The King's Curse

  I stand with one hand raised in farewell until a bend in the road hides them from me and then I go inside, gathering my fine woolen shawl around me. I will go to the nursery and see my children, before dinner is served to the whole household, and after dinner I will raise a glass to the stewards of my house and lands, command them to keep everything in good order during my absence, and retire to my chamber with my ladies-in-waiting, my midwives, and the nurses. There I have to wait, for the four long weeks of my confinement, for our new baby.

  I am not afraid of pain, so I don’t dread the birth. This is my fourth childbed and at least I know what to expect. But I don’t look forward to it either. None of my children brings me the joy that I see in other mothers. My boys do not fill me with fierce ambition, I cannot pray for them to rise in the world—I would be mad to want them to catch the eye of the king, for what would he see but another Plantagenet boy? A rival heir to the throne? A threat? My daughter does not give me the satisfaction of seeing a little woman in the making: another me, another Plantagenet princess. How can I think of her as anything but doomed if she shines at court? I have got myself safely through these years by being almost invisible, how can I dress a girl, and put her forward, and hope that people admire her? All I want for her is a comfortable obscurity. To be a loving mother, a woman has to be optimistic, filled with hope for the babies, planning their future in safety, dreaming of grand plans. But I am of the House of York; I know better than anyone that it is an uncertain, dangerous world, and the best plan I can make for my children is that they survive in the shadows—by birth they will be the greatest of all the actors, but I must hope they are always either offstage, or anonymous in the crowd.

  The baby comes early, a week before I had thought, and he is handsome and strong, with a funny little tuft of brown hair in the middle of his head like the crest on a cock. He takes to the wet nurse’s milk and she suckles him constantly. I send the good news to his father and receive his congratulations and a bracelet of Welsh gold in reply. He says he will come home for the christening and that we must call the boy Reginald—Reginald the counselor—as a gentle hint to the king and his mother that this boy will be raised to be an advisor and humble servant to their line. It is no surprise to me that my husband wants the baby’s very name to indicate our servitude to them. When they won the country, they won us too. Our future depends on their favor. The Tudors own everything in England now; perhaps they always will.

  Sometimes the wet nurse gives him to me and I rock him and admire the curve of his closed eyelids and the sweep of the eyelashes against his cheek. He reminds me of my brother when he was a baby. I can remember his plump toddler face very well, and his anxious dark eyes when he was a boy. I hardly saw him as a young man. I cannot picture the prisoner walking through the rain to the scaffold on Tower Hill. I hold my new baby close to my heart and think that life is fragile; perhaps it is safer not to love anyone at all.

  My husband comes home as he promised—he always does what he promises—in time for the christening, and as soon as I am out of confinement and churched, we return to Ludlow. It is a long hard journey for me, and I go partly by litter and partly by horseback, riding in the morning and resting in the afternoon, but even so it takes us two days on the road and I am glad to see the high walls of the town, the striped black and cream of the lathes and plaster of the houses under their thick thatch roofs, and behind them, tall and dark, the greater walls of the castle.

  LUDLOW CASTLE, WELSH MARCHES, SPRING 1500

  They throw the gates wide open in compliment to me, the wife of the Lord Chamberlain of the Prince of Wales, and Arthur himself comes bounding like a colt out of the main gate, all long legs and excitement, to help me down from my horse and ask me how I am doing, and why have I not brought the new baby?

  “It’s too cold for him, he’s better off with his wet nurse at home.” I hug him and he drops to kneel for my blessing as the wife of his guardian, and royal cousin to his mother, and as he rises up I bob a curtsey to him as the heir to the throne. We go easily through these steps of protocol without thinking of them. He has been raised to be a king, and I was brought up as one of the most important people in a ceremonial court, where almost everyone curtseyed to me, walked behind me, rose when I entered a room, or departed bowing from my presence. Until the Tudors came, until I was married, until I became unimportant Lady Pole.

  Arthur steps back to scrutinize my face, the funny boy, fourteen this year, but sweet-natured and thoughtful as the tenderhearted woman, his mother. “Are you all right?” he asks carefully. “Was it all, all right?”

