He nods. “I knew you would not like it,” he says resignedly.
“I would rather die than see this!”
He nods as if I am exaggerating, like a child.
“And what if you lose?” I demand. “You will be known as a turncoat who supported York. Do you think they will call Henry—your stepson—to court again, and give him back his earldom? Do you think Henry the king will bless him as he did before, when everyone knows you have shamed yourself, and shamed me?”
He grimaces. “I think it is the right thing to do. And, as it happens, I think York will win.”
“Against Warwick?” I ask him scornfully. “He can’t beat Warwick. He didn’t do so well last time, when Warwick chased him out of England. And the time before that, when Warwick took him prisoner. He is Warwick’s boy, not his master.”
“He was betrayed last time,” he said. “He was alone without his army. This time he knows his enemies, and he has summoned his men.”
“Say you win then,” I say, the words tumbling out in my distress. “Say you put Edward on my family’s throne. What happens to me? What happens to Henry? Will Jasper have to go into exile again, thanks to your enmity? Will my son and his uncle be driven out of England by you? Do you want me to go too?”
He sighs. “If I serve Edward and he is glad of my service, then he will reward me,” he says. “We might even get Henry’s earldom back from him. The throne will no longer run in your family, but Margaret, dear little wife, to be honest with you: your family does not deserve to own it. The king is sick, to tell the truth; he is mad. He is not fit to run a country, and the queen is a nightmare of vanity and ambition. Her son is a murderer: Can you think what we will suffer if he ever gets the throne? I cannot serve such a prince and such a queen. There is no one but Edward. The direct line is—”
“Is what?” I spit.
“Insane,” he says simply. “Hopeless. The king is a saint and cannot rule, and his son is a devil and should not.”
“If you do this, I will never forgive you,” I swear. The tears are running down my face, and angrily I brush them away. “If you ride out to defeat my own cousin, the true king, I will never forgive you. I will never call you ‘husband’ again; you will be as if you were dead to me.”
He releases my hand as if I am a bad-tempered child. “I knew you would say that,” he says sadly. “Though I am doing what I think best for us both. I am even doing what I think best for England, which is more than many men can say in these troubled times.”
APRIL 1471
The summons comes from Edward the usurper in London, and my husband rides out at the head of his army of tenants to join his new lord. He is in such a hurry to go that half the men are not yet equipped, and his master of horse stays behind to see that the sharpened staves and newly forged swords are loaded in carts to follow the men.
I stand in the stable yard and watch the men falling into line. Many of them have served in France; many of them have marched out before for English battles. This is a generation of men accustomed to warfare, inured to danger and familiar with cruelty. For a moment I understand my husband’s yearning for peace, but then I remember that he is backing the wrong king and I fire up my anger again.
He comes from the house, wearing his best boots and the thick traveling cape that he gave to me when we rode to see my boy. I was glad of his kindness then, but he has disappointed me since. I am hard-faced as I look at him, and I despise his hangdog expression.
“You will forgive me if we win and I can bring your boy home to you,” he suggests hopefully.
“You will be on opposing sides,” I say coldly. “You will be fighting on one side and my brother-in-law and my boy on the other. You ask me to hope that my brother-in-law Jasper is defeated or killed. For that is the only way that my boy will need a new guardian. I cannot do that.”
He sighs. “I suppose not. Will you give me your blessing, anyway?”
“How can I bless you when you are cursed in your choice?” I demand.
He cannot maintain his smile. “Wife, will you pray for my safety at least while I am gone?”
“I shall pray that you see sense and change sides in the very middle of the battle,” I say. “You could do that and make sure you were on the victorious side. I would pray for your victory then.”
“That would be quite without principle,” he remarks mildly. He kneels to me and takes my hand and kisses it, and I stubbornly do not touch his head with my other hand in blessing. He rises up and goes to the mounting block. I hear him grunt with the effort of stepping onto it and swinging into the saddle, and for a moment I feel pity that a man, not young anymore, who so dislikes leaving his home, should be forced out on a hot spring day to battle.
