The Stolen Crown: The Secret Marriage That Forever Changed the Fate of England (8 page)

4 0 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m are enough of us alive and thriving. The Lord has His own ways, I know, but I think His way with you will be more likely than not to give you children. You will do fine. We all will be fine.”

“You really think it’s just wedding nerves?”

“Yes. Even I had them. I was a bundle of nerves, let me tell you, before my wedding. Just ask my wife.”

I began giggling.

“Now dry your eyes and let me take you riding in the fine fresh air, where you shall get away for a time from all of this pother. I’m not Bessie’s Master of Horse for nothing, you know.”

Our wedding was a relatively quiet affair, most of the court’s energy— and funds—going toward my sister’s coronation to follow in a few days.

Still, it was a grand occasion, and over thirty years later, I still remember it clearly.

What should I write of? My dress? I have worn finer ones since, I suppose, but I loved the exquisite little creation of blue and yellow silk that my sister’s tailor finally completed the evening before I married Harry.

I remember Harry’s robes too: scarlet, worked with the golden knots that were the Stafford badge and that I learned early on could not be called “twisty little knots,” as I called them by mistake a time or two, but “Stafford knots,” if you please. Topping off the Stafford-knot-covered robe was the shining circlet of gold that Harry wore on his head as a mark of his dukedom. No doubt, as all the adults commented, the two of us made a charming little couple. And yet I do not want to write about dress.

The ceremony? My father and my oldest brother, Anthony, led me to the chapel door at Greenwich Palace, where the king and queen awaited us under a gold canopy. Harry was there before me, having been led to his place by George, Duke of Clarence, in rather better spirits since he had complained of John’s marriage to his aunt. (Later, I realized that he himself wished to marry one of the Kingmaker’s daughters and was quite pleased

t h e s t o l e n C r o w n 4 1

that one of their prospective bridegrooms had been taken off the market.) But yet I do not want to write about the ceremony, save perhaps for the kiss Harry gave me at the appointed time. It was a little boy’s kiss given to a little girl, but there was a tenderness in it that I had not expected and that I cannot think of to this very day without shedding a tear.

The feast afterward? It was a great feast, with the most amazing variety of food I had seen to date, though it was to pale beside the coronation banquet that I would attend in a few days. There was a great variety of wine, too, and the king and Lord Hastings seemed to enjoy it particularly well, though Harry and I of course got only a couple of watered-down sips as we sat in our places of state. But it was not the food or the drink that I wish to write about, but this:

It was a very long feast as well as a grand one, at least for us children.

Humphrey, Harry’s brother, finally gave up staying awake as a hopeless task and went to sleep with his head almost upon his plate, and I myself, infected by his example, started to drift off. Too tired to think of what I was doing, I let my head rest on Harry’s shoulder and began to give myself up to a long-needed sleep.

Laughter and exclamations came from the adults near us, and in my half-dreaming state I sensed someone trying to pluck me out of my seat, doubtless to carry me to bed where I belonged. But Harry held on to me tightly as I opened my eyes to gaze around confusedly.

“Don’t disturb her,” he said in the same voice he had used when he had spoken of Humphrey that first day I met him. “My wife is comfortable as she is.”

iv

May 1465 to February 1466

Though i am not old—eight-and-thirty now—i have seen my fair share of crownings. My sister Bessie was my first.

Because of our youth, Harry and I were to be carried on squires’ shoulders during most of the procession—a subject Harry waxed indignant upon when we were told. “I’m too old for that! I stayed awake through our entire wedding, after all.”

Humphrey, the sweetest-tempered lad I knew, sat back and watched his brother fume with his usual gentle expression. “But your wedding was much shorter than the coronation will be,” he pointed out mildly.

“It seemed to take forever,” my spouse muttered ungallantly.

