The White Rose

Like Father, Like Daughter

On the evening of Elizabeth's arrival; the King was alone with his daughter in a room of Westminster Palace, where he liked to isolate himself.

'It is there I think things over,' he had told his familiars one day when he was being particularly forthcoming.

Upon the table was a three-branched silver candelabra whose light fell upon a file of parchments which the King was reading and signing. Beyond the windows the park rustled in the twilight, and Isabella, looking out into the night, watched the dark absorb the trees one by one.

Since the time of Edward the Confessor at least, Westminster had been a royal residence and Edward IV had made it one of his regular country retreats. He liked the silence of the place, closed in as it was by high walls; he liked his park, his garden and his abbey in which Benedictine monks lived out their peaceful lives. The royal apartments were not very large, but Edward the Handsome liked its quiet and preferred Westminster to all his greater houses.

Elizabeth had met her three sisters-in-law, Margaret, Anne, and Catherine, with a serenely smiling face, and had replied conventionally to their words of welcome.

Father,' she said now, 'Father, I am very unhappy. Oh! how very far away England seems since I have been Empress of the Germans. And how I regret the days that are past!'

She found herself trying to fight an unexpected enemy: tears.

After a brief silence, without going to her, Edward the Handsome asked gently but without warmth, 'Was it to tell me this, Elizabeth, that you have undertaken the journey?'

'And to whom should I admit my unhappiness if not to my father?' she replied.

The King looked at the night beyond the gleaming panes of the window, then at the candles, then at the fire.

'Happiness ...' he said slowly. 'What is happiness, daughter, if it is not to conform to one's destiny? If it is not learning to say yes, always to God ... and often to men?'

They were sitting opposite each other on cushionless oak chairs.

'It is true that I am an Empress,' she said in a low voice. 'But am I treated as a monarch over there?'

'Are you done wrong by?'

But there was little surprise in the tone of his voice as he put the question. He knew only too well what she would answer.

'Don't you know to whom you have married me?' she said with some force. 'Can he be called a husband who deserted my bed from the very first day? From whom all my care, all my respect, all my smiles, cannot get a single word of response? Who shuns me as if I were ill and confers, not upon just upon mistresses, but upon men, Father, upon men, the favors he denies me?'

Edward the Handsome had known all this for a long time, and his reply had also been ready for a long time.

'I did not marry you to a man,' he said, 'but to an Emperor. I did not sacrifice you by mistake. I don't have to tell you, Elizabeth, what we owe to our position and that we are not born to succumb to personal sorrows. We do not lead our own lives, but those of our kingdoms, and it is there alone that we can find content ... if we conform to our destiny.'

He had drawn somewhat nearer to her while speaking and the light of the candle-flames etched the shadows upon his face, bringing his beauty into better relief, emphasizing his air of always searching for self-conquest and being proud of it.

More than his words, the King's expression and his beauty delivered Elizabeth from her weakness.

'I could only have loved a man who was like him,' she thought, 'and I shall never love nor shall I ever be loved, because I shall never find a man in his likeness.'