He turns his horse and raises his hand to me in salute. “Good-bye, Margaret,” he says. “And I say ‘God bless you’ to you, even if you won’t say it to me.”
I think it is unkind of me to stand there with my hands by my sides and a frown on my face. But I let him go without a blown kiss, without a blessing, without a command to come back safely. I let him go without a word or a gesture of love, for he is going out to fight for my enemy and so he is my enemy now.
I hear from him within a few days. His second squire comes back in a rush because he forgot the gussets for his coat of mail. He brings the will that my husband has scribbled in haste, thinking battle will be joined at once. “Why? Does he think he will die?” I ask cruelly when the man hands it to me for safekeeping.
“He is very low in his spirits,” he answers me honestly. “Shall I take a message back to cheer him?”
“No message,” I say, turning away. No man who fights under the banner of York against the interests of my son will have a message of hope from me. How can I? My prayer must be that York fails and is defeated. My prayer must be for my husband’s defeat. I will pray that he is not killed, but in all honesty, before my God, I can’t do more than that.
I spend that night, all the night, on my knees praying for the victory of my House of Lancaster. The servant said that they were gathering outside London and would march to meet our forces that are mustering in thousands, somewhere near Oxford. Edward will march out his troops along the great west road, and the armies will meet somewhere on the way. I expect Warwick to win for our king, even with both York boys, George of Clarence and Richard of Gloucester, fighting alongside their older brother. Warwick is the more experienced commander; he taught the York boys everything they know about warfare. And Warwick has the greatest force. And Warwick is in the right. Our king, an ordained monarch, a saintly man, is held a prisoner in the Tower of London by order of the York usurper. How can God allow his captor to have victory? My husband may be there, in the armies of York. But I have to pray for his defeat. I am for Lancaster, I am for my king, I am for Jasper, and I am for my son.
I send to Guildford every day for news, expecting riders to come from London with word of a battle; but no one knows what is happening until one of our men comes back, riding a stolen horse, ahead of all the others to tell me that my husband Henry is wounded and near to death. I hear him out, standing alone in the stable yard until someone thinks to send for one of my ladies, and she clasps my arm to hold me up, while the man tells me of a battle of shifting fortunes and confusion. There was thick mist, the line of the army swung about, the Earl of Oxford changed his coat, or so someone said; there was a panic when he attacked our side, and Edward came out of the mist in a charge like the devil himself, and the Lancaster forces broke before him.
“I will have to go to him and fetch him home,” I say. I turn to his steward. “Get a cart ready so we can bring him home, and put a featherbed in it and everything he will need. Bandages, I suppose, and physic.”
“I will fetch the physician to go with you,” he says. I take it as a reproach that I have never been much of a nurse or herbalist. “And the priest,” I say. I see him flinch, and I know that he is thinking that his master may need the last rites, that he may
be near death as we speak. “And we’ll go at once,” I say. “This day.”
I ride ahead of the slow wagon, but it is a hard long ride, and I get to Barnet as the dusk of the spring evening closes down on the muddy road. All along the way there are men begging for help to get home, or lying down in the hedgerow and dying for lack of friends or family or someone to care for them. Sometimes we are crowded off the road by an armed troop hurrying after the main armies to join with them. I see hideous sights: a man with half his face cut away, a man tying his shirt over his belly to stop his lights from spilling out. A pair of men clinging to each other like drunkards, trying to help each other home with only three feet between the two of them. I ride along the road, cutting across the fields wherever I can to avoid the straggle of dying men, trying not to look at the men who stagger towards me, trying not to see the scatter of equipment and bodies all around me, as if the fields were growing strange and terrible crops.