  “Quite all right,” I say to him firmly. “I’m quite unchanged.”

  He beams at that. This boy has his mother’s loving heart; he is going to be a king with compassion and God knows this is what England needs to heal the wounds of thirty long years of battles.

  My husband comes bustling from the stables, and he and Arthur sweep me into the great hall where the court bows to me and I walk through the hundreds of men of our household to my place of honor between my husband and the Prince of Wales, at the high table.

  Later that night I go to Arthur’s bedchamber to hear him say his prayers. His chaplain is there, kneeling at the prie-dieu beside him, listening to the careful recitation in Latin of the collect for the day and the prayer for the night. He reads a passage from one of the psalms and Arthur bows his head to pray for the safety of his father and mother, the King and Queen of England. “And for My Lady the King’s Mother, the Countess of Richmond,” he adds, reciting her title so that God will not forget how high she has risen, and how worthy her claim to His attention. I bow my head when he says “Amen,” and then the chaplain gathers up his things and Arthur takes a leap into his big bed.

  “Lady Margaret, d’you know if I am to be married this year?”

  “Nobody has told me a date,” I say. I sit on the side of his bed and look at his bright face, the soft down on his upper lip that he loves to stroke as if it will encourage it to grow. “But there can be no objection to the wedding now.”

  At once, he puts his hand out to touch mine. He knows that the monarchs of Spain swore they would send their daughter to be his bride only when they were assured that there were no rival heirs to the throne of England. They meant not only my brother Edward, but also the pretender who went by the name of the queen’s brother, Richard of York. Determined that the betrothal should go ahead, the king entrapped both young men together, as if they were equally heirs, as if they were equally guilty, and ordered them both killed. The pretender claimed a most dangerous name, took arms against Henry, and died for it. My brother denied his own name, never raised his voice, let alone an army, and still died. I have to try not to sour my own life with bitterness. I have to put away resentment as if it were a forgotten badge. I have to forget I am a sister, I have to forget the only boy that I have ever truly loved: my brother, the White Rose.

  “You know I would never have asked for it,” Arthur says, his voice very low. “His death. I didn’t ask for it.”

  “I know you didn’t,” I say. “It’s nothing to do with you or me. It was out of our hands. There was nothing that either of us could have done.”

  “But I did do one thing,” he says, with a shy sideways glance at me. “It wasn’t any good; but I did ask my father for mercy.”

  “That was good of you,” I say. I don’t tell him that I was on my knees before the king, my headdress off, my hair let down, my tears falling on the floor, my cupped hands under the heel of his boot, until they lifted me up and carried me away, and my husband begged me not to speak again for fear of reminding the king that I once had the name Plantagenet and that now I have sons with dangerous royal blood. “Nothing could be done. I am sure His Grace, your father, did only what he thought was right.”

  “Can you . . .” He hesitates. “Can you forgive him?”

  He cannot even look at me with this question, and his gaze is on our clasped hands. Gently, he turns th
e new ring I am wearing on my finger, a mourning ring with a W for Warwick, my brother.

  I cover his hand with my own. “I have nothing to forgive,” I say firmly. “It was not an angry act or a vengeful act by your father against my brother. It was something that he felt he had to do in order to secure his throne. He did not do it with passion. He could not be swayed by an appeal. He calculated that the monarchs of Spain would not send the Infanta if my brother were alive. He calculated that the commons of England would always rise for someone who was a Plantagenet. Your father is a thoughtful man, a careful man; he will have looked at the chances almost like a clerk drawing up an account in one of those new ledgers with the gains on one side and the losses on the other. That’s how your father thinks. That’s how kings have to think these days. It’s not about honor and loyalty anymore. It’s about calculation. It’s my loss that my brother counted as a danger, and your father had him crossed out of the book.”

  “But he was no danger!” Arthur exclaims. “And in all honor . . .”

  “He was never a danger; it was his name. His name was the danger.”

  “But it’s your name?”

