes to assure you that all necessary items of apparel are being prepared against your grace’s arrival.”

I longed to ask, “Can the rest of us come?” but hardly dared. My eyes, however, must have spoken for me, because the man added, “His grace will be pleased to see the queen’s family at Reading also, but he asks that they return to Grafton afterward while lodgings are being prepared for them.”

“Where?” asked the queen.

“It is not certain, your grace. The king intends to stay at Windsor after he leaves Reading, but he may choose quarters at Greenwich or Sheen for the family of your grace. For now.”

“For now?” my mother asked.

“It is the king’s intention that your daughters be wedded suitably, and soon, to men worthy of a queen’s sister. Their residence at court may thus be only temporary.”

I grabbed at one of my sisters’ hands—any sister would do—to keep upon my feet.
Windsor
, spoken as we might say “Grafton.”
Wedded suitably
.

I had imagined this scene often enough, enacted some reasonable facsimile thereof with my dolls, but now that it was coming true, it was beyond belief. Nothing, I realized, would ever be the same for the Woodville family now. Nothing.

iii

September 1464 to May 1465

The Kingmaker, it appeared, had given much thought to finding a suitable bride for the young king. It had been with the greatest satisfaction that he informed the king’s council, meeting at Reading Abbey, that he was all set to travel abroad to negotiate for the hand of the French king’s sister-in-law, Bona of Savoy (“a most beauteous lady,”

the Kingmaker noted with an appreciative smack of his lips). The Earl of Warwick was getting ready to elaborate, whether upon the proposed terms or upon the lady’s charms no one shall ever know, when the king held up his hand for silence.

“I fear that there is an obstacle of my own making to this proposed match,”

he said quietly. “You have had my interests well at heart, and I commend you for it and shall remember it. But no marriage can take place, for the best reason in the world. The truth is, my lords, I am already married.” He paused, but no one even attempted to speak. “To an Englishwoman. To a beautiful, seemly Englishwoman who will fulfill her role admirably. To the former Lady Elizabeth Grey, the daughter of Lord Rivers here.”

According to my father, my informant, the Kingmaker’s expression might have scared the dead out of their tombs. The king rose and beamed.

“I suspect, my lords, you may wish to discuss this matter amongst yourselves more freely. I shall take myself off so that you can do so, and I shall send for my queen so that she may be received by you in the proper manner.

Come, Lord Rivers, with me.”

My father obeyed, but he had barely cleared the room before the

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Kingmaker let forth a series of expletives, in both English and French. Even if I could bring myself to reproduce his words here, it would be impossible, for my father felt that they were far too vivid and descriptive to be shared with the family. There was more silence, either in awe of the earl’s hitherto unknown verbal dexterity or in fear that the king would return, until Lord Hastings said mildly, “Now, now, my lord. I’ve seen her, and I can tell you that she’s a lovely woman. And with two sons, she’s fertile to boot.”

“Which one is the Kingmaker?” I hissed to John as we rode toward Reading Abbey, me riding pillion behind John. For most of the trip to Reading, I’d been behind one of the king’s men, but for the last stretch of the journey, I’d begged to ride behind John, who as ever had cheerfully obliged.

“Never seen him, you know. But I’d lay odds on the brown-haired man standing next to the king. He looks disgusted enough,” said John.

As subtly as I could, which was probably not very subtly at all, I gazed at Warwick the Kingmaker, if indeed that was he, and felt a twinge of disappointment. Aside from his robes, which were obviously of great cost, he was an ordinary-looking man, neither tall nor short, handsome nor plain.

Even his hair was the most unassuming type of brown. It did not help, of course, that he was standing next to my new brother-in-law, who was every bit as fine as I remembered.

We rode toward the rear of the queen’s party, whose imminent arrival had evidently prompted the king and several other men to stand at the abbey entrance, waiting. As the rest of us drew rein, the king stepped forward and headed straight toward my sister’s horse. As Warwick and a boy in his teens watched, both looking slightly greenish, Edward greeted my sister not as a king meeting his queen, but as a young man of twenty-two who had been eagerly awaiting his love. Not allowing a page to do the job, he assisted Bessie from her horse, embraced her, and kissed her soundly and quite at length for their being in a public place. “Welcome to Reading, my dear,” he said, stepping back. For a moment I thought he was going to

2 2 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m draw Bessie into another extended kiss, but he mastered himself and waved a hand that included all of the family. “And welcome, all!”

Warwick’s eyes moved from Woodville to Woodville, quite evidently counting us and arriving at a figure he thought was too high. It was the boy, however, who said, “Quite a sizable family, Ned.”

“As a matter of fact, George, there are some missing, I believe,” said the king genially. He glanced around. “Who’s not here?”

As this seemed to be a question anyone was free to answer, the impulse to be the one to provide this information to the king was irresistible to me.

“My sister Jacquetta,” I called out. “And my brother Anthony. We hope they will be here soon, though.”

The king’s smile grew even broader, and he walked to where I still sat my horse behind John. As effortlessly as if he were lifting a kitten, he swept me out of my seat, then swung me round as I squealed in delight. “This is my wife’s chief rival for my affections,” he said solemnly, after kissing me on the cheek and placing me on the ground before Warwick and George.

“I am very glad to see you here, Kate.”

George tried not to glare at me as I beamed toothily up at them. The Kingmaker managed, “A fine new sister-in-law indeed.” He smiled. It looked like a painful process.

It was a couple of days later, on Michaelmas, that the king’s council and some sundry other men of importance gathered into Reading Abbey and awaited the formal presentation of my sister as England’s queen. My mother and my second oldest sister, Jacquetta, Lady Strange, were to carry my sister’s train, but the rest of us Woodvilles stood in a large knot in the transept with the others.