There are women here, like crows, bending over the dying men and rifling through their jackets, looking for money or jewels. Sometimes a loose horse comes trotting towards mine, whinnying for company and for reassurance. I see a few knights who have been pulled down and killed on the ground, and one whose suit of armor protected him so well that he died inside it, his face smashed to pulp against the helmet. When a looter pulls the helmet upwards, the head comes with it too, and the slop of brains spills out through the visor. I keep a grip on my rosary, and I say “Hail Mary” over and over again to keep myself in the saddle and the vomit at the back of my mouth. My horse walks warily, as if he too is repelled at the smell of blood and knows this is dangerous ground. I had no idea that it would be this bad. I had no idea that it would be like this.
I cannot believe that it was like this for Joan of Arc. I thought of her always on a white horse with a banner of lilies and angels above her head, clean. I never thought of her riding through carnage, though she must have done so, as I am doing. If this is the will of God, it takes a strange and terrible shape. I did not know that the God of Battles was vile like this. I never knew that a saint could summon torment like this. It is like riding through the valley of the shadow of death, and we go like harbingers of death ourselves, for we give away no water, though men imploringly reach towards me, pointing to their bloodstained mouths, where their teeth are all knocked out. We dare not stop and give to one, for that would bring them all down on us, so the master of the horse goes ahead with a whip and shouts, “Clear the way for Lady Margaret Stafford,” and the wounded shuffle out of our way and shield their heads from the lash.
An outrider comes back to us and says that they have found my husband lodged in an inn at Whetstone, and we follow him as he leads us down the muddy lanes to the little village. The inn is nothing more than a village alehouse with two rooms for passing travelers. I am reluctant to get down from my horse, fearful of being on the ground with the walking dead. But I dismount and go in. I am very afraid that my husband will be horribly maimed, like the men on the road, or hacked by a battle-axe; but I find him lying on a settle in the back room, with a scarf tied tight around his belly. The growing red on the scarf tells me he is still bleeding. He turns his head as I come in and manages to smile at the sight of me. “Margaret, you shouldn’t have come.”
“I am safe enough, and I have the wagon following to bring you home.”
His face lights up at the very mention of our home. “I should be glad to see my home. There were moments when I thought I would never see it again.”
I hesitate. “Was it very bad? Has York won?”
“Yes.” He nods. “We had a great victory. We went uphill in the mist at them, and there were twice our number. Nobody but York would have dared to do it. I think he is invincible.”
“So it’s over?”
“No. The Lancaster queen has landed her army somewhere in Devon. Every man who could march has fallen in, and Edward is going as fast as he can to cut her off and stop her getting to reinforcements in Wales.”
“In Wales?”
“She will be going to Jasper,” he says. “She will know her ally Warwick is dead and this army defeated, but if she can get to Jasper and his Welsh levies, she can fight on.”
“So Edward could still be defeated and all this”—I am thinking of the men scrambling south down the road, crying out in their pain—“all this will have been for nothing.”
“All this is always for nothing,” he says. “Don’t you understand that yet? Every death is a pointless death; every battle should have been avoided. But if Edward can defeat the queen, and imprison her along with her husband, then it will indeed be over.”
I hear the physician’s horse, and I go to let him in. “Shall I stay and help you?” I ask, without much enthusiasm for the work.
“You go,” Henry says. “I don’t want you to see this.”
“What is your wound?”
“A sword slash across my belly,” he says. “You go and have them set you up a camp in the field behind this inn. There are no beds to be had in here. And make sure they post a guard over you and your possessions. I wish you hadn’t come.”
“I had to come,” I say. “Who else?”
He gives me his crooked smile. “I am glad to see you,” he says. “I was so sick with fear the night before battle that I even made my will.”
I try to smile in sympathy, but I am afraid he can tell that I think he is a coward as well as a traitor.
“Oh well,” he says. “What’s done is done. Now you go, Margaret, and ask the innkeeper what he can find for your dinner.”
