The Red Queen (50 page)

Richard, his sword red with blood, comes nearer and nearer, knowing the battle will be over with Tudor’s death. The two standards are only yards apart, and Richard is gaining ground, fighting his way through a wall of men to Tudor himself. In the corner of his eye he sees the red of the dragon and, furious, he slashes at it and the standard-bearer, William Brandon, in one huge thrust. The standard looks about to fall, and one of Henry’s bodyguard dives forwards, grabs the broken haft, and holds it aloft. Sir John Cheney, a giant of a man, throws himself between Henry and Richard, and Richard slashes out at him too a vicious wound to the throat, and the Tudor knight goes down, knowing that they are defeated, calling, “Fly, sire! Get yourself to safety!” to Henry, as his last words are choked on his own blood.

Henry hears the warning and knows he must turn and run. It is all over for him. And then they hear it. Both Richard and Henry’s heads go up, at the deep, loud rumble of an army at full gallop as the Stanleys’ armies come charging towards them, lances down, pikes out, swords ready, fresh horses tearing towards them as if themselves eager for blood; and as they hit, Richard’s standard-bearer has his legs sliced off from underneath him by a swing from a battle-axe, and Richard wheels around, his sword arm failing him, suddenly fatally weak, in that one moment as he sees four thousand men coming against him, and then he goes down under a flurry of anonymous blows. “Treason!” he shouts. “Treason!”

“A horse!” somebody screams desperately for him. “A horse! A horse! Get the king a horse!”

But the king is already gone.

Sir William Stanley pulls the helmet from Richard’s lolling head, notes that the king’s dark hair is still damp with warm sweat, and leaves the rest of the looting of his fine armor to others. With a pike head he prizes off the golden circlet of kinghood and strides towards Henry Tudor, kneels in the mud, and offers him the crown of England.

Henry Tudor, staggering from the shock, takes it from him with bloodied hands and puts it on his own head.

“God save the king!” bellows Stanley to his army, coming up fresh and untouched, some of them laughing at the battle that they have won in such decisive glory without dirtying their swords. He is the first Englishman to say this to the crowned Henry Tudor, and he will make sure the king remembers it. Lord Thomas Stanley dismounts from his panting horse at the head of his army, which swung the battle, at the last, the very last moment, and smiles at his stepson. “I said I would come.”

“You will be rewarded,” Henry says. He is gray with shock, his face shiny with cold sweat and with someone else’s blood. He looks, but hardly sees, as they strip King Richard’s fine armor and then even his linen and throw his naked body over the back of his limping horse, which hangs its head as if ashamed. “You will all be richly rewarded, who fought with me today.”

They bring the news to me where I am praying, on my knees, in my chapel. I hear the bang of the door and the footsteps on the stone floor, but I don’t turn my head. I open my eyes and keep them fixed on the statue of the crucified Christ, and I wonder if I am about to enter my own agony. “What is the news?” I ask.

Christ looks down at me; I look up at Him. “Give me good news,” I say as much to Him as to the lady who stands behind me.

“Your son has won a great battle,” my lady-in-waiting says tremulously. “He is King of England, acclaimed on the battlefield.”

I gasp for breath. “And Richard the usurper?”

“Dead.”

I meet the eyes of Christ the Lord, and I all but wink at Him. “Thanks be to God,” I say, as if to nod at a fellow plotter. He has done His part. Now I will do mine. I rise to my feet, and she holds out a letter to me, a scrap of paper, from Jasper.

I read it again. I have the strange sensation that I have won my heart’s desire and that from this date everything will be different. Everything will be commanded by me.

“We must prepare rooms for my son; he will come to visit me at once,” I say coolly.

The lady-in-waiting is all flushed; she was hoping that we would fall into each other’s arms and dance about in victory. “You have won!” she exclaims. She is hoping I will weep with her.

“I have come into my own,” I correct her. “I have fulfilled my destiny. It is the will of God.”

“It is a glorious day for your house!”

“Nothing but our deserts.”

She bobs a shallow curtsey. “Yes, my lady.”

“Yes, Your Grace,” I correct her. “I am My Lady, the King’s Mother, now, and you shall curtsey to me, as low as to a queen of royal blood. This was my destiny: to put my son on the throne of England, and those who laughed at my visions and doubted my vocation will call me My Lady, the King’s Mother, and I shall sign myself Margaret Regina:
Margaret R.
”

This has been a deeply interesting book to write, about a woman who triumphed in the material world and tried at the same time to serve God. She is remembered by feminist historians as a “learned lady,” one of the very few who had to struggle for the privilege of study; by Tudor historians as the matriarch who founded their house; and by less reverent memorialists as “t’ old bitch” who became a mother-in-law from hell. Trying to create for the reader a character who could grow from a child with a sense of holy destiny into a woman who dared to claim the throne of England for her son has been a challenge and a deep pleasure. Some parts of this novel are history, some are speculation, and some are fiction. In particular, we do not know who killed the princes in the Tower, nor even that they died in the Tower. Obviously, the claimants for their throne—Richard III, the Duke of Buckingham, Margaret Beaufort and her son—were the people with most to gain from their deaths.

