The manor house at Groby was described in 1371 as including a chapel with cloister, a great chamber (the ‘whyt chambre’) with a wine cellar below, ‘the bailies chambre’, seven other rooms and a dovecote. The decorative patterns still visible in the brickwork of the dovecote’s wall near Markfield Road have been dated by Beryl Richardson as earlier than Elizabeth’s residence, since they incorporate the family arms of the Ferrers family (a shield shape with seven ‘mascles’, or diamonds) that would have been replaced by the Grey’s ‘Barry of six Argent and Azure’ when the last of the Ferrers family died on 18 May 1445.49
Life at Groby was similar to Elizabeth’s childhood at Grafton, except that as lady of the manor she now presided over the many servants necessary to manage a large country estate. Groby manor, with its bake houses, hay barns, sheepcotes and forge house, dominated the surrounding acres of gardens, fields, ponds and forests, including Bradgate Park where Elizabeth’s son Thomas would later build the manor house that became the birthplace and home of Lady Jane Grey. Groby manor held markets on Fridays and a three-day annual fair beginning on St George’s Day, privileges granted in 1337–8.
Like the Wydevilles, the Greys of Groby were well-known Lancastrian supporters. Sir Edward Grey, Elizabeth’s father-in-law, had sworn allegiance to King Henry VI in Parliament on 24 July 1455, after the first battle of St Albans. At that same Parliament, his neighbour, another Leicestershire representative, adhered fervently to the Yorkist cause. That neighbour was Sir Leonard Hastings, Knight, whose estate at Kirby Muxloe lay just five miles south of Groby manor.
The Greys would have known Sir Leonard Hastings well in his capacity as sheriff of the county of Leicester. An intimate of Richard, Duke of York, Sir Leonard presented his son William to the Duke at Fotheringhay Castle when the boy was sixteen. William Hastings rapidly became a favourite of both the Duke and his eldest son, Edward. First serving as page in the Duke’s household, William became body squire for the Duke, and by 1455 was appointed ranger of Were Forest and sheriff of the counties of Warwick and Leicester. In a grant dated at Fotheringhay on 23 April 1456, the Duke awarded William, ‘his beloved servant’, an annuity of £10 ‘to the end he should serve him before all others, and attend him at all time (his allegiance to the king excepted).’
The bonds of friendship forged early between William Hastings and the Duke’s eldest son, Edward, Earl of March, lasted until death. Hastings fought alongside Edward at the decisive battle of Towton. Immediately upon becoming King in 1461, Edward conveyed to Hastings the manor of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, formerly owned by the loyal Lancastrian James Butler, Earl of Wiltshire and Lord-Treasurer for Henry VI. Ashby-de-la-Zouch lay just twelve miles north-west of Groby. The widowed Lady Elizabeth Grey, a near neighbour, surely must have feared for her own Lancastrian estates, now bounded on both sides by the Yorkist strongholds of Hastings.
Elizabeth’s vulnerability may explain her move home to her father’s estate at Grafton after her husband’s death. Though equally Lancastrian, Grafton manor placed some distance between herself and the newlyhonoured Yorkist leaders. She also had to solve the problem of her dowry lands being claimed by her mother-in-law, Lady Elizabeth Ferrers, who had recently married a second husband, Sir John Bourchier, son of the Earl of Essex and Isabella Plantagenet, sister of Richard, Duke of York.
Sir John Bourchier and Lady Ferrers petitioned the Lord Chancellor to require the tenants of three manors given to Elizabeth as part of her marriage dower to ‘make astate’ instead to Lady Ferrers. Lady Elizabeth Grey in turn filed petitions declaring that these estates – the two manors of Newbotell and Brington in Northamptonshire and a third, Woodham Ferrers in Essex – were enfeoffed at her marriage to provide income for Sir John Grey and his family. In response to the competing claims, two of the tenant holders, Robert Isham and William Bolden, stated that the intent of their contracts was, indeed, to provide an annual income of 100 marks to ‘the said John Grey and Elizabeth his wife, and to the heirs of the said John’s body’. William Fielding, a more politically circumspect tenant, stated merely ‘that he was uncertain as to the intent of the assignment’.
