The People’s Queen. Vanora Bennett

Hill behind the Tower, and process along Tower Street and Chepe, then out of Aldersgate to the pasture-cum-jousting ground at Smithfield. And then the gentlemen of the court will joust, in her honour, while the people of the City, all dressed in their coloured liveries, watch and cheer. And she, and only she, Alice Perrers, who will be known for the week as Lady of the Sun (a title she’s thought of herself), as well as Queen of the Lists, will ride in a golden chariot, at the centre of everything. She’ll be wearing a cap encrusted with jewels, and a cloak of Venetian gold lined with red taffeta, on top of the red gown, lined in white, embroidered with seed pearls, and edged in royal ermine, that she’s got on tonight. She’s going to astonish. She’s going to impress.

      It’s time they realised – all these courtiers, all those Londoners – that a woman who’s already, by the grace of God and the generosity of the King of England (and her own financial acumen), one of the richest people in the land, has every intention of shining like the sun for the rest of her days.

      She hasn’t forgotten her place entirely. Not really. She isn’t going to start acting like, or thinking of herself as, a real, born-to-the-throne queen. (Anyway, who would have let her if she tried? They all still worship the memory of dear old Queen Philippa, who’s been dead for most of the eight years of Alice’s supremacy; and Alice doesn’t have a drop of anything like royal blood in her veins, or noble blood, or even knightly blood. She’s a different kind altogether. She’s not even very interested in thinking of being a helpless, dependent, real queen; she likes her freedom too much to dream of sitting still in an expensive robe, smiling at posturing fools of knights-errant, for the rest of her days.) Still, only an idiot could ignore the meaning of her punning pageant title, and Londoners aren’t idiots. Edward’s royal symbol is the sun. If Alice Perrers is to be Lady of the Sun, at least for this week of glory, then she will be displaying all the power a queen commands. And power, at least the quiet kind that comes with wealth, she does enjoy.

      Even before Edward, even as a very young woman, Alice was busy consolidating her position in this world. Every penny she’s ever inherited, or made, has been put back into snapping up leases on this property or that, taking on unconsidered trifles of fields or tenements here, there and everywhere, making improvements, building, putting up rents, and using the profits to buy more. She’s got a gift for it. She’s done extraordinarily well – far better than she would have if she’d set her sights purely on imitating the real born-to-it ladies of the court and becoming almost indistinguishable from them. But, of course, it’s been much easier for her to achieve wealth since the world came to realise that there’s a misty, unseen, kingly presence at her back. That knowledge concentrates people’s minds. It keeps them honest. No one cheats on a bargain with Alice, as her store of coin and leases grows. No one has, for a long time.

      The real point of this week’s festivities, as far as Alice is concerned, is to make sure she can continue to enjoy the power that feeds and protects all the wealth she’s still building up – even after Edward dies.

      For Alice has begun to understand that the enchanted dream she’s been living in until now – the best part of a decade as the indulged darling of a dear old man who, himself, has been on the throne for nearly half a century, and is loved, everywhere, as England’s greatest king – must soon come to an end. No one else seems to have noticed or to be planning their next move, although when Edward does pass on the end of his reign will surely affect them all. The gentry grumble about paying taxes to fund his war in France, true. But they carry on buying expensive clothes and jewels, far beyond their means, and raiding each other’s manor houses when they think they can get away with stealing a few fields, just as the courtiers carry on dancing and jousting and prancing off to the war at vast expense and raiding each other’s castles, as if they all thought they could somehow continue for ever in the golden sunset years of Edward’s reign, in more or less peace, and more or less prosperity, stuffing their faces with larks’ tongues and honeyed peacock breasts, and watching the ice swans melt at an unending succession of banquet tables.

      But Alice has heard Edward mumbling in the mornings, unable to shake off the night’s dreams; sometimes calling her ‘Philippa’ after his wife, or ‘Isabella’ after his favourite, headstrong, high-and-mighty fool of a daughter. He’s still most of the time, at least in front of others, the sparkling, charismatic, dynamic man he always was; but, in his unguarded moments, alone with her, she also sees the confused old man he’s becoming, or is about to become. She treats the creeping wound on his leg, which won’t heal, so she knows the extent of his physical decrepitude too, just as she knows the folly of his having recently restarted the war in France, years after he’s past his fighting prime, and of expecting to go on having the luck of the Devil that he enjoyed in his muscular youth, and winning.

      So she’s formed a view. She needs to think about the future, beyond Edward. And she’s decided that the best way to protect herself against that cloudy tomorrow is to cultivate the friendship of one of Edward’s sons. Not to become a mistress again, obviously, for Alice doubts that a prince who could have any woman in the land would want his father’s cast-off, no longer young; she’s realistic enough never to have mistaken her rounded plumpness and dark curls and cheeky freckles for beauty. What Alice wants next is respect and recognition; a relationship that will maintain something of her influence and visibility, while leaving her the freedom of manoeuvre she needs to carry on buying up land and extending her possessions.

      Ideally, she’d have preferred this respect and recognition to come from the son who is destined to be the next King of England. But the noble Prince Edward of England, heir to the throne, the former war hero, the ex-ruler of southern France, and as widely admired at court and among the peasants and soldiery as Alice finds him evil-tempered and vindictive, is not an ideal choice of patron for several reasons. One is his wife, Princess Joan, who’s made it clear to Alice for years now that she will never have time for a nouveau riche from nowhere. The other is that the Prince of England has been dying, agonisingly slowly, of some Castilian dropsy caught on campaign, for longer than Alice cares to remember. He’s still clinging to life for the moment; but Alice doubts he will make it to become King Edward IV. And there’s no point in hoping that, when the Prince does die, she’ll get anywhere with his little boy, Richard, a child in the nursery, guarded by his disagreeable mother, that bloated ex-beauty of a princess with the pursed lips and nostrils that flare and dent white whenever she sees Alice.

      That leaves the other royal son: John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, the man out there, sweating as he dances. Son number three originally, but since the death of his brother Lionel he’s been son number two; and with every chance that his eldest brother Prince Edward hasn’t long left in this vale of tears either, he’s all too likely, all too soon, to be the King’s eldest surviving son.

      It’s a matter of whispered conjecture whether Duke John might, in that eventuality, try and get the throne for himself, rather than protect it for his little nephew, his brother’s son. Some people point to Duke John’s innate nobility, the courteous conservatism in every thought and gesture, and say he wouldn’t. But most people think he would.

      There’s no doubt that Duke John’s a good-looking man, in body. There’s a grace to the way he bows his long lean frame, a beauty in the line of eye and cheekbone, and his voice is deep and authoritative. He has a natural dignity of behaviour. But Alice isn’t so sure this beauty extends to his soul. Nor are most other people. After all, Duke John has already claimed one throne, after taking as his second wife a disinherited princess of Castile. He likes to call himself ‘We, the King of Castile’ in his correspondence, and is always threatening to go and conquer Castile and win back his wife’s country (at the expense of the English taxpayer). The suspicious way most people see it is this: would a prince who’s so greedy for a crown that he’ll go all that way in pursuit of one turn up his nose at the much more glorious Crown of England, if he got a chance to grab it? Of course he wouldn’t.

      The very fact that people are so ready to believe the worst of the Duke of Lancaster, with no proof one way or the other, shows what an unpopular man this John of Gaunt is. Not without reason, Alice knows. He’s the scratchy kind. He rubs people up the wrong way, even when he doesn’t mean to; and all too often he does mean to. Even among the aristocrats of this court, he’s considered unusually arrogant; considering