The Kingmaker's Daughter Read Online Free PDF

father is furious with the king and blames the queen and her family for advising him against his true
interests but in favour of her Burgundy kinsman. Worst of all, King Edward sends his sister Margaret to marry the Duke of Burgundy. All my father’s work with the great power of France is
spoiled by this sudden friendliness with the enemy. Edward will make an enemy of France and all my father’s work in making friends with them will be for nothing.
    And the weddings that the queen forges to bring her family into greatness! The moment she is crowned she captures almost every well-born wealthy young man in England for her hundreds of sisters.
Young Henry Stafford the Duke of Buckingham, who my parents had picked out for me, she bundles into marriage with her sister Katherine – the little girl who sat on our table at the coronation
dinner. The child born and raised in a country house at Grafton becomes a duchess. Though the two of them are no older than me, the queen marries them to each other anyway, and brings them up in
her household, as her wards, guarding the Stafford fortune for her own profit. My mother says that the Staffords, who are as proud as anyone in England, will never forgive her for this, and neither
will we. Little Henry looks as sick as if someone had poisoned him. He can trace his parentage back to the Kings of England and he is married to little Katherine Woodville and has a man who was
nothing more than a squire as his father-in-law.
    Her brothers she marries off to anyone with a fortune or a title. Her handsome brother Anthony gets a wife whose title makes him Baron Scales; but the queen makes no proposal for us. It is as if
the moment that Father said that we would not go to her court we ceased to exist for her. She makes no offer for either Isabel or me. My mother remarks to my father that we would never have stooped
to one of the Rivers – however high they might try to fling themselves upwards – but it means that I have no marriage arranged for me though I will be twelve in June, and it is even
worse for Isabel, stuck in my mother’s train as her maid in waiting, and no husband in sight though she is sixteen. Since my mother was betrothed when she was just out of the cradle, and was
wedded and bedded by the age of fourteen, Isabel feels more and more impatient, more and more as if she will be left behind in this race to the altar. We seem to have disappeared, like girls under
a spell in a fairytale, while Queen Elizabeth marries all her sisters and her cousins to every wealthy young nobleman in England.
    ‘Perhaps you’ll marry a foreign prince,’ I say, trying to console Isabel. ‘When we go back home to Calais, Father will find you a prince of France. They must be planning
something like that for us.’
    We are in the ladies’ chamber at Warwick Castle, supposed to be drawing. Isabel has a fine sketch of the landscape from the window before her and I have a scrawl which is supposed to be a
bunch of primroses, newly picked from the banks of the Avon, beside Richard’s lute.
    ‘You’re such a fool,’ she says crushingly. ‘What good would a prince of France do us? We need a connection to the throne of England. There’s the new king on the
throne, there’s his wife who gives him nothing but girls. We need to be in the line of succession. We need to get closer. You are as stupid as a goose girl.’
    I don’t even flare up at the insult. ‘Why do we need a connection to the throne of England?’
    ‘Our father did not put the York house on the throne of England to oblige them ,’ she explains. ‘Our father put the Yorks on the throne so that he might command them.
Father was going to rule England from behind the York throne. Edward was like a younger brother to him, Father was going to be his master. Everyone knows that.’
    Not me. I had thought that my father had fought for the Yorks because they were the rightful heirs, because the queen Margaret of Anjou was a