I am indebted to the historians who have researched Margaret Beaufort and her times and especially to Linda Simon for her biography, and Michael K. Jones and Malcolm G. Underwood whose biography was the starting point for my own work. I owe Michael Jones many thanks for being kind enough to read my manuscript.

More research material and further notes are on my website at
PhilippaGregory.com, and readers may like to attend the occasional online seminar there.

These are the most helpful books I have read:

Baldwin, David.
Elizabeth Woodville: Mother of the Princes in the Tower.
Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2002.

———.
The Lost Prince: The Survival of Richard of York.
Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2007.

Bramley, Peter.
The Wars of the Roses: A Field Guide and Companion
. Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2007.

Castor, Helen.
Blood & Roses: The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century.
London: Faber & Faber, 2004.

Cheetham, Anthony.
The Life and Times of Richard III.
London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972.

Chrimes, S. B.
Henry VII.
London: Eyre Methuen, 1972.

———.
Lancastrians, Yorkists, and Henry VII
. London: Macmillan, 1964.

Cooper, Charles Henry.
Memoir of Margaret: Countess of Richmond and Derby.
Cambridge University Press, 1874.

Crosland, Margaret.
The Mysterious Mistress: The Life and Legend of Jane Shore.
Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2006.

Fields, Bertram.
Royal Blood: Richard III and the Mystery of the Princes.
New York: Regan Books, 1998.

Gairdner, James. “Did Henry VII Murder the Princes?”
English Historical Review
VI (1891): 444–64.

Goodman, Anthony.
The Wars of the Roses: Military Activity and English Society, 1452–97.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981.

———.
The Wars of the Roses: The Soldiers’ Experience.
London:, Tempus, 2006.

Hammond, P. W., and Anne F. Sutton.
Richard III: The Road to Bosworth Field.
London: Constable, 1985.

Harvey, Nancy Lenz.
Elizabeth of York, Tudor Queen.
London: Arthur Baker, 1973.

Hicks, Michael.
Anne Neville: Queen to Richard III.
London: Tempus, 2007.

———.
The Prince in the Tower: The Short Life & Mysterious Disappearance of Edward V.
London: Tempus, 2007.

———.
Richard III.
London: Tempus, 2003.

Hughes, Jonathan.
Arthurian Myths and Alchemy: The Kingship of Edward IV
. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2002.

Jones, Michael K., and Malcolm G. Underwood.
The King’s Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby.
Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Kendall, Paul Murray.
Richard the Third.
New York: W. W. Norton, 1975.

MacGibbon, David.
Elizabeth Woodville (1437–1492): Her Life and Times.
London: Arthur Baker, 1938.

Mancinus, Dominicus.
The Usurpation of Richard the Third: Dominicus Mancinus ad Angelum Catonem de occupatione Regni Anglie per Ricardum Tercium Libellus,
translated and with an introduction by C.A.J. Armstrong. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969.

Markham, Clements, R. “Richard III: A Doubtful Verdict Reviewed,”
English Historical Review
VI (1891): 250–83.

Neillands, Robin.
The Wars of the Roses.
London: Cassell, 1992.

Plowden, Alison.
The House of Tudor.
London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976.

Pollard, A. J.
Richard III and the Princes in the Tower.
Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2002.

Prestwich, Michael.
Plantagenet England, 1225–1360.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005.

Read, Conyers.
The Tudors: Personalities and Practical Politics in Sixteenth Century England.
Oxford University Press, 1936.

Ross, Charles.
Edward IV.
London: Eyre Methuen, 1974.

———.
Richard III.
London: Eyre Methuen, 1981.

Royle, Trevor.
The Road to Bosworth Field: A New History of the Wars of the Roses
. London: Little Brown, 2009.

Seward, Desmond.
The Hundred Years War: The English in France, 1337–1453.
London: Constable, 1978.

———.
Richard III, England’s Black Legend.
London: Country Life Books, 1983.

Sharpe, Kevin.
Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth Century England
. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.

Simon, Linda.
Of Virtue Rare: Margaret Beaufort, Matriarch of the House of Tudor.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982.

St. Aubyn, Giles.
The Year of Three Kings, 1483.
London: Collins, 1983.

Vergil, Polydore.
Three Books of Polydore Vergil’s English History Comprising the Reigns of Henry VI, Edward IV, and Richard III,
edited by Sir Henry Ellis. 1844. Reprint Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 1977.

Weir, Alison.
Lancaster and York: The Wars of the Roses.
London: Jonathan Cape, 1995.

———.
The Princes in the Tower.
London: Bodley Head, 1992.

Williams, Neville.
The Life and Times of Henry VII.
London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973.

Willamson, Audrey.
The Mystery of the Princes: An Investigation into a Supposed Murder.
Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1978.

Wilson-Smith, Timothy.
Joan of Arc: Maid, Myth and History,
Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2006.

Wroe, Ann.
Perkin: A Story of Deception.
London: Jonathan Cape, 2003.