Queen of Trial and Sorrow (29 page)

Oh, how typical, was my first thought.  No matter how ignominious his life, a man ought to make a good end, if only for the sake of his family. 

I remember hearing during the early days of his imprisonment that he had asked to be supplied with wine and the king said: Let him have wine.  Let him have all the wine he wants and let him drown in it. 

‘Hold me fast, men’ the duke is reported to have said, ‘for when I find I can’t drink this butt dry I’ll struggle.’ 

Dorset said: “Malmsey!  Now there’s a fine joke.  He always said it was a full-bodied wine!”

The Duke of Gloucester had made a great success of his administration of the north.  York was his headquarters.  The great men of the city admired and approved of him, for he had prevailed upon his brother to lower their taxes and defended them in their quarrels with the Earl of Northumberland.  In return they gave him their loyalty, frequent gifts, and provided him with soldiers when he needed them without charge.  But he was not so popular with the common citizens, who had occasionally staged riots against his decrees.  He believed in impartial justice, but in ruling the north he had discovered, as had his brother before him, that while a great man had to rely on patronage and the practice of livery and maintenance for his fighting power, impartial justice remained a futile hope. Nevertheless, he had justified the faith his brother had placed in him by keeping that troublesome part of the realm quiet and governing with a firm but just hand.  Occasionally, quarrels broke out between him and the Earl of Northumberland, but Gloucester managed to get and keep the upper hand without ever disturbing Edward. 

As reward Edward gave him more and more lands, and offices, which meant more patronage available to him and yet more power, creating what amounted to a palatine extending over Yorkshire, Cumberland and Westmoreland.  Gloucester had sovereign powers in those areas, and the king’s writ went no further than their borders.  This was an unprecedented mark of Edward’s faith in his abilities and in his integrity, but I was alarmed at the time. 

“Have you forgotten when power-bloated Warwick ruled in the north like another king?” I asked him.

“Gloucester isn’t Warwick.  I trust him implicitly,” he snapped.

“As you once trusted Warwick?” I suggested.

Whereupon he lost his temper and reminded me of the many times I had pushed my family forward while never failing to criticize his own, and in the future I had best keep my tongue behind my teeth where his brother was concerned. 

It was fortunate that the duke had remained steadfastly loyal; otherwise he undoubtedly had the resources to cause his royal brother as much trouble as Warwick had in his time. 

Greater power and responsibilities meant we seldom saw him at court, but he was little missed, for he was becoming more prudish in adulthood than he had been as a boy and was said to deplore the moral laxity of his brother’s court, for which he blamed not Edward but the Wydeville men who were the companions and encouragers of his brother’s vices!  Which was perhaps true of Dorset but no other, and it must be said that Edward had never needed any encouragement in concupiscence.

It was Gloucester the king called upon to conduct the campaign against the Scots, which the duke did but hardly in the same swift and competent manner Edward himself would have done in his day.  After a campaign lasting two years, he marched as far as Edinborough, burned the suburbs and finally took back the fortress of Berwick, lost to England when Margaret of Anjou handed it over to the Scots in exchange for aid.  Still, Edward declared himself pleased and sang the praises of his brother to all.

……….

After so many trials, peace at last.  Edward had accomplished much that he had set out to do in his earlier years.  Gold was pouring into the treasury.  He had a substantial pension from Louis as well as the revenues of his trading ventures, which he had the leisure to give fuller attention to; gold enough that he could buy jewels and fabulous tapestries and books to enrich our homes, to proceed apace with the rebuilding of St. George’s chapel and Eltham and other projects dear to his heart; enough to be able to bring his father’s and brother’s bodies from their simple tomb in Pontefract in slow and splendid procession to a more fitting resting place in the church at Fotheringhay, the college of which he had refounded and enriched in the early years of his reign; enough to ensure our son would not come to the throne as a debt-riddled beggar, and, not least of all, enough that he would never again have to go cap in hand to parliament. 

Also, the Crown’s solvency meant greater prosperity for England.  There was no clear-cut division any longer between the classes. Everyone was climbing upward.  The peasant was looking higher: he wanted to be educated; he wanted to join the church.  Among the prominent ecclesiastics of our times were many who began life in simple homes and went to local grammar schools. Merchants schemed to marry gentlewomen, or marry their daughters to gentlemen.  Gentlemen aspired to knighthood and knights had been elevated to the nobility by the pack.  I sometimes wondered if I had something to do with this: If a gentlewoman could become queen, what might a man not aspire to? 

Trade was booming, and there was a new flourishing of the arts and learning, leading to an increase in literacy.  Thanks to Master Caxton, who came to England to enjoy the patronage of my brother Anthony, books became cheaper and more accessible, and thanks again to the translations made by those two they were being read in English for the first time.  New buildings were going up all over, focussing on comfort rather than defense, and churches were being built in the Perpendicular style, so full of celestial light and soaring to such wondrous heights it stole the breath away.