  “Oh no. My name is Margaret Pole,” I say dryly. “You know that. And I try to forget I was born with any other.”

  WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, AUTUMN 1501

  Arthur’s bride does not come to England till she is fifteen. At the end of summer we travel to London, and Arthur, his mother, and I have two months of ordering clothes, commanding tailors, jewelers, glove makers, hatmakers, and seamstresses to put together a wardrobe of clothes for the young prince and a handsome suit for his wedding day.

  He is nervous. He has written to her regularly, stilted letters in Latin, the only language they share. My cousin the queen has urged that she be taught English and French. “It’s barbaric to marry a stranger, and not even be able to speak together,” she mutters to me, as we embroider Arthur’s new shirts in her chamber. “Are they to sit down to breakfast with an ambassador to translate between them?”

  I smile in reply. It is a rare woman who can speak freely with a loving husband, and we both know this. “She’ll learn,” I say. “She’ll have to learn our ways.”

  “The king is going to ride down to the south coast to meet her,” Elizabeth says. “I have asked him to wait and greet her here in London, but he says he will take Arthur with him and ride like a knight errant to surprise her.”

  “You know, I don’t think that the Spanish like surprises,” I remark. Everyone knows they are a most formal people; the Infanta has been living almost in seclusion, in the former harem of the Alhambra Palace.

  “She is promised, she has been promised for twelve years, and now she is delivered,” Elizabeth says dryly. “What she likes or does not like is of little matter. Not to the king, and perhaps not even to her mother and father now.”

  “Poor child,” I say. “But she could have no more handsome or good-natured bridegroom than Arthur.”

  “He is a good young man, isn’t he?” His mother’s face warms at his praise. “And he has grown again. What are you feeding him? He is taller than me now; I think he will be as tall as my father.” She nips off her words as if it is treason to name her father, King Edward.

  “He will be as tall as King Henry,” I amend. “And God willing she will make as good a queen as you have been.”

  Elizabeth gives me one of her fleeting smiles. “Perhaps she will. Perhaps we will become friends. I think she may be a little like me. She has been raised to be a queen, just as I was. And she has a mother of determination and courage just like mine was.”

  We wait in the nursery for the bridegroom and his father to ride home from their mission of knight errantry. Little Prince Harry, ten years old, is excited by the adventure. “Will he ride up and capture her?”

  “Oh no.” His mother draws her youngest child, five-year-old Mary, onto her lap. “That wouldn’t do at all. They will go to wherever she is staying, and ask to be admitted. Then they will pay their compliments, and perhaps dine with her, and then leave the following morning.”

  “I would ride up and capture her!” Harry boasts, raising his hand as if holding a pair of reins, and cantering around the room on an imaginary horse. “I would ride up and marry her on the spot. She’s taken long enough to come to England. I would brook no delay.”

  “Brook?” I ask. “What sort of word is brook? What on earth have you been reading?”

  “He reads all the time,” his mother says fondly. “He is such a scholar. He reads romances and theology and prayers and the lives of the saints. In French and Latin and English. He’s starting Greek.”

  “And I’m musical,” Harry reminds us.

  “Very talented,” I commend him with a smile.

  “And I ride, on big horses, not just little ponies, and I can handle a hawk too. I have my own hawk, a goshawk called Ruby.”

  His mother and I exchange a rueful smile over the bobbing copper head.

  “You are undoubtedly a true prince,” I say to him.

  “I should come to Ludlow,” he tells me. “I should come to Ludlow with you and your husband and learn the business of running a country.”

  “You would be most welcome.”

  He pauses in his prancing around the room and comes to kneel up on the stool before me, and takes my face in both of his hands. “I mean to be a good prince,” he says earnestly. “I do, indeed. Whatever work my father gives me. Whether it is to rule Ireland or command the navy. Wherever he wants to send me. You wouldn’t know, Lady Margaret, because you’re not a Tudor, but it is a calling, a divine calling to be born into the royal family. It is a destiny to be born royal. And when my bride comes to England, I will ride to greet her, and I will be in disguise, and when she sees me she will say—Oh! Who is that handsome boy on that very big horse? And I will say—It’s me! And everyone will say—Hurrah!”

