The Tudor Rose Part 1

The Tudor Rose.

by Margaret Campbell Barnes.

For Ethel and Kit.

And All That Greenways Stood For.

Author's Note.

In Plantagenet and Tudor times so many parents called their children after royal personages that it gave rise to a confusing repet.i.tion of names. I have, therefore, altered the Christian names of a few of my minor characters. Also, in order to simplify the story, I have throughout the book referred to some characters by the t.i.tles they originally had, although higher ones may later have been conferred upon them.

My thanks are due to the librarian and staff of the County Seely Library, Newport, Isle of Wight, for their patience in producing all possible reference books on the period.

M.C.B.

Yarmouth, Isle of Wight.

A LONG-DRAWN SIGH OF feminine ecstasy filled the room as the white velvet was lifted from its wrappings. Its folds hung heavily across a lady-of-the-bedchamber's outstretched arms so that every jewelled rose and fleur-de-lys stood out and sparkled in the morning sunlight. Other women, on their knees, reached eager hands to spread the embroidered train. Young Elizabeth of York, standing in her shift and kirtle, shivered with excitement as the dressmaker from France slipped the lovely material over her shoulders; for, princess or no princess, it is not every day that a girl tries on her wedding-dress.

"Oh, how beautiful!" breathed her English attendants.

"Comme elle est ravissante!" echoed the dressmaker and her underlings.

Because she was not sure whether such spontaneous compliments referred to the dress or to herself, Elizabeth, the King's daughter, called for a mirror.

"But, Bess, it makes you look so different!" complained her younger sister, Cicely, who had been allowed to watch.

Different indeed, confirmed the metal mirror. Where there had been a slip of a girl who still studied her lesson books, there now stood a stately stranger who might one day become Queen of France. The slender immaturity of her body made her look quite tall, the excited colour in her cheeks became her. Being a Plantagenet, Elizabeth had always been casually aware that she was beautiful-but never, surely, so beautiful as this! "Should there not be a veil?" she asked, overcome by sudden shyness.

"King Louis himself will be sending it," replied her aunt, the d.u.c.h.ess of Buckingham. "An heirloom of fabulous Cluny lace."

"And when I pa.s.s through Paris to Notre-Dame my hair will be unbound?"

"Bien entendu," nodded the French dressmaker. "To signify that your Grace comes virgin to our Dauphin."

"Please-please-let us see now how it will look," begged Cicely from her stool by the window.

Elizabeth smiled at her, understanding as always. She realized that whilst all the others were interested in her as a bride-to-be, Cicely's first terror of parting had been born of seeing her standing there like a stately stranger, and that with hair unbound she would seem again the loving elder sister whom Cicely had always known. At a sign from their mistress two of the younger women loosed the Princess's headdress, letting her hair fall to her waist in a cascade of corn-coloured glory.

"With so much gold, child, you scarcely need a crown!" murmured Mattie, her old nurse, with tears of affection in her eyes.

"If Madame la Dauphine would but stand still!" shrilled the Frenchwoman, trying the effect of a makeshift veil with her mouth full of pins.

"And if Madame la Dauphine would but remember to talk French..." sighed the special governess her father had engaged for her.

"I must get used to this 'Madame la Dauphine' t.i.tle," thought Elizabeth, and heard Cicely sn.i.g.g.e.r from her stool. In private her brothers and sisters often teased her about all her new pomp and circ.u.mstance. Through the new window of leaded gla.s.s she could see the younger ones at play in the garden now, making a sweet childhood travesty of it: Edward dressed in a piece of trailing tapestry as the Dauphin, Ann with a nuptial daisy-chain on her head, Katherine as her bridesmaid, and Richard supposed to be reading the marriage service from one of their father's big books; while baby Bridget crowed delightedly at them from her nurse's arms. At sight of them out there on the sunlit gra.s.s a tender smile curved Elizabeth's lips, and suddenly she hated the white gown which symbolized the reason for her departure to France. "I am tired of all this trying on," she complained. "I pray you, ladies, put the dress away."