In a second petition indicating controversy between wife and motherin-law, Lord Rivers states that he had paid 200 marks to Sir Edward Grey, John’s father, as his portion of the marriage agreement, but that he held the man in such high trust that he did not require a receipt. Now Sir Edward’s widow was requesting payment of 125 marks as part of that settlement. Whether these suits between Lady Elizabeth Grey and Lady Elizabeth Ferrers indicate financial default, personal animosity or political provocation by Lady Ferrers’s newly acquired Yorkist relatives cannot be determined from available records.50
The land dispute was settled in 1463, when William Fielding was ordered to give over to Lady Grey ‘and the heirs of the body of John Grey by her… the common of pasture for beasts and swine’, along with the products of the land essential for maintenance of the messuages and closes.51 Elizabeth thus regained her dowry property from her Yorkist in-law, perhaps assisted by the King’s intervention. If Edward thought, however, that solving this financial contretemps augured well for ending the battles between Lancaster and York, he was sorely mistaken.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Cousins’ Wars
The Wydevilles were caught in the middle when war broke out between Henry VI and his Yorkist cousins – as was all of England. As long as France was the enemy, the English barons, although always jockeying for power and prestige, fought for a common cause. An initial conflict between the houses of Lancaster and York had ended in 1415 when Henry V executed Richard, Earl of Cambridge for attempting to place his brother-in-law, Edmund Mortimer, on the throne. As heir to Lionel, third son of Edward III, Mortimer claimed precedence over descendants of John of Lancaster, the fourth son. After Henry V quelled that rebellion, Richard, Duke of York, son of the executed Cambridge, fought loyally for England as the Hundred Years’ War whimpered towards its end.
The Yorkist struggle for the throne had merely been muted, however, by the uncompromising swords of Henry IV and Henry V. When Henry VI began his reign at the age of nine months, English governance relied on the strong and powerful barons who constituted the King’s Council. As long as the Duke of Bedford, brother of Henry V and uncle to the baby King, was alive, an uneasy peace prevailed – although Bedford’s brother Humphrey was always skirmishing for dominance. After Bedford’s death, each baron who controlled vast tracts of lands and many loyal followers sought to increase his personal and political power. They were not about to give up control to a weak and inexperienced King. Neither was Henry VI capable of compelling submission. Hall’s Chronicle explains much about England’s political and economic problems under Henry VI:
King Henry, which reigned at this time was a man of a meek spirit, and of a simple wit, preferring peace before war, rest before business, honesty before profit, and quietness before labour. And to the intent that all men might perceive, that there could be none more chaste, more meek, more holy, nor a better creature. In him reigned shamefastness, modesty, integrity, and patience…1
Hardly qualifications for a politician. As Henry VI progressively lost the French territory won by his father, the nation began to lose confidence in its King and to question his capacity to lead. By 1450, England was in big trouble. The nation was in debt; Normandy had been lost, with Gascony to follow within a year; anarchy was fast replacing governance. By 1453, only Calais remained under English control. Henry VI’s marriage to Margaret of Anjou, niece of the French King Charles VII, had failed to secure the peace promised by the 1444 truce at Tours. Henry’s claim to be King of France amounted to no more than an empty boast.
Such troubles turned into crisis in July 1453, when Henry suffered a bout of insanity that lasted eighteen months. His cousin Richard, Duke of York was appointed Protector of the Realm and began to assert his claim to the throne. As son of Anne Mortimer, descendant of Lionel, York’s lineage was more direct than that of Henry VI.
York’s claim, however, depended on succession through the female line – Philippa, daughter of Lionel, and Anne Mortimer, great-granddaughter – a claim regarded as weak by those who resisted women as regal heirs.
The crisis worsened with the birth of Prince Edward, son of Henry VI and Margaret, on 13 October 1453. The King was so ill that he did not even know that he had produced an heir to the throne. Queen Margaret, concerned about her son’s rights, began taking an active interest in politics. At the same time, Richard of York, a better administrator by far than the King, savoured the power he wielded. But his claim to the throne was now thwarted by a direct descendant of Henry VI. A clash between the houses of Lancaster and York was inevitable.
