The Last Winter of the Plantagenets

The queen’s rooms smelled of beeswax and rue, and of something else that Margery Lound had learned, over twenty-three years of service, to recognise without naming – the smell of a house that had held death and not yet let it go. A stillness had settled into the hangings, a dimness onto the plate, as though even the silver had chosen to mourn. Anne Neville, Queen of England, died on the sixteenth of March, 1485, and the court at Westminster had not known, since that day, quite what face to wear.

Margery had come to the queen’s service as a girl of fourteen, following her mother, who had herself attended Anne’s mother, the Countess of Warwick, in the old days at Middleham when the earl was still the greatest power in England. That was before the earl had turned his coat — turned it twice, in the end — before the battles and the attainders and the long, strange unravelling of everything the Nevilles had built. Margery had outlasted all of it. She had watched her mistress grow from a fragile girl passed between powerful men like a letter no one wished to open, to a queen who sat at her husband’s right hand with a dignity that asked nothing of anyone. And now she had watched her die.

The pension had been arranged by one of the king’s clerks, a pale young man named Ferrers who delivered the news of it with the manner of a physician announcing a necessary amputation. Twenty marks a year, payable at Michaelmas. A letter of commendation. Safe passage north to Sheriff Hutton, where she had a brother-in-law who kept a modest house and a modest farmstead and had always, she suspected, slightly disapproved of the court.

“His Grace wishes it known,” Ferrers had said, studying the document rather than her face, “that your service to the queen has been noted and valued.”

“I am glad of it,” Margery had replied, because there was nothing else one said.

She was not dismissed in disgrace. She understood that. She was dismissed because there was nothing left to serve. The queen’s household was dissolving around her like salt in warm water — ladies returning to their husbands’ manors, to their fathers’ halls, to the ordinary textures of lives that had been suspended while they attended a dying woman. It was natural. It was right. And yet Margery found herself lingering, her trunks half-packed in the small room near the river that had been hers for three winters, the window fogged with cold, watching the boats on the Thames moving through a January mist that seemed too thick for February, too grey for hope.

She saw the king twice before she left.

The first time was by accident — or close enough to it. She had gone to return a psalter to the royal library, a small illuminated book that had been Anne’s particular comfort in the final weeks, and she had rounded a corner of the eastern corridor to find Richard standing at a window that looked out over the river. He was alone, which was itself unusual enough to stop her feet. He was wearing black, as the whole court wore black, but on him it had a different quality, less a garment than an expression. He was not tall — he never had been, being the shortest of the surviving York brothers — and in the dim January light he looked diminished further, his left shoulder bearing its familiar, subtle differentiation from the right, his hands clasped behind his back with a grip that suggested the effort of stillness rather than its achievement.

He heard her step and turned before she could retreat.

“Mistress Lound.”

“Your Grace.” She curtseyed deeply and held it, feeling the familiar ache in her left knee that had plagued her since autumn.

“Rise, please.” He said it without impatience, but without warmth either. He said most things that way now. She had noticed it spreading over him like frost over a pond, this quality of controlled, exhausted containment — as though all the ordinary expressions of a man had been placed under governance. He looked at the psalter in her hands. “Hers?”

“Yes, Your Grace. I thought it ought to go back to the library, rather than — rather than be packed with the other things.”

He crossed the short distance between them and took it from her. He did not open it. He held it for a moment the way one holds something that one is deciding whether to keep or to surrender, and then he tucked it under his arm with a preciseness that was almost bureaucratic.

“She read from it each morning,” Margery said, and then wished immediately that she had not spoken. It was not her place to inform him of what his wife had done.

But he only said, “I know,” quietly, and looked back out at the river. “You travel north soon.”

“At the week’s end, Your Grace. As soon as the roads will allow it.”

“They will be bad past Grantham.” He said it the way men who have campaigned say such things — practically, assessingly. “Tell your escort to take the Fosse road north of Leicester rather than the direct way. The draining is better.”

“I will, Your Grace.”

He nodded, still looking at the river. She waited a decent interval and then curtseyed again and withdrew, her heart doing something strange and uncomfortable in her chest that she would not, for some time, be able to properly name.

The second time was not accidental at all, and she felt guilty for it afterwards, or not guilty exactly, but aware that she had wanted something she had no right to want — a final fixed image, perhaps, or the satisfaction of a farewell that meant something. She had positioned herself near the great hall on the morning of a council meeting, ostensibly to speak with one of the other departing ladies about a shared wagon, but in truth to see the king pass.

