Succession Read online

  Livi Michael

  SUCCESSION

  Contents

  Lancaster and York Family Tree

  Key Characters

  Prologue

  PART I: 1444–50

  1. 1444: The Earl of Suffolk Stands Proxy for the King

  2. The King Prepares to Meet His New Bride

  3. The New Queen is Deceived

  4. The Wheel of Fortune

  5. 1445: The Coronation

  6. The Earl of Somerset

  7. The Duke of York

  8. The Queen Speaks Unwisely

  9. February 1447: The Duke of Gloucester is Summoned to a Parliament

  10. The Good Duke Humphrey

  11. The Duke of York Accepts a Commission

  12. The New Duke of Somerset

  13. The Duchess Alice Looks to the Future

  14. The Duke of Suffolk Suffers a Premonition

  15. The Duke of Suffolk Writes a Letter

  PART II: 1450–55

  16. The Wedding

  17. Lady Alice Receives News of Her Husband

  18. Lady Alice Visits the Queen

  19. The King’s True Commons

  20. Richard and Cecily

  21. Margaret and Henry

  22. Richard and Henry

  23. So Pore a Kyng was Never Sene

  24. March 1452: Dartford

  25. The Queen Consults Lady Alice

  26. Margaret Beaufort Comes to Court

  27. A Sudden and Thoughtless Fright

  28. Alone

  29. Duchess Cecily Speaks Her Mind

  30. The Earl of Warwick Makes a Speech

  31. The Queen Makes a Resolution

  32. The Queen Receives a Message

  The First Battle of St Albans: 22 May 1455

  PART III: 1455–58

  Margaret Beaufort Travels to Wales

  PART IV: 1456–62

  33. The Hanged Man

  34. The Earl of Warwick

  35. Cat and Mouse

  The Battle of Blore Heath: 23 September 1459

  36. The Queen’s Pledge

  The Battle of Ludford Bridge: 12 October 1459

  37. Duchess Cecily

  38. The Market Square

  39. Margaret Beaufort Visits Her Mother-in-law

  The Battle of Northampton: 10 July 1460

  40. Rain and Treachery

  41. John Coombe of Amesbury

  42. Two Sisters

  43. Richard of York is Reunited With His Wife

  44. Richard of York Claims the Throne

  45. Margaret of Anjou Receives the News

  46. The Queen’s Speech

  The Battle of Wakefield: 30 December 1460

  47. The Duke of York is Surrounded

  48. The Paper Crown

  49. The Queen Hears the News

  50. Duchess Cecily Hears the News

  51. The Three Suns of York

  The Battle of Mortimer’s Cross: 2 February 1461

  52. One Hundred Candles

  53. A Great and Strong-laboured Woman

  The Second Battle of St Albans: 17 February 1461

  54. The Little Prince

  55. Duchess Anne Petitions the Queen

  56. The New King

  57. Henry Stafford Receives a Summons

  58. The Baggage Train

  59. Recruit

  The Battle of Towton: 29 March 1461

  60. The Bloody Meadow

  61. Flight From York

  62. The Reckoning

  63. 4 April 1461: Duchess Cecily Receives a Letter

  64. The World Turned Upside Down

  65. Fair and of a Good Favour

  66. Consequences

  About the Chronicles

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  To Anna Pollard,

  a writer’s friend

  Lancaster and York Family Tree

  Key Characters

  Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI; daughter of René of Anjou and Isabella of Lorraine; niece of Charles VII of France

  Edmund Beaufort, Earl, later 2nd Duke of Somerset; brother of John Beaufort, 1st Duke of Somerset; uncle of Margaret Beaufort

  Margaret Beaufort, daughter of John Beaufort, 1st Duke of Somerset, and Margaret Beauchamp; great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster; great-great-granddaughter of Edward III

  Elizabeth Carew (Betsy), Margaret Beaufort’s nurse

  Alice Chaucer, wife of William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk; granddaughter of Geoffrey Chaucer

  Edward, Prince of Wales, son of Henry VI and Queen Margaret; also nephew of Margaret Beaufort and Edmund Tudor

  Henry VI of England and France; descended from John of Gaunt, who was the third son of King Edward III

  Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, uncle of Henry VI; brother of Henry V

  Anne Neville, Duchess of Buckingham; wife of Humphrey Stafford, Duke of Buckingham; sister of Cecily Neville, Duchess of York

  Cecily Neville, Duchess of York; wife of Richard, Duke of York

  Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury; brother of Cecily Neville, Duchess of York; father of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick

  Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick; son of the Earl of Salisbury; nephew of Cecily Neville, Duchess of York, and Anne Neville, Duchess of Buckingham

  Edward Plantagenet, Earl of March, later King Edward IV; son of Cecily Neville and Richard, Duke of York

  Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York; descended on his mother’s side from Lionel of Antwerp, second son of King Edward III, and on his father’s side from Edmund of Langley, fourth son of King Edward III

