Philippa Gregory - The Kingmaker's Daughter

Worst of all – even worse than all of this – Buckingham is telling everyone that the princes are dead and by my hand. This means the Rivers will fight to put Tudor and Princess Elizabeth on the throne. This means that the country – and history – names me a murderer, a killer of children, a tyrant who turns on his brother’s son and takes his own blood. I cannot bear this slur on my name and honour. This is a slander which will stick like pitch. Pray for me and for our cause – Richard.

I do as he bids me. I go straight to the chapel without a word to anyone and I go down on my knees, my eyes fixed on the crucifix above the rood screen. I gaze at it unblinking, as if I would burn away from my sight the letter which told me that the people we had counted as friends – the handsome and charming Duke of Buckingham, the winner Lord Thomas Stanley, his wife Margaret who was so kind and welcoming to me when I first came to London, who took me to the great wardrobe and helped me to pick out my coronation gown – all these are false. Bishop Morton, whom I have loved and admired for years – false too. But the one sentence that stays with me, that rings in my ears through my muttered Ave Maria, which I repeat over and over again as if to drown out the sound of the few words, is – Buckingham is telling everyone that the princes are dead and by my hand.

It is dark when I rise to my feet, the early dark of autumn, and I am cold and chilled as the priest brings in the candles and the household follows him in for Compline. I bow my head as he goes past but I stumble out of the chapel into the cold evening air. A white owl hoots and goes low overhead and I duck as if it is a spirit passing me by, a warning from the witch who is massing her forces against us.

Buckingham is telling everyone that the princes are dead and by my hand.

I had thought that if the princes were dead then there would be no other claimant to the throne, that my husband’s time on the throne would be untroubled, and my son would take his place when God saw fit to call us away. Now I see that every man is a kingmaker. A throne is not empty for a moment before someone is being measured for the crown. And fresh princes spring up like weeds in a crop as soon as the rumour goes out that those who wear the crown are dead:

Buckingham is telling everyone that the princes are dead and by my hand.

And now, another young man, calling himself heir, appears from nowhere. Henry Tudor, the son of Margaret Beaufort of the House of Lancaster and Edmund Tudor of the House of Tudor, should be out of mind as he has been out of sight. He has not set foot in this country for years, not since his mother hustled him abroad to keep him safe from the basilisk gaze of the House of York. When Edward was on the throne the boy was many steps from being an heir, yet even so Edward would have taken him to the Tower, would quietly have seen to his death. That is why Margaret Beaufort kept him far away, and negotiated very cautiously for his return. I even pitied her as she missed her son. She even sympathised with me when George was going to send his son away. I thought we had an understanding. I thought we were friends. But all the time she was waiting. Waiting and thinking when her son could return, an enemy to the King of England whether the king was Edward or my husband Richard.

Buckingham is telling everyone that the princes are dead and by my hand.

So Henry Tudor has a claim to the throne, through the House of Lancaster, and his mother is no longer my friend but throws off her cloak of obedient affection and becomes a war-maker. She will make war against us. She will tell everyone that the princes are dead, and my husband their murderer. She will tell everyone that the next heir is her son and that they should overthrow such a tyrant, a regicide.

I go up the dark stairs to the north tower, where I have walked so many times with Richard, in the evening sunlight at the end of the day, talking over the joys of the children, the land, the ruling of the North. Now it is dark and cold and the moon is coming up with a silvery glow on the far horizon.

Buckingham is telling everyone that the princes are dead and by my hand.

I do not believe that my husband gave the order for the murder of his nephews. I will never believe it. He was secure on his throne, he had declared them as bastards. Nobody on our progress even mentioned them. They were forgotten and we were accepted. It was only me, talking to the keeper of the Tower, who said that though I could not wish for their death, I knew that I must think of it. And it was the Constable of the Tower, their gaoler, who remarked that I was tender-hearted. Richard would not have given the order to kill the boys; of that I am sure. But I know I am not the only person who loves Richard and wants to keep him safe. I know I am not the only person to think that the boys will have to die.

Has one of our loyal friends stooped to such a dark sin as to kill a ten-year-old boy and his twelve-year-old brother while they were in our keeping? While they slept? And worse – has someone done it thinking to please us? Has someone done it thinking it was my wish? Thinking that I walked with him in the quadrangle of the Oxford college, and then and there actually asked him to do it?

MIDDLEHAM CASTLE, YORKSHIRE, WINTER 1483

We wait for news, and Richard writes to me almost daily, knowing how anxious I am. He tells me of the mustering of his forces; men are flocking to serve him, and the great nobles of the realm are turning out to support their king against the duke who was once at his side. His childhood friend Francis Lovell never leaves him, Thomas, Lord Stanley, though his own wife Margaret Beaufort plotted with Elizabeth Woodville, joins Richard and promises his loyalty. This shows, I think, how little the former queen can appeal to good men. She may have won over Margaret Beaufort – ambitious for her son and hoping for the throne – but she cannot win Thomas, Lord Stanley, who stays true to us. I don’t forget that Thomas Stanley is a bellwether, leading the flock where everyone follows. That he is on our side shows that he calculates we are likely to win. John Howard, our good friend, stays faithful too, and Richard writes to me that Howard is holding down rebels in Sussex and Kent to stop war breaking out against us.

And then God blesses us. It is as simple as that. God is on our side. He sends down the rain that washes the treason out of people’s minds, and the anger out of their hearts as day after day it pours with cold wintry water as hard as sleet, and the men who were mustering in Kent go home to dry fires, the men who thought they would march out of Sussex learn that the roads are impassable, and the citizens of London are flooded from their riverside homes and can spare no thought for anything but the rising waters that threaten the low-lying sanctuary where Elizabeth Woodville has to wait, without news of her rebellion, her messengers stuck where they are, on roads that have churned into mires, gradually losing hope.

God sends rain on Wales and all the little mountain streams that play so prettily through the meadows in midsummer get faster and rougher as the dark waters pour off the mountains into the bigger streams and then into the rivers. The torrents flood and break their banks and pour into the Severn river, which rises and rises until it breaches all the river walls, spreads for miles in the valley, maroons one town after another, drowns the riverside villages and – best of all – holds the false Duke of Buckingham in Wales, while his men melt away as if they were sugar men in the wet, and his hopes become sodden, and he himself runs away from the men that he said he would lead, and his own servant turns him in to us as a traitor for a small reward.