Philippa Gregory - The White Queen

My father and all my brothers ride out of Reading to greet us, so I might enter the town with my kinsmen at my side. There are crowds along the road and hundreds watching my father pull off his hat as he rides towards me, and then dismounts and kneels to me in the dust, honoring me as queen.

“Get up, Father!” I say alarmed.

He rises slowly and bows again. “You must become accustomed, Your Grace,” he says to me, his head bent to his knees.

I wait till he comes up smiling at me. “Father, I don’t like to see you bow to me.”

“You are Queen of England, now, Your Grace. Every man but one must bow to you.”

“But you will still call me Elizabeth, Father?”

“Only when we are alone.”

“And you will give me your blessing?”

His wide smile assures me that everything is the same as ever. “Daughter, we have to play at being kings and queens. You are the newest and most unlikely queen to a new and unlikely house. I never dreamed that you would capture a king. I certainly never thought that this lad would capture a throne. We are making a new world here; we are forming a new royal family. We have to be more royal than royalty itself or nobody will believe us. I can’t say I quite believe it myself.”

My brothers all jump down from their horses, doff their caps, and kneel to me on the public highway. I look down at Anthony who called me a whore and my husband a liar. “You can stay down there,” I say. “Who is right now?”

“You are,” he says cheerfully, rising up, kissing my hand, and remounting his horse. “I give you joy of your triumph.”

My brothers come around me and kiss my hand. I smile down at them; it is as if we are all about to burst out laughing at our own presumption. “Who’d have thought it?” John says wonderingly. “Who would ever have dreamed it?”

“Where is the king?” I ask as we start our small procession through the gates of the town. The streets are lined on either side with townspeople, guildsmen, apprentices, and there is a cheer for my beauty and laughter at our procession. I see Anthony flush when he hears a couple of bawdy jokes, and I put my hand on his gloved fist, clenched on the pommel of his saddle. “Hush,” I say. “People are bound to make mock. This was a secret wedding, we cannot deny it, and we will have to live down the scandal. And you don’t help me at all if you look offended.”

At once he assumes the most ghastly simper. “This is my court smile,” he says out of the corner of his upturned mouth. “I use it when I talk to Warwick or the royal dukes. How d’you like it?”

“Very elegant,” I say, trying not to laugh. “Dear God, Anthony, d’you think we will get through this all right?”

“We will get through it triumphantly,” he says. “But we must stick together.”

We turn up the high street and now there are hastily made banners and pictures of saints held from the overhanging windows to welcome me to the city. We ride to the abbey; and there, in the center of his court and advisors, I see him, Edward, dressed in cloth of gold with a scarlet cape and a scarlet hat on his head. He is unmistakable, the tallest man in the crowd, the most handsome, the undoubted King of England. He sees me, and our eyes meet, and it is once again as if no one else is there. I am so relieved to see him that I give him a little wave, like a girl, and instead of waiting for me to halt my horse and dismount and approach him up the carpet, he breaks away from them all and comes quickly to my side and lifts me off my horse and into his arms.

There is a roar of delighted applause from the onlookers and a shocked silence from the court at this passionate breach of protocol.

“Wife,” he says in my ear. “Dear God, I am so glad to have you in my arms.”

“Edward,” I say. “I have been so afraid!”

“We have won,” he says simply. “We will be together forever. I shall make you Queen of England.”

“And I shall make you happy,” I say, quoting the marriage vows. “I shall be bonny and blithe at bed and board.”

“I don’t care a damn about dinnertime,” he says vulgarly, and I hide my face against his shoulder and laugh.

I still have to meet his mother; and Edward takes me to her private chambers before dinner. She was not present during my welcome from the court, and I am right to read this as her first snub, the first of many. He leaves me at her door. “She wants to see you alone.”

“How do you think she will be?” I ask nervously.

He grins. “What can she do?”

“That is the very thing I would like to know before I go in to face her,” I say dryly, and walk past him as they throw open the doors to her presence chamber. My mother and three of my sisters come with me as a makeshift court, my newly declared ladies-in-waiting, and we step forward with all the eagerness of a coven of witches dragged to trial.

The dowager Duchess Cecily is seated on a great chair covered by a cloth of estate, and she does not trouble herself to rise to greet me. She is wearing a gown encrusted with jewels at the hem and the breast, and a large square headdress that she wears proudly, like a crown. Very well, I am her son’s wife but not yet an ordained queen. She is not obliged to curtsey to me, and she will think of me as a Lancastrian, one of her son’s enemies. The turn of her head and the coldness of her smile convey very clearly that to her I am a commoner, as if she herself had not been born an ordinary Englishwoman. Behind her chair are her daughters Anne, Elizabeth, and Margaret, dressed quietly and modestly so as not to outshine their mother. Margaret is a pretty girl: fair and tall like her brothers. She smiles shyly at me, her new sister-in-law, but nobody steps forward to kiss me, and the room is as warm as a lake in December.

I curtsey low, but not very low, to Duchess Cecily, out of respect to my husband’s mother, and behind me I see my mother sweep her grandest gesture and then stand still, her head up, a queen herself, in everything but a crown.

“I will not pretend that I am happy with this secret marriage,” the dowager duchess says rudely.

“Private,” my mother interrupts smartly.

The duchess checks, amazed, and raises her perfectly arched eyebrows. “I beg your pardon, Lady Rivers. Did you speak?”

“Neither my daughter nor your son would so far forget themselves as to marry in secret,” my mother says, her Burgundy accent suddenly revived. It is the very accent of elegance and high style for the whole of Europe. She could not remind everyone more clearly that she is the daughter of the Count of Saint-Pol, Burgundian royalty by birth. She was on first-name terms with the queen, whom she alone persists in calling Margaret d’Anjou, with much emphasis on the “d” of the title. She was the Duchess of Bedford by her first marriage to a duke of the royal blood, and the head of the Lancaster court when the woman seated so proudly before us was born nothing more than Lady Cecily Neville of Raby Castle. “Of course it was not a secret wedding. I was there and so were other witnesses. It was a private wedding.”

“Your daughter is a widow and years older than my son,” Her Grace says, joining battle.

“He is hardly an inexperienced boy. His reputation is notorious. And there are only five years between them.”

There is a gasp from the duchess’s ladies and a flutter of alarm from her daughters. Margaret looks at me with sympathy, as if to say there is no escaping the humiliation to come. My sisters and I are like standing stones, as if we were dancing witches under a sudden enchantment.

“And the good thing,” my mother says, warming to her theme, “is that we can at least be sure that they are both fertile. Your son has several bastards, I understand, and my daughter has two handsome legitimate boys.”