Yet, there never was a time when we could forget that sorrow was lurking in a corner, waiting to leap out when we least expected it.  Our second daughter, our beloved Mary died of a fever at Shene.  Edward and I were inconsolable.  We learned the difference between the loss of an infant and that of a child who had enriched our lives for fourteen summers and left us with so many memories to break our hearts.  She is sleeping among the angels.

Spring arrived promptly on the first day of April, the sun showing a bright face for the first time in months.  Who could resist being outdoors, if only to take a stroll, to feel the warm breeze on faces and hands immured too long indoors beside smoking fires?  We were at Westminster.  The king elected to go fishing, and with a handful of companions and minstrels boarded the royal barge and set out accompanied by a gay flotilla of lesser barges.   

I chose not to go but instead took a walk in the gardens, where the gardeners were out in force, clearing away winter’s ruin, allowing the new bright verdure to show to best advantage.  The paths were being swept of dead leaves, the lawns raked, old stalks and twigs being pruned away, the litter piled in wheelbarrows to be carried off somewhere behind the jewel house, where smoke was rising.

I didn’t even notice that the sun had been blotted out until Lady Fogge pointed to the sky.  “Your Grace, look at those clouds.  If they’re not full of rain I’ll dance a galliard on the steps of the Guildhall.  We should go in.”

Ominous looking clouds were rolling in from the east, grey-bellied and bloated, driven by a wind that sprang up suddenly and took all the warmth out of the day.

“The fishermen are going to get a soaking.”  I thought: what a shame their outing will be ruined.  But April weather was nothing if not unpredictable.

Scarcely had we reached my chambers than the clouds burst and the rain bucketed down.  Looking out, I saw the gardeners grabbing their tools and running for cover.  It was raining so hard that it bounced off every hard surface, gushed from the eaves and the mouths of the stone men, quickly forming puddles in the garden.  The wind sent it swirling first one way then another, like a shifting gauzy veil, and I knew even the canopy over the royal barge would be scant protection.     

I saw them later, hurrying from the water stairs, a wet and thoroughly bedraggled company.  Servants rushed out with a canopy for the king, but it was too late.  He took to his bed, with what was described as a mild indisposition.  No one was terribly concerned.  Before retiring for the night I went to see him and found him sitting up in bed with a furred robe around his shoulders, playing chess with Lord Hastings.

Since returning from France, he was sporadically felled by the tertian fever, requiring several days in bed and leaving him more and more debilitated each time. No longer the splendid victor of Barnet and Tewkesbury; his good looks had disappeared beneath layers of excess flesh and he was much given to food and wine and pleasure.  He was declining much too swiftly into middle age.  Still, there were compensations: he did not distribute his seed as liberally as he had in earlier years, but generally managed to confine himself to Mistress Shore and me.

Signalling Hastings to resume his seat, I said: “How are you, Sire?”

“I’ll live, I suppose.”

“I’m relieved.  Did you catch anything?”

“Only a damned chill.  John Howard caught a big flounder.”

“I’ve never seen one so far up the estuary,” Hastings said.

“Once the rain started we all lost interest in fishing.”  Intent on the board, Edward groped for my hand and kissed it.  “Bid you good night, Madam.”

I had no intimation, no foreboding.  That night I prayed for his speedy recovery, and the next day he rose, attended Mass, broke his fast and did an hour or so of work before returning to his bed, tired and feverish.  I saw him again, and again saw no reason to worry about him.  During the following days he deteriorated, and then everyone was concerned.  The palace wore a muted air, as if peopled by ghosts; courtiers walked around quietly, without laughter or music.  The doctors were with him every day.  They bled him and cupped him and tried all manner of remedies.  They weren’t even sure what was wrong with him.  Congestion of the lungs, they thought, or perhaps his heart was tiring…They were full of theories but nothing they did had any effect.  He continued to decline, until, one morning, when they came to me in my chambers, it was to tell me that they had given up all hope: he was dying. 

I felt myself falling.  I was motionless, my hands clenched, and yet I had a distinct sense of falling into some whirling abyss.  I doubted and yet I didn’t.  Some part of me doubted that days and even years stretched ahead like an empty echoing tunnel without sight or sound of him, and that our world, of which he had been the brilliant center for more than two decades, could go on without him; and yet I knew those stark words would never have been spoken if there was any hope he would recover.  Physicians are ever optimistic; they like not to admit failure.  Their faces, etched with sorrow, spoke eloquently.  Cold assailed me, like a sudden drenching of December rain on bare skin, or the shuddering chills that accompany fever.

When they had gone, my ladies rushed to my side.  They rained condolences and comfort on me, their tears falling freely.  I brushed them off like flies.  I didn’t know what to do with myself.  I remember when my mother died, it helped to keep busy, but now there was nothing to do: our world would be in a state of suspension until the king died.  I took up my sewing and sat in a window seat, and tried to turn my mind to practical matters while the certainties of my life came crashing down around me.  “Mourning robes,” I remembered, of all things.  “Lady Alice, see to it, please.”

