The Last White Rose Read Online Free PDF Page A

(He employed a chaplain, a clever young man called Thomas Wolsey.) Also present at the meeting were Sir Sampson Norton, the master porter, who had been Master of the Ordinance, William Nanfan, who was probably Richard’s brother, and Flamank himself. Conway made them swear not to reveal what they were going to discuss to anybody else, except ‘to the king’s grace if need shall require’.
    Conway began by warning Sir Richard that he was in grave danger and should thank God he had so far escaped, adding that he knew the identity of the men sent to murder the deputy governor and who was behind them. Naturally, Nanfan wanted to know at once who they were, but Conway said he would tell him later. Everybody present had enemies at Calais, he explained, especially among those who had secured their posts through the influence of the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Daubeney. ‘I and master porter [are] as far into the dance as ye be.’ The only possible reason for their enmity that he could think of – he suggested with a perhaps assumed naïveté – was that ‘we follow the king’s pleasure’.
    Conway then hinted that Lord Daubeney’s loyalty to the dynasty might be suspect – ‘hard it is to know men’s minds if God should send a sudden change’. Sir Richard broke in at this point, to say that he would swear on the sacrament that the chamberlain (who had also fought for Henry at Bosworth) was as loyal to the king as any man living. Sir Sampson Norton agreed with him. Nanfan conceded, however, that Giles Daubeney had been very ‘shlake’ (slack) on at least one occasion, when he had failed to disperse the Cornish rebels of 1499 before they reached Kent, a failure that angered Henry.

    After further discussion, Sir Hugh was forced to retract and to admit that ‘my lord chamberlain … loveth the king as well as any man living’. He added, however, that ‘it hath been seen that change of worlds hath caused change of mind’. Perhaps he was afraid that he might be replaced by one of Daubeney’s numerous protégés.
    What he really wanted to talk about was something more serious still. He went on to remind the meeting that ‘the king’s grace is but a weak man and sickly, not likely to be long lived’, and only recently had fallen dangerously ill at his manor of Wanstead in Surrey. At the time, Sir Hugh had found himself ‘among many great personages’, who were discussing what would happen should Henry die. He did not give the meeting their names, but he recalled how ‘some of them spoke of my lord of Buckingham, saying that he was a noble man and would be a royal ruler’, reported Flamank. ‘Others there were that spoke, he said, likewise of your traitor, Edmund de la Pole, but none of them, he said, spoke of my lord prince’ – by this Sir Hugh meant the late Prince Arthur.
    Clearly, the ‘great personages’ who were cited by the treasurer remembered all too well how Edward V had been turned off the throne and murdered when he was twelve. (After twenty years the late Richard of Gloucester’s coup still cast a very long shadow.) In 1504, the new heir to the throne, the Duke of York – the future Henry VIII – at thirteen was only a little younger. His younger brother Edmund had died only recently so that, apart from his widowed father, he was the sole surviving member of a dynasty which might easily be supposed to be on the edge of extinction.
    When Sir Sampson asked him if he had told the king, Conway asked to be allowed to finish. Since his arrival at Calais, he continued, he had repeated what he had just said to Sir Nicholas Vaux, lieutenant of Guisnes and to Sir Anthony Browne, lieutenant of the castle at Calais. Both had given him the same answer: they felt safe enough in their fortresses ‘and should be sure tomake their peace how so ever the world turn’. The entire meeting then vehemently insisted that Conway should tell the king.
    ‘If you knew King Harry, our master, as I do, you would beware how