Fortune's Wheel Read online

  Anne’s mother, watching the self-contained young man and her even more self-contained daughter, wished yet again that Anne was not so childish looking. She knew her husband’s ambitions with regard to these two, and desired a match even more than he, for the additional reason of sentiment. Anne was of marriageable age, though her immature looks might cause men to think that she was not. Really, as she was now, it would seem like a child violation; there was nothing yet to titillate appetites with even hope for the future. She had an uneasy feeling that matters with Gloucester should have been pressed two years ago, when the match was first mooted. The King had squashed the idea, which had then been dropped. Richard had been so much more malleable then. Now, he was not the boy that she had known, had wished so much was her own. She knew that already he had a mistress — no one at court could keep secrets of that kind — and he might turn out to be as heartily promiscuous as his brother, the King. She was not a clever woman, but she was perceptive enough to realize that such a husband would ruin Anne.

  Warwick wanted a high match for each of his daughters. That excluded any of the Queen’s brothers — he would have seen himself hang before consenting to that — and also those desirable minors, heirs of Dukes and Earls, four of them, who were now married to the Woodville sisters.

  More important was the securing of Clarence for Isabel. Because the Queen had so far borne only daughters, George of Clarence was the King’s heir. Secret negotiations were in progress at the Papal Curia to obtain a dispensation for the marriage. George had bought a betrothal ring from a London goldsmith already. He was captivated by Isabel’s blonde prettiness, her admiring glances and, though he did not know it, by her determination to have him as a husband. Warwick’s task had been made absurdly easy.

  Anne, sitting quietly enough to be almost forgotten, knew exactly what was going on. Now that her father had won George to his side, a stick with which to beat the King, she was the carrot dangled under Richard’s nose, to lure him into the Neville alliance against the Woodvilles. She thought that for once her father had overestimated his influence. She no longer trusted his omnipotence. Richard would reject her. Even if she were older, and beautiful, it would make no difference; he would never put anyone before his brother the King. This certainty hurt her deeply, both in her awakening femininity and her family pride. Richard had been the one person whom she would not have minded marrying. Not that she imagined herself in love, not with anyone, except perhaps in dreams, and she was sure she never dreamed of Richard; he had been too much a part of ordinary everyday life for that. But she had always liked him; he had never frightened her with noise when she was little, or repelled her with boasting, and, until recently, she had never felt shy of him. She was shy with a great many people. Now she showed her resentment of Richard’s desertion of her father and herself by ignoring him.

  After not too prolonged an exchange of pleasantries, the Earl did what his wife knew very well he was going to do. He suggested that Richard should accompany him to the armoury, where he had something to show him. This implication that the Earl and the boy had interests in common would make sure the interview began on the right note. Richard took his leave of the ladies very courteously, but evading an answer to the Countess’s murmurs about a next visit. Though he did not know how much it showed, it was evident, especially to his smirking brother, that he wore an armour of prickles. Warwick, as he steered the boy in the direction he wanted, allowed himself a little bleak amusement. In the armoury, he placed in Richard’s hands his most recent personal indulgence, a hand gun from Germany. The stock was as elaborately decorated as the finest crossbow, with ivory inlays of hunted animals and long tassels of green silk hanging off it to encumber the marksman. It fired a lead ball the size of a nutmeg. Warwick tossed this thoughtfully in his open palm.

  ‘I believe that one day this little pellet will render all armour useless.’

  ‘But not in our lifetime…?’

  ‘Not in mine. In your son’s, maybe. I’d rather face cold steel, I think. This does the same sort of irreparable damage as the cannon shot.’

  ‘Is it cowardly to hope for a quick crack over the skull?’

  Warwick gave a bark of a laugh. ‘No! No, merely acknowledging your kinship with the rest of men. I feel the same.’ He carefully put back the hand gun into its velvet case.

  ‘Kinship…’ he said slowly. Then, ‘I’m sorry, Richard, that your Grace has ceased to regard my family as your own.’

  ‘I would never deny I am a Neville, my lord.’

  ‘Then why stay away from my house, avoid my company?’

  ‘It has come to the point, my lord, where it is neither politic nor pleasing to do otherwise.’

  ‘Your pleasure,’ Warwick said, between his teeth, ‘is of no interest to me. Who has proclaimed it impolitic to be my friend?’

  No answer.

  ‘You have no more need to name them than I have to ask the question.’

  Silence.

  ‘I see. You fear them?’

  ‘Not them. They drop poison in my brother’s ear.’

  ‘Ah! You think the King has begun to see all who are close to the Nevilles as his enemies?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yet this is what the Queen wishes him to think?’

  ‘My brother the King thinks his own thoughts and speaks with his own mouth. He is a Neville too.’

  ‘I used to be glad of it.’

  ‘Used! My lord, there is my reason!’

  Warwick’s in-taken breath made a sound like a knife being drawn. But he did not yet betray his anger.