The Kingmaker and the king’s brother, George, were to lead my sister into the abbey. By now I had learned that the king had a number of brothers and sisters, but several had died very young. The next oldest boy after Edward, Edmund, had died, aged seventeen, with the Duke of York at

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the battle of Wakefield. Remaining to the king were three sisters, Anne, Duchess of Exeter, Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk, and the Lady Margaret, who had yet to be married, and two brothers, George, Duke of Clarence, and Richard, Duke of Gloucester.

George, the only one of them present at Reading, was not quite fifteen at the time. Though his hair was lighter, he otherwise greatly resembled the king. He was tall and nicely built, having an exceptionally handsome face without the spottiness that marred so many faces of youths his age. Yet I did not find his looks as nearly as appealing as the king’s, though I could not quite understand why. Still, he looked more agreeable than he had the day of our arrival, perhaps because he was aware of the fine figure he cut as silence was ordered and he and Warwick processed into the abbey, my sister between them.

I gasped as John lifted me onto his shoulders to get a better look. Lovely enough in everyday clothes, Bessie was stunning in the scarlet and gold robes, trimmed with ermine, that the king’s tailor had hastened to make for her. The king, I supposed, must have given her the jewels that sparkled as she moved, for they were certainly not anything from my mother’s collection, which I liked to sort through on rainy days. Were it not for the fact that her hair was concealed by her headdress, instead of being unbound, she might as well have been going to her coronation. She might have been born to be a queen, indeed, for she walked with her two escorts and her train-bearers as though she were perfectly accustomed to such pomp.

Bessie walked to the altar where the king stood. He stepped forward and took her hand as my mother and my sister gracefully swiveled backward with her train, which fortunately for them was a relatively short one. “I give to you your most gracious lady, my wife and consort, your Queen Elizabeth!”

After that, any business of the council was strictly anticlimactic. Soon its members dispersed to their homes, as did we Woodvilles. The king and queen stayed at Reading for several weeks, with only a small company of

2 4 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m servants. I knew there were hopes—in my family, at least, and presumably on the king’s part—that my sister would emerge from this quiet time with an heir to the throne in her belly.

Before the council departed from Reading, however, the king, my father, and the Earl of Arundel had a conference. When it ended, my sister Margaret was betrothed to the earl’s fourteen-year-old heir, Thomas Fitzalan. We had barely settled ourselves at Grafton before it was time to escort Margaret to Arundel Castle in Sussex, where she was to live with the earl’s family until she and Thomas were a little older and were considered ready to consummate their marriage.

Perched up high above its surroundings and even more magnificent inside than it appeared from the outside, the castle was the grandest place in which any of us girls had been to date, and as the earl and his family were most hospitable, I was at liberty to wander around it undisturbed. I lost no time in climbing the winding stairs to the castle’s highest turret, where I gazed down at the River Arun and the town below, imagining myself in the glorious days of the third King Edward, with some knight in shining armor racing across the terrain to save me. (From what he was supposed to be saving me was a matter on which I was vague, not to mention historically somewhat confused.) When we left Margaret in her new home and returned to Grafton, it seemed unbearably small, even with fewer of us living there now.

I did not have too long to suffer, though, for in December we were on the move again, this time to Eltham Palace. It would not only be my first time at a royal palace, it would be the first time I met the king’s family, other than Clarence, and I did not think he had boded all that well.

Our days at Eltham were formal, with the elaborate lengthy meals that I was used to, on a considerably smaller scale, from Grafton. In the evening, however, only the immediate family gathered in the king’s chamber, some to play chess or other games, some to dice, some to dance, and some just to chatter, and it was then that I began to get a sense of who my new relations were.

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Cecily, the king’s mother, was pointedly absent from the gathering—I heard later that she had carried on dreadfully about her son’s marriage to a commoner, and John swore that steam had been seen to rise from her hennin when she heard the news—but the king’s brothers and youngest sister, Margaret, all had come for the festivities from Greenwich, where they spent most of their time. George, of course, I had met. Margaret was eighteen; old, I thought, to still be unmarried, especially since she was quite seemly in appearance, though very tall for a woman. If she had any misgivings about her brother’s marriage, she kept them to herself and spoke quite amicably to the queen and the rest of us. Encouraged by her approachability, I always claimed the closest seat to her on informal occasions, when protocol did not forbid it. If she got tired of me doing this, she had the goodness never to say so.

Richard, Duke of Gloucester, twelve years old, was the youngest of the royal family. Unlike the king, George, and Margaret, he was of middling height, with just a fortunate inch or so saving him from being called short.

He was darker than they were too, though far from ill-favored. As he was much quieter than his brother or George, though not at all melancholy, I paid little mind to him.

Edward’s sister Elizabeth, the Duchess of Suffolk, and her husband the duke, John de la Pole, did not make much of an impression on my young mind either, though my mother had been godmother to Elizabeth twenty years before when she was born in Rouen. They were a quiet couple. My brother Lionel told me that the Duke of Suffolk was the great-grandson of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, which impressed Lionel a great deal. I, however, stayed at a distance lest the poor duke, who in all fairness did not appear the least bit inclined to do so, fall into reciting verse to me.

By far the most interesting of the king’s family (aside, of course, from the king himself) was his older sister, Anne, Duchess of Exeter. She had arrived at Eltham after Margaret, George, and Richard. Finding it strange that a duchess should be without a duke, I sidled up to the Lady Margaret at the earliest opportunity. “Where is the duke, my lady? The Duke of Exeter?”