“My Lady the King’s Mother told me herself. He’s selling them to barbarian galleys and they’ll be chained to the oars till they die. He’s selling them to be slaves in Ireland. We’ll have no friends in Cornwall for a generation. How can a king sell his people into slavery?”

I look at my son, I see the inheritance we are preparing for him, and I have no answer.

It is a victory, but one so reluctantly won that there is little joy. Henry gives out knighthoods grudgingly, and those who are so honored dread the charges that will come with their new titles. Massive punitive taxes are laid on anyone who sympathized with the rebels, and lords and gentry have to pay huge fines to the Exchequer to guarantee their future good behavior. The leaders of the Cornishmen are briskly tried and hanged, their entrails drawn out of them and then they are quartered, hacked alive as they die in agony. Lord Audley loses his head in a prompt execution when the crowd laugh at his grave face as he puts his head on the block for defending his tenants against his king. Henry’s army pursues the Cornishmen all the way back to Cornwall and they disappear into the lanes which are so shielded with hedges that they are like green tunnels in a green land, and nobody can tell where the traitors have gone, nor what they are doing.

“They’re waiting,” Henry tells me.

“What are they waiting for?” I ask, as if I don’t know.

“For the boy.”

“Where is he now?”

For the first time in many months Henry smiles. “He thinks he is setting out on campaign, financed by the King of Scotland, supported by him.”

I wait in silence, knowing that triumphant beam well enough by now.

“But he is not.”

“No?”

“He is being tricked on board a ship. He is to be handed over to me. James of Scotland has finally agreed that I shall have the boy.”

“You know where he is?”

“I know where he is and I know the name of the ship that he will set sail in: him and his wife and his son. James of Scotland has utterly betrayed him to me, and my allies the Spanish will pick him up at sea, pretending friendship, and bring him to me. And at last, we will make an end of him.”










WOODSTOCK PALACE, OXFORDSHIRE, SUMMER 1497

The court behaves as if we are on a summer progress, but really we are trapped in the middle of England, afraid to move in one direction or another, waiting for trouble but not knowing where the boy may land. Henry hardly ever leaves his room. At every place where we stay he creates a headquarters ready for a siege, receiving messages, sending out orders, commanding more arms, mustering soldiers, even getting his own armor fitted new, and he readies himself to wear it on the field of battle. But he does not know where the battle will be, as he has no idea where the boy has gone.

Arthur cannot return to Ludlow Castle. “I should be in my principality!” he says to me. “I should be with my people.”

“I know. But your guardian Sir Richard has to command his men in the king’s armies. And while your father does not know where the boy might land, it is safer if we are all together.”

He looks at me, his brown eyes dark with concern. “Mother, when are we going to be at peace?”

I can’t answer him.

One moment the boy was said to be in his love nest with his new bride, beloved of the Scots king, confidently planning another venture; but then we hear that the boy has sailed from Scotland, and disappeared once again, as this boy so skillfully seems to do.

“D’you think he has gone to your aunt?” Henry asks me. Every day he asks me where I think the boy has gone. I have Mary on my knee, and am sitting in a sunny spot in her nursery in a high tower of the beautiful palace. I hold her a little tighter as her father stamps up and down before us, too loud, too big, too furious for a nursery, a man spoiling for a fight and on the edge of losing control. Mary regards him gravely, not at all afraid of him. She watches him as a baby might watch a bearbaiting: a curious spectacle but not one that threatens her.

“Of course I don’t know where he’s gone,” I say. “I can’t imagine. I thought you told me that the Holy Roman Emperor himself had ordered the duchess not to support or succor him?”

“Why would she ever do as she is told?” Henry rounds on me. “Faithless as she is to anything but the House of York? Faithless as she is to anything but ruining my life and destroying my rightful hold on my own kingdom!”

This is too loud for Mary and her lower lip turns down, her face trembles. I turn her towards me and show her a smile. “There,” I say. “Hush. Nothing’s wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong?” Henry repeats incredulously.

“Nothing for Mary,” I say. “Don’t distress her.”

His angry glance falls on her as if he would shout to warn her that she is in danger, her house on the brink of collapse, thanks to an enemy like a will-o’-the-wisp. “Where is he?” he asks again.

“Surely, you have all the ports watched?”

“Costs me a fortune, but there is not an inch of the coast that is not patrolled.”

“Then if he comes, you will know. Perhaps he has gone back to Ireland.”

“Ireland? What d’you know about Ireland?” he demands, swift as a snake.

“I don’t know!” I protest. “How should I know? It’s just that he was there before. He has friends there.”

“Who? What friends?”

I stand up to face him, holding Mary close. “My lord, I don’t know. If I knew anything, I would tell you. But I know nothing. All I ever hear is what you tell me, yourself. No one else speaks to me of him, and anyway, I would not listen if they did.”

“The Spanish may yet take him,” Henry says, more to himself than to me. “They have promised him their friendship and they will capture him for me. They have promised me that they have ships waiting off the coast for him and he has agreed to meet with them. Perhaps they will—”

There is a sudden loud hammering on the door, Mary cries out, and I clutch her tighter to me and stride across the room, away from the door, towards the bedroom, as if I am running away, suddenly afraid. Henry spins on his heel, his face white. I pause on the threshold of the bedroom door, Henry just a step before me so that when the messenger walks in, dirty from the road, he sees the two of us, pale with fear, as if we are expecting attack. He drops to his knee. “Your Grace.”

“What is it?” Henry demands roughly. “You frightened Her Grace, coming in so loudly.”

“It’s an invasion,” he says.

Henry sways and clutches at the back of the chair. “The boy?”

“No. The Scots. The King of Scots is marching.”

We have to trust Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, my sister Anne’s husband, to save England for Henry. We, who trust nothing and fear everything, have to trust to him; but it is the rain that serves us best. Both the English and the Scots set sieges and are all but destroyed by the unceasing rain. The English troops, camped on wet ground before stoical castles, fall ill, and melt away in the driving mist to their own homes, to warm fires and dry clothes. Thomas Howard cannot keep them loyal, cannot even keep them in their ranks. They don’t want to fight, they don’t care that Henry is defending his kingdom against England’s oldest enemy. They don’t care about him at all.