He passed in company. That was what she noticed first — not the men themselves, several of whom she recognised, but the quality of their proximity to him. Lord Stanley walked three paces behind and to the left, which was correct in terms of rank and precedent, but there was in those three paces a distance that felt architectural rather than ceremonial, as though Stanley had measured the space to a tolerance that allowed him to deny, later, any particular significance to it. His son Lord Strange walked beside him, and neither of them spoke to the men around them. They were present at the council and absent from the court, and everyone in the corridor understood this without anyone remarking upon it.

Margery watched Stanley’s face as he passed. It was a face she had studied for years, as one studies a landscape one crosses regularly: familiar in its contours, opaque in its depths. Thomas Stanley had survived every change of fortune since the days of Henry VI by a faculty she had once heard described, by one of the queen’s sharper ladies, as ‘the political genius of never quite being anywhere.’ He had been Richard’s own steward, and now — she did not know what he was. Nobody knew what he was. That, she supposed, was precisely the point.

Francis Lovell passed with the king, talking quietly and earnestly in a way that suggested business rather than comfort. John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, whose broad face always wore an expression of practical determination, was saying something about provisions and the southern ports. Men preparing. Men calculating. The air around them was not the air of a court in mourning; it was something older and more specific — the air of a camp before a muster, of men making peace with what was coming by attending to what was immediate.

Henry Tudor was in France. Or rather, Margery corrected herself — he had been in Brittany, sheltered for years by Duke Francis, and then France had drawn him in when Brittany became complicated, and now he was preparing something on the Normandy coast, though the preparation had been preparing for some time and the something had not yet arrived. But it would. Everyone at Westminster understood, without saying it plainly, that it would. The spring would bring him, or the summer would, or the year after — but the logic of it, the terrible gravitational logic of it, was as legible as a sentence in plain English: there would be a battle, and the battle would settle everything, and nothing that happened between now and then could alter that fundamental shape.

Richard passed without looking at her, which was entirely as it should be. He was speaking to Norfolk, and his face in motion was sharper than his face in stillness — more animated, more like the man she had observed at Middleham years ago, when he had been the lord of the North and the North had loved him for it. He passed. The corridor swallowed his party and returned to its ordinary grey January light, and Margery stood for a moment with her hand resting on the cold stone of the wall.

“Are you quite well, Mistress Lound?” It was Joan Clifton, the lady she was supposed to have been meeting, approaching from the far end of the passage with a practical expression.

“Perfectly well,” Margery said. “Cold.”

“All of it is cold,” Joan said, which might have been a comment on the weather.

The court’s mourning had never quite settled into a coherent form, and this, Margery thought, was perhaps the strangest thing about the last weeks. It was not that no one grieved — she had seen grief enough, real grief, in the faces of those who had known the queen personally: in the old woman who had been Anne’s dresser since Middleham, in young Thomas Wyndham, who had been the queen’s page and had wept openly in the chapel and been quietly ushered away. She had felt it herself, in the specific, wordless register that attaches to the loss of someone one has attended through illness and recovery and illness again, watching the diminishment arrive in increments too small to mark until they were too large to deny.

But the broader court mourned uncomfortably, with the slightly forced quality of people performing a scene they had not adequately rehearsed. There were those, she knew — she would have had to be deaf not to know — who whispered that the king had wished his wife dead, that her illness had been convenient, that there were plans regarding the Portuguese princess, or the niece Elizabeth of York, though the second rumour was too grotesque for most people to speak above a breath. She gave the rumours the credit she thought they deserved, which was very little. She had watched Richard at his wife’s bedside in the final weeks, had seen the manner of a man who is frightened rather than impatient. But she was aware that courts did not traffic in what was observed by ladies-in-waiting. Courts trafficked in what was useful.

And what was useful, apparently, was doubt. Doubt about the king’s loyalties, his intentions, his legitimacy — doubt as a climate, pervasive and largely sourceless, drizzling down on everything. She had noticed it thickening since the autumn, since the news from France had become more concrete, since the Stanleys had taken on their particular quality of non-presence. A court that had once been a thing of definite allegiances, of the sharp Northern loyalties that Richard had cultivated through a decade as lord of those lands, had become something softer and less readable, like a map left in the rain.

On her penultimate evening in Westminster, she attended a small supper in the rooms of Lady Dacre — an informal gathering of women from the dissolving queen’s household, more farewell than celebration, attended by wine that was good and conversation that was careful. The talk moved around the things it could not settle on, like water finding its way around stones: there was discussion of the roads, of the relative comforts of the various manors to which the women were departing, of a new fashion in French hoods that someone had seen at a Flemish merchant’s house. Agnes Percy asked about Margery’s brother-in-law’s farmstead near Sheriff Hutton, and Margery described it with more affection than she had ever felt for it in life, because it was distant and it was safe and describing it felt like describing a destination that existed.