"But should we not wait for your English Queen to see eet?" expostulated its proud creator. "Her Maj-es-tie express a so ardent wish..."

"My sister the Queen promised to come," admitted Katherine of Buckingham.

"Were our mother coming she would have been here by now. She has been out from matins this half-hour or more, but hurried back to her apartments," vouchsafed Cicely, from her vantage-point by the window.

"Then something important must have detained her," the disappointed women decided.

So the wedding finery was reluctantly put away and Princess Elizabeth clad again in her everyday brown velvet with the square beaded neckbands. But before they could pin up her hair one of the King's pages, pushing his way through the protests of her women, came and bowed before her.

"Why, Almeric, how pale you look! Have you been making yourself sick again stealing the Queen's strawberries?" she teased.

"No, Madam."

"Madame la Dauphine," corrected the d.u.c.h.ess with asperity.

But either Almeric was mulish or he did not hear. "His Grace sent me to fetch you," he said, speaking directly and without ceremony to Elizabeth.

"Then wait while they bind my hair," she answered blithely. After so much standing about for dressmakers it should prove a pleasant diversion to see the King.

"No, Madam, by your leave," insisted the lad. "His Grace said 'immediately.'"

For a moment or two Elizabeth stood wondering. What could the King want with her so urgently? It could be some last-minute arrangements he had been making with the French Amba.s.sador, of course, or even just some new book he wanted her to read. One of those wonderful new printed books, perhaps, fresh from Master Caxton's press. Or perhaps, with his usual impulsiveness, her father had bought her some amusing gift. Something from the tall-masted foreign ship which had just put in at St. Katherine's Dock-some strange spices from the very edge of the world, a little monkey or some other pleasant surprise. "You mystify me, Almeric!" she said with a laugh and a shrug; and, waving aside her women with their pins and their combs, she lifted the folds of her gown in either hand and followed him. Elizabeth almost ran through the long galleries of Westminster Palace, singing a gay little song as she went. It was always a joy to see her father. And nowadays, since this Sh.o.r.e woman had captivated him, she saw him so seldom.

Edward the Fourth of England was the fondest and most indulgent of parents. Self-indulgent, too, her mother said. And growing more indolent of late as his wife waxed more meddling. Their children often heard them quarrelling about it. But to Elizabeth, his firstborn, he had never raised his voice in anger.

Yet before Almeric had pushed upon the heavy oak door of the audience-chamber she could hear her father's powerful voice, and it was certainly raised in anger now. The easy-going King had been driven to one of his rare outbursts of Plantagenet rage, using that oath of his ancestors which always came to his lips when abnormally roused. "By G.o.d's breath, I will revenge this treacherous insult in every vein of his heart!" he was thundering, as she came into the room. There appeared to have been some sort of hurried Council-meeting, but it was over now and all the important men about him looked frightened as rabbits. Even Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the King's young brother, and Lord Hastings, his trusted Chancellor, stood silent; and the French Amba.s.sador was cringing like a whipped cur.

"Even Guienne and Acquitaine, which my fathers fought for, I agreed to as her dowry," said Edward thickly. His strong hands were twisting a letter on which was impressed the seal of France, and presently he flung it to the floor and set his spurred heel upon it. His comely face was dangerously flushed and his tall body shook with anger.

"Will it mean war?" Elizabeth heard a man near the door whisper behind his hand.

"A year or two ago it might have," whispered back his neighbour. "But not now, perhaps. That harlot, Jane Sh.o.r.e, has softened him."

No man in that great room had eyes save for the furious King. No one noticed his daughter standing in the doorway until Gloucester, whom little ever escaped, touched his brother on the arm. As the torrent of his rage subsided, Edward must have remembered that he had sent for her. Glancing in her direction and seeing her white frightened face, he tried to take a hold of himself. He strode across the room to her, his arms with their hanging crimson sleeves driving his courtiers before him as he went, so that every man of them melted away through the open door way to discuss the dreadful purport of the French King's letter in some safer place.