  ‘My dear Richard, I’d be only too glad to return to a happier situation. Most men wish at one time or another that the years would retreat. But it is not possible. The time has come when I can no longer endure the insults, or suffer the ingratitude humbly.’

  ‘My lord, my brother the King is a generous man!’

  ‘And you know by this time as well as I that the whole Woodville tribe suck his generosity until it dries up at the fount. They are swollen with gain like a fungus on a tree, and the tree they batten on is the King. I tell you, Richard, it is time to lop them from the tree. If the King will not take action against them himself, then he must be forced to do so by others.’

  ‘No subject can force the King to any action. It is treason to talk of it.’

  ‘Do you champion the Woodville faction?’

  ‘No, but I will not listen to treason spoken against the King!’

  ‘I do not consider acting in the King’s best interest to be treason. You are too young to realize that King Edward is himself still young and not above being led. Led — you can have my candid opinion — by the prick, by the Woodville woman, and by that trio of whoremasters, Herbert, Hastings and Stafford.’

  ‘I am not too young to realize that you seek to lead my brother by the nose for your own gain!’

  Warwick’s temper unleashed at this, in a fury that swept away all reason and prudence. His hand lashed out and should have fetched the obstinate, defiant boy a mighty clip over the ear, but he was clumsy with rage, and his fist landed hard across Richard’s mouth. The weight behind it knocked the boy across the edge of the table, off which he bounced, staggering on his feet, realized he had swallowed one of his own front teeth, feeling the blood run. He got himself out of the room, and his servants out of the Erber, though they would willingly have stayed to brawl with Warwick’s men.

  The barge shot London Bridge on the ebb tide race in a fashion that caused the rowers to pray harder than usual. Richard, trying to disguise the evidence of Warwick’s assault on his face, was not aware of any danger. The outcome of the encounter had been even worse than he had expected. As the Thames tide took him back to his brother’s court, his loyalty to King Edward unbroken, he felt little satisfaction. At the back of his mind was the certainty that soon he might have the chance to become a real man and go to war. There was no joy in it.

  2

  The Sun in Splendour
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br />   January – June 1469

  Sithe God hathe chose thee to be his knyght

  And possesside thee in this right,

  Thou hime honour with al thi myght,

  Edwardus, Dei Gratia

  Oute of the stoke that longe lay dede

  God hathe causede the to sprynge & sprede,

  And of al Englond to be the hede,

  Edwardus, Dei Gratia

  Edwardus Dei Gratia (c. 1461)

  2

  Gold, frankincense and myrrh — the three caskets were borne not before three kings, but one. On the morning of Twelfth Day, the King of England went in solemn procession to the Abbey of Westminster to offer these gifts to Christ as the kings Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar had done upon the first Epiphany. As a small child, Richard had wondered what frankincense and myrrh were, and whether they could be eaten.

  King Edward wore his crown. In it, he stood about six and a half feet tall. He looked splendid beyond belief, his cloth of gold tissue, jewels, gilded embroidery and crimson velvet as magnificent as the copes of the Abbot and the bishops; even the three kings of Orient could not have looked so fine, and they had been Moorish, and probably much smaller. He strode along at a good pace — short legs always had to work hard to keep up with King Edward — and the January sun made of him a gilded reflection of itself, as if one could have warmed one’s hands in his rays.

  At the time of King Edward’s coronation, Richard had been eight. His brother was nearly eleven years older. He could never, since, see the King crowned and splendid without experiencing something of that child’s awe. The crown, the candles, the incense, the astonishing fact of his brother smiling down at him — it happened now, when he was old enough to have forgotten. But the promise of that June day eight years past had now been blighted.

  The procession moved across palace yard; it was impossible to tell whether the sprinkle of whiteness which had been carefully swept from underfoot was snow or heavy hoar-frost. The Abbey roof was silvered in big patches melting into dampness; the pinnacles were rimed as if with powdered sugar. In the first hour or two after snow, the palace of Westminster could look like the towers of Camelot; at all other times it looked like a ramshackle tenement sprawling outside a city’s walls. It was so crowded with people no one could relieve himself without all his neighbours knowing. From the look of the patched-up houses of all ages, shapes and sizes, the place could be the home not of the King and his court, but of all the thieves, pimps and whores in the kingdom. Sometimes Richard thought that it was.

  In the crowd of lords all jostling for precedence at the abbey doors, no one would have dared actually to elbow the King’s brother out of the way, even if he were young and likely to be ignored by those hasty in their climbing into the royal favour, more especially by the ones who had chosen the ladder of the Queen’s patronage. In the procession, behind the King and his crowd of attendants, was the Queen. At the banquet to be given that evening in the White Hall, Richard had been assigned the task of attending upon the Queen. He cursed the fact that he was still thought young enough for these duties; that he would be sharing them with his fourteen-year-old cousin, Harry Buckingham, did not comfort him at all.