When Henry VI regained a degree of health in early 1455, he was still incapable of governing. In his stead Queen Margaret, intent on securing her son’s rights, tightened her control, with the assistance of Lancastrian supporters led by the Duke of Somerset. Hall describes Margaret of Anjou:
The Queen his wife was a woman of a great wit, and yet of no greater wit than of haut stomach [arrogance], desirous of glory, and covetous of honour, and of reason, policy, counsel, and other gifts and talents of nature belonging to a man, full and flowing: of wit and wiliness she lacked nothing, nor of diligence, study, and business, she was not unexpert: but yet she had one point of a very woman: for often time when she was vehement and fully bent in a matter, she was suddenly like a weathercock, mutable, and turning.2
By 1455, Richard, Duke of York and his followers began to challenge openly the King’s authority. The baronial families supporting York included the Nevilles, Mowbrays and Bourchiers, families whose wealth both in land and in men constituted an awesome threat to the King’s authority. The Nevilles, in particular, led by Richard, Earl of Salisbury and his son, Richard, Earl of Warwick, controlled enormous resources and loyal supporters across much of England.
Actual warfare broke out in May 1455 at the first battle of St Albans, just north of London, when the supporters of Richard, Duke of York attacked the King’s troops. Although the skirmish lasted only half an hour, crucial Lancastrian leaders were killed: Somerset, Northumberland and Clifford. This battle would set the pattern for the next thirty bloody years, during which the nobility of England would progressively annihilate itself.
‘The Wars of the Roses’, the name by which we know these battles, was never used within the lifetime of its combatants. Three centuries later, Sir Walter Scott romanticised the conflicts as ‘The Wars of the Roses’, perhaps influenced by Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part I, where York picks a white rose and Somerset a red one to symbolise their differences.3 While the House of York did display the white rose as its symbol during this era, contemporary Lancastrians never identified partisans with a red rose. The name used by the people who lived through the next thirty years more accurately describes these bitter internecine conflicts: ‘the cousins’ wars’.
The first battle of St Albans in May 1455 resulted in a Yorkist victory. Henry VI was not overthrown, but the shift in power caused major changes in governing authority. Richard, Duke of York once more was made Protector of the Realm, Lord Salisbury was appointed Chancellor, and Warwick was named Captain of Calais. Life in Henry VI’s court continued with a patina of civility while York remained superficially loyal to the King. When his appointment as Lieutenant of Ireland in 1457 effectively isolated him from the centre of power, however, York’s dissatisfaction increased. Margaret tried to retain Lancastrian control by acting behind the scenes, and soon she replaced her husband in name as well as in deed. When armed conflict ultimately broke out, the Lancastrian troops became known as ‘Margaret’s army’.
Meanwhile, Warwick used his appointment as Captain of Calais to develop enormous power and influence. As commander of the garrison and naval forces, he sent his English ships to attack both the Hanseatic and Castilian fleets in 1458. His success greatly enriched his personal treasury and consolidated Yorkist power. When the Duke of York plotted another active challenge to the King in 1459, Warwick invaded England, marching through Kent towards Ludlow where York and Salisbury were amassing troops. Salisbury’s initial victory over a detachment of the Lancastrian army at Blore Heath augured well for the Yorkist cause. But many Englishmen were not ready to rebel against their anointed King and flocked to the Lancastrian side. As troops began to amass just south of Ludlow, Warwick’s men from Calais began to have second thoughts. Led by Andrew Trollope, they deserted, and the Yorkist leaders fled in the face of the superior Lancastrian army. Richard, Duke of York escaped to Ireland, abandoning his wife and two youngest sons, George and Richard, who remained in Ludlow Castle.4 Warwick and Salisbury, with York’s eldest son, Edward, Earl of March, fled back to Calais where they regrouped and rebuilt their forces.
By the summer of 1460, they were ready to invade again. At the battle at Northampton on 10 July, Warwick’s superior power crushed King Henry’s army and brought Richard, Duke of York home from Ireland. In October 1460, Parliament tried to settle the family feud by decreeing that Henry VI would remain King during his lifetime, and that Richard of York or his heirs would succeed to the throne at Henry’s death. Prince Edward of Lancaster was excluded from the throne, as rumours began to circulate that he was not, after all, Henry’s child, but adulterous Margaret’s bastard. Charges of adultery would become the modus operandi of Yorkist men, who claimed regal rights by accusing women of infidelity. In later years, York’s sons Clarence and Richard would each accuse their own mother of adultery in their quest for the throne. Whether Richard, Duke of York would have modified his propaganda against Margaret of Anjou had he known that his own wife would be slandered by their sons, we shall never know.