I don’t do as my husband bids me. Of course I don’t. While he is lying in a dirty inn being served by our physician as a wounded hero, injured in the cause of York, the Queen of England will be marching as fast as she can towards my son and my only true friend, Jasper, certain that they will be arming and mustering their men to ride with her. I call the lad who rides before me, who is young and faithful and will go fast. I give him a note addressed to Jasper and command him to ride west as fast as he can and find some men marching under the banner of Lancaster who will be going towards Wales, to join the armies that Jasper will be recruiting. I tell him to approach them as a friend and order them to give the letter to the earl with the promise of a reward. I write:
Jasper,
My husband has turned his coat and is our enemy. Write to me privately and at once what are your fortunes and that my boy is safe. Edward has won his battle here at Barnet and is marching to find you and the queen. He has the king in the Tower and has secured London. He knows the queen has landed, and he guesses she is headed for you. God bless and keep you safe. God keep my son safe, guard him with your life.
I have no sealing wax or seal with me, and so I fold it over twice. It does not matter if anyone reads it. It will be the reply that will tell so much. Then, and only then, do I go to find someone who can make me some dinner and find me a bed for the night.
SUMMER 1471
It was not easy getting my husband safely home, though he did not complain and begged me to ride ahead. But I did my duty as a wife to him, though he had failed in his duty to me. It was not easy getting through the summer when finally we learned of what had happened when the queen’s forces met Edward. They were outside Tewkesbury, and the queen and her new daughter-in-law, Anne Neville, Warwick’s youngest daughter, took sanctuary in a nunnery and waited for news, as every other woman in England waited for news.
It was a long hard battle, evenly matched between men exhausted by forced marches in hot sunshine. Edward won, damn him to the hell that he deserves, and the prince, our Prince of Wales, died on the battlefield, like a flower cut down in the harvest. His mother, Queen Margaret of Anjou, was taken prisoner, Anne Neville with her, and Edward of York returned to London like a conqueror. He left behind him a battlefield drenched in blood. Even the churchyard at Tewkesbury had to be scrubbed out and reconsecrated after he left his soldiers in among the Lancaster men who were hiding there to claim
sanctuary. Nothing is sacred to York, not even the house of God. My cousin, the Duke of Somerset, Edmund Beaufort, who came to our house to ask my husband to ride beside him, was dragged out of the sanctuary of Tewkesbury Abbey and cut down in the marketplace: a traitor’s death.
Edward came into London in a triumphal procession, Queen Margaret of Anjou in his train, and the same night our king, the true king, the only king, King Henry of Lancaster, died in his rooms at the Tower. They gave out that he was ill, that he was weak with ill health. I knew in my heart that he died a martyr on the blade of the York usurpers.
I excused myself to my husband for all of June, and I went to the nuns at Bermondsey Abbey. I spent four weeks on my knees praying for the soul of my king, and for the soul of his son, and for his defeated widow. I prayed for vengeance on the House of York and on Edward, and I prayed that he would lose his son too and that his wife—the relentlessly successful, beautiful, and now triumphant—Elizabeth would know the agony of losing a boy, as our queen had done. I could only bear to go home when I heard God whisper to me, in those dark nights of my prayer, that I would have vengeance, that if I would be patient and wait and plan, then I would triumph. Then, at last, I could return home and smile at my husband and pretend to be at peace.
Jasper held out in Wales until September, and then he wrote to me that he thought both he and Henry would be safer out of the country. If Edward could make war on men in sanctuary, on a saint himself, helpless in his private rooms, then he could certainly murder my son for no greater crime than his name and his inheritance. The true Prince of Wales died at Tewkesbury, God bless him; and this puts me still closer to the Lancaster throne, and Henry is my son and heir. If in future years men look for a Lancaster claimant to the usurped throne of England, they could call on Henry Tudor. This is his destiny and his danger, and I see both coming to him. York is predominant; nothing can destroy him now. But Henry is young and has a claim to the throne. We must keep him safe and prepare him for war.