Bella Court, Greenwich, Summer 1437
Bella Court, Greenwich, Summer
WE HAVE NEWS of another marriage for love in the summer, another great lady lowering herself for lust: the child duchess Jacquetta, fresh from burying her husband John Duke of Bedford, has married her groom of the household, Richard Woodville, without royal permission – exactly the same crime as the dowager queen’s.
I seize on it as a model for how to condemn Owen Tudor.
‘Woodville must be condemned for rape and executed,’ I say to my husband and our councillors in our own council room at Bella Court.
Humphrey is eager: he and the Woodvilles have been daggers drawn ever since a Woodville held the Tower for the Beauforts.
But my clerk John Home purses his lips and shakes his head, and Canon Southwell looks doubtful.
‘They’ve broken a royal tradition, not the law of the land,’ Dr Bolingbroke advises.
‘His Grace made a law against the remarriage of dowager queens, but it does not apply to Jacquetta of Bedford. She should have asked for the permission of the king to marry; but it’s a tradition, not the law. The king will fine her.’
‘A huge fine then.’ I think what will tempt my husband to punish a pretty girl and her love match.
‘What about a fine so heavy that she has to sell the library that she inherited – your brother’s library?
He left it all to her. What good are books on alchemy, philosophy, and experiments to a fool like her? Can she even read Latin?’
Dr Bolingbroke looks up; the other scholars too are like hounds hearing the hunting horn. ‘His books are a treasure beyond price,’ he agrees. ‘With what we have here already, it would make a library as good as Padua.’
My husband smiles his thin-lipped smile. ‘You’re easily bribed, Roger!’
Dr Bolingbroke nods. ‘Her Grace knows my price,’ he says. ‘I’d do anything to know the secrets of the universe, and Duke John’s library is second to none.’
‘It’s second to mine,’ my husband insists.
‘Yours will be second to none in the world, if you take your brother’s books,’ I say silkily.
‘I’ll set the fine so high that they’ll have to sell – one of you can take the message that they are to sell to me,’ my husband decides.
‘Canon Southwell will tell them,’ I say simply. ‘And now: the lesser issue of Owen Tudor. You must get him before a reduced meeting of the council, when you’re sure the king is absent.’
‘He won’t attend next week,’ his tutor volunteers. ‘He is celebrating the apostles, Philip and James.’
‘We have to execute Tudor this summer,’ I say. ‘Before the king takes extra royal powers on his sixteenth birthday.’
My husband nods, but his mind is on the library. ‘Consider it done,’ he says.