The best-laid plans of York and Warwick, however, failed to take into account the wrath of Queen Margaret, who would not tolerate disinheriting her son, Edward of Lancaster. Since his father could not protect his son’s rights, the Queen began to fight. ‘Margaret’s army’ captured and killed Richard, Duke of York at Wakefield on 30 December 1460. Unfed and unpaid, Margaret’s army then marched south towards London, ravaging the countryside and creating fear and loathing in the people as they passed. Their decisive victory at the second battle of St Albans on 17 February 1461 caused the citizens of London to tremble in terror as they anticipated starving soldiers ransacking their city.
To save London, the Lord Mayor and the city’s aldermen mobilised their best defence. They turned to women. Exploiting the long-time friendship between Margaret of Anjou and Jacquetta of Luxembourg, the Lord Mayor of London asked the Duchess of Bedford to intervene on the city’s behalf. Several contemporary records describe what happened:
The Duchess of Bedford and the Lady Scales, with divers Clerks and Curates of the City, went to Saint Albans to the King, Queen, and Prince, for to entreat for grace for the City. And the King and his Council granted that four knights with 400 men should go to the City and see the disposition of it, and make an appointment with the Mayor and the Aldermen.5
‘The Lady Scales’ was one of Margaret’s attendants, and the widow of a noted Lancastrian lord. She became the mother-in-law of Anthony Wydeville, Jacquetta’s eldest son, who married Lady Elizabeth Scales sometime before 23 July 1461.
The Great Chronicle reports that ‘long and many lamentable supplications’ were required to appease Margaret.6 A letter in the archives of Milan, written by C. Gigli on 22 February 1461, describes the situation to Michele Arnolfini of Bruges:
I wrote of the victory obtained by the forces of the Queen and Prince at Saint Albans on the 17th of this month, and how they recovered the king and have him, and how this town [London] sent to them at Saint Albans to offer the place, provided they were guaranteed against pillage. With them went my Lady of Buckingham, the widow, and my Lady the Regent that was. They returned on the 20th, and reported that the king and queen had no mind to pillage the chief city and chamber of their realm, and so they promised; but at the same time they did not mean that they would not punish th
e evildoers.7
‘My Lady the Regent that was’ identifies Jacquetta by her title when married to the Duke of Bedford, the title by which she was prominently known in Bruges and Milan. Lady Buckingham was Anne Neville, sister of Salisbury and of the Duchess of York, a relationship which would seem to align her to the Yorkist cause. But she had married Humphrey Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, a Lancastrian noble who was killed at the battle of Northampton in July 1460.
Almost nothing has been written about the role of women in these wars. Other than Margaret’s command of the King’s army, a role that has provoked only negative images, the contemporary chronicles focus on battle manoeuvres and body counts, with little attention paid to the personal devastation wreaked on family and friends. Lady Buckingham’s situation reveals how families fragmented as their men fought for power as Lancastrians or Yorkists. The remarriage of Elizabeth Wydeville’s first mother-in-law similarly reflects the complexity of personal relationships during these conflicts between cousins. Though the Greys of Groby had always been solid Lancastrians, Sir Edward Grey’s widow, Lady Elizabeth Ferrers, married Sir John Bourchier, son of Isabella Plantagenet and nephew of Richard, Duke of York. Personal liaisons shifted political loyalties; politics, in turn, shattered families as war divided brother from sister – or in the case of Lady Ferrers, pitted grandmother against grandson in seeking control of property rights.
Women saved London in February 1461, a fact recorded in the contemporary chronicles but ignored in too many accounts of the Wars of the Roses. We can only wonder what Margaret and Jacquetta discussed as they met to decide the city’s fate. Did these two friends recall the innocence of 1445 – just sixteen years earlier – when the Duchess of Bedford and Sir Richard Wydeville escorted the fifteen-year-old Margaret across the Channel to her new country and husband? Did they reflect on the ironies of their changed circumstances? Did they lament the hopes dashed by the miseries of men fighting for power? Did they foresee the future of continuing conflict and the annihilation of most of their loved ones? In these wars of the cousins, personal ties were severed with the swing of a sword, yet in the days following the second battle of St Albans, personal trust saved the city of London.
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