‘Beautiful?’ I whisper. I am not a pretty girl myself, which is a disappointment to my mother, but not to me, for I rise above vanity.
He shakes his head and says exactly what I want to hear, ‘No, not pretty, not a pretty little thing, not girlish; but the light shone from her.’
I nod. I feel that I understand–everything.
‘Well, that was the end of that campaign for me, but she went on. She took the French dauphin to Reims and crowned him and then went on to Paris. We threw her back from the walls of Paris but it was a close thing–think of it! She nearly took Paris! And then she led her army down the valley of the Loire.’
I have no idea what is the valley of the Loire. It sounds like the valley of the shadow of death, and so it was for Joan. ‘A Burgundian soldier pulled her off her white horse in a battle,’ the earl says matter-of-factly. ‘Ransomed her to us; we passed her on to the Church for questioning, they found her guilty of heresy and witchcraft and Lord knows what, and released her to us and we executed her.’
‘Did you burn her yourself?’
‘Margaret!’ my mother reproves, but the earl lifts up his hand.
‘My commander, the Duke of Bedford did it. His wife Jacquetta the duchess examined her first. It was our duty as Englishmen to destroy her, she was the most formidable weapon they had, the equal to all our longbows. I don’t doubt she would have defeated us if she had not been stopped. And her death sentence was the choice of her countrymen and her church. But I will say she was the bravest woman I have ever known. I don’t expect to see such a woman again. She was little more than a girl but she was burning up long before we put her on the pyre. She was ablaze with the Holy Spirit.’
He looked down at my rapt face and laughed. ‘Forget her,’ he said to me. ‘She is nothing to you. She had her day, and she was defeated. The king she crowned will never unite his country. The men she led are dead or lost without her. Her name will be forgotten and they scattered her ashes so no one could make her a shrine.’
‘But God spoke to her: a girl,’ I whisper. ‘He did not speak to the king, nor to a boy. He spoke to a girl.’
He nodded. ‘I don’t doubt she was sure of it,’ he said. ‘I don’t doubt she heard the voices of angels. Otherwise she couldn’t have done what she did. But she was mistaken, for she was defeated, so God was on our side, not hers.’
Obedient to a signal from my mother, I step down from the table, curtsey to the earl and go to my mother for her blessing. ‘Enough of this,’ she says. ‘I am tired of your harping on the Maid. You heard your guardian, he said: “Forget her”.’
I curtsey to my mother but I disobey her in this. I never forget Joan, and every veteran that comes to the door of Bletsoe begging for food is told to wait, for little Lady Margaret will want to see him. I always ask them if they were at Les Augustins, at Les Tourelles, at Orléans, at Jageau, at Beaugency, at Patay, at Paris. I know her victories as well as I know the names of our neighbouring villages in Bedfordshire. Some of the begging soldiers were at these battles, some of them even saw her. They all speak of a slight girl on a big horse, a banner over her head, glimpsed where the fighting was the fiercest, a girl like a prince, sworn to bring peace and victory to her country, giving herself to the service of God, nothing more than a girl, nothing more than a girl like me: but a heroine.
I am so far from a heroine that I haven’t even been taught how to ride, and I am not allowed even to be led on a horse of my own, not even when we come into London and hundreds of people in the streets and markets and shops gawp at the fifty of our household as we ride by. I have to jog behind Wat, my hand on his belt, like some village slut going to a goose fair, and not at all like the heir to the throne of England. We stay at an inn, not even at court, for the Earl of Suffolk my guardian, is disgraced in the Tower of London and we cannot stay in his palace. I offer up to Our Lady the fact that we don’t have a good London house of our own, and then I think that she too had to make do with a common inn at Bethlehem, when surely she must have thought that Herod had spare rooms in the palace, and I try to be resigned, like Her.
At least I am to have London clothes before we go to court for me to renounce my betrothal. My Lady Mother summons the tailors and the sempstresses to our inn and I am fitted for a wonderful gown. They say that the ladies of the court are wearing tall conical headdresses, so high that a woman has to duck to get through a seven-foot doorway. The queen, Margaret of Anjou, loves beautiful clothes and is wearing a new colour of ruby red made from a new dye as red as blood. My mother orders me a gown of angelic white by way of contrast, and has it trimmed with Lancaster red roses to remind everyone that I may only be a girl of nine years old but I am the heiress of our house. Only when the clothes are ready, can we take a barge down river to declare my dissent against my betrothal, and to be presented at court.
The dissent is a formality. I am hoping that they will question me and that I might stand before them shy, but clear-spoken, to say that I know from God Himself that John de la Pole is not to be my husband. I imagine myself before a tribunal of judges amazing them by my clarity and wit; I thought I might tell them that I had a dream which told me that I was not to marry him for I have a greater destiny: I am chosen by God Himself; but it is all written down before we arrive and all I am allowed to say is ‘I dissent’ and sign my name, and it is done. Nobody even asks me for my opinion on the matter. We go to wait outside the presence chamber and then one of the king’s men comes out and calls ‘Lady Margaret Beaufort!’ and everyone looks around and sees me, and I have a moment, a wonderful moment when I remember to despise worldly vanity, and then my mother leads the way into the king’s presence chamber.
