Philippa Gregory: The Red Queen

At dinner, my husband Edmund talks only to his brother Jasper. Neither of them say so much as one word to me, but I have to listen to the two of them worrying that Richard, Duke of York, will make a claim on the throne on his own account. He is advised by Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick, and these two, Warwick and York, are men of too vast an ambition to obey a sleeping king. There are many who say that the country cannot even be safe in the hands of a regent, and if the king does not wake, then England cannot survive the dozen years before his son is old enough to rule. Someone will have to take the throne; we cannot be governed by a sleeping king and a baby.

“We can’t endure another long regency; we have to have a king,” Jasper says. “I wish to God you had married and bedded her years ago. At least we would be ahead of the game now.”

I flush and look down at my plate, heaped with overcooked and unrecognizable bits of game. They hunt better than they farm in Wales, and every meal brings some skinny bird or beast to the table in butchered portions. I long for fast days when we have only fish, and I impose extra fast days on myself to escape the sticky mess of dinner. Everyone stabs what they want with their dagger from a common plate, and sops up the gravy with a hunk of bread. They wipe their hands on their breeches, and their mouths on their coat cuffs. Even at the high table we are served our meat on trenchers of bread that are eaten up at the end of the meal. There are no plates laid on the table. Napkins are obviously too French; they count it a patriotic duty to wipe their mouths on their sleeves, and they all bring their own spoons as if they were heirlooms, tucked inside their boots.

I take a little piece of meat and nibble at it. The smell of grease turns my stomach. Now they are talking, in front of me as if I were deaf, of my fertility and the possibility that if the queen is driven from England, or her baby dies, then my son will be one of the king’s likely heirs.

“You think the queen will let that happen? You think Margaret of Anjou won’t fight for England? She knows her duty better than that,” Edmund says with a laugh. “There are even those who say that she was too determined to be stopped by a sleeping husband. They say she got the baby without the king. Some say she got a stable boy to mount her rather than leave the royal cradle empty and her husband dreaming.”

I put my hands to my hot cheeks. This is unbearable, but nobody notices my discomfort.

“Not another word,” Jasper says flatly. “She is a great lady, and I fear for her and her child. You get an heir for yourself, and don’t repeat gossip to me. The confidence of York with his quiver of four boys grows every day. We need to show them there is a true Lancaster heir-in-waiting; we need to keep their ambitions down. The Staffords and the Hollands have heirs already. Where’s the Tudor-Beaufort boy?”

Edmund laughs shortly and reaches for more wine. “I try every night,” he says. “Trust me. I don’t skimp my duty. She may be little more than a child herself, with no liking for the act, but I do what I have to.”

For the first time, Jasper glances over to me, as if he is wondering what I make of this bleak description of married life. I meet his gaze blankly with my teeth gritted. I don’t want his sympathy. This is my martyrdom. Marriage to his brother in this peasant palace in horrible Wales is my martyrdom; I offer it up, and I know that God will reward me.

Edmund tells his brother nothing more than the truth. Every single night of our life, he comes to my room, slightly unsteady from the wine at dinner that he throws down his throat like a sot. Every night, he gets into bed beside me, and takes a handful of my nightgown as if it were not the finest Valenciennes lace hemmed by my little-girl stitches, and holds it aside so he can push himself against me. Every night I grit my teeth and say not one word of protest, not even a whimper of pain, as he takes me without kindness or courtesy; and every night, moments later, he gets up from my bed and throws on his gown and goes without a word of thanks or farewell. I say nothing, not one word, from beginning to end, and neither does he. If it were lawful for a woman to hate her husband, I would hate him as a rapist. But hatred would make the baby malformed, so I make sure I do not hate him, not even in secret. Instead, I slide from the bed the minute he has gone and kneel at the foot of it, still smelling his rancid sweat, still feeling the burning pain between my legs, and I pray to Our Lady who had the good fortune to be spared all this by the kindly visit of the bodiless Holy Ghost. I pray to Her to forgive Edmund Tudor for being such a torturer to me, her child, especially favored by God. I, who am without sin, and certainly without lust. Months into marriage I am as far away from desire as I was when I was a little girl; and it seems to me that there is nothing more likely to cure a woman of lust than marriage. Now I understand what the saint meant when he said that it was better to marry than to burn. In my experience, if you marry, you certainly won’t burn.

One long year of loneliness and disgust and pain, and now I have another burden to bear. Edmund’s old nursemaid becomes so impatient for another Tudor boy that she comes to me every month to ask if I am bleeding, as if I were a favorite mare at stud. She is longing for me to say no, for then she can count on her fat old fingers and see that her precious boy has done his duty. For months I can disappoint her and see her wizened old face fall, but at the end of June I can tell her that I have not bled, and she kneels down in my own privy chamber and thanks God and the Virgin Mary that the House of Tudor will have an heir and that England is saved for the House of Lancaster.

At first I think she is a fool, but after she has run to tell my husband Edmund and his brother Jasper, and they have both come to me like a pair of excited twins, and shouted their well wishes, and asked me if I would like anything special to eat, or if they should send for my mother, or whether I should like to gently walk in the courtyard, or to rest, I see that, to them, this conception is indeed a first step towards greatness, and could be the saving of our house.

That night, as I kneel to pray, at last I have a vision again. I have a vision as clear as if I were in my waking life, but the sun is as bright as in France, not Welsh gray. It is not a vision of Joan going to the scaffold, but a miraculous vision of Joan as she was called to greatness. I am with her in the fields near her home; I can feel the softness of the grass under my feet, and I am dazzled by the brightness of the sky. I hear the bells tolling the Angelus, and they ring in my head like voices. I hear the celestial singing, and then I see the shimmering light. I drop my head to the rich cloth of my bed, and still the blazing light burns the inside of my eyelids. I am filled with conviction that I am seeing her calling and I am being called myself. God wanted Joan to serve Him and now He wants me. My hour has come and my heroine, Joan, has shown me the way. I tremble with desire for holiness, and the burning behind my eyes spreads through my whole body and burns, I am sure, in my womb, where the baby is growing into the light of life and his spirit is forming.

I don’t know how long I kneel in prayer. Nobody interrupts me, and I feel as if I have been in the sacred light for a whole year when I finally open my eyes in wonder, and blink at the dancing candle flames. Slowly I rise to my feet, hauling myself up the bedpost, weak at the knees with my sense of the divine. I sit on the side of my bed in a state of wonder and puzzle at the nature of my calling. Joan was called to save France from war and to put the true King of France on his throne. There must be a reason that I saw myself in her fields, that all my life I have dreamed of her life. Our lives must march in step. Her story must speak to me. I too must be called to save my country, as she was summoned to rescue hers. I have been called to save England from danger, from uncertainty, from war itself, and put the true King of England on his throne. When Henry the king dies, even if his son survives, I know it will be the baby now growing in my womb who will inherit. I know it. This baby must be a son-this is what my vision is telling me. My son will inherit the throne of England. The horror of war with France will be ended by the rule of my son. The unrest in our country will be turned into peace by my son. I shall bring him into the world, and I shall put him on the throne, and I shall guide him in the ways of God that I shall teach him. This is my destiny: to put my son on the throne of England, and those who laughed at my visions and doubted my vocation will call me My Lady, the King’s Mother. I shall sign myself Margaret Regina: Margaret the queen.