Read Online The Men Who Would Be King by Josephine Ross - Free Book Online

and velvet and gleaming with jewels, embraced the soberly dressed Elizabeth with a great show of affection, and when the splendid procession entered London, Elizabeth was in the place of honor, directly behind the queen. The princely cavalcade wound slowly through the streets, accompanied by cheers and music and halted at intervals by elaborate entertainments, until it reached the Tower, where Mary was received by the constable and officials. She passed through the main gateway to go to her state lodgings; near the great Norman keep a little group of prisoners knelt on the grass. She raised them up, kissed them, and said emotionally, “These are my prisoners.” Two of them were familiar figures from her past, her old friend the proud Duchess of Somerset, whom she used fondly to call “my good gossip Nan,” and the leathery veteran Duke of Norfolk, now nearly eighty. The Catholic bishop Gardiner was there too, imprisoned under Protector Somerset’s Protestant regime; and there was another, a young man, tall and graceful, with the fair hair and handsome features of the Plantagenets. He was Edward Courtenay, great-grandson of Edward IV; with his combination of royal ancestry and personal attraction he seemed the ideal suitor to a queen—or a princess.
    â€œYesterday Courtenay, who was thrown into prison fifteen years ago, was released; and there is much talk here to the effect that he will be married to the Queen, as he is of the blood royal,” wrote the imperial ambassador. It was taken for granted that a queen must marry. The events of the six years since the death of Henry VIII had given grim warning of the dangers of a weak succession; Mary must marry and secure England’s future by producing heirs. She was not strong, she was approaching middle age and menopause, the need for her marriage was urgent, and so the gabbling voice of rumor announced that the ideal candidate had been found already, in the handsome person of Edward Courtenay, “the last sprig of the White Rose.”
    â€œThere is in him a civility which must be deemed natural rather than acquired by the habit of society; and his bodily graces are in proportion to those of his mind,” the imperial ambassador wrote, in his lengthy report on the young man. Courtenay’s youth had been even more constrained and overcast than Elizabeth’s, for he had been imprisoned in the Tower since he was a child of twelve, after his father, the Marquis of Exeter, a potential claimant to the throne, had been executed for treason by Henry VIII. Courtenay had grown up behind dark walls, and, like a plant deprived of sunlight, he had grown tall and palely graceful but insubstantial, lacking proper roots, shifting lightly towards any proffered source of benefit, spindly and undependable by nature. His intrinsic weaknesses were not at first apparent, since they were overlaid with charm and accomplishments, and if he appeared somewhat immature for a man of twenty-seven, it was generally felt that he might be forgiven much after his long imprisonment. The imperial ambassador, the great diplomat Simon Renard, informed the emperor that Courtenay had “applied himself to all virtuous and praiseworthy studies” during his years in the Tower, “so he is very proficient, and is also familiar with various instruments of music.” Bishop Gardiner, who had become devoted to the bright young man while they were prisoners, became his principal champion after their release; the old prelate, reinstated as a member of the Privy Council, was determined to see his protégé married to the queen, and it seemed at first that he might succeed. It would be a wise diplomatic match, in the tradition of the marriage of Mary’s grandfather, Henry VII, to Courtenay’s great-aunt, Elizabeth of York; allied to the queen, Courtenay’s Plantagenet blood would reinforce her Tudor muscle to create for themselves and their descendants an