Philippa Gregory - The White Queen

We are waiting for news in the Tower when the sound of cheering tells me that my husband is coming home. I run down the stone stairs, my heels clacking, the girls behind me, but when the gate opens and the horses rattle in, it is not my husband but my brother Anthony at the head of the troop, smiling at me.

“Sister, give you joy, your husband is well and has won a great battle. Mother, give me your blessing, I have need of it.”

He jumps from his horse and bows to me, and then turns to our mother and doffs his cap and kneels to her as she puts her hand on his head. There is a moment of quietness as she touches him. This is a real blessing, not the empty gesture that most families make. Her heart goes out to him, her most talented child, and he bows his fair head to her. Then he gets up and turns to me.

“I’ll tell you all about it later, but be sure he won a great victory. Margaret of Anjou is in our keeping, our prisoner. Her son is dead: she has no heir. The hopes of Lancaster are down in blood and mud. Edward would be with you, but he has marched north where there are more uprisings for Neville and Lancaster. Your sons are with him and are well and in good heart. Me, he sent here to guard you and London. The men of Kent are up against us, and Thomas Neville is supporting them. Half of them are good men, ill led, but the other half are nothing but thieves looking for plunder. The smallest and most dangerous part are those who think they can free King Henry and capture you, and they are sworn to do so. Neville is on his way to London with a small fleet of ships. I’m to see the mayor and the city fathers and organize the defense.”

“We are to be attacked here?”

He nods. “They are defeated, their heir is dead, but still they take the war onwards. They will be choosing another heir for Lancaster: Henry Tudor. They will be swearing for revenge. Edward has sent me to your defense. At the worst I am to organize your retreat.”

“Are we in real danger?”

He nods. “I am sorry, sister. They have ships and the support of France, and Edward has taken the whole army north.” He bows to me and he turns, and marches into the Tower bellowing to the constable that the mayor shall be admitted at once and that he wants a report on the Tower’s preparedness for siege.

The men come in and confirm that Thomas Neville has ships in the sea off Kent, and he has sworn he will support a march by the men of Kent by sailing up the Thames and taking London. We have just won a dramatic battle, and killed a boy, the heir to the claim, and should be safe; but we are still endangered. “Why would he do it?” I demand. “It is over. Edward of Lancaster is dead, his cousin Warwick is dead, Margaret of Anjou is captive, Henry is our prisoner held here in this very Tower? Why would a Neville have ships off Gravesend and hope to take London?”

“Because it is not over,” my mother observes. We are walking on the leads of the Tower, Baby in my arms to take the air, the girls walking with us. Mother and I, looking down, can see Anthony supervising the rolling out of cannon to face downriver, and ordering sacks of river sand to stack behind the doors and windows of the White Tower. Looking downriver we can see the men working in the docks piling sandbags and putting water buckets at the ready, fearful of fire in the warehouses when Neville brings his ships upriver.

“If Neville takes the Tower, and Edward were to be defeated in the north, then it all starts again,” my mother points out. “Neville can release King Henry. Margaret can reunite with her husband, perhaps they can make another son. The only way to end their line for sure, the only way to end these wars forever, is death. The death of Henry. We have scotched the heir; now we have to kill the father.”

“But Henry has other heirs,” I say. “Even though he has lost his son. Margaret Beaufort, for one. The House of Beaufort goes on with her son, Henry Tudor.”

My mother shrugs. “A woman,” she says. “Nobody is going to ride out to put a queen on this throne. Who could hold England but a soldier?”

“She has a son, the Tudor boy.”

My mother shrugs. “Nobody is going to ride out for a stripling. Henry Tudor doesn’t matter. Henry Tudor could never be King of England. Nobody would fight for a Tudor against a Plantagenet king. The Tudors are only half royal, and that from the French royal family. He is no threat to you.” She glances down the white wall to the barred window, where the forgotten King Henry has been returned to his prayers again. “No, once he is dead, the Lancaster line is over and we are all safe.”

“But who could bring themselves to kill him? He is a helpless man, a half-wit. Who could have such a hard heart as to kill him when he is our prisoner?” I lower my voice-his rooms are just below us. “He spends his days on his knees before a prie-dieu and gazing without speaking out of the window. To kill him would be like massacring a fool. And there are those who say he is a holy fool. There are those who say he is a saint. Who would dare murder a saint?”

“I hope your husband will do it,” my mother says bluntly. “For the only way to make the English throne safe is to hold a pillow on his face and help him to lasting sleep.”

A shadow goes across the sun, and I hold my baby Edward to me, as if to prevent his hearing such bitter counsel. I shudder as if it is my own death that my mother is foreseeing.

“What’s the matter?” she asks me. “Are you chilled? Shall we go in?”

“It’s the Tower,” I say irritably. “I have always hated the Tower. And you: saying such vile things, as to murder a prisoner in the Tower, who has no defense! You shouldn’t even speak of such things, especially not before Baby. I wish this was over and we could go back to Whitehall Palace.”

From far below my brother Anthony looks up and waves to me to signal that the cannon are in place and we are ready.

“Soon we will be able to go,” my mother says comfortingly. “And Edward will come home, and you will be safe again with Baby.”

But that night the alarm sounds and we all jump from our beds and I snatch up Baby and the girls come running to me, and Anthony throws open my bedchamber door and says, “Be brave, they are coming upriver and there will be firing. Keep away from the windows.”

I slam and bar the shutters on the windows, draw the curtains around the big bed, and jump inside with the girls and Baby, and listen. We can hear the crump of the cannons firing and the whistle of cannonballs in the air, and then we hear the thud as they hit the walls of the Tower, and Elizabeth, my oldest daughter, looks at me, white-faced, her little lower lip trembling, and whispers, “Is it the bad queen?”

“Your father has beaten the bad queen and she is our prisoner, as the old king is too,” I say, thinking of Henry in the rooms below us and wondering if anyone will have thought to close his shutters or keep him away from the windows. It would serve Neville right and save us all a great deal of trouble if he were to kill his own king with a cannon shot tonight.

There is a roar from our cannons on their mountings before the Tower, and the windows light up briefly with the blaze of the firing. Elizabeth shrinks back against me. “That is our cannon, shooting the bad men’s ships,” I say cheerfully. “It is a cousin of Warwick, Thomas Neville, who is too stupid to know that the war is over and that we have won.”

“What does he want?” Elizabeth asks.

“He wants to start it all again,” I say bitterly. “But your uncle Anthony is ready for him, and he has the London-trained bands ready on the walls of London, and all the apprentice boys-they like a fight-are ready to defend the city. And then your father will come home.”