Philippa Gregory - The White Princess

I incline my head. On the other side of the king I notice My Lady, his mother, lean forwards so that she can see me, as if she expects me to weep.

“Your dead brother’s name,” she reminds me. “Abused by this forger.”

“Yes,” I say.

“The new emperor, Maximilian, loves the ki—the boy,” the ambassador offers, flushing over the terrible slip. “They are together all the time. The boy represents the emperor when he meets with his bankers, speaks for him with his betrothed. He is the emperor’s principal friend and confidant. He is his only advisor.”

“Oh, and what did you call him?” Henry asks, as if it does not much matter.

“The boy.”

“What d’you call him when you see him at the emperor’s court? When he’s at the emperor’s side? When he is, as you describe, so central to the emperor’s happiness, at the heart of his court? His only friend and advisor? When you greet this youth of such great importance? What do you call him at court?”

The man shuffles, passes his hat from one hand to another. “It was important not to insult the emperor. He is young, and hotheaded, and he is the emperor, after all. He loves and respects the boy. He tells everyone of his miraculous escape from death, he constantly speaks of his high birth, of his rights.”

“So what did you call him?” Henry asks quietly. “When you were all in the emperor’s hearing?”

“Mostly I didn’t speak to him. We all avoided him.”

“But when you did? On those rare occasions. Those very rare occasions. When you had to?”

“I called him ‘my lord.’ I thought it was the safest thing to say.”

“As if he was a duke?”

“Yes, a duke.”

“As if he was Richard, Earl of Shrewsbury and Duke of York?”

“I never said Duke of York.”

“Oh, who do you think he is?”

This question is a mistake. Nobody knows who he is. The ambassador is silent, twisting the brim of his hat. He has not yet been primed with the story which we have learned by rote.

“He is Warbeck, the son of a Tournai boatman,” Henry says bitterly. “A nobody. His father is a drunk, his mother is a fool. And yet you humbled yourself and bowed to him? Did you call him ‘Your Grace’?”

The ambassador, uncomfortably aware that he will have been spied on in his turn, that the reports piled facedown on Henry’s table will include accounts of his meetings and conversations, flushes slightly. “I may have done. It’s how I would address a foreign duke. It wouldn’t mean that I respect his title. It wouldn’t indicate that I accept his title.”

“Or a king. Because you would call a king ‘Your Grace’?”

“I did not address him as a king, Sire,” the man says with steady dignity. “I never forgot that he is a pretender.”

“But he’s a pretender now with a powerful backer,” Henry breaks out, suddenly furious. “A pretender living with an emperor and announced to the world as Richard, son of Edward, King of England.”

For a moment everyone is too frightened to speak. Henry’s bulging gaze holds his frightened ambassador. “Yes,” the man concurs into the long silence. “That’s what everybody calls him.”

“And you did not deny him!” Henry bellows.

The ambassador is frozen like a statue of fear.

Henry exhales a shuddering sigh, and stalks back to his seat, pauses with his hand on the high carved back, stands under the cloth of estate as if to indicate to everyone his greatness. “So if he is King of England,” Henry says with slow menace, “what do they call me?”

Again the ambassador looks at me for help. I keep my eyes down. There is nothing I can do to divert Henry’s rage from him; it is all I can do to avoid being its target myself.

The silence lasts, then Henry’s ambassador finds the courage to tell him the truth. “They call you Henry Tudor,” he says simply. “Henry Tudor, the pretender.”

I am in my rooms, Elizabeth is quiet in the cradle beside me and my sewing is in my hand, but little work is being done. One of My Lady’s endless kinswomen is reading to us from a book of psalms, My Lady the King’s Mother nodding along to the well-known words as if they are somehow in her ownership, the rest of us silent, listening, our faces composed into expressions of pious reflection, our thoughts anywhere. The door opens and the commander of the yeomen of the guard stands there, his face grave.

My ladies gasp, and someone gives a little frightened scream. I rise slowly to my feet and look to my cousin Maggie. I see her lips working, as if she is about to speak, but she has lost her voice.

Slowly, I rise to my feet and find that I am trembling so that I can barely stand. Maggie takes two steps towards me, putting her hand under my elbow, holding me up. Together we face the man responsible for my safety who looms in my doorway, neither coming in nor announcing a visitor. He is silent as if he cannot bear to speak either. I feel Maggie shudder and I know she is thinking, as I am, that he has come to take us to the Tower.

“What is it?” I ask. I am glad that my voice is quiet and steady. “What is it, Commander?”

“I have to make a report to you, Your Grace,” he says. He looks awkwardly around the room as if he is uncomfortable at speaking in front of all the ladies.

The relief that he is not here to arrest me almost overwhelms me. Cecily, my sister, drops into her seat and gives a little sob. Maggie steps back and leans against my chair. My Lady the King’s Mother is unmoved. She beckons him in. “Enter. What is your report?” she says briskly.

He hesitates. I step towards him so he can speak to me quietly. “What is it?”

“It’s Yeoman Edwards,” he says. His face suddenly flushes as if he is ashamed. “I beg your pardon, Your Grace. It’s very bad.”

“Is he sick?” My first fear is of plague.

But My Lady has joined us and she is quicker than me. “Has he gone?”

The captain nods.

“To Malines?”

He nods again. “He told no one he was going, nor where his loyalties lay; I’d have arrested him at once if I’d had so much as a whisper. He’s been under my command, guarding your door for half a year. I never dreamed . . . Forgive me, Your Grace. But I had no way of knowing. He left a note for his girl, and that’s how we know. We opened it.” Hesitantly, he proffers a scrap of paper.

I have gone to serve Richard of York, true King of England. When I march in behind the white rose of York I will claim you for my bride.

“Let me see that!” Lady Margaret exclaims, and snatches it from my hand.

“You can keep it,” I say dryly. “You can take it to your son. But he won’t thank you for it.”

The look she turns on me is quite horrified. “Your own yeoman of the guard,” she whispers. “Gone to the boy. And Henry’s own groom has gone.”

“He has? I didn’t know.”

She nods. “Sir Ralph Hastings’s steward has gone and taken all the family’s silver to Malines. And Sir Edward Poynings’s own tenants . . . Sir Edward, who was our ambassador in Flanders, can’t keep his own men here. There are dozens of men, slipping away—hundreds.”

I glance back at my ladies. The reading has stopped and everyone is leaning forwards trying to hear what is being said; there is no mistaking the avidity on their faces, Maggie and Cecily among them.

The commander of my guard dips his head in a bow and steps backwards and closes the door behind him. But My Lady the King’s Mother rounds on me in a fury, flinging a pointing finger to my kinswomen.

“We married those girls—your sister and your cousin—to men we could trust, so that their interests would lie with us, to make them Tudors,” she hisses at me, as if it is my fault that they are eager for news. “Now we can’t be sure that their husbands aren’t hoping to rise as Yorks, and their interests go quite the other way. We married them to loyal nobodies, we gave men who had almost nothing a princess of York so that they would be true to us, so that they would be grateful. Now perhaps they think that they can take their makeshift wives and reach for greatness.”