“Will you return to court?” Agnes asked. She was young — younger than most of the women present — with the particular frankness of someone who had not yet learned to pre-answer her own questions before speaking.

“I expect not,” Margery said.

“But if — I mean, should things — should there be another queen —” Agnes stopped, aware of what she was saying, and covered it inadequately by reaching for her wine.

“I am forty-one years old,” Margery said, with a precision she found she actually meant. “I have served at court since I was fourteen. I think it is perhaps time to be somewhere smaller.”

There was a silence that was, she thought, made up of several different kinds of assent. Lady Dacre refilled the wine cups. Someone said something about the Flemish hood again, and the conversation moved on, and the evening wound down as such evenings do, incrementally, the candlelight growing and the gathering shrinking, until Margery walked back to her room through corridors that were quiet in the particular way of places that had recently held more life than they currently contained.

She had heard the talk about Sheriff Hutton, too — that was the other thing. The castle there had been, in Richard’s years as Duke of Gloucester, the seat of the Council of the North, his administrative engine for governing those vast, difficult, loyal lands. It was still a royal stronghold, still housed the Council, still represented something of the old Northern power that had been Richard’s particular inheritance and achievement. But it was also — this was the part that circulated in whispers — where the king had sent certain persons for safekeeping. The boy Edward, Earl of Warwick, Anne’s nephew and the last male Plantagenet of the Clarence line, was at Sheriff Hutton under what was called the Council’s protection and what everyone understood as custody. And the girl, Elizabeth of York, eldest daughter of Edward IV, had spent time there too, though she was at Westminster now.

Margery did not think about these things with the particular frisson of intrigue that some of her fellow ladies brought to them. She thought about them the way a practical woman thinks about weather — as conditions to be navigated, not dramas to be performed. The boy Warwick was ten years old and had spent most of those years in one kind of custody or another, and his existence was a problem that no king, whatever his name or badge, would find easy to resolve. The girl Elizabeth was twenty and accomplished and contained, and Margery had observed her at court with a kind of respectful attention — recognising in her a quality of endurance that was, she thought, the most demanding virtue a woman could be asked to exercise.

She was not going to Sheriff Hutton to keep watch on anyone. She was going because her brother-in-law had room for her, and because there was nowhere else in particular to go, and because the north had always been the direction that meant home, however loosely she applied that word.

On the morning of her departure, a Friday, the sky above Westminster was the colour of unbleached linen, flat and featureless, with the particular metallic quality that promised snow before midday. Margery stood in the outer yard while her two trunks were loaded onto the wagon — a solid vehicle, hired from a man in Southwark who had initially quoted her a price she had declined to accept — and surveyed the scene with the flat competence of a woman who has organised many departures.

Her escort was four men, provided by the household: two of them young and bored-looking, one older and apparently the senior of the party, and one who seemed to exist in a state of permanent, mild puzzlement. The older man — his name was Harwick, a Northumberland man by his vowels — had already assessed the sky with the same reading she had made and nodded at her when she mentioned the possibility of snow.

“Likely before we reach Barnet, mistress,” he said. “We’ll make good time if we move now.”

“Then let us move.”

She did not make an occasion of leaving. She had said her goodbyes the previous evening, and she was not, in any case, a woman who experienced leavings as events requiring ceremony. She had her riding cloak, her warmest gloves — the ones with the lamb’s-wool lining that she had bought from a York glover three winters ago and that had served her better than anything the London drapers had offered — and her own horse, a solid grey mare called Patience who had been given that name by someone else and had, in Margery’s experience, done very little to justify it.

She mounted in the yard and adjusted her seat and looked once at the face of the palace — the stone walls, the windows, the flags dark with moisture — and thought of nothing in particular, which was perhaps the thought that the moment required. Then she turned Patience toward the gate.

It was there, as she passed under the arch into the outer passage, that she encountered the king for the last time.

He was coming in from the tiltyard, which at this hour and in this weather was eccentric enough to arrest her attention. He was accompanied by Francis Lovell and two grooms, and he was carrying his helmet under his arm, and he was flushed from the cold in a way that made him look, briefly and unexpectedly, younger. He saw her and checked his step, and she halted Patience and prepared to incline her head and ride on, because that was the appropriate response, and because she had already had her farewell at the window with the psalter and she did not think she could sustain another one without doing herself a disservice.

But he walked over, which she had not anticipated, and Lovell and the grooms stopped at a respectful distance while Richard Plantagenet, King of England, came to stand beside her horse with his helmet under his arm and the cold of the morning in his face.