  After the divine service in the Abbey, Richard watched his brother walk among the press of court, greeting people constantly as he went, a nod here, a touch on the shoulder, a clasp of the arm there, and always a smile and a word. It was incredible how many of them he could recognize and put a name to. King Edward never forgot a face, or its name, and this extraordinary memory of his ensured much of his personal popularity.

  He was still talking away to one and all, easy and friendly, in the evening when the company began to file into the hall for the Twelfth Night feast. Richard joined the group of the Queen’s attendants and knelt before her. It was another in the list of minor purgatories he had been forced to endure at her hands. He would never, he thought, kneel to her in anything but grudging homage. It would not have been so bad if she had demanded a little less knee grovelling and reverential hand kissing — woe betide anyone who presumed to touch her hand with their lips. A queen was a queen, but before this one, her royal brothers and sisters-in-law looked like adorers at the feet of the Queen of Heaven. Only the Duchess of York, their mother, rose above her abasement and turned every humiliating act into one of gracious condescension. George of Clarence made every obeisance appear an insult, which was foolish and dangerous. Richard noticed that neither George nor the Earl of Warwick was present at the feast.

  The Queen, while Richard was standing and kneeling in front of her, began to stare at his face. As he had not looked in a mirror, he was not sure if the damage Warwick had done was obvious and turning a horrible rainbow of colours. Probably the Queen thought he had been fighting and had taken the worst of it. He did not stare back at her; that would have been an unforgivable breach of manners. Many people, other than himself, thought she was made for staring at.

  Elizabeth Woodville was close on thirty-two years old, but still men gasped at the sight of her. She dazzled the eye armed with nothing other than her silver-fair colouring, but it was not her habit to appear before her subjects unadorned. Heavy paintwork was not necessary; it would have spoilt the perfect skin, luminous and pale, like the inside of an oystershell, but she always wore enough gems to make Our Lady of Walsingham look a pauper. She preferred the colourless stones — and the most costly — diamonds and flawless pearls, as if she challenged them to outshine herself. She loved gowns sewn with crystal drops, shimmering cloth of silver and inappropriate virginal white. This did not mean that she disliked the fire of rubies, emeralds and sapphires, or despised amethysts, beryls or garnets, for, loaded with them, she could look like a queen from Byzantium. She was one of the sights of Europe, like a shrine; foreigners would gawp for hours, while she did not deign to give them so much as a look or a word. She looked as inviolate as the Madonna.

  It was hard to believe that she had two sons by her first husband, one of whom was as old as Richard. When she had snared King Edward, she had been a widow five years older than he, with only a posy ring to deck her fingers. Now she was seven months gone in her third pregnancy. This last fact was extremely evident; she carried her babies high and jutting. For a woman with the rare delicacy of a pearl, she enjoyed robust health. Childbearing did not cause her to droop, and she did not retire to her rooms until the very last moment custom decreed. It was unfortunate that she had so far given the King no heir, only two little daughters. Richard thought that she was as tough as a camp-follower, and that it might have solved everyone’s problems if she were not. It was wicked to wish her dead, but sometimes he did. He hated her. Not because she was more beautiful than anyone he could possibly hope to attain, or because she treated him with a mock-sisterly patronage, which he knew concealed a contempt for his youth, smallness and lack of manly attractions (or lack of response to herself), but because the woman behind the mother-of-pearl façade was merely a commonplace bitch. Because he loved his brother, he felt that Edward deserved better, and would not admit that what Edward had got had been acquired by his own wilful determination to have it.

  The Woodville beauty could stun even himself sometimes, though it always left an after-chill. He could not, even in moments of wildest fantasy, imagine what she was like in bed — sinful to uncover his brother’s nakedness in his thoughts — but she could not be so unsatisfactory as to make Edward reluctant to lie with her; he did so often. There were many others; Edward was demanding in his requirements, and he regarded variety as his natural prerogative, but he always came back to his wife. Their brother George, who never kept a hold on his tongue, said that he would not have her or any of her sisters if he were given a crown for the service.

  Sisters, brothers — Woodvilles swarmed, lesser stars in her firmament. Running his eye briefly along the tables in the hall, Richard could see six of one and five of the other. All were now provided with spouses they could not even have hoped for had their eldest siste
r not captured the King. And there, right under his nose, and responsible for the existence of the whole lot, was the Queen’s mother.

  Lord Rivers’ French wife, Jacquette, was usually known by her more impressive widow’s title of Duchess of Bedford. She came of the highest nobility of France, daughter of the Count of St Pol, and had been made the wife of the Duke of Bedford, King Henry V’s brother and Regent of France, when she was very young. After his death two years later, she had secretly married one of his household officials, to the horror of her family, for Woodville had been only a petty squire. The pair had to pay an enormous fine to the King for daring to do it. But Rivers must have been handsome, randy and on the make, like his sons and grandsons. At sixty he still looked as brawny and virile as ever, and as determined to climb ever higher. Between them, he and Jacquette must have spawned about fifteen children, of whom this ubiquitous dozen were very much alive. George of Clarence called her the Duchess of Bedward, because this was the message her eyes still gave to the world.