Still it rained.  The gardens were drenched, muted and forlorn.  Had the victor of Mortimer’s Cross and Towton, Barnet and Tewkesbury, really been felled by a sudden shower?  The pity of it is, I had thought, and so had he, that he would have much more time.  If he had known… But, it is not given us to know.  And it surely is a great blessing that we are ignorant of the hour of our death.  How blighted our lives would be otherwise.  We know that everything that lives must die. Every year we watch the flowers bloom and watch them perish with the onset of winter.  Even the very stones wear out with time.  But why so soon?  Why before we are ready?  When there is so much more to do?  What was God thinking when He made trees to live longer than us, His children?

He must have a purpose.  It is not given us mortals to know the Divine Will.  Yet we must believe, else we are lost.

I turned from the window, set my sewing aside and led my ladies to the chapel.  I hardly felt the cold hard floor beneath my knees, or saw the face of the suffering Christ gazing down on me.   

Does God hear our prayers?  Do they have any power, any at all?  Sometimes I am assailed by doubts.  In the last few days, in pulpits all over the realm, in country church and cathedral, the people had been asked to pray for the king’s recovery, but He had not heeded them.  Nor had He heeded my prayers.  Now all I could pray for was that He would forgive my husband’s sins that he might know salvation and everlasting life.

Hastings came later that day to fetch me to the king.  I was dry-eyed and my hand was steady on his wrist.  The chamber was crowded but hushed, for the death of a king is not a private matter.  It stank of medicines and of corruption.  Men moved aside as I entered.  I have no idea who was there; I presume the great men of the kingdom.  I felt their eyes on me, and their sorrow.  My own eyes were fixed on the figure in the great canopied bed.  As I approached, I saw he was lying on his left side.  His face was gray-white emphasizing the lines of suffering that were now etched deep, each a shadowed valley, and his eyes were sunk into bruised sockets.  They were only half open and it seemed to me that the spirit was already preparing to depart from them.  I knelt by the bedside.

A beringed finger beckoned me closer, and I had to lean over the bed and put my ear close to his mouth to hear what he wanted to say.  The breath rasped in his chest.  “I must go.”  I nodded my understanding.  Then he said: “Be good to our children.”  And closed his eyes, as if those few words had cost him all his strength.

Fighting tears, I said: “Sleep in peace, my dear lord. Until the time I am with you again I shall pray every day of my life that Almighty God take you into his everlasting mercy.”

I took his flaccid hand and pressed it to my lips and then held it to my cheek.  He was so weak, his fingers didn’t even curl around mine.  I don’t know how long I knelt thus, suspending the final parting, but then someone touched my shoulder.  “Madam.”  And: “Farewell,” I whispered.  With great care, I laid his hand down, rose to my feet and allowed myself to be gathered into Anne’s embrace.  A chair was placed for me beside the fire.  Lawyers took my place to read out his lengthy will, and he still had the strength to add a couple of codicils, though I didn’t hear anything other than their murmurings and his breathy whisper.  The lawyers made way for Hastings, whose face was etched with grief, and Dorset, one on each side of the bed, and his voice seemed stronger as he urged them to put aside their quarrels and work together for the sake of our son and for the good of the realm.  They reached across the bed to clasp each other’s hands and swore to do so, and each face was wet with tears.

He closed his eyes.  It was as if the last of his strength was gone.  The Cardinal-Archbishop of Canterbury, entered to administer Extreme Unction.  We had just received news of the death of his brother, the Earl of Essex, Edward’s uncle-by-marriage, for whom death came as a relief.  No one quite knew how old he was, except that he was closer to eighty than seventy.  The archbishop, too, was a very old man.  How cruel it was to see him there, with his age-mottled face and wrinkled ears sprouting more hair than he had on his head.  He had crowned Edward and would see him borne to the grave.  I did sometimes wonder why God gave some people such a lengthy senescence and others so little time. 

And so we waited, throughout that night, sitting on stools or leaning against the wall in that quiet chamber, and listened to the king struggling for breath, an agonized sound, a sound that made you want to beg God to allow it to stop.  Occasionally someone would enter and go to the bedside to say farewell, before taking his place against the wall.

He lived through another dawn and then his breathing stopped.  I went once more to the bedside and looked my last on him who had been my life, my love, my strength and comfort, and allowed myself to be led the chamber.  Everyone I passed bowed low and kept their eyes down.  I held myself rigidly.  No one must see me weep.  Tonight, alone in my bed, I would shed tears enough to flood Hell.  For now, I led my ladies to the chapel.  Prostrating myself before the altar, I prayed that in death he would find the peace that he had sought for so long in life.  There was some comfort in knowing that he died solvent if not rich, powerful, held in great affection by his subjects and respected throughout Europe for his strong and wise rule.

And he had achieved his aim of dying in his bed – an end that once seemed unlikely.  Yet it had been an arduous life, and it had exacted a toll on him.  I knew when I knelt at his bedside that when death came to claim him, he had not put up much of a fight.  He was ready to rest. 

He departed this life, my beloved husband, on the ninth day of April 1483, worn out by war and excess, disillusion and illness, just three weeks before his forty-first birthday.  I often thought later – uselessly, I know – that had he stayed with us just a few more years, four or even three, how different things might have been.  Would have been.  But he died and left me to face alone the bitter season to come.