Read Online The Midsummer Crown by Kate Sedley - Free Book Online

Woodvilles without a second’s hesitation.
    And there were so many stories to the Queen Dowager’s discredit and to that of her family. I had probably heard more of these rumours and tales than my fellow commoners because of the strange circumstances which had drawn me, mostly against my will, into the inner circle of the royal family and nobility. I was prepared to accept that some of the indictments might be untrue or exaggerated, but there were a couple of highly disgraceful episodes which were given universal credence.
    Shortly after the late king’s marriage, Thomas FitzGerald, Earl of Desmond, by all accounts a handsome, brave, cultivated and convivial man, had come from Ireland for the new queen’s coronation. Immensely popular at the English court, he had struck up a lasting friendship with the young Duke of Gloucester, but he had proved to be a man too honest for his own good. When, during a hunting trip, King Edward had asked his opinion of the new queen, Desmond had replied that while he admired Elizabeth’s beauty and virtue, he considered the king would have done better to make a foreign alliance. Edward accepted the answer in the spirit in which it was made, but the queen and her family were not so easily satisfied. Two years later, when the hated John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, (nicknamed the Butcher of England) was appointed Deputy Lieutenant of Ireland, he helped the Woodvilles to their revenge. Not only was Desmond beheaded on a trumped-up charge of treason, but two of his small sons were also cruelly murdered.
    The second episode had been the arrest of Sir Thomas Cook, also on a charge of treason, because the Woodville matriarch, Jacquetta of Luxembourg, widow of Henry V’s brother, John, Duke of Bedford, had coveted Sir Thomas’s tapestries depicting the Siege of Jerusalem. The knight had been thrown into prison and his London house ransacked. When he had been brought before Chief Justice Markham, a man famed for his honesty, the jury had been directed to bring in a verdict of misprision of treason only. The queen’s late father, the first Earl Rivers, had succeeded in having Markham driven from office and thrown Cook into the King’s Bench prison where he had exacted the enormous fine of eight thousand pounds. Not content with this, his daughter had resurrected from the statute books the archaic and lapsed right of ‘queen’s gold’, by which she had been able to claim one hundred marks for every thousand pounds of the fine. Sir Thomas was ruined.
    I had heard these two stories more than once and from more than one person, and four times out of five their truth had been attested to from the personal knowledge of the speaker. Moreover, they had chimed with what I, myself, had seen and heard of the Woodvilles, and I had never felt the least inclination to disbelieve them. They had simply strengthened my loyalty to the Duke of Gloucester. But during the past few weeks, I had been uneasily conscious of a growing fear that Prince Richard’s desire for revenge – for Desmond, for Sir Thomas Cook and others like him, above all for Clarence – might be escalating out of proportion, especially when it was coupled with the secret belief that his mother’s long-ago admission of Edward’s bastardy was really true.
    The future seemed suddenly insecure, like looking through a glass darkly. I found myself praying that my lord would do nothing rash or foolish, but without any real conviction that my prayer would be answered. I continued to stare at the ceiling, at the shifting patterns made by the moonlight, until, without my knowing it, I fell deeply and dreamlessly asleep.
    My first sight of Minster Lovell was about midday, two days later.
    Timothy had not exaggerated the speed of our journey, nor its hardships, with changes of horses that left time for nothing more than a stoup of ale drunk standing up, meals of little more than bread and cheese