Only Gloucester lingered, who-for all the battles he had fought-was not so many years older than herself. Although all the others had stared at her surrept.i.tiously, Gloucester did not so much as glance at her, whether from tact or pity she did not know. "If you need me, Sir, I can raise an army for France," he offered, in that pleasant, unemotional voice of his.

But the King's oath had outrun his decisiveness. He only made a vague gesture of dismissal to his brother and drew her back with him to the centre of the room. For some moments it seemed that he could not speak. "That those false fiends should have done this to you!" he managed to say at last, when the door was shut and they were alone.

"Done-what?" she asked, trying not to see the offending letter trampled into the scented rushes at her feet.

"Broken their solemn betrothal contract."

Even then Elizabeth, so freshly come from all that femine preparation, could scarcely credit her understanding. Tall for her years, she stood close before him, looking up searchingly into his face. "You mean-the Dauphin does not want to marry me?" Her shamed words dropped slowly into the silence of the imposing room, reducing an event of world-wide importance to the personal feelings of a girl.

Shaken out of his anger at sight of her stricken face, the King would have taken her in his arms; but Elizabeth stood stubbornly still. This was an affront to her feminine nature. Something which would make her different in her own eyes as well as in the eyes of others, and which no man, however kind, could accept for her.

"He has asked for the Duke of Burgundy's daughter instead," her father told her, reducing his explanation to the same simplicity of terms.

Elizabeth felt as if someone had hit her a stinging blow across the face. She had been humiliated in public, so that the whole palace, the whole world, seemed full of mockery and belittling laughter. She saw herself again as she had looked in the mirror, a lovely bride in jewelled velvet. Madame la Dauphine, a future Queen of France. For a moment the figures on the wall-tapestries wavered uncertainly before her, but she was not a person given to fainting. Instead she just stood there, holding her chin a little higher. And in those searing moments she ceased to be the high-spirited child who ran singing through her father's palace, and became a woman. A woman aware of the ambitious cruelties of men.

"Bess, my dear!" implored her father, who could not bear to see such subdued bewilderment upon so young a face. And at sound of his voice, bereft of all but love, her mask of dignity slipped and she hurled herself into his arms. "C-couldn't they have sent their horrible messenger before p-people had seen me t-trying on my wedding-dress?" she sobbed out against his breast.

Edward sat down in his great state chair and drew her on to his knee. He stroked her unbound hair and tried to comfort her as if she had been small Katherine or baby Bridget, but with infinitely more understanding, since they two had always been very close. "It has nothing to do with you as a woman. You must always remember that," he told her. "This Burgundian chit might be as ugly as sin for all France cares. All Louis wants is to avoid war for the succession-the same horrors of civil war as we have suffered here. So, because my sister Margaret's husband keeps a Burgundian army which is a perpetual menace, the Dauphin must marry into their family." Explaining the matter to her, Edward almost came to see it from Louis the Eleventh's point of view, and his indignation waned. "You know how these marriages are, my poppet, with our daughters as the bait for political alliances."

"Yes," said Elizabeth, who had already been the proposed bait for several. But those other proposals had never been serious and she had been but a child. Whereas now the whole face of life was changed. She would have to readjust herself. "What a waste it seems, all the hours I spent learning to write French," she said, with a gallant effort at lightness.

But neither of her cultured parents would think so. "No learning is ever wasted," Edward told her gravely. "Particularly for people like ourselves who live in an era of expansion and invention, with William Caxton bringing the literature of the world within the reach of all. See here, child, how he had already improved his methods since I took you and your brothers to watch him at work. He is even ill.u.s.trating his books with woodcuts." Reaching across a ma.s.s of state papers, the King picked up a box of small wooden pieces of type and scattered them on the table beside him. "That printing machine of his will turn out more books in a month than is done in years by the tedious script of monks."