The king is on his great throne with his cloth of estate suspended over the chair and a throne almost the same size beside him for the queen. She is fair-haired and brown-eyed, a round little face with a straight nose. I think she looks beautiful and spoilt, and the king beside her looks fair and pale. She looks like ordinary day and he is like starlight. He smiles at me as I come in and curtsey, but the queen looks from the red roses at the hem of my gown to the little coronet on my head, and then looks away as if she does not think much of me. I suppose, being French, she does not understand who I am. Someone should have told her that if she does not have a child then it will be a son of mine who becomes the next King of England. Then I am sure she would have paid me more attention. But she is worldly; I am sure she would not even have seen the light in Joan. The French can be terribly worldly, I have observed it from my reading. I cannot be surprised that she does not admire me. I curtsey very low and I smile at the king.
‘I am giving your daughter in wardship to my dearly loved half-brother, Edmund Tudor,’ the king says to my mother. ‘She can live with you, until it is time for her to marry.’
The queen looks away, and nods to someone in the crowd of people in the presence chamber as if she is not much pleased by this either. I wait for someone to ask me for my consent, but my mother merely curtseys and steps back and then someone else steps forward and it all seems to be over. The king has barely looked at me, he knows nothing about me, no more than he knew before I walked in the room, and yet he has given me to a new guardian, to another stranger. How can it be that he does not realise that I am a child of special holiness as he was? Am I not to have the chance to tell him about my saints’ knees?
‘Can I speak?’ I whisper to my mother.
‘No, of course not.’
Then how is he to know who I am, if God does not hurry up and tell him? ‘What happens now?’
‘We wait until the other petitioners have seen the king, and then go in to dine,’ she replies.
‘No, I mean, what happens to me?’
She looks at me as if I am foolish not to understand. ‘You are to be betrothed again,’ she says. ‘Did you not hear? And this is an even greater match for you. You are to become the ward and then you will marry Edmund Tudor, the king’s half-brother by their mother, Queen Katheri
ne of Valois. There are two Tudor brothers, both great favourites of the king, and with royal blood.’
‘Won’t Edmund Tudor want to meet me?’
She shakes her head. ‘It is not you they want,’ she says. ‘It is the son you will bear.’
‘But I’m only nine.’
‘He can wait three years,’ she says.
‘I am to be married when I am twelve?’
‘Yes.’
‘And how old will he be then?’
She thinks for a moment. ‘Twenty-five.’
I blink. ‘Where will he sleep?’ I ask. I am thinking of the house at Bletsoe, that does not have an empty set of rooms for a hulking young man and his entourage, nor for his younger brother.
She laughs. ‘You will go to live with him and his brother in Lamphey Palace, Wales.’
‘Mother, you are sending me away to live with two full grown men, to Wales, on my own?’
She shrugs, as if she is sorry for it; but that nothing can be done. ‘It’s a good match,’ she says. ‘Royal blood on both sides. If you have a son, his claim to the throne will be undeniable. He will keep Richard of York at bay for ever. Think of that, don’t think about anything else.’
SUMMER 1453
My mother tells me that the time will pass quickly; but of course it does not. The days go on for ever and ever, and nothing ever happens. My half-brothers and sisters from my mother’s first marriage into the St John family show no more respect for me now that I am to be one of the Tudors, than when I was to be a de la Pole. Indeed, they laugh about me going to live in Wales which they tell me is a place inhabited by dragons and witches where there are no roads but just huge castles in dark forests where water witches rise up out of fountains and wolves prowl in vast packs.
‘At least you are spared the disgrace of the de la Poles,’ my half-sister Edith says one day when we are sewing shirts together in my mother’s chamber.
‘He was in the Tower when I was in London,’ I say. ‘No one could see him. I was not allowed even to say goodbye to him.’
‘Oh they let him go after that. King Henry released him, he could not bear to have him executed, he is as soft-hearted as a girl.’
‘He is king of England,’ I say. ‘And you would be whipped if I told my lady mother that you said such a thing of him.’
‘She knows what he is, well enough; it is only you who thinks he is a saint who can do no wrong. But actually, the king did wrong by William de la Pole.’
‘Why, what did he do?’
‘Killed him with kindness!’ she says triumphantly. ‘He couldn’t resist him, when he begged for his freedom so he told him he could go into exile for five years. De la Pole bade farewell to his family and headed for the English castles in France. They still think he is a great man there, for getting a French peace and a French queen for England. But he never got there. Halfway across the narrow seas, guess what happened?’
My needle is in mid-air, my mouth open. ‘What?’
‘A ship gained on them, called them to halt and boarded them.’
‘Pirates?’
‘Englishmen. They took the earl and accused him of treason. They gave him time to confess, then they took him on a little boat out in the sea, and they hacked off his head with a cutlass. They landed the body on the beach at Dover and stripped him naked and left him: body on the sand, head on a pole. He was de la Pole indeed!’
