Philippa Gregory - The White Queen

“They call me Piers. That’s Peter in English. They call me Perkin as a nickname.” He pulls back from me and looks into my face. “What will you call me?”

I shake my head. I cannot speak.

“Your Lady Mother will call you Piers for the time being,” Sir Edward rules from the fireplace, where he is warming himself. “You are not restored to your own yet. You have to keep your Tournai name for now.”

He nods. I see that his identity has become like a coat to him; he has learned to put it on or off. I think of the man who made me send this little prince into exile and made him hide in a boatman’s house, and sent him to school as a scholarship boy, and I think that I will never forgive him, whoever he may be. My curse is on him, and his firstborn sons will die, and I will have no remorse.

“I will leave you two,” Sir Edward says tactfully.

He takes himself off to his room and I sit in my chair by the fire and my boy pulls up a footstool and sits beside me, sometimes leaning back against my legs so that I can stroke his hair, sometimes turning around to explain something to me. We talk of his absence, of what he has learned while he has been away from me. His life has not been that of a royal prince, but he has been given a good education-trust to Edward’s sister Margaret for that. She sent money to the monks as a scholarship for a poor boy; she specified that he must be taught Latin and law, history and the rules of governance. She had him taught geography and the boundaries of the known world, and-remembering my brother Anthony-she had him taught arithmetic and Arabic learning, and the philosophy of the Ancients.

“And when I am older, Her Grace Lady Margaret says that I will come back to England and take up my father’s throne,” my boy says to me. “She says that men have waited longer and with worse chances than me. She says look at Henry Tudor thinking he has a chance now, Henry Tudor who had to run away from England when he was younger than me, and now comes back with an army!”

“He has had a lifetime in exile. Pray God, you will not.”

“Are we going to see the battle?” he asks eagerly.

I smile. “No, a battlefield is no place for a boy. But when Richard wins and marches to London, we will join him and your sisters.”

“And I can come home then? Do I come back to court? And be with you for always?”

“Yes,” I say. “Yes. We will be together again, as we should be.”

I reach out and stroke his fringe of fair hair from his eyes. He sighs and puts his head on my lap. For a moment we are very still. I can hear the old house creaking around us as it settles for the night, and somewhere out in the darkness an owl is calling.

“And what of my brother Edward?” he asks very quietly. “I have always hoped you had him in hiding, somewhere else.”

“Has Lady Margaret said nothing? Sir Edward?”

“They say that we don’t know, that we cannot be sure. I thought that you would know.”

“I am afraid he is dead,” I say gently. “Murdered by men in the pay of the Duke of Buckingham and Henry Tudor. I am afraid your brother is lost to us.”

“When I am grown, I will avenge him,” he says proudly, a York prince in every way.

I put my hand gently on his head. “When you are grown and if you are king, you can live in peace,” I say. “I will have taken vengeance. It is not for you. It is finished. I have Masses said for his soul.”

“But not for mine!” he says with his cheeky boyish grin.

“Yes, for yours, for I have to keep up a pretense just as you do, I have to pretend that you are lost to me as he is, but when I pray for you, at least I know that you are alive and safe and will come home. And besides, it will do you no harm to have the good women of Bermondsey Abbey praying for you.”

“They can pray to bring me safely home again then,” he says.

“They do,” I say. “We all do. I have prayed for you three times a day since you went, and I think of you every hour.”

He leans his head against my knees and I run my fingers through his blond hair. At the back, behind his ears, it is curly; I can wind the curls around my fingers like golden rings. It is only when he gives a little snore like a puppy that I realize we have sat for hours and he is fast asleep. It is only when I feel the weight of his warm head against my knees that I realize he is truly home, a prince come to his kingdom; and that, when battle is met and won, the white rose of York will bloom once more in the green hedgerows of England.

This new novel, the first of a series about the Plantagenets, came from my discovery of one of the most interesting and thought-provoking queens of England: Elizabeth Woodville. Most of the story that I tell about her here is fact, not fiction-she lived a life far beyond even my imagination! She was indeed the most famously beautiful descendant of the dukes of Burgundy, who cherished the tradition that they were descended from Melusina, the water goddess. When I discovered this fact, I realized that in Elizabeth Woodville, a rather disregarded and disliked queen, I would be able to rewrite the story of a queen of England who was also the descendant of a goddess and the daughter of a woman tried and found guilty of witchcraft.

Given my own interest in the medieval view of magic, of what it tells us about women’s power, and of the prejudice that powerful women meet, I knew this was going to be rich terrain for me as a researcher and writer-and so it has been.

We know that Elizabeth first met Edward with a request for financial help and that she married him in secret, but their meeting on the road as she stood under an oak tree (which is still growing at Grafton Regis, Northamptonshire, today) is a popular legend and may or may not be true. Her drawing of his dagger to save herself from rape was a contemporary rumor; we don’t know it was historical fact. But much of her life with Edward was well recorded, and I have drawn on the histories and based my novel on the facts wherever they exist. Of course, sometimes I have had to choose from rival and contradictory versions, and sometimes I have had to fill in the gaps of history with explanations or accounts of my own making.

There is more fiction in this novel than in my previous ones, since we are further back in time than the Tudors, and the record is more patchy. Also, this was a country at war and many decisions were taken on the spot, leaving no documentary record. Some of the most important decisions were secret plots, and often I have had to deduce from the surviving evidence the reasons for particular actions, or even what took place. For example, we have no reliable evidence as to the so-called “Buckingham Plot,” but we know that Lady Margaret Stanley, her son Henry Tudor, Elizabeth Woodville, and the Duke of Buckingham were the main leaders of the rebellion against Richard. Clearly they all had very different reasons for the risks they took. We have some evidence of the go-betweens, and some idea of the plans, but the exact strategy and command structure were secret and remain so. I looked at the surviving evidence and the consequences of the plot and I suggest here how it may have been put together. The supernatural element of the real-life rain storm is, of course, the fictional and was a joy to imagine.

Equally, we don’t know even now (after hundreds of theories) exactly what happened to the princes in the Tower. I speculate that Elizabeth Woodville would have prepared a haven for her second son, Prince Richard, after her first son, Prince Edward, was taken from her. I genuinely doubt that she would have sent her second son into the hands of the man she suspected of imprisoning the first. The provocative suggestion, by many serious historians, that Prince Richard might have survived, led me to speculate that she might not have sent him to the Tower at all, but used a changeling to take his place. But I have to warn the reader that there is no hard evidence for this.

Again, there is no definitive evidence as to how the boys met their deaths, if they did, nor who gave the order; and, of course, there are still no bodies positively identified as those of the princes. I suggest that King Richard would not have murdered the boys, as there was little to gain and much to lose for him; and I don’t believe that Elizabeth Woodville would have put her daughters in his care if she had thought him the murderer of her sons. It seems also that she recalled her son Thomas Grey from the court of Henry Tudor, which perhaps indicates that she was disenchanted with the Tudor claim and allying with Richard. All this remains a genuine mystery and I merely add my suggestion to the many others, proposed by historians, some of which you can find in the books listed in the bibliography.

I am indebted to the scholar Professor David Baldwin, author of Elizabeth Woodville: Mother of the Princes in the Tower, both for his clear and sympathetic portrayal of the queen in his book and for his advice on this novel, and I am grateful also to the many historians and enthusiasts whose studies are based on their love for this period, which I now share, and I hope you do too.

More information about the research and writing of this book can be found on my website, PhilippaGregory.com, where there are also details of seminars on this book which I gave on tour in the UK, the United States, and worldwide, and on regular webcasts.

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.

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