“You travel today,” he said.

“Yes, Your Grace. Before the snow.”

He glanced at the sky, confirming what they both already knew. Then he looked up at her with an expression that she would think about for a long time afterward without being entirely able to parse — not quite grief, not quite determination, somewhere in the space between them. “You will find the north much as you left it,” he said. “Or perhaps a little colder.”

“The north is generally a little colder,” she said, and surprised herself by sounding almost light.

Something shifted in his face. Not a smile, precisely, but the shape from which a smile might have come, if things had been arranged differently. “Tell my people there —” He stopped. “Tell them their king remembers them.”

It was such a simple thing to say, and he said it with a simplicity that was, she thought, the most genuine thing she had heard at Westminster in several weeks. Not a proclamation. Not a speech. The statement of a man who wished to be remembered by people who had loved him, in a place that had been the best version of what his life contained.

“I will, Your Grace,” she said. “I promise it.”

He nodded once, stepped back, and she rode on.

The snow began, as Harwick had predicted, before Barnet. It came in from the northwest in a steady, purposeful way, not the decorative dusting of early winter but a working snow, settling on the road with the intention of remaining. Patience picked her way through it with the pragmatic displeasure of a horse that considered the entire enterprise ill-advised, and Margery rode wrapped in her cloak with her face half-turned against the wind, watching the landscape on either side of the road lose its specificity and become instead a general white proposition, a world of outlines rather than details.

She thought about the king’s face, and then she thought about the queen’s face — not as it had been at the end, grey and laboured, but earlier, at Middleham, in the summer years before everything had come apart, Anne Neville riding out in the morning with that particular expression she wore when she was happy and was not quite sure she was entitled to be. She thought about the earl, the great Warwick, whose daughter Anne had been and whose ambitions had scattered so much grief across so many lives. She thought about Edward IV, who had been magnificent and careless and was five years dead. She thought about small Edward, the king’s son, who had died the year before last and left his parents with a future that contracted daily.

The road north of St Albans narrowed and the trees on either side grew heavier with snow. Harwick rode up beside her and said they would stop at an inn he knew near Redbourn, and she agreed to this without ceremony. The other men were quiet. The horses were quiet. The snow fell with its absolute indifference to the concerns of courts and kingdoms and the particular grief of people who had served well and were being released into a world that would not, in the near term, have much use for them.

She thought about the Stanleys. She thought about the ports on the Normandy coast, and the ships that would come from them when the spring tides were right, carrying the last Lancastrian claimant and the army he had spent his exile assembling — Welsh levies and French mercenaries and English exiles who had been in Brittany so long they probably dreamed in French. She thought about the midlands somewhere, the flat fields west of Leicester, where the logic of it would resolve itself in the way these things always resolved — through the simple arbitration of men with weapons, through whatever grace or damnation the field extended, through the long, irreducible mathematics of war.

She did not know the name of the place, because no one knew it yet. She only knew the shape of what was coming, in the way one knows a storm from the feel of the air before it arrives.

And she thought — riding through the snow past the last houses of the last village before the road committed itself to open country — she thought that she would probably not see him again. The man with the psalter under his arm. The man who had come in from the tiltyard with winter in his face and asked her to carry a message north to people who remembered him. She was forty-one years old and she had twenty marks a year and a brother-in-law with a modest house and the whole difficult reach of England between her and the court, and the court itself was living, she felt with certainty she could not have explained, on borrowed time — the way a candle lives on borrowed time in the final fraction of its burning, not less bright for it, perhaps brighter, but surrounded by a darkness that is patient and has already, in its own way, begun.

Patience stumbled slightly on a root beneath the snow and recovered herself, and Margery steadied her with a hand and murmured something sensible, and they rode on north through the white afternoon, through the silence that snow makes of ordinary country, toward a castle on the Yorkshire plain and whatever life there was still to be lived in it.

The road behind her vanished almost immediately. She did not look back.

Anne Neville, Queen of England, died on 16 March 1485 — not, as this story specifies for narrative compression, in January, though her health had been declining since late 1484 and contemporary rumours did circulate about Richard III’s alleged plans to remarry. The detail of Richard riding out to the tiltyard at dawn is fictional. Thomas, Lord Stanley’s ambiguous loyalties in early 1485 are historically attested; he and his brother Sir William Stanley ultimately switched sides at the Battle of Bosworth Field (22 August 1485), contributing decisively to Richard’s defeat and death. Sheriff Hutton Castle in the North Riding of Yorkshire was a genuine seat of the Council of the North and housed Edward, Earl of Warwick, among others; Margery Lound herself is entirely fictional.

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