Harry’s anger somewhat cooled, however, as the day when he was to be made a Knight of the Bath approached. Humphrey was also being knighted, as were my sister Margaret’s husband-to-be and my brothers Richard and John. My brother Anthony had been knighted some years before; Lionel was destined for the Church; and Edward, the youngest, would have to wait for his turn later, there being a great many young men and boys who were to be dubbed at the Tower.

Among them was a man of twenty-two, John de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. I felt very sorry for the young earl, who had gained his title in the saddest possible way several years before when his father and his older brother had both been beheaded on charges of plotting with Margaret of Anjou. King Edward had been very kind in allowing him to succeed to the earldom and to attend my sister’s coronation, I thought, as there were

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rumors that he was not inclined to be loyal to the House of York. But he had married a sister of the Kingmaker, who was as good a Yorkist as could be, so that was a good sign.

Harry and Humphrey had been told many times what to expect at their knighting, and listening to them talk about it, I was rather relieved on the whole that I was a girl and would never have to go through such a ceremony. The bath on the evening before the knighting would be pleasant, I thought, if it were warm enough, and the blue ermine-trimmed robes one put on at the very end sounded magnificent. But the all-night vigil of prayer beforehand sounded cold and wearisome even for the most pious.

All in all, I decided as I snuggled into my warm bed with Cecilia and my favorite doll the evening Harry and the others were to proceed into the chilly church, it was far more pleasant to be a Knight of the Bath’s lady than a Knight of the Bath.

I probably slept no better that night than Harry, though. The next day, Friday, May 24, was the day my sister was to ride from Eltham Palace to the Tower, where as was the custom she would sleep before proceeding to Westminster. I was all agog; if my sister was a fraction as excited as I, she must not have slept a wink.

When at last the morning came, the king’s aunts and sisters, my mother, a few other sundry duchesses, and myself were seated in several richly decorated litters, behind one in which Bessie rode in solitary splendor. We were to ride to London’s great bridge, where the mayor and the alderman had prepared a show on which they had been working for months. At Shooters Hill, the fathers of the city, their scarlet robes ablaze against the usual grayness of the London sky, joined us.

Though my travels had mostly been by barge, John had taken me across the bridge once or twice. It had been a marvelous enough sight then; now I barely recognized it. The laundry poles that protruded from the houses that lined both sides of it had been festooned with banners, and the mud and muck on the path of the bridge had been obliterated by clean sand that seemed to momentarily confuse the horses. Stages had been erected every

4 4 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m few feet. On them were men dressed as angels and saints, choirs of boys sweetly singing, and members of all of the guilds of London in their finest clothes. I could not see my sister’s face as she took in all of this that had been planned for her, but I saw Mama next to me trying not to cry tears of pride. I squeezed her hand, and she smiled at me and squeezed back.

But, of course, the ceremonies were only beginning.

At the Tower, the newly made Knights of the Bath greeted us in their blue and silver robes, Harry as the highest ranking standing at the forefront of the group. John looked especially dashing in his robes, which later earned him an approving thunk of the cane from his wife, and my brother Richard looked quietly dignified in his. Harry at nine, I am afraid in retro-spect, looked rather more quaint than manly in his knightly attire, especially as he was surrounded by grown and nearly grown men, but of course his grandmother told him that he was the height of mature masculinity, and he puffed up in a manner indicating that he believed her wholeheartedly.

Humphrey, fortunately, was having a good day and looked almost the picture of health as he stood with his comrades, as proud as the rest of them.

I thought the new Earl of Oxford looked appealingly melancholy as he stood there with his fellow knights. (Much later in life, having had occasion to become friendly with the earl, John de Vere, I mentioned this to him.

“Of course I looked melancholy,” he replied. “I was a Lancastrian in a sea of Yorkists. How else could I look?”) On Saturday, the Knights of the Bath escorted my sister from the Tower to Westminster, we ladies following in our shared litters behind Bessie in her open litter as we wound our way through the city streets, lined with guild members. Bessie flashed her smile right and left, and so, for that matter, did I. I waved so much my wrist ached, and the Fishmongers and I gave each other such enthusiastic welcomes that when we had passed clear of them, Mama muttered through clenched teeth, “Child, it is not your coronation. Have you forgotten that?”

