The Tudor Rose Read Online Free PDF

really believe that I—or any of us—would break our freshly made oath to him whom we loved and served, or leave anything undone which we deemed necessary for the protection of his son?”

    The Queen could have refused to use the seal, knowing that in the absence of the Duke of Gloucester none other would have dared; but her brief essay to take command had burnt itself out. At the first shock of combined opposition her high-handed assumption of authority had dissolved into self-pity. In her blood was no stain of royalty to sustain her. “Then I must let myself be overruled by your counsel,” she submitted. “And I pray God none of us assembled here may live to rue it!”

R AIN BEAT UPON THE painted windows of the Abbot of Westminster's parlour, and every now and then a large drip from the smoke louvre high up in the middle of the roof would fall with a melancholy plop upon the May Day branches decorating the hearth. The tall candles guttered in the draught from a hole in the wall through which men had been bringing in furniture and chests of clothing from the adjoining Palace. And on the floor, low among the rushes, sat the Queen. She stared straight before her, scarcely noticing the strange disorder, and the pale hair which had once enmeshed an impetuous King hung like a yellow cloak about her.

    Seeing her mother all abased and desolate like that seemed worse to Elizabeth than looking down upon the splendid coffin of her father—except for the fact that she loved him more.

    “Do you remember, Bess, how we made our own May Day fun when we were in sanctuary before?” asked Cicely, picking wistfully at the withering green branches. To Elizabeth, sobered early to womanhood by the shame of a broken betrothal, the loss of such revelling meant little; and the others were too young to remember. But to fifteen-year-old Cicely small present disappointments assumed as big proportions as the portentous news that Uncle Gloucester had somehow intercepted Uncle Rivers and their younger half-brother Grey and imprisoned them in Pontefract Castle.

    “We could not in any case have kept May Day with our father dead,” young Richard reminded her, looking up from the book he was reading as he lay on his stomach by the Queen's side.

    “All safe in sanctuary! Safe in sanctuary!” chanted small, pink-cheeked Katherine, dancing round and round the fireless hearth with outspread skirts. To her and to eight-year-old Ann, their change of fortune was all a new kind of game.

    Only Elizabeth knew that it was not her daughters' safety, nor yet her own, that their mother was nearly crazed about. It was the thought of Edward in Uncle Gloucester's hands. Each time Richard would have sprung up to join in the younger ones' play the Queen's restraining hands reached out to fondle him. “As long as I keep them apart each is safe,” she had said more than once, looking across the boy's smooth, burnished head to seek the comfort or corroboration in her eldest daughter's eyes.

    This had been the Queen's instant answer to the ill news—her supreme strategy. Even with anxiety for her brother and her son Grey weighing upon her, she had roused the children of her second marriage from their beds and appealed to the Abbot for sanctuary, and he, poor man, not deeming it fit that they should share the asylum of felons claiming the Church's protection from justice, had given up to them his fine hall—never dreaming that in her desire for speed and secrecy the Queen would move in so precipitously as to wreck his masonry. Her move had taken everybody by surprise. To the saintly Abbot it must have seemed scarcely necessary, considering that the young King was already coming southwords in his royal uncle's care and had been proclaimed King in York by Gloucester's orders. But to the Queen's more suspicious mind, nurtured as it was on years of strategic struggle for the succession, the keeping of her younger son where no one could touch him seemed the most