She laughs at her own joke like a cackling witch; but I am shocked. ‘Who would do such a thing? After the king had forgiven him?’
She shrugs. ‘He had many enemies, most people think he betrayed us in France. Perhaps it was even the king himself, getting rid of a man he no longer trusted. They say it was a royal ship that overtook them.’
I shake my head. ‘Why would the king send a crew to behead a man he had released?’
She laughs again. ‘You are too simple,’ she says. ‘You are to be the wife of a great man, you may be a great woman in the world and yet you don’t know how it works at all! The king might change his mind, mightn’t he? He cannot decide one thing from one moment to another. The king might learn something new against the earl and send a crew after him. Someone might lie to the king, or someone might do the deed and tell the king later. To be a king or a great man is to become accustomed to killing. There is only one way to win in a war and that is to kill your enemy. Even your heroine Joan of Arc knew that: she was a soldier, she didn’t hesitate to shed a little blood.’
‘She was fighting in open battle, in a fair war,’ I say, trying to rid myself of the picture of my former guardian, saying his prayers on a rocking boat and then readying himself for the deadly blow.
‘There are no fair wars,’ says Edith roundly. ‘It is only after, when it is all over, that the winners say that it was a victory fairly won. If you want to be a great woman in the world, a duchess, if you want to see your son on the throne of England, you had better learn to fight for him, aye and plot and lie and murder too. There is no point wondering if it is fair or not.’
I raise my head, proudly, as I think Joan of Arc would have raised her head. ‘I will never do anything against my conscience or against my religion. I would go to the stake rather than betray my soul.’
She laughs again: she is a stupid girl who can barely understand even French. ‘What is the point of all your praying if not to get your own way?’ She demands. ‘You will be no better than the rest of your family, the house of Lancaster, when you get a chance. There never was a family more ready to sacrifice each other for their own good.’
At family prayers that night my mother cites the name of the king with more than usual devotion, and we all have to stay on our knees for an extra half hour to pray for the health of King Henry VI, in this, his time of trouble; and beg Our Lady that the new baby in the womb of the queen, proves to be a boy. I don’t say ‘Amen’ to the prayer for the health of the queen for I thought she was not particularly pleasant to me, and any child that she has will take my place as the next Lancaster heir. I do not pray against a live birth for that would be ill-wishing, and also the sin of envy; but my lack of enthusiasm in the prayers will be understood, I am sure, by Our Lady, who is Queen of Heaven and will understand all about inheritance and how difficult it is to be an heir to the throne but a girl. She herself, had a boy, of course.
I wait till my half-brothers and sisters have gone ahead, hurrying for their dinner, and I ask my mother why we are praying so earnestly for the king’s health, and what does she mean by a time of trouble? Her face is quite strained with worry. ‘I have had a letter from your new guardian, Edmund Tudor today,’ she says. ‘He tells me that the king has fallen into some sort of a trance. He says nothing, and he does nothing, he sits still with his eyes on the ground and nothing wakens him.’
‘Is God speaking to him?’
She gives a little irritated tut. ‘Well, who knows? Who knows? I am sure your piety does you great credit, Margaret. But certainly, if God is speaking to him, He has not chosen the best time for this conversation. The Duke of York is bound to take the opportunity to seize power; the queen has gone to parliament to claim all the powers of the king, but they will never trust her. Richard Duke of York will become regent instead of her. It is a certainty. Then we will be ruled by the Yorks and you will see a change in our fortunes for the worst.’
‘What change?’
‘If the king does not recover, then we will be ruled by the Yorks as regents, and they will enjoy a long regency while the queen’s baby grows to be a man. They will put their family into the best positions in the Church, in France and in the best places in England.’ She bustles ahead of me to the great hall, spurred by her own irritation. ‘I can expect to have them coming to me, to have your betrothal overturned. They won’t want you betrothed to a Tudor of our house. They will want you married into their house, and I will have to defy them if the house of Lancaster is to continue through you.’
‘But why does it matter so much?’ I ask, half running t
o keep up with her down the long passageway. ‘We are all of the same royal house. Why would we be rivals? We are all Plantagenets, we are all descended from Edward III. We are all cousins.’
She rounds on me, her gown sweeping the strewing herbs. ‘We may be of the same family but we are rivals for the throne,’ she says. ‘We may be cousins but they are of the house of York and we are of the house of Lancaster. Never forget it. We of Lancaster are the direct line of descent from Edward III by his son, John of Gaunt. But they can only trace their line back to John of Gaunt’s younger brother Edmund. They are a junior line, they are not descended from Edward’s first heir. They can only inherit the throne of England if there is no Lancaster boy left. So what do you think they are hoping when the king of England falls into a trance, and his child is yet unborn? And when you are the only Lancaster heir and only a girl, and not even married yet? Let alone brought to bed of a son?’
‘But surely the king will wake up? And his baby could be a son.’
‘Pray God the king wakes soon,’ she says. ‘And you should pray that there is no baby to supplant you. And pray God we get you wedded and bedded without delay. For no one is safe from the ambitions of the house of York.’