“But they like us so much, Mama!” I protested. Still, I tried to conduct myself with a little more dignity—for a few minutes, anyway. Then the

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joy of the occasion swept me up again, and even Mama and the dowager Duchess of Buckingham (whom I now called Grandmother Buckingham) lost some of their matronly reserve and began to dimple and wave as much as I.

At last, coronation morning, Sunday, May 26, arrived. The Earl of Warwick was not there, being in Burgundy on the king’s affairs. (There was speculation that he might have absented himself on purpose, but I supposed that he was simply a very busy man.) The king’s mother, the Duchess of York, had no business to excuse her own absence, as everyone well knew, and I felt sorry for Bessie’s sake that she was being snubbed so. But the king’s sisters Margaret and the Duchess of Suffolk were there, smiling and pleasant, and I soon forgot to care about Cecily Neville’s absence. If she wished to miss the finest day in England, let her do so!

“Lord God, keep me from swooning,” Bessie muttered that morning as my mother adjusted her robes for the millionth or so time. She was a vision—with her honey-colored hair falling unbound to her shoulders, her purple mantle, and a golden circlet upon her head—but a very nervous one.

“Has anyone ever swooned during this, I wonder?”

“Now, now,” my mother said.

My sister took a deep breath and took her place underneath a purple canopy borne by the four barons of the Cinque Ports. “I’m hot,” she moaned. “I
will
faint.”

Three people at once moved to fan my sister.

Meanwhile, I, clad in ermine and red velvet like the other duchesses and countesses, clambered on the shoulders of the squire who was to bear me. When I had settled myself safely, the squire—a strapping, handsome young man for whom any maiden over fourteen would have died for the privilege of being carried so—carefully arose. “Up we go, Duchess. No fingers around my eyes, please; I need to see where I am walking, you know. You’re a light weight, I’m glad to say.”

“And you are very strong,” I said gallantly, staring around me. “It’s better than being on horseback!”

4 6 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m My mother left off adjusting my sister’s robes for a moment to fiddle with mine. From where we were, we could hear the sound of the Duke of Clarence, the Earl of Arundel, and the Duke of Norfolk riding through Westminster Hall on horseback, clearing a path through the onlookers so that my sister and the rest of us could pass safely through.

The Bishop of Salisbury and the Bishop of Durham took their places on either side of my sister, while the Abbot of Westminster listened for a signal from within the hall. “Time, your grace,” he said at last, and took his place behind Bessie under the canopy. A trumpet sounded.

I do think my sister groaned. Then she took a scepter in each hand and a deep breath and began walking forward as Grandmother Buckingham lifted her train.

Never in my life had I imagined that so many people could crowd into Westminster Hall—not that I had had much occasion to consider the matter. I knew not whether to look at them or to look at the rafters of the hall above my head, which thanks to my squire I could see better than I ever had in my life. “Hold tight, my lady, and keep a sharp lookout,” my squire hissed as the spectators pressed forward. “Some of them will try to grab at the ladies’ gowns, for souvenirs.”

I gasped and tightened my grip on the squire. As I did my little gold coronet drooped to one side a little, giving me what I suppose now must have been a rather jaunty air.

My gown and the other ladies’ made it through Westminster Hall intact, though, and we arrived outside of Westminster Abbey unmolested. There waiting for us was the Archbishop of Canterbury, and surrounding him were so many other bishops and abbots that if the Lord Himself had suddenly appeared among them, I would not have been the least bit surprised.

The Duke of Clarence, the Earl of Arundel, and the Duke of Norfolk had left their horses—which had been as splendidly attired as any human present—behind, and stood ready to lead the way into the abbey. With them, carried like me on the shoulders of a squire and looking far less pleased about it, was Harry. I caught his eye and smiled as Bessie stepped