He took her hands and kissed them.

“I had always intended that you should be my Queen,” he said.

Waves of gladness swept over her. It was truly so. He was smiling, well pleased, loving himself as well as her. She thought how charming he was . . . how young. All the miseries of the last years were falling away from her. This young man with those few words and looks of tenderness in his eyes had brushed them aside.

She would never forget. She would be grateful forever.

There were tears in his eyes. He saw them and they pleased him. He was the perfect chivalrous knight rescuing the lady in distress. It was a role he loved so well and had often played it in his imagination.

“That pleases you?” he asked.

She turned her head away to hide her emotion; and he liked that too.

He put his arms about her and kissed her.

“I shall never forget this moment,” she said. “I shall love you until the day I die.”

She heard a chaffinch sing in the gardens. Then the bells were pealing. In the streets the people were waiting to see him and his chosen bride.

“The King is dead,” they would say. “Gone is the old miser and in his place this handsome young man, this golden boy, every inch of him a king.”

Already they were proclaiming him.

“God bless the King. God save King Henry the Eighth.”

Bibliography

Aubrey, William Hickman Smith, National and Domestic History of England

Bruce, Marie Louise, The Making of Henry VIII

Chrimes, S. B., Henry VII

Gairdner, James, Henry VII

Gairdner, James, History and Life and Reign of Richard III

Gairdner, James, Life and Papers of Richard III

Green, John Richard, History of England

Green, Mary Anne Everett, Lives of the Princess of England

Guizot, M. Translated by Robert Black, History of France

Halsted, Caroline A., Richard III

Hume, David, History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution

Hume, Martin A. S., Spain: Its Greatness and Decay

Jenkins, Elizabeth, The Princes in the Tower

Kendall, Paul Murray, Richard III

Luke, Mary M., Catherine the Queen

Mattingly, Garrett, Catherine of Aragon

More, Sir Thomas, Life of Richard III

Prescott, William H. Edited by John Foster Kirk, History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic

Ramsey, J. H., Lancaster and York

Stephen, Sir Leslie and Lee, Sir Sydney, The Dictionary of National Biography

Strickland, Agnes, The Lives of the Queens of England

Timbs, John and Gunn, Alexander, Abbeys, Castles and Ancient Halls of England and Wales

Wade, John, British History

Walpole, Horace, Historic Doubts on the Life of Richard III

Williams, Charles, Henry VII

A Reader’s

Group Guide

The following questions were created to help your reading group discuss Jean Plaidy’s To Hold the Crown.