The Tudor Plot: A Cotton Malone Novella Read Online Free PDF Page A

rough, harsh man the public seemed to worship. Eleanor was in many ways like her father, though she clearly had inherited her mother’s commanding physical presence. He wondered, though, where she acquired such ambition. None of the Saxe-Coburgs had ever shown that trait. But this vixen seemed a new breed. One more to his liking.
    “As much as you seem to be enjoying all this, I do have to go,” he said.
    “Business to do before evening?”
    He rose from the bed. “I’ll see you at dinner.”
    He stepped to the door and left, gently closing it behind him.
    Yourstone made his way back toward the front of the house. Along the way oil portraits of his ancestors kept him company. Most had been financiers to kings and queens, trusted members of Parliament the Crown had counted on to ensure the status quo was religiously maintained.
    Either a Hanover or a Saxe-Coburg, all far more German than English, had sat on the throne since 1714. But the house of Yourstone would soon become the ruling family of England. Where once adversaries on battlefields with pickaxes and short swords fought for the right to rule, the 21st century provided weapons no previous usurper had ever possessed. The printing press, cameras, public opinion polls, and the Internet were proving far more effective than armies.
    And the goal was now in sight.
    He descended the staircase and reentered his study.
    The book that had started it all sat on the table beside his favorite club chair, a 19th-century analysis of a 16th-century manuscript. The editor, a sociologist at the British Museum, had been entranced by the legend of Arthur. The researcher had spent a lifetime searching for proof that Arthur was not a poet’s romantic notion. He’d been fortunate enough to uncover an obscure journal scavenged from a French monastery, which told of something that happened during the summer of 1189 and into 1191.
    With Henry II.
    A Plantagenet from the 12th century.
    The last to rule a united France and England.
    He opened the book to a marked section.
    During the Octave of the Apostles Peter and Paul, in the nineteenth lunation, on the third day of the week, the fourth day of July in the year of our Lord 1189, a scribe strode across the courtyard of Chinon Castle, toward a chapel. He’d traveled through France to this, the heart of the Angevin empire, and carried a leather bag over one shoulder, taking great care to shield its contents from a summer rain. At the chapel door he lightly knocked and was ordered inside. The dingy stone walls were lit from the glow of candles that struggled in damp air to maintain life. On a threadbare divan lay His Majesty, Henry II. Where once this monarch stood tall, broad-shouldered, with the freckled face of a lion, he presently loomed sick and wretched, a mere shell of the giant he once was. Beside him stood the Archbishop of York, Geoffrey, Henry’s illegitimate son, and it was Geoffrey who directed the scribe to a table where he obediently removed from the satchel several sheets of vellum, a goose quill, and a small jar of black ink
.
    “Record whatever the king says,” the archbishop ordered in a quiet voice
.
    The scribe’s hand shook with a quake he found hard to control. Here before him was the ruler of a territory that stretched from Ireland, through England, across the channel to Normandy, then south to the Pyrénées. He was the first of the House of Angevin to claim the throne and for thirty-five years his armies had dominated France and England
.
    Yet his accomplishments seemed hollow
.
    Henry’s legitimate sons, Richard and John, had long schemed with their mother to subvert his throne. Over the past few weeks their treachery had climaxed with Henry’s armies suffering a series of humiliating defeats. Eighty knights and 100 men-at-arms had been taken prisoner at Tours only three days ago. Afterward, towns had been sacked and castles besieged. Henry’s commanders were surrendering at an alarming rate, and only