"Will they ever be as beautiful?" asked Elizabeth.

"In time perhaps. And girl as you are, I warrant you a day will come when you will be glad that you can write a fair hand in more languages than one."

Elizabeth tried to fix her attention on what he was saying, knowing that he was trying to keep her thoughts from the shock which she had just sustained. He told her that she might come every day and read his books. "Not that I will have them taken away even by you," he stipulated.

"No, Sir," said Elizabeth meekly, knowing well enough that Richard, her younger brother, had one of them out in the garden.

Edward recommended The Sayings of the Philosophers for her piety, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales for her diversion, but inevitably he had more serious matters to attend to. "I must go now and talk with your uncle and Hastings," he told her, getting to his feet.

And she must face again all those people who had so lately a.s.sisted in the preparations for her splendid marriage. Worse still, she must face them with red eyes, looking like any lovesick milkmaid jilted by her swain. "If it please your Grace," she asked in a small voice, "may I stay here a while?"

"a.s.suredly, my pretty," he agreed readily. "And I will send your mother to you."

Elizabeth stood twisting her hands together in the folds of her skirt. "Please, no..." she began, before she had time to think.

"No?" Her father, already gathering up some papers, awaited some kind of explanation.

Both of them, perhaps, had been tried beyond pretence. "She would begin-trying to put things right-to manage..." Elizabeth stammered, without reverence or caution. But before lowering her eyes she caught the answering gleam of amus.e.m.e.nt in his. "I mean, I would rather have someone who-who knows nothing of the matter. Someone who will not want to speak of it, or even be thinking 'The-Dauphin does not want to marry her.'"

With his free hand the King pushed her gently into his vacated chair. "But someone of your own, dear child?" he urged.

Elizabeth's only wish was to be alone; but even from this side of the Palace she could still hear the distant shouts of children at play, "Then I will have Richard," she said.

"A wise choice. I always find him a most engaging companion," commended the departing King. And from the doorway she could hear him calling an order to someone to fetch his Grace the Duke of York.

So presently Richard came to her, still struggling with the weight of the big leather book.

"Why, d.i.c.kon, it is The History of Troy!" she reproached.

"I know. I can read some of it. I took it from the King's collection," he said, with that look of complete candour which he had.

"But how could you?"

"We had to have a book for the wedding service." For all his sensitive air of delicacy there was a streak of obstinate daring in this ten-year-old which was not in the other royal children.

"Well, we shall not need it now," sighed Elizabeth. "So put it back with the others. Mercifully, our father did not miss it. I hope you let no dew from the roses get on it."

"I held it very carefully, Bess."

"I saw that you did."

"Where from? What are you doing?"

"I was in my room trying on-a dress."

"They are always making you do that. But now for once I have you to myself. I like books better than dresses, Bess."

"I believe that I do too, d.i.c.kon. Yes, I am sure that I do now."

Having managed to heave his burden on to an appropriate shelf, the boy had more opportunity to observe things. "You are sitting in the King's chair!" he said, quite shocked.

"He invited me to. You know I would not sit here otherwise."

"Of course not," agreed Richard. "But perhaps Ned will sit in it one day."

"Not for years and years, I hope!" declared Elizabeth, still pa.s.sionately grateful for her father's kindness.

"Is it specially comfortable?"

"No. Rather hard, in fact," she laughed, surprised that she could be so soon amused.

The boy was tired with his play and came and leaned against her, and it was strangely comforting to have him there. He began building wooden castles with Master Caxton's little pieces of type, and Elizabeth was able to think her own thoughts. After all, apart from hurt pride, why should she mind so much? She had never seen the Dauphin. And now, perhaps, she would be able to stay in England with Richard and the others. Her arm went round him, drawing him closer. She supposed him to be childishly absorbed in the construction of a tower; but with young Richard one could never be quite sure. Evidently his nimble brain had been pursuing some line of thought suggested by the troubled times of which his elders talked. "It is strange, is it not, Bess," he observed, hoisting a paper flag from his tower, "how many people want to sit in the King's seat even if it is uncomfortable?"