  John de la Pole, son of William de la Pole and Alice Chaucer; m. (1) Margaret Beaufort, (2) Elizabeth, daughter of Richard of York

  William de la Pole, Earl, later Duke of Suffolk; m. Alice Chaucer

  Henry Stafford, son of Duke and Duchess of Buckingham; m. Margaret Beaufort

  Humphrey Stafford, 1st Duke of Buckingham; m. Anne Neville, sister of Cecily Neville and the Earl of Salisbury

  Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond; half-brother of King Henry VI; m. Margaret Beaufort

  Henry Tudor, son of Edmund Tudor and Margaret Beaufort, later King Henry VII

  Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke; half-brother of Henry VI; Edmund Tudor’s younger brother

  Owen Tudor, father of Edmund and Jasper; m. Katherine of Valois, widow of King Henry V

  Prologue

  Everything frightened her when she was four years old. A cluster of shadows at the end of the corridor, light winking off a door handle, the open mouth of a hunted stag on the long picture, and her own footsteps tap-tapping eerily, erratically, on the tiled floor.

  She had lost her way. She had somehow become detached from her nurse, and all the corridors and doorways looked the same. She was too small to open any of the great doors. Worst of all, right at the end of the hallway and half hidden in shadow, there was an image of the devil, rising out of a crack in the earth, chewing the limbs of the damned.

  And she could only totter towards him, because she didn’t know where else to go.

  If she screamed, and no one heard her, the devil would surely hear.

  Her dress was heavy and sticky, chafing her beneath the arms, her breathing hoarse and uneven, coming out in ragged whimpers.

  She knew already that it was a terrible disgrace to cry, except in penitence.

  Finally she banged the flat of her hands against the carved panel of one of the great doors, and to her surprise it moved smoothly away. She stood in the doorway, light streaming towards her from two immense windows so that she could hardly see.

  Then she saw his legs in their silk stockings; the long, pointed shoes.

  She had hardly seen the duke since coming to live with him as his ward, yet she
knew it was him. There was something spread out on the table in front of him and he was bending over it. She could see more clearly now his thinning grey hair, and the powerful nose with spectacles perched unevenly on the end of it. His lips moved as he read.

  Some impulse made her step forward; she didn’t know what. She was almost as scared of the duke as of the devil.

  He didn’t look up until she had nearly reached the table.

  Hello, he said, his watery blue eyes clearing. You must be … Margaret?

  And when she didn’t answer, he asked if she would like to see a marvellous thing. And when she didn’t answer that, he held his hand out and she walked awkwardly over to him, and then he picked her up and stood her on a chair. He brushed the tears from her face with a quick thumb and told her not to touch.

  Do you know what this is? he asked, and she shook her head.

  It was a great map, he told her, a map of the world.

  It curled at the corners and he had pressed it down with weights of various kinds: a small box, an ink stand, a wooden head.

  The world was all colours; a mass of colours surrounded by blue. Around the edges the twelve faces of the wind blew the sea in all directions and tossed the little boats upon it. He talked her through the countries.

  This is France, see, and this is Brittany, and this – this is England, where you live now.

  She listened politely, not believing him. How could England be so small? She waited for him to explain the other features of the map: the fire-breathing dragons and salamanders, great snails and griffins and giants, beasts joined together with heads at both ends, and men with ears trailing along the ground.

  In the centre of the world there was Jerusalem, of course, bounded by a circle that was God’s holy tower. To the west there was an oval country, where unicorns played. There, he told her, it was possible to find the well of youth, guarded by two-headed geese in the pepper forests of Malabar, where there were trees that grew lambs from giant pods, and wool-bearing hens.

  At the top were Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Five rivers spouted from this garden, flowing south and west. If it were possible to sail south on one of these rivers, he said, past the line of the Equator, you would see men who walked upside down on their hands, and rain falling upwards on to the earth.

  But she was looking at the margins of the map, which were decorated with feathers and shells, and further up were the sun and moon, representing the firmament, and beyond that, of course, the glory of God. Which some men maintained you could sail to, he said, following her gaze.

  She listened carefully, not liking to say that his fingers were digging into her as he held her on the chair. Sunlight shifted into cloud, and there was a spatter of rain at the windows.

  He had sailed to some of the countries himself, he told her, and knew for a fact that Ireland was not near Spain. And yet, he said, half smiling into her serious face, there is the world we live in, and the world of the imagination, and who is to say which is the more real?

  And now he was smiling not so much at her as at some inward vision.

  He released her then, so that she tottered slightly, and he put out one hand to steady her, then began to roll the map up, methodically and swiftly rolling up the known world. She had a sudden dizzying sense of scale: England a small, brown corner of the world and herself a tiny speck on it.

  He spoke about his time abroad, especially in France, where he had been captured by a woman wearing armour.

  Do not underestimate the strangeness of the world, he told her. And then he said that this woman, who was known as Jeanne d’Arc, was the bravest woman that ever lived.

