The Sunne in Splendour: A Novel of Richard III by Sharon Kay Penman Read Free Book Online Page B

kin to Calais.
    That was generally the case, Edmund conceded. Ned never argued with their father, he was unfailingly polite, and then nonchalantly went his own way; whereas, he, Edmund, deferred dutifully to his father's authority and then found himself resenting both his parent's austere discipline and his own reluctance to rebel.
Edmund had envisioned all too well how Ned was amusing himself in Calais, and his discontent festered into a lingering depression when word reached Dublin in July that Ned and the Nevilles had landed upon
English soil. They'd been welcomed into London and acted swiftly to consolidate their position. Eight days later, they'd marched north from London to confront the King's forces at the town of Northampton.
The Queen was some thirty miles distant at Coventry, but the hapless person of the King had fallen into the hands of the victorious Yorkists after the battle. Edmund had yet to ride into battle and it was with ambivalent emotions that he learned Ned had been entrusted with command of one of the Yorkist wings by his cousin Warwick. The day his father would do the same for him, Edmund was convinced, it'd be possible to go sledding in Hell. The King had been conveyed back to London after the battle and, with all due respect, installed in the royal residence at the Tower. For it was the Queen, not His Grace, good
King Harry, whom they opposed, Warwick took pains to assure one and all as London awaited the return of the Duke of York from Ireland.
York came in October and stunned Warwick, Salisbury, and his son Edward when he strode into
Westminster Hall and laid his hand upon the vacant throne. During his months of Irish exile, he had at last concluded that he must either claim the crown in his own right or be doomed to fight an unending series of bloody and bitter skirmishes with the Queen and her cohorts.
Edmund concurred heartily in his father's decision; to him, a puppet King was even more dangerous than a boy King, and Scriptures spoke clearly enough on that subject: "Woe unto thee, O Land, when thy
King is a child!" Harry of Lancaster was no more than a pale icon of authority, a shadow manipulated to give substance to the acts of sovereignty done in his name, first by Marguerite and now by Warwick.
The Duke of York, moreover, had a superior claim to the throne. Sixty years ago, the royal succession of
England had been torn asunder, brutally disrupted when Harry of Lancaster's grandfather deposed and murdered the man who held rightful title to the English throne. Six decades later, the echoes of that violent upheaval were still reverberating. The murdered King was childless; the crown should, under English law, have passed to the heirs of his uncle, Lionel of Clarence, the third son of Edward III. The man who'd seized the crown was the son of John of
    Gaunt, the fourth son of the same Edward III, but he showed no inclination to adhere to the finer points of English inheritance law, and so began the Lancastrian dynasty.
Had Harry of Lancaster not been so unmitigated a disaster as a monarch, it was likely that few would have chosen to challenge the consequences of a coup legitimized, if not legalized, by the passage of sixty years' time. But Harry was weak and well-meaning and wed to Marguerite d'Anjou, and seven years ago, he had, at last, gone quite mad. Suddenly people remembered the dire injustice done the heirs of the long- dead Lionel of Clarence, and Marguerite showed herself willing to go to any lengths to destroy the man who might one day lay claim to the crown, the Duke of York, who traced his lineage from that same
Lionel of Clarence.
Edmund saw this complex dynastic conflict as a very simple issue, indeed. In his eyes, it was right and just and pure common-sense self- preservation that his father should act to claim the crown that was his by rights. He soon discovered, however, that right and just though it might be, it was a political blunder.
While few disputed the validity of York's