Chapters (58)
Richard was right about one thing; they don’t welcome his reforms. He’s been lifting up rocks and looking under them, opening cupboards and setting skeletons rattling, holding men to account who’ve been used to doing what they like. For years the King has impoverished the treasury, with imprudent gifts to men who’ve done little more than flatter to earn them. The Commons say they’ve been taxed too high to pay for the King’s generosity to men already wealthy. Richard thinks they’re right, and wants it back.
All of this means that, though it should be easier to rule as Protector, actually it’s harder. And if the King is quiescent, his queen isn’t. She makes known her opposition to Richard’s reforms which, she says, slight men her husband has favoured. Suddenly such men speak warmly of her. Nor is she appeased when Richard settles on her son the duchy of Cornwall and earldom of Chester, and enshrines in law his princedom of Wales. ‘It’s his due,’ she says.
‘It’s more than I would give to Beaufort’s bastard,’ Cecily complains, when she hears of it.
‘We’ve no proof he’s anything but the King’s son,’ says Richard. ‘Would you have me go to war because a man who is dead may have cuckolded the King?’
‘Would you let a bastard sit on the throne of England?’
‘Had I proof of it …’
There is no proof, of course. And the risk of war too great.
She consoles herself; the bastard is a child yet, and may die. Or a time may come when men will be ready to believe it without proof.
Come February, the King returns to Westminster, walking and talking and looking like himself again, the Queen on his arm and smiling. He tells Richard he no longer needs a protector, though he loves his cousin still, his trusted counsellor, his old friend. He wants peace, he says, between all the lords of England; between all the lords of England and his queen.
‘I’ve no quarrel with anyone,’ Richard tells him, ‘while I’ve surety of your good faith.’ It’s the best he can do.
Parliament is dismissed and Henry declares a royal progress.
York and his duchess are not invited to attend, though young Henry Beaufort travels with them, and Henry Holland whips up his dogs to run slobbering beside him in the royal train. The Queen has the ordering of it all, and though the proclaimed intention is to bring the King’s justice to the whole realm, they progress no further than Kenilworth, where, far from court and Commons, they settle.
‘The Queen will have the rule of him now,’ Cecily tells Richard. ‘And she is our utter enemy.’