  “It didn’t go very well at all,” Arthur tells his mother glumly. He comes into the queen’s bedroom where she is dressing for dinner. I am holding her coronal, watching the maid-in-waiting brush her hair.

  “We got there, and she was already in bed, and she sent out word that she could not see us. Father would not take a refusal and consulted with the lords who were with us. They agreed with him . . .” He glances down, and both of us can see his resentment. “Of course they did, who would disagree? So we rode in the pouring rain to Dogmersfield Palace and insisted that she admit us. Father went into her privy chamber, I think there was a row, and then she came out looking furious, and we all had dinner.”

  “What was she like?” I ask into the silence, when nobody else says anything.

  “How would I know?” he demands miserably. “She hardly spoke to me. I just dripped all over the floor. Father commanded her to dance and she did a Spanish dance with three of her ladies. She wore a heavy veil over her headdress so I could hardly see her face. I expect she hates us, making her come out to dinner after she had refused. She spoke Latin, we said something about the weather and her voyage. She had been terribly seasick.”

  I nearly laugh aloud at his glum face. “Ah, little prince, be of good heart!” I say, and I put my arm around his shoulders to give him a hug. “It’s early days. She will come to love and value you. She will recover from seasickness, and learn to speak English.”

  I feel him lean towards me for comfort. “She will? Do you really think so? She truly did look very angry.”

  “She has to. And you will be kind to her.”

  “My lord father is very taken with her,” he says to his mother as if he is warning her.

  She smiles wryly. “Your father loves a princess,” she says. “There’s nothing he likes more than a woman born royal in his power.”

  I am in the royal nursery playing with Princess Mary when Harry comes in from his riding lesson. At once he comes to me, elbowing his little sister to one side.

  “Be careful with Her Grace,” I remind him. She giggles; she is a robust little beauty.


  “But where is the Spanish princess?” he demands. “Why is she not here?”

  “Because she’s still on her way,” I say, offering Princess Mary a brightly colored ball. She takes it and carefully tosses it up and catches it. “Princess Katherine has to make a progress through the country so that people can see her, and then you will ride out to greet her and escort her into London. Your new suit is ready, and your new saddle.”

  “I hope I do it right,” he says earnestly. “I hope that my horse behaves, and that I make my mother proud.”

  I put my arm around him. “You will,” I assure him. “You ride beautifully, you will look princely, and your mother is always proud of you.”

  I feel him square his little shoulders. He is imagining himself in a cloth-of-gold jacket, high up on his horse. “She is,” he says with the vanity of a well-loved little boy. “I’m not the Prince of Wales, I’m only a second son, but she is proud of me.”

  “What about Princess Mary?” I tease him. “The prettiest princess in the world? Or your big sister, Princess Margaret?”

  “They’re just girls,” he says with brotherly scorn. “Who cares about them?”

  I am watching to make sure that the queen’s new gowns are properly powdered, brushed, and hung in the wardrobe rooms when Elizabeth comes in and closes the door behind her. “Leave us,” she says shortly to the mistress of the robes, and by this I know that something is very wrong, for the queen is never abrupt with the women who work for her.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s Edmund, Cousin Edmund.”

  My knees go weak at the mention of his name. Elizabeth pushes me onto a stool, then goes to the window and throws it open so that cool air comes into the room and my head steadies. Edmund is a Plantagenet like us. He is my aunt’s son, Duke of Suffolk, and high in the king’s favor. His brother was a traitor, leading the rebels against the king at the battle of Stoke, killed on the battlefield; but in utter contrast Edmund de la Pole has always been fiercely loyal, the Tudor king’s right-hand man and friend. He is an ornament to the court, the leader of the jousters, a handsome, brave, brilliant Plantagenet duke, a joyous signal to everyone that York and Tudor live alongside each other as a loving royal family. He is a member of the innermost royal circle, a Plantagenet serving a Tudor, a collar that has been turned, a flag that billows the other way, a new rose of red and white, a signpost for all of us.