MONTHS LATER ELIZABETH WAS wearing another new velvet dress; but this time it was black. As she stood at an open latticed window she could feel the sun hot upon the sombre stuff. There were gold tips to the little willows along the river bank, and lilacs scenting the Palace garden, and the invitation of an April morning made it seem all the more unbelievable that instead of planning some pleasant expedition she should be looking down upon the coffin of her dead father.

Because Edward the Fourth of England had been a soldier and a sportsman and had died quickly in the prime of his manhood the coffin was both long and heavy, and the bearers stumbled a little as they bore it out in to the sunshine from the dark Abbey doorway. Seen from above they looked oddly foreshortened creatures, so that Elizabeth wondered in a detached sort of way how they would lift so dead a weight on to the standing hea.r.s.e, while that part of her mind which was freshly bludgeoned by grief recalled how briskly he had been wont to cross the courtyard in his lifetime. Following after, as if borne upon the sad sound of requiem chants, came the lords spiritual and temporal; and high upon the hea.r.s.e went Edward Plantagenet's wooden effigy, wearing his sparkling crown and clad in his crimson cloak, so that it made a splendid splash of colour among the sombre crowd of Londoners who were come to gape at it. And to his eldest daughter it seemed that no living creature in the whole bareheaded throng would ever cut so fine a figure as he, who had dwarfed men by his height and dazzled women by his handsomeness.

As men mounted their horses and the procession began to move, a small piteous cry was wrung from her. Her father, who had always so cherished her, was leaving home for the last time. He had begun his last journey to be laid to rest at Windsor. More than anything that had happened during these past dreadful days, the slow, dull rhythm of mourners' feet in a stilled street made her feel bereft. So much more bereft than the daughter of any ordinary citizen; not by the measure of her grief but by the measure of her insecurity. It was as if the strong champion of her family's reclaimed inheritance were gone.

From the raised embrasure of the window where she stood Elizabeth turned for comfort to the living relatives who were left. They were all a.s.sembled there except the elder of her brothers, now so suddenly and frighteningly important, who was with his tutor at Ludlow. Elizabeth looked at them imploringly-at her mother, the Queen, sitting apart by the table, and at her younger sisters and Richard huddled in their unaccustomed mourning at the far end of the room. She had supposed that they, too, would want to come crowding to the window to watch the outset of the late King's funeral. That Cicely at least, who was rising fifteen, would want to look her last upon that effigy and wish a loving father farewell. But fear seemed to inform them; and it was natural enough, she thought indulgently, that in the strange circ.u.mstances of Death they should draw closer together and leave her, the eldest, to watch alone.

But a small gust of indignation rose in her as she watched her mother, marvelling that so newly made a widow should sit there dry-eyed, locked in some inward scheming with a half-written letter before her-trying, as ever, to improve on destiny. That she should not be too moved to do aught but mourn! But perhaps even that, too, was natural. For did not the whole realm know that Jane Sh.o.r.e, the glover's daughter, had more immediate cause to grieve? That most alluring of the late king's many mistresses who had dimmed the l.u.s.tre of his name, causing him to smear with sloth and self-indulgence what should have been the well-earned years of leisured honour after his splendid wars. Jane Sh.o.r.e, reflected Elizabeth, must be a lost and frightened woman by now.

At seventeen Elizabeth Plantagenet knew all about her father's faithlessness; but knowing also his parental fondness, she found it hard to understand how humiliation can harden a supplanted woman's heart.

With tears in her eyes, she turned her back upon them all. Already the solemn procession was wending its way into King Street, and soon the velvet-draped coffin with the great silver gilt cross would be borne beyond the bend of the river, to be censed again by the lovely village cross at Charing. Was she the only one to care? But before it had pa.s.sed from sight she heard the slither of a light step beside her and a cold hand was slipped into hers. "Where are they taking him?" whispered Richard.