Philippa Gregory - The White Princess

Henry glances at me as I struggle to compose myself. He turns back to Sir William and his face is blank. “I gave you everything you asked for,” he says flatly, as though loyalty should be bought.

Sir William inclines his head.

“You yourself handed the crown of England to me on the battlefield.”

It is terrible how the people have fallen away from Sir William as if they have suddenly seen on him the pockmarks of the plague. Without seeming to move, everyone has receded from him by a clear pace and he stands alone, facing the king’s horrified gaze.

“You are my stepfather’s brother, I have treated you as an uncle.” Henry looks at his mother. She is swallowing convulsively as if bile is rising in her throat and she is going to vomit. “My mother assured me that you were her kinsman, you were a man we could trust.”

“A mistake,” Thomas, Lord Stanley, says. “Sir William can explain, I know . . .”

“There are forty important men promised with him,” Sir Robert prompts unasked. “He has recruited supporters. Between them they have sent the boy a fortune.”

“You are of the royal family of England and yet you side with a pretender?” Henry struggles with the words as if he cannot believe that he is saying this to his uncle. He had thought to shame me with the proof of my mother’s disloyalty, he had thought to shock the court with half a dozen names that he would send to the hangman to teach the others to be loyal in future. He did not think that in this theater of asserting his power he would find a traitor in his own family. I look at his mother, who is clinging to the back of his chair as her knees give way beneath her, looking with staring eyes from her husband to his brother as if they are equally faithless. At that horror-stricken glance from her I realize that they probably are. The brothers never act without each other. Perhaps they decided that Sir William would back the pretender and Thomas, Lord Stanley, maintain his fatherhood of the king. Both of them waiting to see who would win. Both of them determined to be on the winning side. Both of them judging that Henry Tudor was likely to lose.

“Why?” he asks brokenly. “Why would you betray me? Me! After you supported me? Me! Who gave you everything?”

Then I see him snap off the questions, as he hears in his own voice the weakness in his tone. It is the whine of a boy who was never loved, who was always in exile hoping one day to come home. The boy who could never understand why he should be far from his mother, why he should have no friends, why he should live in a foreign land and have only enemies at home. Henry remembers that there are some questions which should never be asked.

The last thing he wants his court to hear is why Sir William was ready to risk everything for the boy, to throw away everything he had gained from the king. Why Sir William would take that choice could only be for a residual love and loyalty for the House of York, and his belief that the boy is the true heir. Henry doesn’t want to hear this. The last thing he should invite is a justification from the Stanleys. Who knows how many people would agree with them? He slams his hand flat on the table. “I won’t hear a word from you.”

Sir William shows no intention of speaking. His face is pale and proud. I can’t look at him without thinking that he knows his cause is a good one. He is following a true king.

“Take him away,” Henry says to the guards at the door and they step forwards and Sir William goes with them without a word. He does not ask for mercy and he does not try to explain. He goes with his head held high, as if he knows he will have to pay the price for doing the right thing. I have never seen him, in all my life before, walk like a proud man. I have always thought of him as a turncoat, one who would go from one side to the other for the winnings. But today, as they take him out as a traitor, when he is going to his death, when he is utterly lost for supporting the boy who says he is my brother—Sir William goes gladly, his head held high.

Sir Robert, whose family lands were confiscated by Sir William and who has borne him a grudge since then, watches him go with a broad smile, and reaches into the sack of seals as if to give us all another surprise.

“Enough,” Henry says, looking as sick as his mother. “I will inspect them on my own, in my rooms. You can go. You can all go. I want no one—” He breaks off and looks past me as if I am the last person who might give him comfort in this moment of betrayal. “I want none of you.”

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, FEBRUARY 1495

Henry’s suspicion of me and all Yorks drives him onwards to find a husband that he can trust who can marry my sister Anne and thus eliminate her as a center for rebellion. His choice falls on Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, who has been punished long enough for being loyal to the House of York and is released from the Tower. He was Richard’s man; but made it clear to Henry that his loyalty was always only to the crown. Once the crown was on Henry’s head he followed it. Henry has doubted this, and suspected him, but his faithful waiting in the Tower, like a dog for the return of his master, has convinced Henry to take the risk. So Thomas is betrothed to my sister Anne, takes his title back into his hand, and has every reason to think that the Howard dynasty will rise under the Tudors as it was set to do under the Yorks.

“Do you mind?” I ask Anne.

She gives me one level look. She is nineteen, and has been proposed as a bride all around Christendom.

“It’s time,” she says shortly. “And it could be worse. Thomas Howard is a coming man, he will rise in the king’s favor. You’ll see. He’ll do anything for him.”

Henry wastes little time on the wedding that he has ordered; he can think of nothing but the sack of seals and the names of the men who have been betraying him ever since he took the crown on his head.

Jasper Tudor, the only man in the world that Henry can trust, heads a commission to try the traitors and with eleven lords and eight judges, drags into court anyone who has ever spoken of the boy or whispered the name Prince Richard. Before Jasper come priests, clerks, officials, lords, their families, servants, sons, a terrible parade of men who had taken the Tudor shilling, sworn the Tudor oaths of loyalty, but then decided that the boy was the true king. Despite their position, despite the wealth that Henry had given them, these lords have gone against their own interests, drawn to the boy as if they could not help themselves, following a brighter star than their own selfish good. They are like martyrs for the House of York, pledging their faith, gambling their own safety, sending words of love and loyalty in their own hands sealed with their family crests.

They pay a heavy price. The lords are publicly beheaded, the common men hanged, gutted while they are still alive, their bellies and their lungs dragged out of their sliced bodies and burned before their glaring eyes, then finally they die as they are cut into pieces, quartered like a carcass, their mangled bodies sent around the kingdom to be displayed at city gates, at crossroads, at village squares.

From this, Henry hopes that his country will learn loyalty. But I recognize—knowing this country as I do, and he does not—that all the people will learn is that good men, wise men, wealthy men, men as privileged as Sir William Stanley, men as knowing and as cunning as the king’s own uncle, are ready to die for the boy. All they will judge from the many deaths and the festering body parts is that many, many good men believed in the boy, and were ready to die for him.