  And then her nurse had appeared, flustered, anxious, and the duke had lifted her down from the chair, and she had hurried towards her in a stumbling run, back to the known world.

  Later, much later, she learned that the world had changed from the flatness of a map into a globe, that it was not bounded by dragons and giants but by a sea of ice at both poles, that Jerusalem was no longer the centre of the world, and that there was a new land to the west, which was bigger than anyone had realized.

  She learned also that her guardian had been accused of treason, that he had lost much of the nation’s land in France, and that he had plotted to take the throne by marrying her to his son. For which crimes he had been sent to the Tower. And upon his release from the Tower he had been murdered on a ship. And the sword that killed him was rusty: it had taken six blows to sever his head. After which his headless body had been thrown upon a beach.

  Still, when she thought of him, she remembered that afternoon in his study, the hiss of rain at the windows. He had spoken of a brave woman with deference, she remembered that. And he had unravelled the world for her, bigger, more colourful and stranger than she had ever known.

  PART I: 1444–50

  1444: The Earl of Suffolk Stands Proxy for the King

  In this time by means of the forenamed Earl of Suffolk a marriage was concluded between the king and Dame Margaret, the king’s daughter of Sicily and Jerusalem, a woman of exemplary birth and chargeable to this land, for … it was agreed by the king … that he should give over all his right and title in the duchy of Anjou and the earldom of Maine, the which two lordships were in the keep of Normandy. The which conclusion of marriage was the beginning of the loss of France and of much heaviness and sorrow in this land.

  Great Chronicle of London

  She was not beautiful in the English sense, being small and dark, but there was a vivid quality to her, an intense attentiveness. She walked like a dancer; her ribs were lifted, her collar bones open so that her neck seemed long. It took most people some time to realize she was not tall. Her father had given her no dowry, so she walked taller than ever. Seed pearls glistened like tiny teeth in her hair.

  The Earl of Suffolk adjusted his body to an attitude of admiration and deference. She was fourteen years old, but it seemed to him that she would require a great deal of deference. As she drew closer he could see the minute contractions and dilations of her pupils, a nerve quivering in the soft upper lip.

  ‘They will not love me, I think,’ she had said to him once, with that air of certainty that left no room for doubt or hesitation. He had said that of course the people would love her, just as the king had loved her, from the first. Though, privately, he considered that love was an accommodating word, like beauty.

  It was true that the king had felt a passion fix’t and unconquerable from first seeing her portrait. The dim miniature which to everyone else had seemed unclear, slightly damaged by its journey, had in the king’s eyes resolved into a composite of everything he yearned for, for himself and the nation. He had attached himself to this vision with that fixity of which he was unexpectedly capable. Amenable to most things, he would from time to time grow obdurate as a stone; there was no reasoning with him, no persuasion. That was why the earl had accepted, on his behalf, this young girl who brought with her no dowry, who had to be bought at the great cost of the territories of Maine and Anjou.

  It had been part of his mission to win her confidence, and he had won it. In any company she looked first to him before speaking or taking a decision. Now he smiled encouragingly as she took her place beside him, and although she did not smile back he could see a certain release in the set of her shoulders, the tilt of her head. They stood together while the choirs sang in a soft curtain of light that came through the great windows, and the earl had the sense of being as insubstantial as one of the motes of dust that danced about in its rays.

  Then there was the journey to England.

  After several hours at sea the clouds gathered out of nowhere; the sky began to brood and churn, and the sea to broil and foam. It twisted like the coils of some monstrous intestine, spewing out extraneous matter from its depths.

  The crew, fleetingly illuminated by flashes of light, battled frantically with the sails. Soon the air was nine parts water and it was difficult to breathe. All the passengers were ordered b
elow, where they clung to one another and prayed.

  Some said they saw armies marching from the battlements of the sea, while others saw the faces of devils in the waves, and yet others the faces of their saints, to whom they cried out for aid. The first ship was dashed against hidden rocks but remained afloat, lurching dangerously, with part of its belly gone and some of the crew swept overboard.

  One man swore he saw the Son of God walking towards him. In His hand He held a shining cross and His face was smiling. This smiling Jesus came towards him on a wave, and the man tried to cry out to Him, but his mouth was full of the storming sea, and so the Son of God walked past.

  Yet he was saved, this man, by the beam of timber from the broken ship to which he clung, though afterwards he always said he had been saved by the smiling Jesus. In later years, when he told this tale, some laughed, while others grew sober and joined in with fantastic tales of their own, and others asked, half mocking, what the Son of God had been smiling about, which was hard to say. Also it was hard to describe the nature of the smile. ‘Was it pitiful?’ they asked him. No. ‘Was it joyous, for He was bringing His flock home?’ No. Nor was it triumphant, nor sad. When they doubted him, because he could not describe the face of his Lord, nor say how he knew for certain that it was Him, he remembered how in childhood he had walked across the rafters of a burnt-out house for a dare. And in a burst of inspiration he said that it was just as if He was right pleased at being able to walk on water again.